Coincidance - Principia Discordia

142 COINCIDANCE
doubt about the famous incident of sexual molestation or rape at age
12—Norma Jeane told several conflicting versions of it and lied so often that
everything she said needs to be taken with caution—but she could even be
funny about that assault or fantasy, or whatever it was. Once she claimed
that she first had sexual intercourse at seven, and when asked "My God,
how old was the man?", she replied, abruptly shifting to her sly bedroom
whisper, "Younger." I don't think Groucho Marx ever became "Groucho
Marx" so convincingly in real life as Norma Jeane played "Marilyn" at that
moment; but we still don't know what real incident or hallucination was the
basis of both her pathetic tales of rape and that obvious Send Up. We are in
Roshomon, as Mailer concluded desperately at the end of his biography of her:
whenever Norma Jeane almost comes into focus, up pops the Actress
holding up the Goddess masque to blind and bewilder us.
On the question of having sex with producers to advance her career,
"Marilyn" said, "It was no great tragedy. Nobody ever got cancer from sex."
Did Norma Jeane believe that? One or other, anyway, wrote poetry with
occasional brilliant lines in it ("I am both your directions / Existing more with the old f
/ Strong as a cobweb in the wind.') and believed that, because she was a Gemini
like her idol, Walt Whitman, she was doomed to be two persons. Norma
Jeane was converted to Christian Science early on and, whenever she came
out from hiding behind the Actress and the Goddess, was still trying to
believe she could cure her terrors with Faith; "Marilyn" bluntly called herself
an atheist. She read Joyce, Proust, Emerson, Rilke, art criticism, everything
she could get her hands on, and studied how to improve her acting with the
grim determination of a terrorist plotting Apocalypse in a garret. She
suspected all her lovers and husbands of betrayal and even suspected her
female friends of weaving Lesbian plots to seduce her. Booze and pills, and
more booze and more pills, and some Christian Science, kept her moving
like a missile toward the target of Success, and when an audience or camera
appeared, she trampled her anxieties like Atilla trashing a village and
became, while the performance lasted, the sexiest and funniest woman in
the world.
Was there some kind of cover-up connected with Marilyn's death?
Summers presents a convincing case that there was a conspiracy in which
Marilyn's death was concealed for three hours while persons unknown
carefully removed from her house all evidence of her love affairs with John
and Bobby Kennedy. I think Summers also proves that this cover-up was
instigated by actor Peter Lawford, brother-in-law to John and Bobby, who
had previously provided his house as a discrete trysting place for the lovers.
It is not perfectly clear that Lawford ever suspected, or allowed himself to
suspect, that he might be conspiring to conceal clues to a murder; he