Read Online Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer - Free Book Online Page A

the metamorphosis had come. She lived
in a sudden coronation of sex, a sainthood of sex. If there was a
Goddess of Sex, Norma Jean might as well have been anointed by
her.
    We have to reflect back on the boredom of the
orphanage. That torpor was not unlike a storage cell in which
resentment could build up potential, that nihilistic potential of
the highest human voltage. Deep inside her must have developed a
blank eye for power unattached to any notion of the moral. A
manifest of Yeats’ beast slinking to the marketplace, the
unconscious pressure toward finding power was so great that of
course she could not speak with ease and squeaked when she laughed
— other orphans, survivors, psychopaths, and delinquents have taken
up rifles on rooftops to shoot down on the streets. It is in fact
the “blank and pitiless gaze” of twentieth-century power that sits
in their eyes.
    But she encountered Ana Lower, and somewhere
in the mills of her psyche, libido was commenced. Had a libido ever
been concocted before out of such tender love mixed into the high
voltage of such blank hate? A product issued forth from her pores.
She emanated sex, a simple sweet girl on still another back street,
emanated sex like few girls ever did. It was as if her adolescence
had come forth out of so many broken starts and fragmented pieces
of personality forcibly begun and more quickly interrupted that
libido seemed to ooze through her, and ooze out of her like a dew
through the cracks in a vase. Long before other adolescents could
even begin to comprehend what relation might exist between this
first rush of sex to their parts and the still unflexed structure
of their young character, she was already without character. So she
gave off a skin-glow of sex while others her age were still cramped
and passionate and private; she had learned by Mind to move sex
forward — sex was not unlike an advance of little infantrymen of
libido sent up to the surface of her skin. She was a general of sex
before she knew anything of sexual war.
    And in this time she also began her
exploration of the arts of makeup, a skill at which she would
become sufficiently superb to be respected by the best makeup men
in Hollywood. When girls were jealous and gossiped about her, she
looked to wear her bathing suits smaller and was delighted at the
result. She was a center of attention. If libido was always flowing
out to her surfaces, then she would require that it also pour in,
and whenever she was the center of attention, energy would come
back to her from others. So her sex appeal is always a reflection
of her surroundings. She is a mirror of the pleasures of those who
stare at her. Like an animal, she is never in a photograph just as
herself — rather, is herself plus the sum of her surroundings. In
her high school yearbook, they do not place her under A for
Ability, or B for Beauty. She has the M’s all to herself.
MMMMMMMMMM — Norma Jean Baker. MMMMM. The initials of Marilyn
Monroe are on their way.
    There is not a tight sweater she does not
employ nor a beauty aid she would ignore. She will wash her face as
often as fifteen times a day, and Grace or Ana give her permanents
to curl her straight hair. Horns will honk as she walks to school.
“Even the girls,” she says, “paid a little attention. Hmm! She’s to be dealt with.” And this will be told with a laugh
to Dick Meryman of Life not two months before her death.
“The world became friendly . . . it opened up to me.” Boys would
come visiting like a swarm over the honey. Suddenly there are
twelve or fifteen boys on a quiet street all milling around her
yard, hanging upside down from tree limbs to catch up her
attention. MMMMMM. Yet . . . “the truth was that with all my
lipstick and mascara and precocious curves I was as unresponsive as
a fossil . . . I used to lie awake at night wondering why the boys
came after me.” She is the general of sex, but like other generals
she does not feel the excitement and fear