Free Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer

the
imaginary pleasure of putting ourselves into the early discussion
between Mrs. Dougherty on one side and Grace and Ana on the other.
Since the Doughertys are working class and Grace is a film
librarian and presumably, by the measure of the early Forties, a
stylish and educated woman, married to an engineer, the fundamental
offer, which we may be certain was never suggested, is that Jim is
going to marry up! If he is getting a fifteen-year-old who wears
too much makeup, Ana Lower is there to suggest by way of her own
good manners that this is a passing phase and Norma Jean will yet
become more of a lady than any girl in the neighborhood.
    We need no more than suppose Mrs. Dougherty
is a determined woman anxious for her children to better
themselves, and we see her soon placing the full weight of her
opinion in favor of the marriage. To this we need only disbelieve
that the future groom was simply what he later claimed to be — a
good-looking practical adolescent who was playing the field.
Perhaps he thought he was being forced to go along. We need only
remember it is Marilyn we are talking about. So we know he
has to be — more than he will ever admit — has to be secretly and
hopelessly entangled in the insane sexual musk which comes off a
fifteen-year-old who talks to him with eyes as soft and luminous as
a deer’s and then become eyes that have just gone dead in a pouted
painted mouth, a presence that comes down upon his own mouth like
velvet, then withdraws into a veil of mist and tears tender as a
warm and rainy fog.
    He has never been near such luxury of mood,
such emoluments of future sex, and such longing in a girl for the
strength he can offer. His relations with other girls have been
more even. She, however, is hopeless and incommensurate. To kiss
her is to drift in a canoe. She does not neck — she floats. He has
passed unwittingly into the drug of female sex. What also attracts
the good athlete in him is that no girl in the neighborhood is so
desired; what frightens the good athlete in him is that there are
better athletes in the world.
    And she in turn has to be off on the initial
exercise of star status. Jim Dougherty is her first leading man –
he goes with the Santa Barbara beauty queen and owns a car; in her
near field of high school sophomores, he is a luminary. So she is
discovering the first laws of the actor’s creation. Pumped high on
the premise that she is in love, the premise has become more real
than whatever reality is left once the premise is removed. Why not
assume she is playing her role with such invention she is ready to
enter an actor’s arena where reality can be measured only by the
intensity of emotion. That is all that is real. So she adventures
out for the first time into that psychic territory where fantasy
can reach into terrors never confessed before to anyone alive, and
she confesses to him, her first actor, that she lives in terror of
doing away with herself, yes, she knows she will kill herself some
day.
    There is no record of such a conversation, no
particle of evidence to underwrite it, except that she is forever
ready to tell him in their marriage that if he were to die or go
away she would jump off the Santa Monica pier. It must have been
said with enough seriousness to have brought forth the remark from
Dougherty after her death that even if Norma Jean had remained with
him she might have broken down.
    So at the least, we can guess she is more
attracted to the idea of marriage than she will later confess. How
to ignore that it will be her first thoroughgoing role? Already she
must sense that the best route to her identity may be found by
running simulations of experience through real situations.
Dougherty, in turn, could easily have been overcome by the size of
the mystery he was purchasing. While it is true he continues to
date his other girl friends for weeks after the engagement is
announced, there is no reason not to assume he is, like Norma Jean,
experiencing the