‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: Life Writing in Cultural Context

ABSTRACT

In 1973, Norman Mailer published a work of creative nonfiction about the life of the actor Marilyn Monroe, entitled Marilyn: A Biography. Released amid a wave of American nostalgia for the 1950s and during the Watergate investigation, the book was upheld as evidence of a ‘witch-hunt’ Watergate culture. In this article, I will analyse the initial reception of Marilyn and its affective history. Situating Marilyn at the intersections of biography, New Journalism, and Watergate discourses demonstrates the important role historical context can play in analysis of celebrity biography. Considering Marilyn in its political, cultural, and literary context illuminates the ways in which the project’s destabilisation of truth aligned with New Journalist pursuits while clashing with Watergate era longings for stability, a collision which excited the ire of many of its initial critics and an early reception that continues to shape responses to the work to this day.

KEYWORDS:

• Norman Mailer
• Marilyn Monroe
• New Journalism
• literary celebrity

Acknowledgements

The author would also like to thank Clare Brandt and the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King's College London for providing institutional access, without which this research would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Oline Eaton teaches literature at the University of Memphis and is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London.

ORCID

Oline Eaton http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4167-9238

Notes

1 This is a method which foregrounds the cultural currents visible to the contemporary subjects, outlining the atmosphere in which they acted and reacted, and exposing links between contemporary cultural phenomena which are less likely to have been addressed in secondary accounts. Admittedly, this method has limitations. It disregards the editorial process to which these sources have been submitted and archival materials that may shed further light upon the commercial forces and the demands of the marketplace which may have influenced the Mailer book. Nor does it address the complex publication history of Marilyn, which has been reprinted in substantially different editions over the years: from the original hardback to paperback editions to the Taschen reprint entitled Norman Mailer/Bert Stern. Marilyn Monroe (2012), which paired Mailer’s text with photographs by Bert Stern. I am interested in the book as an idea and a text, and thus I will only briefly touch upon Marilyn’s long publishing history, and will not be discussing its photographic component beyond the initial exhibition out of which it arose.

2 Written by the conservative, anti-communist author Frank A. Capell (1907–1980), The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe circulated during the 1964 campaign season, presumably with the intent of derailing Robert Kennedy’s Senate campaign. In his 72-page booklet, Capell claimed there was a communist conspiracy to murder Monroe because she had threatened to reveal publicly an affair with Robert Kennedy. Described by the Wall Street Journal as ‘A romantic mystery story’ (‘In Politics It’s—The Year Of Smear’, 1964, M1), The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe was seen, at the time, to be part of a trend of campaign season paperbacks from ‘demagogic and overzealous’ right-wing writers (Jones, 1964, 14). In his acknowledgements, Mailer claims not to have been aware of Capell’s work while he was writing Marilyn, and notes that the publication was produced by a ‘right-wing press’ (Mailer, 1973, 261). However, he is generous in his handling of The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, referring to it as a ‘book’ despite its more accurate classification as a pamphlet, granting it the illusion of intellectual rigour through multiple references to its ‘thesis’, and situating Capell’s claims in relation to his own. He cites the booklet’s portrait of Robert Kennedy as ‘valuable’ in revealing ‘how sinister a figure [he] must have appeared to ultra-conservative groups’ (262), and also in its detailing of the circumstances in which Monroe’s body was found as ‘a point where further investigation can continue’ (261).

3 Such characterisations are not static. Despite Marilyn’s positioning of Monroe in the 1950s, Mailer’s interpretation of her remained dynamic. By the 1990s, Mailer saw her as a star of an altogether different era. In a profile of the performer Madonna, published in the August 1994 issue of Esquire, Mailer saw Monroe as an emblem of the 1930s. ‘She was our movie star of the Fifties’, he wrote, ‘but Marilyn spoke of a simpler time, the Thirties. It was to the Thirties that she belonged. Her smile goes back to such archetypes in our sentimental loyalties as the songs of the Thirties—“Let’s have another cup of coffee, and let’s have another piece of pie”’ (Mailer 1994). For Mailer, Monroe existed on a scale that slid backwards, a circumstance that possibly reveals the author’s increasing nostalgia for childhood as he aged.