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PAUL: What was the event or experience, aside from the support and urging of Ian Ayres, a publisher in France, that inspired you to finally tell about the Marilyn you knew? JOHN: I suppose choking slowly on my own wanting of a life to share with someone else, my own seeking for the place we’re conditioned to find: love, etc. Rather, I lived in isolation - with wives, children, stations and so many locales, kidding me into conducting a life I could never live. All under the surface. I had to shut it all away, sensing only the bubbles on the surface, never facing the storm beneath the sea. I would drown never grabbing the truth. The basic ability to love and accept love and return love was not a part of my emotional vocabulary. Only opening the door as urged by Ian Ayres let a glimmer of the bugaboo sneak through. I might’ve closed it, stuffed what was showing back into the dark, but Ian wanted me to write a memoir about Marilyn and I said okay — after, of course, a personal battle as I went through with Jimmy when I hadn’t talked about him for twenty years until Don Shepherd had a book deal I never asked for. PAUL: I imagine that the decades following Monroe's death, particularly the beginnings of hack writer exploitations and conspiracy outrages, have been deeply harrowing and frustrating for one so close to her, the person, as you were. Did you go through a long period, as with Dean, during which you simply would not speak of her? JOHN:
As far as writing about her, I made only a couple mentions, one in LAID
BARE, and another in a magazine years ago. PAUL: I have to say, thank you, in regard to the merciful, tasteful, and, in the end, more revealing approach of avoiding worn out and overly dissected subjects like Marilyn's love life and cultural significance. It makes for a much more humanizing and refreshing perspective, not to mention more insightful, and all this must have been at the helm of your view all along. Were there any low points, during the writing of the memoir, that stopped you cold, momentarily, out of the subject matter being too close to your heart, too personal even to tears? One would think that, the release of so many feelings and intensely personal memories, which had been with-held from public view for over 40 years, it had to be, at times, very emotional. JOHN: Yes. And yes. And more yes. I dreamed about Marilyn for three or so months each night while I was putting together all I knew and had learned. She was with me constantly. I learned how deeply I had cared for her — being the self-absorbed actor of course never letting on to myself, and yet knowing how impossible it was and would have been — sustaining a relationship with Marilyn. Yet the pain of having failed to be the friend I intuitively felt she was asking for, hammered at me through most of the work on the project. There were times when I had to get plastered to relive the pain, the ache summoned, not only my own but hers as well. The world around me retreating into nothing. But, surfacing, it has been one of the most profound experiences, and has fixed me dead-center in my own life, pretty much for the duration .I have lost the people — Jimmy and Marilyn, but the memories are there; Jimmy in Hamburger Hamlet’s on the Strip, Marilyn on Outpost Drive and in New York; and the little rented house I had on in West Hollywood; the energy is with me like those out-of-body experiences, floating and with me on some kind of cord that unspools from my heart. I’m now even able to make statements like this, never would I have said such a few years ago. Introduction
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about the book :: about the author :: Official John Gilmore Site |
But
from her death until last summer, I did not divulge anything of what was
close to me. However, I did talk about her to those I knew who had known
Marilyn, and even made friends with a few I had not known previously. So
all in all, it would be like more than forty years…
