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In his Brooklyn Heights flat, the author settled back last week for a leisurely interview with TIME'S Marsh Clark. Mailer appeared a bit peaked after a 20-day fast (no solids, water but no booze) that brought him down from 188 to 165 Ibs. "I've really gotten to the point where I'm like an old prizefighter, and if my manager comes up to me and says, 'I've got you a tough fight with a good purse,' I go into the ring. Nothing makes an old fighter any madder than to do a charity benefit."
Five wives, two dwellings−he also owns a house near Stockbridge, Mass.−and seven children* populate the Mailer background. With enormous expenditures−the writer and his dependents need $200,000 before taxes per year−charity begins at Brooklyn Heights. Yet even with a sizable advance, Mailer could not fulfill the original terms of the contract. "I come from a long line of proud, competitive and vain American writers," says Mailer proudly, competitively and vainly. "We have looked upon ourselves as athletes rather than scholars−Ernest Hemingway and Crane and Melville and London. So part of the reason for this book is that I wanted to say to everyone that I know how to write about a woman. When I read the other biographies of Marilyn, I said to myself, 'I've found her; I know who I want to write about.' " As the obsession grew, the preface became a lengthy essay, then a full-length "novel ready to play by the rules of biography."
Blatant Chutzpah. Among the 93,000 words in the book are many by other Monroe biographers. Last week Freelance Writer Maurice Zolotow, author of Marilyn Monroe (1960), perused Mailer's Marilyn and pronounced the biography "one of the literary heists of the century ... at least a quarter of his book is made up of either direct big hunks of my book ... or other big chunks taken without attribution."
In England, Publisher Mark Goulden of W.H. Allen & Co. thought he spotted further borrowing in Marilyn. One of his authors, Fred Guiles, had written a book titled Norma Jean back in 1969−a book Goulden saw reflected in nearly every one of Norman's pages. "In my 35 years in publishing," he fulminated, "I have never seen anything as blatant as this. In America you would call this chutzpah." Translation: Mailer quotes Norma Jean 255 times, with and without acknowledgment.
At the sound of the bell, Mailer always comes out swinging−often at the referee. "No one is going to call me a plagiarist and get away with it," he claims. "If I'm going to steal from other authors, let me use Shakespeare or Melville. I don't have to steal from Fred Guiles."
Or from Zolotow, for that matter. The literary phosphorescence, the wild hypotheses, are Mailer's alone. The influence of the other biographers is largely in the procession of biographical detail−though that represents a considerable and perhaps even ethically questionable influence.