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PAUL: You wrote in the Monroe memoir that Marilyn was much like yourself in that neither of you were capable of giving or receiving love, that the ability was “emotionally scrubbed” from your lives. At what point in your own life did you realize this about yourself? JOHN:
It has been an unfolding awareness, opening to me over the past four
years, coming from that part of me that was in the can and on the shelf-
in a way, a picture of myself I was denying that was actually a fact. The
unfolding of this was in part due to a year and a half of counseling.
Then, urged and coaxed by external factors to do the piece on Marilyn,
well, I had to go to that shelf, and, as I wrote in an answer earlier, I
had to unlock all that I’d stuffed away, all the psychological
paraphernalia that accompanies sex, sex, sex, sex, that you want to be
love but it’s only sex, because, presto, it ain’t there. The
cupboard’s bare, there ain’t even a dog for the bone. What was at
stake here? Forty-one years of serious commitment to another—three
marriages equaling 39 years and then a two-year live-in relationship in
San Francisco (the city of romance!). I did the same thing four times, the
same moves, the same manufacturing of this other person into a female John
Gilmore. Always lasted a few years and then, always, petered out; the
females wanted their own identity- their freedom, and in short but most
pointedly, they wanted to feel loved for themselves. Not for what I could
create or manufacture of them. The last divorce, while I was still in
shrink-rap, socked all the above in for a home run. Bang! What I needed
was a mannequin, a female John Gilmore, the 26 year-old (preferably
blonde), tall, lithe, nice tits, long legs, a Bardot mouth, her bright
brain a sounding board and mirror for my ideas; beautiful calves and feet;
one-hundred-seventy-five percent faithful; a form I could transform by
eccentric Vintage clothes, little out of the way coffee shops, Italian
cafes with gingham tablecloths, candle light- her eyes sparkling, vivid,
her love and adoration unshakable; black lipstick at times, black nail
polish, or red or change the hair to black- red or whatever the mood
dictates, a dancing partner who follows easily and light as a paper sack;
intelligent, good humor, old movie buff, classical music, a snob like me,
communicative and intense and most important, devoted and dedicated to me.
Someone who enters my life with their trail erased; there is nothing now
but me, and for me there is nothing but them; my devotion, adoration and
commitment unshakable as steel. Introduction
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about the book :: about the author :: Official John Gilmore Site |
That is how they all started, more or
less; the female wanting to change to please me, to be the person I want
them to be, a vessel to be filled by me. But then some point is reached
where what they were conditioned to want, supposedly to need, has not been
met in this existential, Bohemian life with me. They are driven, subtly at
first and then finally, forcefully, away from me by the dictates of
mediocrity that they have pushed to the bottom of themselves in order to
accommodate the overflow of my energies, thus measuring up as my
soul-mate. It has always failed and will continue to always fail because
there is no such real person in existence as I’ve described above. They
cannot completely “come fly with me...”, nor can I offer them the
traditional security of being loved for who they are- how they came and
what they are...And they cannot surrender the deep links of mediocrity so
intrinsically instilled in the American and no doubt European female. In
no way am I suggesting a superiority of the male. I find most males
occupying space on the planet to be nothing but clods or wooden-headed
plants hammered hopelessly into propagators of Bourgeoisie hogwash spewed
from basically crude, mediocre baseness. Which leaves us a mindless
Japanese cutie, whom (what the hell), is better than nothing—or is she?
Jumps at the heart of the question, am I so conditioned to illusory
concept of a “soul-mate” that I am willing to sacrifice space and
pieces of life that’s left in order to what...? Get laid? Eat sushi with
ham and eggs while trying to explain life in the Nifty Fifties? Or who
Humphrey Bogart was or to attempt to decode the magic of a Rilke or
Rimbaud? Blank, empty eyes in a head that nods better with a cock in the
mouth than grasping a creative concept. No, it is either aloneness or a
$7000 mannequin who fills the visual bill but fails to speak or show a
single, spontaneous spark of recognition. She looks good laying on her
stomach or those with flesh-identical thighs pressing at my cheeks. But
then- how can I share Chopin, Mozart or Hound Dog Taylor? We can’t.
I’d have to go mad to believe it possible. So, the answer, like
whispered from the lips of an invisible angel, is simply “Have a nice
day...”
