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For Marilyn was not Norman's conception. The project was assembled by the Barnum of still photography, Larry Schiller. From his earliest years, Schiller, 36, has been cursed with a sightless eye. But he was concomitantly blessed with the hustler's twin gifts: overweening ambition and an ability to be at the right place with the right lens. On assignment for Paris Match in 1962, he snapped the consecrated shots of Marilyn romping nude at poolside. "Do you think I should really send those pictures out?" she asked Schiller later. It was the rabbit asking the fox if she should venture into the meadow. "You're already famous, Marilyn," he counseled. "Now you can make me famous,"
From then on, Schiller never looked back. As Jack Ruby lay on his deathbed, Schiller smuggled a recorder into the hospital room to tape the dying man's confession−that he acted alone and on impulse. Soon afterward Schiller got out a record: Why Did Lenny Bruce Die?, a post-mortem by Bruceans; then, after the Manson murders, he homed in on Susan Atkins for yet another exclusive interview with a killer. The book became a Signet paperback quickie, The Killing of Sharon Tate.
Venus's-Flytrap. Last year Schiller came full circle−to the woman who had brought him his initial fame. With the success of his Monroe exhibitions Schiller decided that Marilyn was too big for galleries. She needed to be preserved between cloth covers. But the book business had been experiencing a soft market in coffee-table items. Publishers Grosset & Dunlap decided that if a picture was worth a thousand words, surely 111 pictures needed, say, 25,000! But who would write the text?
French Novelist Romain Gary seemed a likely choice. So did Gloria Steinem. Very likely, Gary would have provided a polished but unsurprising sketch. As for Steinem, there is no Mstery to her bias. Marilyn, in one of her last interviews, complained: "That's the trouble, a sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing." It takes little imagination to see the Venus's-flytrap that Steinem could have grown from that seedling. But, neither writer has quite the emotional magic of Norman Mailer. As another chance to roll the karmic dice?
Why was Mailer attracted to the book? Was it as a method of re-creating the object of the American dream? As a mode of escape for the prisoner of sex?
"As a way of making money," recalls Mailer, who tends to lag behind IRS demands. "I had some debts. Let me tell the truth. I was seriously behind. I called Scott Meredith, my agent, and said, 'Before I start work on my novel again, I think I need to take a short job that might pay well.' "
The novel is a formidable task−a 300,000-word chronicle that Meredith describes as the saga of a Jewish family from ancient Egypt to the present day. Given the temporal strictures of that project, it is not surprising that Mailer welcomed the chance to write some more recent history. The workman's compensation was also intriguing: a $50,000 advance against royalties. But for the first time, Mailer was not in full control of his property. The book's 24 photographers receive two-thirds of the author's royalty gross−and Schiller's Company gets 49% of their take. The other third is Mailer's alone.