It was pouring rain in Brooklyn Heights on the day TIME'S New York bureau chief Marsh Clark rang Norman Mailer's doorbell. They had never met before. By the time Clark left Brooklyn Heights, he had learned a great deal about Mailer's fantasies of Marilyn Monroe (for this week's cover story), Mailer's views on writing and money and the American psyche -and Mailer's passion for thumb wrestling. "Mailer is the self-proclaimed champion of the U.S.," Clark recalls. "But he confessed that he had fractured his right thumb in a boxing match a few years back, and so he is in temporary retirement from thumb wrestling. This was good news to me, because I had also fractured my right one a few years ago. Anyway, his thumb looked thick and tough."

Clark returned to Brooklyn Heights two weeks later. Mailer alternated between reclining on a velvet couch and pacing around the room as Clark asked questions about his controversial new biography, Marilyn. "He was extremely sensitive to criticisms, but he was as honest and candid a cover subject as I've ever interviewed," says Clark, who has worked on 25 covers for TIME.

"At one point I asked him about the title Marilyn," Clark recalls, "and I wondered if he hadn't used up the proper title with the bestseller that made him famous, The Naked and the Dead. Mailer took a sip of his gin and tonic, looked out across the East River and then said, 'Mmm. Never thought of that. You might be right.' "

In Los Angeles, Correspondent Pat Delaney wrestled with Mailer by subjecting Marilyn to a comparison with accounts from people who knew the star. "I enjoyed the detective work," she says, "and I dealt with people who felt that the best way to protect Marilyn was to give the facts." Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who prepared the coroner's report following Marilyn's death, gave Pat information that he had never revealed before.

TIME Essayist Stefan Kanfer, who wrote the story, approached his subject with remarkable detachment. Says he: "I never met Monroe, nor have I met Mailer. But Mailer never met Monroe either, so that makes us even in a way." Kanfer knew both his subjects' milieus in the way that counts, however, for he has been a frequent reviewer of both movies and books since coming to TIME in 1966 (he is also the author of a new study on the Hollywood blacklists of the 1950s, A Journal of the Plague Years). "Having read all of Mailer's books at least once, all I had to do was open them up again -they create their own excitement. And I've been staying up late to watch a lot of Marilyn Monroe movies on television lately. She still exerts a tidal pull. The fates are still working."

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