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PAUL: In correspondence related to Monroe, you wrote..."Having opened the locked-up door since I quit trying to be a movie star (1961 when I didn't get the picture with Marilyn, as was about to happen, but Fox fired her), forty-five years of hiding the nakedness of pain, it rushes around me now like a wind... I think naked now, yes, and how to shield against those winds? Answer is not to shield but to step aside once all the anguish has struggled itself free and you see it wasn't even anguish after all, but a case of running and hiding and being the emotional bandit I was branded so far back it's hazy history to examine." Referring to a "locked up door" being opened, did you mean allowing your true artistic calling ,writing, to come charging out into the world at long last, after years spent chasing the actor's life, or was it the unlocked door having to do with releasing closed-up memories of Marilyn? There's something of pain and loss in the above statements of yours, as well as the feeling of release and discovery of your true calling, that of writer, within the tumultuous time frame of change and loss; almost double entendre in that the time frame of your artistic transition, along with Fox cutting Marilyn loose, the ditching of the Stripper film idea, and Monroe's untimely death, all lead to two doors, metaphorically speaking, in your life. One door opened in 1960-62 that lead to the writing career, and some forty-five years later you opened another door to unlock all those feelings and memories of Marilyn. Do you feel Monroe's passing, as painful and sad as it was for you, was also the event which set the stage for the birth of your creative identity? What exactly was your intended meaning with "it wasn't even anguish after all but a case of hiding, being the emotional bandit…" JOHN: It seems there are two parts to the question, re: two doors, and this is maybe right and maybe not, and I’m not sure how to address it...but I will take a stab.... PAUL: Referring to a “locked up door” being opened, did you mean allowing your true artistic calling - writing - to come charging out into the world at long last, after years spent chasing the actor’s life, or was it the ‘unlocked door’ having to do with releasing closed-off memories of Marilyn?
Introduction
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JOHN:
Not of Marilyn personally, I’d say, but of the way I’d been living-
the seeking of the completion of something that could never be completed:
the actor’s life as it would eternally skim the surface, a wading pond
of creative venture, never being able to take a plunge into the depths of
somewhere that would allow the unfurling of the inner creative spirit. The
actor would be resigned to interpret rather than giving birth to a whole.
This was a bane for Marilyn since she wanted so desperately to be
acknowledged as a “great talent,” like Sarah Bernhardt, who she so
admired, and at one time shared with me her own enthusiasm to do with
Bernhardt. It was a dream. As for myself, in my own way, I tried to force
the realization of the dream into reality, but the actor’s destiny was
never in the actor’s hands. It was only reconfirming how one could be so
misplaced. As if from birth, your fate would be resigned to shamble along
beneath the dictates of others. To me, Marilyn said of the dictates,
“you can be crushed under such an impasse...” She was right. So I
jumped ship.
