|
PAUL: You expressed feelings of "misgiving and a sense of loss" regarding the timing of your coming forward with what you've carried in your heart for so long about Monroe. With such an enormous plethora of MM biography available, did you feel that you had waited too long, that somehow the decades of silence would hurt your credibility? JOHN: My sense of “misgiving and a sense of loss” isn’t related to a time factor, and I meant that in general. What’s in my heart will remain, and will go up in smoke with my corpse. I probably would not have ever written what I have if Ian Ayres hadn’t urged me so seductively and wanted to publish the book in France. Same with my first Dean book — I was asked to do it, coaxed. Important point that I’d like to underscore just once and then dump the idea: I have little interest in the “plethora of MM biography available”, as what I write is the same as if I painted a picture, from my experience — knowledge, as I’ve lived, what I know, as I wrote earlier. I have intersected with many people over the past four decades who were close to Marilyn in some way. The biographies out there are ninety percent hack jobs riddled with errors and deliberate misrepresentation manufactured for profit. As for “credibility,” I have no interest in selling goods or offering something “tantalizing” to the masses that I hope they’ll buy. You can’t serve two gods, someone said a ways back, can’t serve the dollar and truth at the same time. We’ve all been there. I threw it in the garbage years ago, along with the fourteen or fifteen movies I wrote or fixed as a “script doctor” to make money. Writing is words, as paints, language as the means of communicating is the life as it goes, and when I’m dead I’ll have left a legacy. I am sad that Marilyn didn’t live, sad that we didn’t work together, sad that I didn’t become a big star, but all of that is irrelevant in light of the truth—what is remarkably indelible. Had Marilyn miraculously lived, (if we leap into the hypothetical circus with the clowns), I would probably not have survived her had I become a star, and Marilyn, in my honest wild-guess speculation, would have been institutionalized as was her mother. But all of that is the wild-guess style, and basically the road she paved to self-destruction was so substantial and with no one to guide her off that road (they were too busy exploiting her), she was on a one-way ride. In real time, she could never have had a successful relationship with another and her failure at this and the emptiness and loneliness would have eaten her into madness or death. The binges took her first.
Introduction
:: Previous :: Next |
|
|
|
|
|
|
about the book :: about the author :: Official John Gilmore Site |
PAUL:
In the second part of our interview on James Dean, you wrote of Jimmy's
propensity for not holding liquor well and sometimes beating his
girlfriends: "...Jimmy didn't know all the shit he had going on
inside himself, and as is the case with so many 'stars,' the fame can only
seem to compound the disturbances at times...(This is what happened to
Marilyn Monroe always!)". Please comment further on Monroe's
difficulty handling her celebrity status and her notoriety causing grave
problems and irritation for her inner disturbances.
