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PAUL: Do you now feel that, had you developed a physical relationship with Monroe, would it have dulled or otherwise complicated the deeper, spiritual nature of what you actually DID share with Marilyn? Would the complex emotional connection, itself admittedly ethereal and felt from afar at times, have been compromised and, thereafter, cut you both off from the special sibling-type friendship you had with her? JOHN: What Marilyn and I shared was not a “sibling-type friendship” but yes, you’re totally right in saying a “complex emotional connection...” A subliminal recognition of baggage and issues being toted like a load on a coolie or camel’s back, and like saying without words, ‘My, god, you’re as crippled as I am!’ and ‘Which is better, do you think, the wooden spine or the prosthesis infusion?’ All said with a look in the eyes, and the words never spilling from our lips. What words spilled is what I wrote in the selected scenes with Marilyn. I have discussed with my friend, Diana Herbert at great length recently (and over many bottles of wine), more in the nature of a confession on my part and I have told her it is okay to share a little of this with Paul Waters, if he cares to open this particular can of peas. I have had no choice — either coming to terms with the inadvertent hidden message in your question, or else to resign and twiddle my thumbs or carry into being the very fear I experienced with Marilyn; her fame and stature, while secondary to her impulsiveness, held between us a kind of shield concealing a very basic link that had to do with the pills. I feared them. I puked up the two she gave me (without letting her see me vomit them), yet all the while harboring an impulse to follow her on that path. In short, as fucking shocking as it has been to look into this mirror and see it, the eyes, face, that energy dazzling like a spinning sparkle illuminating a very dark place as a possibility of fusion. Do you know what I’m saying? Simply, I was saying, “I want to go with you.” PAUL: Aside from the extreme fraudulence and vulture-like profiteering of blowhard Robert Slatzer, in your experience and research, who is probably the least reliable of Monroe's "biographers"? With so many shouldering in for a piece of the action and joining the ranks of an enormous biographical genre, one must stand out as the worst of the lot. Perhaps I answered the question myself ?
PAUL: While Marilyn was alive, did you ever get the sense that she would not live long? JOHN: No, I did not have that feeling. My view was a forward vision, planted well within my own navel. I have said before I knew she was on the pills, and I knew it was causing havoc with her but then you could always stop taking pills–clean up your act, unlike charging break-neck in a sports car where the odds of not seeing sundown far out-shone those of popping a handful of pills. After all, most of Marilyn’s drugs were doctor prescribed , and what ‘actor’ is going to argue or question the decisions of a genuine MD? Obviously Marilyn needed the drugs—that’s what you’d think and believe and you just had to circumvent the results, ‘shoot around it’ as it goes. Only later, like in ’61, did I get the feeling something was very wrong because of how she looked, the weight she’d lost, the way her skin was looking and her eyes like those in the head of a store window mannequin. Introduction
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JOHN:
Norman Mailer is perhaps the worst of the lot, the originator of the
“let’s trash Marilyn for a fast buck profit” scenario. Slatzer
didn’t care who he trashed, as long as his name got bantered about and
people paid attention to him. There are many others in the line, in fact,
most every biography on Marilyn is a baloney sandwich peppered gingerly
with so-called invention. Best to ask who comes close to being on target,
and I guess I feel better with poet Norman Rosten’s small book, but then
it is more Rosten than Marilyn. The good guys do the same thing: it is
always them more than her —y ou might ask why is that? I’d have to say
because even the good guys approach the subject with the Marilyn she
created as the primary subject, as opposed to looking past the movie image
which is, invariably, a difficult task because you have to get yourself
inside the glass bubble that is Hollywood; and if you’re a hardcore
New Yorker or such (of the era we’re talking about) you are
conditioned to turn your nose up at what used to be called the “cultural
wasteland.” L.A. is the now the world center of creative activity in all
fields. So one from the ‘other side’ tends to dress or invest in one
within the bubble the trappings that figure has gathered on their journey
from Nobody to front-cover material.
