Mind of an Outlaw (56 page)

The point is that
The Misfits
is a movie, particularly in its first half, that moves on no more powerful hydraulic of plot than the suggestion of one nuance laid like a feather over another—so it is closer to the nature of most emotional relations than other pictures. But its virtue is also its vulnerability. We see Roslyn and Langland come together, sleep together, set up home together, we feel the other two cowboys perching themselves on the edge of this relation, but no emotional facts are given, no setting of category or foundation, for the plot is never bolted down. We do not know exactly how Roslyn comes to feel for each man, nor how much she feels. The picture is even less precise than biography. Unlike other movies, we have no blueprint to the emotional line of her heart. Instead she seems to shimmer on the screen with many possibilities of reality. When she holds Monty Clift’s head on her lap after he has been wounded in the rodeo, we do not know whether she is maternal or stirring for him, or both—nor is she likely to know what she feels. In life, how would she?

So the movie is different in
tone
than others, and she is altogether different from other actresses, even different from her performances of the past. She is not sensual here but
sensuous
, and by a meaning of the word which can go to the root—she seems to possess no clear outline on screen. She is not so much
a woman as a mood, a cloud of drifting senses in the form of Marilyn Monroe—no, never has she been more luminous.

For Taping from TV
Ladies of the Chorus
(1948)

With Adele Jergens, MM, Rand Brooks, Nana Bryant. Directed by Phil Karlson.
(B&W, 61 min.)

A bad B movie about a young burlesque star (chaste!) daughter of an older burlesque star (classy) in love with a scion. It came out in 1948, and is the first movie where we can really see her; she sings, dances, acts, even has a catfight with hair pullings, slaps, shrieks, awkward blows reminiscent of girls throwing baseballs—the picture is terrible, but she is not. She is interestingly wooden in the wrong places (like a faint hint of the wave of Camp to come), and she sings and dances with a sweet vitality, even does her best to make one agree it is not absolutely impossible she is in love with Rand Brooks, the scion (who must certainly be the plainest leading man any ambitious ingenue ever was assigned to love), but what is most interesting in the comfort of studying this actress who is to go so far is the odd air of confidence she emits, a narcissism about her own potentialities so great it becomes a perfumed species of sex appeal as if a magnificent girl has just walked into a crowded room and declared, “I’m far and away the most beautiful thing here.” Of course, she is not. Not yet. Her front teeth protrude just a fraction (like Jane Russell’s), her chin points a hint, and her nose is a millimeter too wide and so gives suggestion of a suckling pig’s snout. Yet she is still close to gorgeous in her own way, with a sort of I-smell-good look, I-am-wonderful look. She is like a baby everyone loves—how wise are the tunneled views of one’s own hindsight!

Love Happy
(1950)

With Chico, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Ilona Massey, Raymond Burr, Vera-Ellen, MM. Directed by David Miller.
(Color, 85 min.)

In
Love Happy
, with Groucho Marx, Marilyn has a classic moment—the famous undulating movement of her hips is now unveiled for the first time in a movie. It is an uproarious moment in the movie—the wild call of a strange girl’s ass to Groucho Marx—he engorges his cigar in a leer.

“What seems to be the problem?” he inquires.

“Men keep following me all the time.” She exits, Mae West in one swinging pocket, Jean Harlow in the other. It is uproarious, but she may have been desperate. Twice hired, twice fired, and she is approaching the age of twenty-three—Elizabeth Taylor, who is four years younger, is already famous. So she puts everything she knows of provocation, exaggeration, and the nascent art of Camp into the swing—“Take me from behind, I’m yours,” say her undulating hips.

River of No Return
(1954)

With Robert Mitchum, MM, Rory Calhoun, Tommy Rettig. Directed by Otto Preminger.
(Color, 91 min.)

A “Z cowboy film” is Monroe’s concise description of
River of No Return
. She is the only woman and, surrounded by strong male actors, is also drenched in scenes with a boy actor and with a director who is famous for grinding actors’ bones in the maw of his legendary rage. It is the most demoralizing movie in which Marilyn ever played a lead, and must be the worst of Preminger’s pictures.

The Prince and the Showgirl
(1957)

With MM, Laurence Olivier, Sybil Thorndike, Richard Wattis. Directed by Laurence Olivier.
(Color, 117 min.)

The irony of
The Prince and the Showgirl
is that it is better than anyone has a right to expect from the (nightmarish) history of its making, but that is because Monroe is superb—will wonders never cease?

She is also lovely. Milton H. Greene is indeed a genius with makeup. Never will Marilyn exhibit so marvelous a female palette, her colors living in the shades of the English garden. A hue cannot appear on her face without bearing the tone of a flower
petal. Her lips are rose, her cheeks have every softened flush. Lavender shadows are lost in her hair. Once again she inhabits every frame of the movie.

Of course, Olivier in his turn cannot fail to be excellent. He is too great an actor not to offer some final delineation of a Balkan archduke. If there are a thousand virtuosities in his accent, it is because his virtuosities are always installed within other virtuosities—a consummate house of cards. It is just that he is out there playing by himself. So one can never get to believe he is attracted to Monroe. (Indeed, he is most believable when he snorts, “She has as much
comme il faut
as a rhinoceros!”) Willynilly, he is therefore emphasizing the high level of contrivance in the plot.

Let’s Make Love
(1960)

With MM, Yves Montand, Tony Randall, Frankie Vaughan; cameos by Milton Berle, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly. Directed by George Cukor.
(Color, 118 min.)

She never made a movie where she is so ordinary. A sad truth is before us again. Art and sex are no more compatible than they care to be. She is wan in the movie and dull.

Also on Tape

Marilyn Monroe videocassettes which Norman Mailer chose not to review in depth include:

All About Eve
(1950)

With Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, MM. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.
(Magnetic Video cassette, B&W, 138 min., $79.95)

Clash by Night
(1952)

With Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, MM. Directed by Fritz Lang.
(Video Communications cassette, B&W, 105 min., $49.95)

How to Marry a Millionaire
(1953)

With MM, Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, William Powell, David Wayne, Rory Calhoun. Directed by Jean Negulesco.
(Magnetic Video cassette, color, 96 min., $59.95)

Marilyn Monroe
(1967)

Documentary with narration by Mike Wallace.
(Karl Video cassette, B&W, 30 min., $45)

Fallen Stars: Elvis and Marilyn
(1963 approx.)

Documentary with narration by John Huston.
(Discount Videotapes / Sound Video Unlimited cassettes, B&W, 60 min., $39.95)

Marilyn also did
Right Cross
and
Home Town Story
for Metro. For Twentieth there was
The Fireball, As Young As You Feel, Love Nest, Let’s Make It Legal, We’re Not Married, Don’t Bother to Knock, Monkey Business, O. Henry’s Full House
and
Niagara
. They are all in varying degree unimportant pictures, and need little more description than their titles.
Love Nest
is worth a footnote in any history of cinema, for Jack Paar has a part in it,
We’re Not Married
is comic, and
Don’t Bother to Knock
, although a slow and disappointing piece of cinema, is worth study for a student of Monroe since she gives a serious performance in the part of a deranged girl with nuances of alternating numbness and hysteria, although she fails to project menace. It is a role she does not go near again. She has a classic stuntman’s ride in an automobile with Cary Grant in
Monkey Business
, a scene with Charles Laughton in
Full House
, and a starring role in
Niagara
, in which she offers the only interest.

After her orgy of attention in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
and her skill in stealing
How to Marry a Millionaire
from Betty Grable and Bacall, she managed to get past
There’s No Business Like Show Business
and
River of No Return
to go on to be the center of every production after (except for
Let’s Make Love
, which has no center), dominating directors and running away with each movie. They have all, in varying degree, become
her
movies. Few prizefighters could point to such a string of triumphs.

The films she made through the last years of her life are her best, the fulfillment of an art. Her art deepened. She got better. Her subtlety took on more resonance. By
The Misfits
she was not so much a woman as a presence, not an actor, but an essence—the language is hyperbole, yet her effects are not. She appears in these final efforts as a visual existence different from other actors and so leaves her legend where it belongs, which is on the screen.

BACK IN 1967
, I was trying to cast
The Deer Park
for Off-Broadway and needed a tall, young, clean-cut American to play the hero. Only you could not find talented actors in New York with such looks—they were all on the West Coast. One day, drinking a gloomy beer, I happened to glance at an old black-and-white TV set which had been muttering in the corner all afternoon and noticed a man on a horse. “There’s the guy,” I cried—it was much like a scene out of films one used to see—“that’s the man we want. There’s our Sergius O’Shaughnessy.”

The director’s name was Leo Garen, and he looked at me in pity. “Yes,” he said, “he’d be wonderful. But we can’t afford him.”

“Why?” I asked. “It’s a soap opera. He’s probably dying to get into a play.”

“No,” said Garen, “this is an old rerun of
Rawhide
. The actor you’re looking at is the hottest thing around right now.”

That was my introduction to Clint Eastwood. Now, looking back on his years of starring in films which return prodigious profits, it is obvious he satisfies some notion in hordes of people of how an American hero ought to look.

NORMAN MAILER:
I’ve seen an awful lot of presidential candidates, and you’re one of the few people who could go far that way.

CLINT EASTWOOD:
(laughs)

MAILER:
I’m not kidding. There’s one guy in five hundred who’s got a presidential face and usually nothing else.

EASTWOOD:
If I’ve got the presidential face, I’m lacking in a lot of other areas.

MAILER:
Well, all lack it.

EASTWOOD:
I don’t feel I could get up and say a lot of things that I know I couldn’t perform on. Yet they have to do that to win. The ones that are honest about what they can or can’t do don’t have a chance.

Let us assume we are strangers and searching about for a topic of conversation at dinner.

We discover we are both interested in Clint Eastwood.

Yes, I admit, I happen to know him.

Immediately, your mood improves.

Well, I say, I don’t know him very well, but he’s an interesting man. He’s hard, however, to understand.

Do you like him?

You have to. On first meeting, he’s one of the nicest people you ever met. But I can’t say I know him well. We talked a couple of times and had a meal together. I liked him. I think you’d have to be around for a year before you saw his ugly side, assuming he has one.

It would take that long?

Well, he’s very laid back. If you don’t bother him, he will never bother you. In that sense, he is like the characters he plays in his films.

Since my new partner is a good listener, I begin to expatiate. I describe Eastwood on our first meeting. I talk about his tall presence,
which is exceptional—exactly as one would wish it to be in a movie star. He certainly has the lean, self-contained body that you see only in the best dancers, rock climbers, competition skiers, and tightrope walkers. His face has the same disconcerting purity. You could be looking at a murderer or a saint.

Here, my partner makes a face.

No, I say, it’s true. Men who have been in prison for twenty years sometimes have such a look, and you can see it on monks and certain acrobats with fine and tragic faces.