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No Nudes. Napoleon is followed through her complex marriage with Joe DiMaggio, though Mailer never directly attempted to talk to the Yankee Clipper−"I heard that he was impossible." So, apparently, were most of the people in the star's constellation; Mailer admits to only twelve interview sessions. One, however, is original−an encounter with Marilyn's photographer-lover Andre de Dienes, with whom she once traipsed across the West. Confessed De Dienes: when he wanted to photograph her in the nude, Marilyn screamed. "I won't! I won't! Don't you understand? I'm going to be a great movie star some day." The year before her death De Dienes made a sentimental journey to her home. "She was recovering from an operation for 'internal troubles, female troubles,' and the studio, she confessed, was trying to tell her she was insane."
With considerable acuity, the author analyzes Marilyn's years with her third husband, Arthur Miller. It is in this Actors Studio period that Mailer, like Monroe, enjoys his greatest successes. From the start he perceives Marilyn's enchantment with acting jargon: " 'Concentration,' 'sense memory' and 'penetrating the subject' had to impress a simple American mind with a prairie love of technology ..." As for the playwriting: "[Miller] spoke in leftist simples that might conceivably be profound, was reminiscent of such tall spare American models of virtue and valor as Lincoln and Gary Cooper, and so could certainly serve as a major figure for the Jewish middle class of New York (who were the economic bedrock of Broadway)... Miller knew how to compose drama out of middle-class values. No one else in that period did."
Cheap Shots. Marilyn, who had been locked out of that class by poverty, then fame, entered it with her third marriage. She began to cut loose from her old associates−her longtime acting coach, her early photographer friends, her former in-laws. If she was nearing her professional apogee, she was approaching her personal nadir.
Her life fluttered upward in a brief, delirious swirl, marked by such films as The Prince and the Showgirl, co-starring Sir Laurence Olivier. Yet success was not unabated. There were always cheap shots from the press, and even from actors−although none to compare with Mailer's " 'All right, Marilyn, be sexy [Olivier told her]!' One might as well ask a nun to have carnal relations for Christ."