PAUL:  After acquiring an autograph of Marilyn’s a couple years ago, you wrote in correspondence that you’d sooner “lose an arm” than part with that treasured memento. Also, you planted “Marilyn Monroe Roses” near your home to remind yourself not only of your connection to her, but of all the creative and brilliant friends you’ve had, most of whom, like Monroe, are now gone. You have mentioned having frequent and vivid dreams of Marilyn, as well as of Jimmy Dean. Please comment further on these dreams, especially those of Marilyn, and how they have intensified with and shadowed the writing of the memoir. You related very strongly, in a different way, to Dean; mostly having to do with the pursuit of ART and the fulfillment of creative expression. However, with the intimate emotional link you have with Monroe, it seems to have transcended the realm of art completely, moving instead into something almost spiritual.

JOHN:  My link to Dean was more on the surface understandable than what I shared with Marilyn. I obsessed about Jimmy while he was alive more than I did about Marilyn while she was alive. When she and I didn’t do the movie together it was, for me, like I was being turned inside out. I had no control of my destiny; and when she died so shortly thereafter, I understood that what I’d had I didn’t take (believe me, not that I would have undertaken such a monumental task as cultivating a relationship with Marilyn– that would be jumping into quicksand with a gator at the bottom). So with Marilyn it was almost like unrequited co-working together, unrequited in other ways, and only knowing it after she was gone –  never to be personally seen again. It was, for me, a kind of suicide of a part of my spirit –  I can’t explain that, except to say that she came into my dreams like a kind of ghost, forever lonely, forever as she was on screen, not as she was in actual life. I buried it all under work –  buried it all under relationships like with any star or starlet I knew, and then buried it in marriages – unable to be true, unable to love my partners, unable to truly receive their love, though I didn’t know all this – I thought I was okay. I wasn’t. The memoir brought all this tumbling back, as I’ve said before, the dreams more vivid, three months of them, and now, like a breath of fresh sea air through a window flung open, I realize I don’t give a shit and probably never did because I’m unable to love unselfishly, as was Marilyn. That place had not been removed from us, but was never installed so there was never something to draw upon –  never something to be ignited. The outward performances were that – acting: actors inside and out.

PAUL:  In the memoir chapter titled "Spies on 58th Street", Marilyn, while in extreme physical pain, is frantically trying to hide from supposed FBI agents as she confides to Diana Herbert about J. Edgar Hoover, the Feds, and Walter Winchell’s lesbian daughter. I’m not clear as to what Marilyn was trying to say, whether it was Winchell trying to get in Marilyn’s pants, or Winchell calling off the Feds if Marilyn would befriend Winchell’s daughter?

JOHN:  No, no, Marilyn wasn’t trying to say Winchell was offering his toad daughter in exchange to call off the Feds. Winchell couldn’t have done that anyway, he didn’t have that kind of clout. He was a kind of stooge for Hoover in exchange for favors. Winchell was disgusted with his daughter who used to hang out all night in the Village at Howard Johnson’s 24 hour restaurant on 6th Avenue across from 8th Street. Winchell tried to divorce her from his life and consciousness; “natch” (naturally) no one was going to make a gossip trip out of it — they would’ve been crucified. People were afraid of Winchell, and Winchell hated Arthur Miller for not being a “true blue son of America”. When talking to Hoover via private line, they referred to Miller as the “Jewboy” and Marilyn as “Blondie the bitch.” This I got from the former FBI agent. Winchell was trying to cozy up to Marilyn for “hot tips,” and thinking he could “charm” her into slips about “Jewboy”. Never worked. Marilyn was not a dummy, no matter what Zanuck and others in the industry thought of her or tried to paint her as.

PAUL:  I was not aware that Arthur Miller and Milton Greene disliked each other. You wrote they were both guilty of "milking opportunities afforded by Marilyn." Please give examples of their ulterior motives and opportunism.

JOHN:  All I can say is they latched onto her — initially for different reasons; Miller for the esteem and ego of having the world’s most glamorous girl in his life (and in his bed); though the reality of her as a complicated, human quite different from the one he adored on screen quickly sent it all down the tube — drove him to total distraction in time, financially drained and living on her money. Both bounced back and forth and in and out in their personal fantasies of love and marriage though neither could give of themselves to create that vital, third element: the relationship apart from Miller and Marilyn; I doubt that it ever existed outside of fantasy. He didn’t offer her the trust or security she so craved yet found so impossible to absorb. Miller detested Greene for worming his way into her life with flashy ideas of making big pictures, making Marilyn all that Marilyn dreamed of being. Plus there was a lot of pill passing between the two; he encouraged her being dependent on him (Greene), and sought to control her life. Miller was smart enough to know he couldn’t control Marilyn in any way himself. Something DiMaggio learned the hard way; didn’t have the smarts Miller had or the smooth-talker operative skills of a Greene. Both Greene and Miller were reaching to own Marilyn from opposite ends of a spectrum, Meanwhile Marilyn was in the middle and wanting only to be all that she could be and “None of them,” she told me — making a general statement without naming names, “can see that this is what is important to me…”