Two Myths Converge: NM Discovers MM

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Or money. The outsized potential of the book is no mystery. Marilyn's subject is, after all, the greatest float in the pageant of cinema's doomed blondes−women like Jean Harlow, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield, Carole Landis−all of whom died young and under tragic circumstances. But unlike the others, the voluptuously tragic figure of Monroe continues to exert an attraction beyond nostalgia and, very possibly, beyond sex itself. Last October, for example, thousands of viewers queued up for hours in Tokyo to glimpse a gallery of Monroe poses. In Los Angeles, blow-ups of those photographs sold for $250 apiece. Was it merely libidinous curiosity? But there are more graphic shots in any porn shop in town. Could it have been a collective sigh for the irretrievable past? But no other '50s personality could have attracted such crowds or commanded such prices. A $19.95 biography of Kim Novak? Elizabeth Taylor? Jane Russell? Unthinkable.

As for her biographer, he too is beyond the calipers of ordinary critical measurements. The raunchy pug, the political candidate, the ultrajournalist has become, at 50, the grand middle-aged man of American letters. No longer the deafening celebrant of the Orgasm, the notorious wife stabber whose looming presence could constitute a threat, Mailer has grown almost mellow. A detached retina has taken him physically, if not metaphorically, out of the boxing ring. Past the middle of the journey, he is learning how to sail. His aesthetics tend to look to the 19th century's achievements of mythos and style. His ethics, full of references to "celestial or satanic endeavors," are astonishingly close to the medieval conception of original sin ("If society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most hideous of questions about his own nature?"). In his politics, Mailer, as always, remains a true original. The Procrustean brackets of liberalism, for example, have never been able to embrace him. Indeed, his tocsins often seem to have been recorded from the pulpit of some brimstone preacher: "This evil twentieth century with its curse on the species, its oppressive Faustian lusts, its technological excrement all over the conduits of nature, its entrapment of the innocence of the best."

He is secure in the knowledge that such books as Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago have altered the course and style of reportage, perhaps forever. Novels like An American Dream and Why Are We in Viet Nam? have been rediscovered. The once indifferent public now treats him as a figure of Hemingway proportions. The Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award have been bestowed, as has election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is no wonder that Mailer was chosen to be the chronicler of the life and times of Marilyn. The wonder is that he was not the first choice.

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