The Jewish Princess

With a selection of photographs from Marilyn, a Biography, Pictures by the World’s Foremost Photographers

By Norman Mailer
Editor’s Note: The year is 1956. Norma Jean Baker has long since blossomed into Marilyn Monroe, “every man’s love affair with America.” She is making some of her best movies, is about to star with Olivier and Gable, has plunged impressively into “method acting” at Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. Her marriage to Joe DiMaggio has come to an end, and she is courting Arthur Miller, the playwright. An improbable affair becomes headline-grabbingly probable. Miller, engaged in combat with the Red hunters of the House Un-American Activities Committee, is fighting to get his passport from the U.S. Government. Here, in an excerpt from a fascinating biography, a great writer tells much about actors and acting, about Hollywood, about sexuality in America, about an ill-starred marriage, and the doomed princess of sex.

It is a year in which a movie star can be persecuted in the press for open left-wing associations. Marilyn Monroe is beginning to capture the imagination of America’s intellectuals; grudgingly, they are obliged to contemplate the remote possibility that she is not so much a movie star as a major figure in American life—of a new sort! Of course, they will not move too far in this direction until her death. But since European intellectuals are agog at this new portrait—America persecuting Arthur Miller, its outstanding author, and its most attractive movie star in a neo-McCarthian wholly sophomoric hysteria, et cetera—the State Department quietly intervenes, and Miller and Monroe have held their first fort. He gets the passport. They can be married and go to England to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier.