Between You and Me (32 page)

She was fascinating, and so, too—each in her own way—were the other gifted performers I’ve mentioned. But to me, at least, there was something extra-special about the quartet I’ve chosento focus onin

[ 247 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

this chapter. In fact, I can’t think of a more stimulating treat than to have dinner some evening with the four of them. I would relish the chance to hear Streisand and Turner compare notes about performing.

Or to hear MacLaine and Redgrave share their opinions about politics and the film industry. Or to hear all four of these strong-willed women expound on the various issues that inflame their passions. I’d be happy just to sit there and listen and, for once, keep my own mouth shut.

[ 248 ]

N I N E

. . . A N D O T H E R C E L E B R AT E D

C H A R AC T E R S

( M a r i l y n M o n ro e )

N o r m a n M a i l e r

A rt h u r M i l l e r

INEVER HAD THE PLEASURE of interviewing Marilyn Monroe.

I never even met her. But she was the costar of a 60 Minutes story I did in1973, whenthe celebrated author NormanMailer wrote a book about Monroe that featured his ownbizarre twist onwhat brought her life to an end in August 1962. In the book’s final chapter, Mailer made the outlan

dish suggestionthat Mon

roe had beenmurdered by

Kennedy-hating conspirators from within the CIA and/or the FBI, and he did so without a shred of solid evidence to back up his speculation.

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

Needless to say, his idiosyncratic take on Monroe’s death provoked a storm of criticism, and to a large extent, he welcomed the controversy that swirled around him in the summer and fall of ’73. That came as no surprise to those of us who had followed his career, for over the years, no one had enjoyed a spirited public scrap more than Norman Mailer. He had been courting conflicts and disputes of one kind or another since 1948, when, at the age of twenty-five, he made a big splash with his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was inspired by his combat experience in the Philippines during World War II.

Other successful books followed, and Mailer eventually proclaimed himself the top literary lion on the contemporary American scene, the king of a lush and creative jungle that encompassed both fiction and nonfiction. (Although he achieved his early fame as a nov-elist, Mailer won his first Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1969 for The Armies of the Night, a deeply personal and intuitive piece of journalism about an antiwar demonstration in Washington; he received his second Pulitzer eleven years later for The Executioner’s Song, a “true life novel,” as he called it, about the Gary Gilmore case in Utah.) He also liked to boast that he was the reigning heavyweight champion of machismo, the aggressive, masculine attitude that aroused the ire of feminists, who labeled it male chau-vinism. Given his macho sensibility, it was no doubt inevitable that Mailer would be drawn to the challenge of writing about a mythic sexual goddess like Marilyn Monroe (Aphrodite as observed by King Kong), and it was perhaps just as inevitable that I would welcome the opportunity to do a story on the project that had brought these two icons into each other’s realm.

This was not the first time Mailer and I had confronted each other on television. Our initial encounter took place back in 1957, when I interviewed him on Night Beat. At that time, the big hero in

[ 250 ]

. . . A N D O T H E R C E L E B R A T E D C H A R A C T E R S

his life was Ernest Hemingway, who, with his passion for bullfight-ing, big-game hunting, and other blood sports, had preceded Mailer as the chest-thumping master of machismo, at least in literary circles. Mailer had recently proposed in a newspaper article that Hemingway run for president, “because this country could stand a man for President since for all too many years our lives have been guided by men who were essentially women.” One of my first questions in our Night Beat interview was about that article.

W A L L A C E : What do you mean by that, “men who were essentially women”? Who among our leaders is so unmasculine that you regard him in that light?

M A I L E R : Well, I think President Eisenhower is a bit of a woman.

W A L L A C E : What do you mean by that?

M A I L E R : Well, he’s very passive. . . . If we’re en terin g a crisis, he’s not exactly the kind of man, I believe, who would have any imagination, any particular grasp of how to change things.

Inasmuch as Dwight Eisenhower was a former five-star general who had been the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, it was patently absurd to characterize him as “a bit of a woman”—and Mailer knew it. He later admitted that he had expected me to quote what he had written about the effeminacy of our male leaders, and he had planned to make the remark about Eisenhower merely to create some mischief and get my reaction. It worked, for when he said it, I nearly fell out of my chair. Mailer later compared my facial response to “the wince of a wounded Indian.” Although this was still fairly early in his career, he already was going out of his way to play provocateur.

[ 251 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

I interviewed him again in the fall of 1960, when he was on the verge of announcing his candidacy in the upcoming race for mayor of New York City, a decision based entirely on chutzpah, since he had no visible base of support and no political credentials whatsoever. Still, I decided to humor him and his ego trip, so I asked him questions about various local issues, as though his views on such matters were worthy of serious consideration. I brought up the concern over a recent rise in teenage violence, and Mailer was quick to offer a bold and imaginative remedy. The kids, he said, should not be disarmed, because to a male adolescent, “the knife is an instrument of manhood.” After extolling the heroic spirit of the Middle Ages, he proposed holding modern “jousting tournaments” between teenage gangs in Central Park. In the meantime, I had noticed that Mailer was sporting a black eye—a real shiner—and when I asked him how he got it, Mailer replied, “Oh, I was in quite a scrape Saturday night.”

That was true enough, but it wasn’t the whole story. Mailer neglected to mention that when he came home from that Saturday-night scrape, he had quarreled with his wife, Adele, and stabbed her with a three-inch penknife. Our interview was taped on Monday, and while Mailer nattered on about the knife as “an instrument of manhood,” his wife was undergoing intensive care following an emergency operation at a nearby hospital. Shortly after the interview, Mailer went to a police station and turned himself in. Only then did the press—and the public—learn about the incident. Adele recovered, but even Mailer recognized that being exposed as a wife-stabber was not a promising way to launch an election campaign. He put his political ambitions on hold until 1969, the year he made his maverick run for mayor of New York. Although his hope of capturing city hall was utterly doomed from the start, his quixotic campaign was stimulating, boisterous, and hugely entertaining.

[ 252 ]

. . . A N D O T H E R C E L E B R A T E D C H A R A C T E R S

So here it was, four years after his foray into politics, and he and I were once again crossing swords, this time over what he had written in his latest book. The flap over his biography of Marilyn Monroe was a new kind of controversy for Mailer. He was accustomed to detractors who, over the years, had disparaged him for his raucous behavior, his public displays of bravado, and other excesses that were so much a part of his expansive personality. But even his critics (or most of them, anyway) had acknowledged that at his best, Norman Mailer was one of America’s most gifted writers, and his reputation had been enhanced by the highly charged, intensely personal works of journalism that became his forte in the 1960s.

But now, in 1973—and for the first time in his colorful career—

serious questions were being raised about Mailer’s professional integrity. Most of the criticism of his biography centered on the sensationalism of the final chapter, with its lurid speculations about Monroe’s death, but that was by no means the only objection. Mailer wrote the book at a frantic pace (he bragged about having dashed it off in a mere two months), and in doing so, he did not take the time to do any fresh reporting of his own. He gathered almost all his information from previously published books and articles, and he bor-rowed so heavily from those sources that he was charged with plagiarism. Finally, both Mailer and his publisher, Grosset & Dunlap, were accused of crassly exploiting the tabloid gossip about Monroe and the two Kennedy brothers so they could cash in on the reputations of three deeply admired American legends who were conve-niently dead and in no position to respond to all the scandalous stories. That charge of exploitation was uppermost in our minds when we chose to call our 60 Minutes piece “Monroe, Mailer and the Fast Buck.” When I interviewed the author at his home in Brooklyn Heights, I began with a question about his own motives.

“Why did you write the book?” I asked.

[ 253 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

“I started to write it as—to do a preface, to pick up a sum of money,” Mailer replied. “It was a book which was a commercial venture for me. I needed the money very badly. And then what happens?

I fell in love with the material.”

As I pointed out to our viewers when we broadcast the story in July 1973, Mailer had never met Monroe, and the material he “fell in love with” was her films and various books and magazine articles that others had written about the actress. Later in our interview, I asked him to explain how he came up with his off-the-wall theory about the cause of Monroe’s death.

M A I L E R : All Hollywood was gossiping about Marilyn having an affair with Bobby Kennedy . . . which I believe in fact she was not having. Although they were dear and close friends.

So, if she could be murdered in such a way that it would look like a suicide for unrequited love of Bobby Kennedy, it would be a huge embarrassment for the Kennedys. And there were people around in those days, in the CIA and the FBI, who hated the Kennedys. . . . I’m saying that some of them may have decided it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to knock off Marilyn Monroe.

W A L L A C E : You don’t believe that she was murdered, though, really. Down bottom.

M A I L E R : Well— No, I don’t know. I didn’t know her.

W A L L A C E : I say you don’t believe it.

M A I L E R : If you ask me to give a handicapper’s estimate of what it was, I’d say it’s ten to one that it was an accidental suicide. Ten to one, anyway.

W A L L A C E : At least.

M A I L E R : But I would not—I could not ignore the possibility of a murder.

[ 254 ]

. . . A N D O T H E R C E L E B R A T E D C H A R A C T E R S

W A L L A C E : And do you believe that Bobby Kennedy was there, had been with her that night?

M A I L E R : It’s possible.

W A L L A C E : I’m asking you again.

M A I L E R : I don’t know.

W A L L A C E : Handicap it!

M A I L E R : I’d say it’s even money.

Elaborating on the uncertainty of it all, Mailer insisted that it was impossible to know for sure what had happened to Monroe because

“no one’s talking, and no one’s going to talk about that night.”

Mailer was wrong about that. Someone was willing to talk about that night, and she happened to be the one person who could refute his convoluted theory about Monroe’s death. Eunice Murray was Marilyn’s housekeeper at the time, and prior to my interview with Mailer, I talked to her about the night her employer died. I asked her directly if Monroe could have been murdered.

M U R R A Y : Definitely not.

W A L L A C E : You say definitely not. Why?

M U R R A Y : Impossible. Because I was alone there with her, the doors were locked, we had been— We had gone to bed and there wasn’t any— No one was around. . . .

W A L L A C E : Bobby Kennedy was not there that night?

M U R R A Y : No.

W A L L A C E : You were?

M U R R A Y : That’s right.

W A L L A C E : In doing his research for the book, Norman Mailer never got to you?

M U R R A Y : That’s right. I think it was reported that I was in hiding.

[ 255 ]

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

W A L L A C E : Yes, it was.

M U R R A Y : It’s very funny. My name is in the telephone direc-tory, and I have never made any effort to hide.

I had to conclude that the only reason Mailer couldn’t find Eunice Murray was because he didn’t really try, and I later stressed that point in my interview with him.

W A L L A C E : It’s as though you and your publishers didn’t want too many of the facts, but were more anxious for the controversy, for the mystery . . . a mystery on which a considerable amount of light could be shed by the simple expedient of picking up a telephone and calling Eunice Murray.

M A I L E R : No, no, no, wait a moment. We obviously discussed the possibility of calling Eunice Murray. . . . I vetoed it because I hate telephone interviews. And I do. As a writer, I hate them. I hate that way of getting facts.

W A L L A C E : Then you get on a plane and go to Los Angeles—

M A I L E R : I told you, I had a choice. I was coming down to a deadline. I had something like twenty thousand words to finish in the last week—

W A L L A C E : But facts, Norman!

M A I L E R : Now, wait a minute, Mike. Let me just give you my attitude on it. What I knew was I was sailing into a sea of troubles, and I said, “Fine, that’s what we’re going to sail into.”

Because the alternative was this: I did not have the time to do both.

Mailer was thoroughly flustered. He clearly had not expected me to grill him about his slipshod reporting methods or the deeply flawed