by Carl Rollyson

So far as I know, I am the only biographer to recognize Norman Mailer’s signal contribution not only to an understanding of Marilyn Monroe but to the genre of biography. His book appeared in 1973, about a year after Gloria Steinem launched Ms. Neither Mailer nor his detractors advanced the idea that his biography was part of that second wave of feminism. On the contrary, his book was vilified and treated as a kind of counter-revolutionary and retrograde work. Yet with one word he altered not only Monroe’s place in world culture but also how the life of a movie star ought to be studied. The word is mentioned only twice in Marilyn, but it comes out of a biographer’s understanding that his attachment to his subject is both a projection of his own ambitions and of hers. 

At a Popular Culture conference in the early 1980s I delivered a talk about the biography of Monroe I was still writing.  After my presentation, Emily Toth, a prominent feminist scholar, chided me, recommending that if I did write about another woman, I should pick one much stronger than Marilyn Monroe. The prevailing opinion among feminists then dismissed the actress as a rather passive, even pathetic figure, a victim of Hollywood and of a misogynistic culture.  She lacked what feminist scholars like to call “agency.” My female colleagues at Wayne State University voiced similar sentiments although not quite as bluntly as Toth. Academics had yet to deal seriously with movie stars. A biography of a film star, especially a sex symbol like Monroe, even one written by an academic, simply had no place on university press lists more likely to feature books about film history, film directors, and cultural studies of the film industry.

I turned to trade houses, calling up editors in New York and pitching my book.  I don’t think you would get through to such editors today. You would have to go through an agent, and I did not have one then. I got the attention of an important editor, Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s Press, but in the end he passed on the book, not telling me why. Then I started pestering Matthew Bruccoli, a professor at the University of South Carolina, a biographer of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a well connected editor, whom I implored to give me the name of an editor who might take on my biography. He came up with a name, Shaye Areheart.  

Shaye loved my book and pitched it to the editorial board of Doubleday, saying it was a serious, yet accessible book and not like anything that had been written about Monroe.  That actually was the problem. As Shaye regretfully told me, my biography, the editorial board concluded, “fell between two stools.” It was eminently readable and yet serious and they simply did not know how to market such a book for an audience as yet unprepared to read it. What to do? Shaye recommend I get an agent. That was fine with me, but who? She recommended a friend of hers, Elizabeth Knappman.  They had worked together as editors and now Elizabeth had turned to agenting.

Elizabeth liked my book but told me she could not sell it.  She had good advice, though.  Offer it to UMI Research Press, a small academic publisher that had brought out my revised dissertation on William Faulkner. She said, if they are interested, give them only three years to market a hardcover edition. Hold back all other rights, including paperback and foreign rights. As it happened, UMI was looking to reach a broader audience, and they quickly complied with the stipulations Elizabeth had advanced. UMI even agreed to an expensive four color jacket cover, a reproduction of Audrey Flack’s Vanitas portrait of Monroe, which made the point about Monroe as both a popular icon and a subject to be treated seriously.

UMI made my book its lead title for those three years, eventually negotiated an English edition with Souvenir Press in London, and then a cheaper mass market edition published by Hodder & Stoughton.  My biography has never been out of print, and a revised and updated edition is now part of the University Press of Mississippi’s Hollywood Legends series.  That series, along with a similar one at the University Press of Kentucky shows how different the publishing landscape is now for movie star biographies, which are on the lists of major academic publishers like Oxford University Press. 

In 1986, when UMI first published my biography of Monroe, Gloria Steinem published hers, yet she generously blurbed my book, saying: “More than anything else in her life, Marilyn Monroe wanted to be taken seriously as an actress. Rollyson has done just that in Marilyn Monroe:  A Life of the Actress, the first and only book that is entirely an analysis and appreciation of her work. It will be important to both film historians and to Marilyn’s fans—and it would have made Marilyn feel honored and worthwhile.” 

I also wanted a contemporary actress to read and endorse my biography, and through the assistance of Ralph Roberts, Monroe’s friend and masseur, I was able to interview Ellen Burstyn, close to the late Lee Strasberg, Monroe’s teacher at the famous Actors Studio.  I listened to Burstyn’s appreciative analysis Monroe’s performances. I sent my completed biography to her, and she provided this blurb: “a wonderful, highly readable book, the first biography that truly shows the actress at work.”

I could not have attracted Steinem’s attention without the intervention of Norman Mailer.  I don’t mean he had anything to do with connecting me directly with Steinem, but that his biographical approach to Monroe made my biography possible, made me want to look at Monroe the actress, using what I knew from my own training and motivations as an actor to respond both to Mailer’s example and to Monroe’s practice. 

Mailer’s biography is unacknowledged as a breakthrough not only in biographies of her but in the history of American biography, a history that, to my astonishment, has still not been written. I made this claim about Mailer to feminist historian Lois Banner during a dinner conversation shortly after her own excellent biography of Monroe appeared in 2012. Banner accorded Monroe a degree of agency undreamed of in biographies of her before the advent of Mailer’s Marilyn. At first Banner bridled, taking a disparaging view of Mailer so familiar to me from earlier encounters with certain feminists. I said Banner’s own biography would not have been possible without Mailer’s, and she seemed to assent after I uttered the Mailer word that I will disclose in due course.

But first I have to back up and delve into the years between the publication of Mailer’s Marilyn (1973) and my discovery of Audrey Flack’s Marilyn (1977), part of her Vanitas series that I describe in my Monroe biography. I no longer remember exactly when I saw a reproduction of Flack’s photo-realist painting. She had transformed a photograph of Monroe at Jones Beach in 1950 and adorned it not only with vanitas symbols—like the burning candle—but with, to my astonishment, a page from the paperback edition of Mailer’s Marilyn. Most reproductions of the painting blur his words—sort of a fitting result given the way his own contribution to her biography has been disparaged. When I went to interview Flack, she gave me a signed poster of the painting, in which Mailer’s words are legible, especially one particular phrase about how Monroe realized “one could paint oneself into an instrument of one’s will!” This phrase is quintessential Mailer but also quintessential Marilyn Monroe and quintessential Audrey Flack whose paintbrush dripping with paint is posed diagonally across Mailer’s page representing a chain reaction of influence. As I gazed at the painting in Flack’s studio, her mother pointed to the painted photograph in the painting and said “That’s Audrey and her brother.” Flack flared up and said “Don’t tell him that!” We all laughed because what her mother said was true, but the artist wanted me to figure that one out for myself. When she inscribed the poster to me, I felt I was part of the chain reaction that Mailer had set in motion.  

What you get in Mailer’s biography is process—how the biographer goes about constructing and construing a portrait of his subject. He builds on a story from Maurice Zolotow’s Monroe biography about Marilyn discovering makeup at an orphanage and realizing she could paint herself into an instrument of her own will. He makes no secret of his reliance on Zolotow and Fred Guiles, who wrote the first complete biography of Monroe, and I did the same as Mailer—not only extending what those two biographers began but also befriending them and carrying the story of their work and Mailer’s and Monroe’s into mine. In The Art of Biography, Paul Murray Kendall declares every biography is also an autobiography. In Marilyn, Mailer exemplifies Kendall’s claim when Mailer says “put an artist on an artist,” suggesting that his own ambition and desire to perfect the self and the work paralleled Monroe’s quest to articulate her identity and her art, which for an artist also means dominating an imaginative space, the space that Flack’s painting encloses, the screen that became the locus of Monroe’s individuality. Performing or writing or painting are proofs of existence, of what it means to exist. We get from Mailer an existential Monroe: “Since the psychological heft of a role has more existential presence than daily life (and in fact the role creates real reactions in everyone who sees it), so the twilight between reality and fantasy is obliged to become more predominant for a great actor than for others.” What Monroe makes of herself in Mailer’s biography is made up and yet real to her, which is a way of taking her seriously and seeing beyond the anecdotes about her that may or may not be true.  Existential is a word he employs four times in crucial passages—although this is not the ultimate word of Marilyn, the word I have yet to disclose. 

The dominant word in Marilyn is ambition—although it is still not the word on which I will finally rest my case for the significance of Mailer’s biography. Without ever sentimentalizing her, or seeing her as a victim, Mailer writes about Marilyn in terms no other biographer had essayed, projecting her into a tragic dimension:

In her ambition, so Faustian, and in her ignorance of culture’s dimensions, in her liberation and her tyrannical desires, her noble democratic longings intimately contradicted by the widening pool of her narcissism (where every friend and slave must bathe), we can see the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation, yes, she ran a reconnaissance through the Fifties, and left a message for us in her death, “Baby go boom.”

In Mailer’s view, Monroe no longer stands alone as simply a sex symbol; her fate is implicated in the trajectory of a generation.  I’m not sure any biographer without Mailer’s persona and literary power would have dared to write such prose. 

Mailer got into trouble with reviewers when he explored autobiographical impulses that biographers like Paul Murray Kendall acknowledge but do not risk revealing: “The secret ambition, after all had been to steal Marilyn; in all his vanity he thought no one was so well suited to bring out the best in her as himself, a conceit which fifty million other men may also have held – he was still too untested to recognize that the foundation of her art might be able to speak to each man as if he were all of male existence available to her.” Norman Mailer, the biographer, becomes a character, presented in the third person, but introduced generically—not his “secret ambition” but “the secret ambition,” a phrase that links him to “each man” she is speaking to.  If you know the Monroe oeuvre, you know that most of her leading men were not like Robert Mitchum in River of No Return or Yves Montand in Let’s Make Love or Clark Gable in The Misfits but far less prepossessing actors like Tom Ewell in The Seven Year Itch who nonetheless fantasized about her as their conquest. If Tom Ewell can imagine bedding Marilyn Monroe, so can most other males. And don’t forget Mailer’s reference to himself as “untested” in that passage in which as a biographer he admits that biography is a process, not just a product. The common practice of biographers is to come clean about their own motivations and struggle to understand their subjects after their books have been published, after their books have been reviewed. Afterwards, the subject can be presented as part of the biographer’s life or working methods. With Mailer we have a novel of a biography in a biography with the biographer gradually coming to terms with himself and his subject. 

In Marilyn, Mailer is constantly expanding the scope of how to view Monroe by using the word ambition and wrapping it in generalizations such as “The force that propels a great actor in his youth is insane ambition.” This ambition is “wild and unmanageable.” In other words, whatever Monroe’s psychological problems, family background—and anything else that might be thrown in to pathologize her—there is the brute fact of what acting does to her and what she does to acting. Mailer’s presentation of the nexus between acting and identity is what I extended in providing the vocabulary of gestures and movements that Monroe perfected on screen. 

The psychological problems that previous biographers had portrayed as merely Monroe’s,  Mailer perceived as the consequences of “frustrated ambition.” As a Mailer biographer, I will interpose myself between him and his subject by suggesting a good deal of his own erratic behavior had the same root in frustrated ambition, the thwarting of a desire to dominate the stage of his own dream of success. Surely Mailer is writing as much about himself as about Monroe when he observes: “While formal psychiatry is a maze of medical disciplines that seek to cure, stupefy, or pulverize madness, it is another kind of inquiry to search into the uncontrollable ambition to dominate one’s own life, the life of others, or the life of communities not yet conceived, that simple rage to put one’s signature upon existence.” When that signature is not recognized, when the “failure of such ambition” is recognized, that “must double all desperation,” Mailer concludes. 

Mailer traces in his biography a chain of ambitions that includes, for example, the photographer Andre de Dienes whose photograph of young ambitious Marilyn is the one Flack unerringly chose to transform for her magnificent eight by eight foot painting of Monroe that graces the first edition cover of my Monroe biography.  It was this young Hungarian photographer’s ambition, coming to America right after the war, “to photograph beautiful young girls in the nude, and ideally photograph them in natural western scenes. Then he wants to make love to them. It is all part of his idea about America and the boundless promise of the West,” Mailer notes. With Monroe, the photographer collaborates in the projection of an ambition that, all told, is identified twenty-nine times in Mailer’s Marilyn.

Mailer forges this chain of ambition connecting all the significant figures in Monroe’s life from her mother to her husband Arthur Miller, who “would be inhuman if he did not have sufficient ambition to recognize that a marriage to Monroe would be theatrically equal to five new works by Williams.” She is also linked by ambition to the Kennedys, Mailer notes, seeing in them a whole new stage of her career.

But what exactly is the nature of this ambition?  What word would best exemplify the world historical pitch of Mailer’s biographical narrative? He saves that word for just two moments in order to crush all other possibilities—as someone as ambitious as Mailer is want to do. “Napoleonic was her capture of the attention of the world,” he declares. “Are there ten women’s lives so Napoleonic as her own?” he asks. Two other times he refers to her as a female Napoleon in exile, living at Fifth Helena Drive.  Who else, could have projected into Marilyn Monroe what was already there, except a writer who had announced in Advertisements for Myself an ambition to make a “revolution in the consciousness of our time.”

Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, at Baruch College, CUNY, has published eighteen biographies and several books about biography. His subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Hellman, Martha Gellhorn, Norman Mailer, Rebecca West, Susan Sontag, Jill Craigie, Michael Foot, Sylvia Plath, Amy Lowell, Pablo Picasso, Marie Curie, Thurgood Marshall, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner Dana Andrews, Walter Brennan, and Ronald Colman. Podcast: A Life in Biography: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/carl-rollyson; website: carlrollyson.com. He reviews biographies twice a week for the New York Sun.