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Marilyn's ingestion of barbiturates seemed to rise in direct proportion to her recognition. Through The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, Some Like It Hot, she earned praise as an actress and comedienne of considerable skill. But she was also experiencing miscarriage after miscarriage. The goddess of sex was unable to bear a child−possibly, posits Mailer, because of her history of abortions. The Miller marriage dissolved long before its official conclusion in 1961. There was an affair with Yves Montand (who bore an ominous resemblance to DiMaggio) and a paralysis of will. During the filming of The Misfits she was chronically late, driving the cast up the wall and her costar, Clark Gable, to an early grave. Or so implies Mailer, who views the Gable-Monroe relationship in Freudian simples: Gable is her surrogate father. When he dies, she seeks to punish herself.
From the Monroe-Miller crackup downward, the biographer has few facts to exploit. He speculates about Marilyn's bedtime stories: "Was Sinatra good?" asks an unnamed "intimate." Replies the star: "He was no DiMaggio." With the death of Gable she began to sink into an irreversible depression. She was briefly institutionalized at Payne Whitney clinic ("The gate to the orphanage closes again") and later underwent an operation: "She seems to respond well to the [gall bladder] surgery−perhaps a knife in her belly pays part of the debt to Gable." She began to zigzag toward suicide.
Here Mailer begins his most irresponsible guesswork. From the beginning, Marilyn has served as one more arena in which he can parade his favorite devils: the Zeitgeist, the corrupt American instinct, the Republican Party, and of course its standard bearer. ("It is possible that Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but factoids during his public life.") But Mailer allows no political favoritism. Of Marilyn's early success, he writes: "Down in Washington, ambitious young men like Jack Kennedy are gnashing their teeth. 'Why is it,' they will never be heard to cry aloud, 'that hard-working young Senators get less national attention than movie starlets?' "
Once a Senator has been quoted for something he never said, the gloves are off, and below the belt is the order of the day. Seizing the prevalent rumors of the period, Mailer amplifies the supposed infatuation with America's First Family, then affects to find traces of the famous Irish smile and style in every post-Kennedy photograph of Marilyn. Yet the author suddenly grows chaste when it comes to Bobby's gossip-mongered affair with her: "His hard Irish nose for the real was going to keep him as celibate as the happiest priest of the county holding hands with five pretty widows."