Read Online Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online
Authors: Norman Mailer
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Russell,
but we do not claim Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t learn anything about
acting while she was at Van Nuys High.” No, she was not forward. A
year or two earlier, when she first came to live with them, Grace
and Doc had called her “The Mouse,” for she would sit and listen,
too timid to make a sound. Her laughter was hardly more than a
squeak, not so different from the high-pitched whimper a mouse will
make when it bursts for liberty and a cat is on it. In later years,
she would continue to laugh in that squeak — it was the least
impressive sound she could make, and there are no scenes of her
laughing at length in her films.
During these years, however, her relation
with Grace Goddard’s aunt, Ana Lower, was begun, and it was
probably the happiest association of her life, and the longest — it
lasted from 1938 until Aunt Ana died in 1948. It was certainly her
first relation with someone who was not only concerned about her,
but adored her. Even in the factoid which follows is some sense of
feeling. Marilyn is speaking.
“ She changed my whole life. She was the
first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She
was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her and I
showed it to somebody once and they cried when I read it to them.
It was called, ‘I Love Her.’ It was written about how I felt when
she died. She was the only one who loved me and understood me. She
showed me the path to the higher things of life and she gave me
more confidence in myself. She never hurt me, not once. She
couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love. She was good to
me.”
The quality of Ana Lower can be seen in the
inscription she wrote in the book she gave to Norma Jean before she
died in her early seventies. “Norma dear, read this book. I do not
leave you much except my love, but not even death can diminish
that; nor will death ever take me far away from you.” The book is
Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures . Ana made her living as a working practitioner of
Christian Science, and even produced a bit of religious dedication
in Norma Jean, who would spend every Sunday with Aunt Ana and go
with her to a Christian Science church. Later, in 1941, after Doc
Goddard came once when drunk into Norma Jean’s room and embraced
her, she moved over to live in Aunt Ana’s house, and thereby began
the most secure year of her life. Before it was over she would be
in her first sexual bloom, and this for a variety of reasons, of
which the least was not necessarily Ana Lower’s Christian Science.
If that was a religion which every sophisticated taste had always
found unendurable (since the language is of an unrelenting
fulsomeness: “imbibe the spirit,” and “cast our evil as unreal” for
“the full diapason of secret tones” will reveal “the power of Truth
demonstrated”), and if the brain of Mary Baker Eddy is livid, a
fever of sugars and strictures, still, back of the language is the
same American passion to slash a way through the great spaces and
overwhelming tangle of American life so that the working of one’s
own individual Mind can prevail . That same passion would yet
produce a thousand LSD guides through the Himalayas of psychosis.
So Marilyn would respond to Christian Science. Her mind, muddy,
drifting, fevered, possessed of unconnected desires and
extraordinary fillips of vision, could of course not help but
respond to the thought that “Divine Love always has met and always
will meet every human need.” That offered the possibility of a
future success that was not to be measured by aptitude but by need.
The more she needed, the more she would get, if only she could
trust the voice of her instinct which was the manifestation of
Mind. So she was close to an early Hippie, there in Van Nuys and
West Los Angeles in 1940 and 1941, almost saintly in her newfound
Christian Science, and yet the sex object of every neighborhood
through which she passed. For
but we do not claim Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t learn anything about
acting while she was at Van Nuys High.” No, she was not forward. A
year or two earlier, when she first came to live with them, Grace
and Doc had called her “The Mouse,” for she would sit and listen,
too timid to make a sound. Her laughter was hardly more than a
squeak, not so different from the high-pitched whimper a mouse will
make when it bursts for liberty and a cat is on it. In later years,
she would continue to laugh in that squeak — it was the least
impressive sound she could make, and there are no scenes of her
laughing at length in her films.
During these years, however, her relation
with Grace Goddard’s aunt, Ana Lower, was begun, and it was
probably the happiest association of her life, and the longest — it
lasted from 1938 until Aunt Ana died in 1948. It was certainly her
first relation with someone who was not only concerned about her,
but adored her. Even in the factoid which follows is some sense of
feeling. Marilyn is speaking.
“ She changed my whole life. She was the
first person in the world I ever really loved and she loved me. She
was a wonderful human being. I once wrote a poem about her and I
showed it to somebody once and they cried when I read it to them.
It was called, ‘I Love Her.’ It was written about how I felt when
she died. She was the only one who loved me and understood me. She
showed me the path to the higher things of life and she gave me
more confidence in myself. She never hurt me, not once. She
couldn’t. She was all kindness and all love. She was good to
me.”
The quality of Ana Lower can be seen in the
inscription she wrote in the book she gave to Norma Jean before she
died in her early seventies. “Norma dear, read this book. I do not
leave you much except my love, but not even death can diminish
that; nor will death ever take me far away from you.” The book is
Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures . Ana made her living as a working practitioner of
Christian Science, and even produced a bit of religious dedication
in Norma Jean, who would spend every Sunday with Aunt Ana and go
with her to a Christian Science church. Later, in 1941, after Doc
Goddard came once when drunk into Norma Jean’s room and embraced
her, she moved over to live in Aunt Ana’s house, and thereby began
the most secure year of her life. Before it was over she would be
in her first sexual bloom, and this for a variety of reasons, of
which the least was not necessarily Ana Lower’s Christian Science.
If that was a religion which every sophisticated taste had always
found unendurable (since the language is of an unrelenting
fulsomeness: “imbibe the spirit,” and “cast our evil as unreal” for
“the full diapason of secret tones” will reveal “the power of Truth
demonstrated”), and if the brain of Mary Baker Eddy is livid, a
fever of sugars and strictures, still, back of the language is the
same American passion to slash a way through the great spaces and
overwhelming tangle of American life so that the working of one’s
own individual Mind can prevail . That same passion would yet
produce a thousand LSD guides through the Himalayas of psychosis.
So Marilyn would respond to Christian Science. Her mind, muddy,
drifting, fevered, possessed of unconnected desires and
extraordinary fillips of vision, could of course not help but
respond to the thought that “Divine Love always has met and always
will meet every human need.” That offered the possibility of a
future success that was not to be measured by aptitude but by need.
The more she needed, the more she would get, if only she could
trust the voice of her instinct which was the manifestation of
Mind. So she was close to an early Hippie, there in Van Nuys and
West Los Angeles in 1940 and 1941, almost saintly in her newfound
Christian Science, and yet the sex object of every neighborhood
through which she passed. For
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