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Show written by Fred Guiles, Mailer expanded his preface for an advance of $50,000. Guiles was paid for his material, and Mailer clearly acknowledges that he could never have undertaken his book if Norma lean had not existed. In short, there is practically nothing new in the Mailer book, except for his sensational murder theory, and in fact, the best portion of the book consists of photographs previously collected by promoter Schiller for an exhibition. ly suffered deeply from an almost omnipresent inferiority complex. She knew that both her grandmother and mother had fallen victim to insanity, and understandably she was fearful that she, too had inherited the same mental instability. Not her father She was also aware that she was illegitimate. She knew that the name on n her birth certificate, Norma Jean (born June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles), was not the name of her true father. It was not until she was a teenager that she finally learned to her satisfaction that her father was C. Stanley Gifford who had worked alongside her mother in the laboratories of Consolidated Film Industries in Hollywood. Later, when she was 25 and under she contract to 20th Century-Fotraced C. Stanley Gifford to the Red Rock Dairy which he owned in Hemet, a small city above Palm Springs. One day Marilyn decided to drive down and confront Gifford. En route to Hemet in her car, she stopped to phone him. Gifford's wife answered the call. Marilyn explained who she was. Gifford's wife said Gifford didn't want to see her. If Marilyn had any claims or complaints, Mrs. Gifford declared she should take them to her husband's lawyer in Los Angeles. Hurt, frustrated, and bewildered, Marilyn slumped back to her car, returned to Hollywood, feeling as she frequently did, lost, unwanted, unloved always the waif, emotionally shat- fantastic interest' "I put this whole deal together," Schiller proudly told me over the phone, "and we stand to make worldwide about a million and a half bucks. Norman gets one-thir- d of the royalties s. and the photographers get It was my idea to hire Mailer in the first place. "The interest in Marilyn," Schiller explains, "is still fantastic. The first printing of the book, including the order for the was 320,000 copies. We also sold serial rights to the Ladies' Home Journal, and The Atlantic monthly, and we're licensing the book overseas country by country. It could turn out to be one of the biggest best sellers of all time." Also one of the biggest ripoffs. Despite the bitter brevity of her life, Marilyn Monroe knew several men intimately. There was Jim Dougherty, her first husband, whom she married at age 16 and then walked out on while he was Mor-tenso- two-third- th Norman Mailer got $50fi00 advance against royalties for a book which puts forth a bizarre murder theory. the maritime service. There was the lecherous movie mogul Joe Schenck who at age 69 used her, advised her, befriended her and recommended her for a job at Columbia Pictures. There was Freddie Karger, the musician who later married Jane Wyman, Governor Reagan's first wife. There was little Johnny Hyde, originally Haidabura, a who "kept" Marilyn in a style to which she was then not in vaudevil-lian-turned-age- accustomed. There was her second husband of 10 months, Joe DiMaggio, whom she referred to as 'The Slugger" and who in retrospect was probably the most decent and certainly the most reliable man in her life and death. There was knows, Marilyn Monroe was a fright- ened, insecure young woman who x, After marriage to foe DiMaggio, whom she called "The Slugger," Marilyn looked radiant. But happiness paled, they were divorced within the year. playwright Arthur Miller, her third and most talented husband of four years. And there was Italian-bor- n actor Yves Montand (real name Ivo Livi) with whom she in a travesty, Let's JAake Love, and with whom she did. In all probability there were others, but surely the one man who knew her best, or certainly as no other did, was her psychiatrist. Dr. Ralph Greenson, one of the deans of psychoanalysis in Southern California. Marilyn not only used Greenson as a psychiatrist but as a surrogate father. She told him all, or as much as she could confess to any human being. And she was not reluctant with the confessional. How truthful she was is another matter. But reluctant no. The first time I interviewed her, in 1947, at the reStudio pubquest of a 20th Century-Fo- x licist, Jim Denton, she confided to us over lunch that she had been assaulted by one of her guardians, raped by a policeman, and attacked by a sailor. She seemed to me then to live in a fantasy world, to be entangled in the process of invention, and to be completely absorbed in her own sexuality. ed And it was to him I went 11 years ago when I sought the truth of her death. For it was he who first discovered her dead. 'Not murdered' Greenson is sure that Marilyn Monroe was not murdered. He ridicules Mailer's suspicions and theory and assumes that the current spate of books o'n Marilyn is the result of "peoples desire to make a buck." "Why are they Watergating her?" he asks. "Why can't they let her rest in peace? She was a bedeviled, fatherless young woman, torn between being a waif one minute and a princess the next. How could she have been murdered? I think Mailer is all wrong." As anyone interested in her life sure tered. Searching for substitutes Marilyn never again sought to contact the man she considered her father, but she never stopped searching for one. Most of the men in her life were continued How much to believe? I had no idea of how much to believe of what she said, and thus decided to write nothing about her. Three years later when I wrote a script at RKO entitled High Heels, I recommended to producer Jerry Wald that we hire Marilyn for the leading role and I interviewed her again. And again I was struck by her waifhke naivety, her obvious sex appeal, and her inconsistent version of her background. Dr. Greenson, however, I am sure, dredged up the truth about Marilyn. Marilyn's lasted longer much-publiciz- ed four years marriage but it, too, to author-playwrig- finally ht ended Arthur Miller in divorce early in 1967. |