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Marilyn (nee Norma Jean) was, as the world is about to be reminded, a battered child whose mother and grandmother both went insane. As a child she was sent to an orphanage where, Mailer guesses, she began a rich fantasy life. "We are all steeped in the notion that lonely withdrawn people have a life of large inner fantasy," he writes. "What may be ignored is the tendency to become locked into a lifelong rapture with one's fantasy, to become a narcissist." It is a shrewd, knowing speculation, ruined a moment later by Mailer's Hollywood hindsight: across from the orphanage "a movie company's sound stages are visible from the window by her bed. At night, a repeating flash of forked neon lightning shows 'RKO' through the window. Sixteen years later, she will make Clash by Night for RKO release."
Through the tutelage of a foster parent, Norma Jean became a Christian Scientist−"the poorest," says Mailer, "in the history of the religion, for there was no pain she cared to bear if a drug could be found." It is the remark of an unwounded biographer jesting at scars.
By the time she was an adolescent, Norma Jean could not walk into a room without causing steam to form on the windows. Boys came around in packs; cars honked whenever she went for a walk. At 16 she was married to Jim Dougherty, a 21-year-old metalworker. The marriage lasted four years. Norma Jean soon began modeling, without much distinction, until a casting director named Ben Lyon got her a screen test at 20th Century-Fox. She emerged as Marilyn Monroe and started on her parabola of grandeur and agony.
Much of Mailer's chronicle is strictly pyrites−fool's gold in the Hollywood hills. He tells every hoary anal and oral joke about starlets that has circulated since The Birth of a Nation, and attaches them all to Marilyn Monroe. He makes her the part-time mistress of 20th Century-Fox Studio Founder Joe Schenck, but because the union is unprovable Mailer trails a disclaimer: "If there was sex, it was not necessarily the first of the qualities he found in her. We are not going to know. There is, on the other hand, no reason why they would not find each other interesting."
She did have numerous and provable affairs, but it was her marriages that made sensations. Tromping in the sexual battlefield, Mailer creates his most peculiar analogy: In her "capture of the attention of the world [she is]... Napoleonic." It is a conceit he follows through the entire book until at last Marilyn expires−the coincidence is almost too much for Mailer to bear−at Helena Drive in Brentwood.