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PAUL: In Shelley Winters' autobiography, she describes Dean and Monroe in each others company, though they weren't "together", at a party. Winters wrote that Dean terrorized her and Marilyn with his motorcycle antics after a Hollywood Premier. At the party afterwards, Dean and Monroe allegedly behaved toward each other like ill-mannered, resentful children. Did Winters ever mention that story to you personally, or do you think that's one of those publisher-pressured, apocryphal tales, like the Actors Studio scene, supposedly witnessed by Winters, in which she stops a crying Jimmy Dean from further self-mutilation with a switchblade in front of Strasberg and a class? JOHN: I’m afraid Shelley told tall tales; nothing of the above is true. I loved Shelley but it was all fabrication to glorify herself as the Brando-like, ‘Method’ personality she clung to as a resort from being overlooked in the business. Nobody ran to the movies to see Shelley. She adored and worshiped Marilyn—Marilyn was her heroine, her goddess. Shelley wouldn’t admit that, preferred to paint herself as Marilyn’s chum, an equal in other words, advisor, confident. She played Strasberg’s game by sidling up to Marilyn and petting her with the notion that Strasberg’s guanidine was Marilyn’s salvation. What we’re talking about here is exploitation and money. Marilyn thought James Dean was a “wonderful actor…” (her words). She asked me how he worked, how he “focused” (her term), and I did my best to tell her, which was, disconcerting for poor Marilyn, a kind of opposite of all she kept trying to achieve, God bless her. But like Jimmy, she gave so much to the world, different from what he gave, but equal in its impact on us emotionally. PAUL: Marilyn's husbands and other love interests nearly always became, at least on a subliminal level, cases of her pursuing a father-figure type. This was especially true of Arthur Miller, and to a lesser extent of Joe DiMaggio. Do you think her need for a father sabotaged what should've been a relationship between husband and wife? After reading INSIDE MARILYN MONROE, I suspect that the entire emotional and psychological dynamic of Marilyn with Joe, or Marilyn with Arthur, was complicated and constrained with her identity as a star, and, father-figure or not, the whole scene was dwarfed by the larger issues involving Monroe's pursuit of artistic respect, but yet still remain a star.
PAUL: In your Author's Note of the memoir, you "hoped to seek the truth of a thing, as poet Rainer Rilke put it, the "ding an sich"-the thing in itself.....worrying it to a nub and trying to make discoveries sometimes catapults one into harm's way." Would you say that Marilyn, as well as James Dean for that matter, were both cases of seeking that "thing in itself", much to their own detriment? In other words, for both of them, was it an almost demented pursuit of the absolute, for that essential core, which inevitably had to send both "into harm's way"? JOHN: Let me put it this way; Jimmy knew what he was after. He had a keen sense of what he wanted and knew how to manipulate, to subvert and take control of a situation, even if by crying and withdrawing into himself. He was intelligent and most of all he held the strings to his intelligence. Marilyn did not. Marilyn placed the strings in the hands she believed she could trust to guide her, to show her what she wanted and what was best for her. She sought sureness in others, could be easily manipulated into believing one was taking charge of her for her own best interests. Of course, she could catch on soon enough and she’d rebel if it wasn’t comfortable. If it was comfortable, you had her best qualities. On the one hand, she was lonely and sad, desperately seeking someone to care, not fuck, but care and communicate with her. On the other hand, if you were hurting her, she could throw the tables upside down and you’d never, never, reach her. And where would that take her? Into her dark corner of sadness and loneliness, and her seeking for someone to care; goes round and round. Introduction
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JOHN:
If Marilyn had not been a world-famous movie star, neither DiMaggio or
Miller would have been interested in marriage. A quick girl friend? Sure,
why not. Kazan got his kicks, but then enough is enough. Who had time to
wet-nurse a confused, neurotic starlet? You got your dick in a few times
and that was it. There were far more serious fish to fry. So after being
dumped, little Marilyn sat alone, crying and being further convinced of
her worthlessness as a human being. But with Marilyn the movie star, both
DiMaggio and Miller were like driving Rolls Royce’s and wearing diamond
cufflinks. They were in. The rest, her father-figure chase, the deep
shadowed area just lay there breathing and grunting, satisfied of a
permanent home within the frail nature of Marilyn or Norma Jeane or
whoever…
