Word: starlet
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...nearly 200 newspapers. Wilson treads his ex-stable mate's old path around Manhattan and keeps the same strenuous hours. The fruit of all that effort-a dollop of show business shoptalk and a few bon mots from the stars, wrapped around a demi-cheesecake photo of some starlet-may not always seem worth it. But occasionally he comes up with a genuine hard-news scoop, like his 1953 disclosure that Dr. Jonas Salk was working on a polio vaccine. Wilson heard it from Helen Hayes, whose daughter was a polio victim...
...bitch goddesses, stars who could be all things to all men, who could, via screen, be injected into the hearts of America, and via fantasy, enter every bed in America. Stars, yes, a race apart from you and me. If they could accept glory as a given of the starlet role, then they could build it into the identity: They could believe their parts; they could believe themselves exceptions to the truth that their movies were but all promises; they could grow so used to glory that they could come to need it in order to know who they were...
...promises even further sales. On the premise that the romantic melodramas are addictive, President W. Lawrence Heisey, a 43-year-old Harvard Business School graduate, is offering 2,000,000 copies of a single title, Dark Star, for only 15? each. The plot: prim secretary competes with dusky movie starlet for affections of compelling Latin. Dealers across the U.S. are getting the book free; it would normally command about 36? wholesale, 60? retail...
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...
...rest easy--he does not seem responsible for a majority of his material. He never met her. He doesn't even quite have hold of the metaphors in the book. He imagines Marilyn as a Napoleon of publicity who meets her end on a Fifth Helena Brentwood. As a starlet who made it seem easy as "ice cream." As a protean personality of opposites, sentimentality and Grand Bitchiness, soft as lamb's wool and cruel as steel; and finally Mailer has her at her core of sexual power bigger than any man she ever meets. Her movement is towards bigger...