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PAUL: With the intense work of INSIDE MARILYN MONROE completed, how do you feel as you look back at not only the work itself, but the period of Monroe’s life, how she affected you then as compared to now, and the various places in your heart and mind, so long closed to yourself and others, but now opened and perhaps giving new light to things about yourself as well as Marilyn? This can also be in regard to a view of all that has happened pertaining to Marilyn since her death and how the decades of retrospectives, some well- intentioned but falling short, others exploitive nonsense, together with your overall life-long relationship to Hollywood and L.A., how it has all shaped and influenced you as a writer and artist. JOHN: I’m dealing with the fact that doing this book has been the most cathartic experience I’ve had. It has changed me - set some course ahead that’s kind of an unbroken trail, and so much I believed important has just lost meaning - lost its importance. The work is important, what you and I are doing - this interview piece and the biography of my own life — is important, and I believe I am arriving at what could be called a point of view with the overall - whatever the hell it comes out as. We’ll have to see, like they say, throw it up and see how it lands. For over four decades (more than 40 years) I’ve been trying to understand that curious connection I shared with Marilyn, an unspoken spark that seemed to say “I know you and you know me and we know each other in a different way than how it seems, and that we cannot know unless we say it, but neither is going to say it...” Fifty years ago I met my director friend, Curtis Harrington, on the Fox lot. We’ve been friends through thick and thin for half a century. Meeting for lunch a few weeks back we had a great time reminiscing, but he looked a total wreck; like one foot’s in the grave. I would have suggested that you interview him for the bio, but he did in fact pass away shortly after I last saw him. But add four more years onto that fifty and I’d already met and had conversations with Marilyn; I’d already been friends with Jimmy Dean, who was two years dead by the time the 50 years began...I was twenty-one, 50 years ago, and burning to be a movie star; had all the merits and attributes, but the ‘rebel’ ran counter, the maverick (that motherless stray who belongs to the first to put a brand on it), was flinging itself against psychic and emotional walls within the chamber of my being, as was happening within the chamber of Marilyn’s being, and I was carrying the odd spark I sensed between us like a current for almost four years before I ever met Curtis - then an associate to Jerry Wald, who had made “Clash by Night” with Marilyn and Keith Andes (whom I also knew). I’ve talked to people over the last 45 years who had at some time interacted with Marilyn. I didn’t talk about her to anyone outside that circle. It had been the same with Jimmy, the non-talk, although with Jimmy, the few of us who hung around with him at Googies, made a vow that we wouldn’t blab spicy tales, or much of anything, to the movie magazines and gossip rags, raging back then for any dribbles of fact to elaborate upon like pumping a garden mushroom into an atomic cloud. I was asked a number of times for “stories” about Jimmy but I didn’t give them. It was a subject, as I said, a few of us had vowed not to exploit. With Marilyn, I didn’t talk to anyone outside a similar circle of like-minded friends and associates. It was only as I saw Jimmy ballooned into an artificial image did I begin to concern myself with the fact that he was - the person himself, for better or worse, being paved over. I don’t think the tall tales, as with Marilyn, so implanted into the minds by the media, can ever be set aside, and now I say ‘Why should they?” It’s a free country full of ripe enterprise; but what I think I may have done is to at least lay bare an alternative view, as much with Dean as now with Marilyn, and one can come to it as they wish; but it is there, and so far it has been widely and universally acknowledged, despite the sour grapes attacks by certain individuals who have lumped themselves hopelessly into the stew of exploitation and mediocrity; in some cases, their own “contributions” to the written record of lives such as those of Dean, Monroe, and other bright talents, have ended up being the nearest thing to sacrilegious.. So I confess to still carrying the spark that jumped between Marilyn and myself, and maybe with the offering of my view of her via INSIDE MARILYN MONROE, I have been able to permanently allow that spark to be felt by others, so even when I kick the bucket, it will continue to be the same as a piece of music by George Gershwin or Mozart, or as performed by Ella Fitzgerald or Sinatra. That’s what I wanted to do. Though doing it has opened that private door and like Fibber McGee’s closet, all the emotional baggage comes banging and tumbling out. Introduction
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