Free Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer Page B

when
reporters will ask her about the nude calendar pictures, she will
reply to the question, “Did you have anything on?” with the answer,
“Oh, yes, the radio,” a quip quickly telegraphed around the world,
but just as likely she was not trying to be funny. To lie nude
before a photographer in a state of silence was a different
condition, and much more naked, than to be nude with the protection
of sound. She did not have a skin like others.
    Perhaps she was nearer to animals than most.
She would not know about headlights on a horse because she would
assume that after the barbarity of the saddle and the cinch, all
other accessories were possible. Not only her libido but her
intelligence lived on the surface of her skin. Like an animal, she
was ready to collect any new omen in a shift of wind.
    If she were animal, however, it did not mean
that she was simple in her sex. The word from Hollywood over the
years (where prowess in sex becomes as ticketed in men and women as
batting averages) was that she was not to be celebrated as a
fireball, and indeed was sometimes described — in the omnibus
category of the disappointed male — as frigid. She was certainly,
by more civilized report, pleasant in bed, but receptive rather
than innovative, and somewhat ceremonious — like a geisha, as
though the act was a tender turn in a longer passage, and food and
conversation and easy laughter was also part of it, a tender
description of her by a lover who had not been in love. “Of course,
I cannot say how she was with other men,” he remarked, “but she was
always just a little remote with me. And very friendly. I liked
her.”
    Descriptions by other men are similar. But we
must not assume we know too much about her. She was secretive in
the extreme, and if she had lovers in later life for which her body
felt unruly desire we are not likely to find out easily. She was
the measure of her surroundings. There is hardly a posed photograph
in which she does not appropriate something of the background by
the curve of her limbs — she is the mirror of the mood about her
and may have had a tendency to return each man his own sexual
goods, tenderness and detachment with a friend, but something else
on a one-night stand for which she felt some blood. We will not
ever know about the one-night stand.
    So it is that when we make a supposition or
two about her sexual nature in the time she was married to
Dougherty it is not impossible to put together their wholly
divergent versions of the marriage. She will call him in later
years a “kind man” and a “brother.” She will also state in the cold
tone of a maiden aunt, “My marriage brought me neither happiness
nor pain. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t
because we were angry. We had nothing to say.” Yet in Dougherty’s
account, her only flaw is the cooking. Years later, he would
still be able to recite the text of typical notes she would put
into his lunch pail for him to discover during coffee-break in the
early morning hours of the night shift. “Dearest Daddy, when you
read this,” the note would say, “I’ll be asleep and dreaming of
you. Love and Kisses. Your baby.” She is working twenty-four hours
a day at the marriage.
    Of course, these words are furnished by the
memory of the abandoned husband years later, and his pride is hurt.
She has been telling her side of it to the world for many a year
and has left him measured as nugatory. So he will look to give
every hint in his interviews that she enjoyed him. Unless he is a
psychopathic liar, we may as well take some percentage of his word;
the discrepancy can still be comprehended if we believe she was
invariably the mirror of the man with whom she lived. Since he was
young and athletic, and not without appetite, she was, in
Dougherty’s tell-it-all phrase, a “most responsive bride,” and they
could easily have made love in real coordination with his heart
going over the hill in happiness and hers