Without realizing precisely what he is doing, Mailer destroys Miller by character assasination. In the process of writing his story, the old competitor in Mailer cannot stop himself from taking vicious shots at Miller's intellectual capacity, trying to make Miller's reputation seem inflated. Finally, the liberties that Mailer takes as novelist sometimes just sicken:

Now when the Twentieth learns from her lips that she has, yes, posed in the nude, a novelist has the right to invent the following dialogue.

"Did you spread your legs?" asks a studio executive

"No."

"Is your asshole showing?"

"Certainly not."

"Any animals in it with you?"

"I'm alone. It's just a nude."

"You are going to deny your ever took those pictures."

It is curious that there is no ostensible decline in Monroe's beauty. Makeup was always part of her performance--although audiences saw her most often as a pale white angel with a moist red mouth. What struck many who met her for the first time in person was that she was strongly covered with freckles which were filtered out in almost all the color pictures included in the book. When she died, on August 5, 1962, she was 36 years old and was at the peak of her beauty, although some reviewers noted that the lines around her eyes in the Bern Stern portraits showed the outlines of a "harridan." To some others, those photographs show the most openess, the promise that all the pictures of her in bathtubs with gauze covering the defects could not deliver.