Word: mailer
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With this groundwork, Mailer allows that everything about her was possible and proceeds to include, well, just about everything...
...MAILER'S MONROE is a repository for hoary legends and dirty jokes told about starlets in general. And in the process reveals at least as much of the Mailer that we already knew than any new insight he has provided about his subject. His language is perhaps no flatter than anyone else who tried to write 90,000 words in 60 days, but it is not much better than his account of the Frazier Ali fight which he wrote on deadline for Life. In Marilyn, Mailer coins at least four new words: "fucky" as the description of her earlier roles...
Most of the excitement of the book comes from the inevitable progression of the narrative, which is mostly raced along by the facts which Mailer has gleaned from his sources. Still, he was not averse to citing before, and quoted extensively in all his nonfiction books. But in this case, his own interviews and not extensive newspaper research, and his own speculations and impressions do not carry that magic proportion of the book with which he can rest easy--he does not seem responsible for a majority of his material. He never met her. He doesn't even quite have...
...MAILER also has Monroe "winning her films," but the metaphor of the boxer wears thin by the end of the book. Perhaps the most insight is offered in the section on the making of The Misfits, which coincided with Monroe's breakup with Arthur Miller. Mailer here is able to offer his most credible insights into the nature of Miller's attraction to the uneducated woman and, hers to him in his failure to deal with her consumptive insecurity, congenital lateness, and the cancerous dependence on sleeping pills. Mailer also offers convincing testimony that the key to this insecurity...
Without realizing precisely what he is doing, Mailer destroys Miller by character assasination. In the process of writing his story, the old competitor in Mailer cannot stop himself from taking vicious shots at Miller's intellectual capacity, trying to make Miller's reputation seem inflated. Finally, the liberties that Mailer takes as novelist sometimes just sicken...