Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online

accent, and this could have had its effect.
While Marilyn would never sound English, there is something
analogous to an English accent in her voice — perhaps it is the
knowledge (which also resides in a good Southern accent) that
language says more when savored. Most Americans speak to
communicate an idea, but a good English accent puts emphasis on
those words which carry the personality. So Marilyn may have
learned from the English couple how to communicate more than a
single thought with one speech. In films, she was usually saying
two things at once. When she will fall off the piano bench in The Seven-Year Itch and as quickly says to Tom Ewell that he
must not feel bad because men always made passes at her, she is
blonde, full-blown, and altogether nurturing to the thin quivering
banjo-string repressions of thin Tom Ewell, she is all of that, but
she is also the mistress of that great remote female void where
wonder at the comedy of men’s urgencies resides. “What is it I got
that makes them twitch?” is what she is also saying. It is why we
laugh. When we perceive a paradoxical truth just long enough to be
warmed by the novelty, but not so long that we must pay by altering
our ideas, we laugh. The truth she is offering in the scene is that
ubiquitous sex appeal — there for everyone! — seems to depend on
the existence of a void. But, already, her arch little voice, so
much in control of its paradoxes, is moving on to some new artful
and double expression of what had been hitherto a single thought.
So we do not stop to think — we laugh. And maybe we enjoy the
influence of that English accent she heard in her childhood.
    We will hardly know for certain. One would
have to go through the payrolls of old George Arliss movies to
discover the couple’s name, and they would be dead. Sixty years old
then, they would be a hundred now. Besides, it is the least of the
mysteries in this period of Norma Jean’s life. For Gladys will not
be with her long. In no more than three months the mother will go
mad, will literally be carted away by force, and will end — now, we are looking at scenes from a Chaplin film — will end in the
state asylum at Norwalk where her own mother died. Gladys’ sanity
must have been maintained for years as an act of will, a species of
discipline in the name of her grand project. Now the grand project
was manifest in a little girl who wandered around the house, stared
at people drinking, sang “Jesus Loves Me,” disappeared into movies
on Saturday, and had no relation to her mother other than an
occasional numb embrace. It is worth supposing that this relatively
undramatic condition, this increment of Gladys’ long continuing
depression, was finally enough to pull apart whatever fine membrane
of sanity she had wrapped over all her isolated traps and fires.
She woke up one morning in a depression too complete to go to work
— the horrors were upon her. Then came a psychic explosion. The
English couple was distraught. Attendants from the hospital, called
in to subdue her, had to take her away lashed to a stretcher. The
Englishman gives a gentle word to Norma Jean when she comes home
from school. “Your mother,” he tells her, “was taken ill today.
She’s gone to the hospital.” She would not learn what was wrong
with Gladys until she was a woman herself, nor would she live with
her again for twelve years.
    Her life is washing out of the last nets of
social life. Norma Jean is on the edge of institutional life
herself. The English couple still take care of her during this
period (which lasts for almost a year), but are obliged to sell her
mother’s furniture to meet the taxes and mortgage payments. They
are even obliged to sell the prize of the house, a white piano,
reputedly owned once by Fredric March and bought by Gladys at
auction for her daughter to play. (Norma Jean, when still with the
Bolenders, had taken piano lessons with a teacher named Marion
Miller; it is one arm of the