Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

‘Mrs Leslie’ was Marilyn Monroe, busy making Bus Stop. ‘Mr Leslie’ was Arthur Miller, holed up in the desert waiting out his residency to qualify for a Nevada divorce. They had taken their code names from Vina Delmar’s novel, About Mr Leslie, the story of a nightclub singer and a married man who live together as man and wife for six weeks each year. In real life, Marilyn and Miller would soon be able to dispense with such deceptions.

  Miller was cautious, as the man in the middle of divorce was bound to be. When he talked to Time magazine, huddled with the reporter in a parked car, he avoided saying whether he wished to marry Marilyn. ‘I can’t afford to get married for a long time,’ he said. ‘Where will I get the money to support two families? My play, View from the Bridge, just closed on Broadway. I got thirty-five thousand dollars, and that will have to last me for two years until I can write another one. And she is not ready to be married either. She’s fanatic about the projects ahead of her.’

  Marilyn, for her part, could not resist a few confidences. Just as she had done before marrying Joe DiMaggio, she made sure that her favorite reporters knew her plans. May Mann, of the New York Herald Tribune, was surprised to receive a telegram from Marilyn, setting up a call for a specific hour. Marilyn phoned right on time, to confide that she and Miller would be married ‘at midsummer — but don’t print it yet.’

  On June 2, with Bus Stop completed, Marilyn hurried back to New York. As Miller prepared to follow, disaster loomed. Still in Nevada, he was served with a subpoena by Congress’ Committee on Un-American Activities. The congressmen intended to question the nation’s leading playwright about his supposed Communist affiliations. As Miller well knew, this was an ordeal that had ruined dozens of his colleagues in the past decade.

  The House Un-American Activities Committee had leapt to prominence in 1947, when it gained access to the Attorney General’s list, a catalogue of organizations that held allegedly totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, or ‘any other subversive views.’ Its function was to interrogate and expose, and its sights were leveled above all at Communists, real or imagined.

  From 1950 on, the witch-hunters gained a figurehead in the shape of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the demagogue whose name has become synonymous with the repressive policies of the time. The Committee’s friends included two future presidents, Richard Nixon and minor actor Ronald Reagan.

  The Hollywood film community, which included many idealistic left-wingers of thirties’ and forties’ vintage, was a prime target. Arthur Miller had watched appalled as the victimization of writers and directors took its toll. Some, their careers ended, committed suicide or became human flotsam. Screenwriter Alvah Bessie, whose career had held great promise, ended up as a technician in a nightclub. Mystery writer Dashiell Hammett went to prison rather than inform on left-wingers he had known. His career never recovered.

  Until 1956 the Committee had never found a reason to call Arthur Miller, though he had long been assailed by the vocal right. A protest over his early play, All My Sons, led to it being banned in occupied Germany, because of its ‘twisted’ scenario of crooked military suppliers and lax military inspectors. In 1949 the film version of Death of a Salesman was picketed by right-wingers. It was at the height of the campaign, four years later, that Miller produced The Crucible, his powerful evocation of witch-hunting hysteria in the seventeenth century. Few missed the modern message in the play, yet Miller remained unscathed. On Broadway, the blacklist circulating in Hollywood — which prevented alleged left-wingers from working — had never taken hold. Now, in 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee found an excuse to summon Miller.

  It was quickly apparent that the decision had as much to do with Marilyn Monroe as it did with Miller. The press was alive with rumors of her impending marriage to Miller, and the Committee’s Chairman, Congressman Francis Walter, saw an opportunity to get into the newspapers. The Committee had not been front-page news recently. Secretly, Miller was offered an easy ride if he would arrange for Marilyn to pose for photographs beside Congressman Walter. Miller refused.

  His confrontation with the Committee came on June 21, 1956, in the vast Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building. Miller, in blue suit and horn-rimmed spectacles, admitted having ‘signed some form or another’ at a Marxist study course in about 1939. He said he had ‘no knowledge’ of having applied for Communist Party membership.

  Miller’s real clash with the Committee came when he refused, time and again, to name others he had met at Communist gatherings. ‘I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him,’ he told the congressmen. ‘These were writers, poets, as far as I could see, and the life of a writer, despite what it sometimes seems, is pretty tough. I wouldn’t make it any tougher on anybody. I ask you not to ask me that question.’

  Miller’s refusal to name names placed him in legal jeopardy. A month after his appearance the House of Representatives voted him in contempt of Congress, a charge which could have put the playwright in prison for a year. He was first convicted, appealed, and was finally acquitted two years later. From the start, it was a fight conducted with the support of Marilyn Monroe.

  Asked at the time to comment on Miller’s congressional testimony, Marilyn played the good little woman. ‘I don’t know much about politics,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to have a talk with him and I think he’s very tired.’ Two years later, when the case was filially resolved in Miller’s favor, she said she never doubted the outcome, ‘because I have been studying Thomas Jefferson for years and, according to Thomas Jefferson, this case had to turn out this way. …’

  Marilyn played the ingénue, but she was fiercely loyal to Miller, and learning to apply her shrewdness to political affairs. At brief press appearances during Miller’s ordeal before the House Committee, she was a model of dignity and quiet support. The very aura of Marilyn protected Miller from adverse public opinion in a way that none of the committee’s other victims enjoyed. Instead of being regarded as a left-wing writer under attack, Miller was transformed by the headlines into the harassed lover of the nation’s sex symbol. Later Marilyn helped in a material way. It was her money, according to her financial adviser, Henry Rosenfeld, that eventually paid many of the daunting legal fees.

  Marilyn also proved, if it still needed proving, that she could be brave. In 1960 she told British writer W. J. Weatherby, ‘Some of those bastards in Hollywood wanted me to drop Arthur, said it would ruin my career. They’re born cowards and want you to be like them. One reason I want to see Kennedy win is that Nixon’s associated with that whole scene.’

  A year before her death, Danny Greenson, the student son of Marilyn’s psychiatrist, talked to her about the Committee hearings. ‘The way Marilyn told it,’ Greenson said, ‘she would say to Miller, “You can’t let those bastards push you around. You’ve got to stand up to them.” She really was unsophisticated politically, but her instincts were always with the underdog and — to me — on the side of the right. There was more to Marilyn than met the eye.’

  Miller aside, some of Marilyn’s closest associates were now, in fifties’ terms, of the Far Left. The House Committee on Un-American Activities had records on both Lee and Paula Strasberg, linking them with what the Committee called ‘Communist fronts.’ Paula, a former member of the Communist Party, was now Marilyn’s coach. The FBI had not failed to notice such associations.

  Repeated applications under the Freedom of Information Act prised a clutch of documents on Marilyn out of the FBI. The earliest, dated August 19, 1955, when Marilyn was several months into her new friendships in New York, was almost entirely blanked out by the censor before release, under the B-1 exemption. The B-1 category is meant to cover matters of national security, though it is frequently used to withhold anything dealing with foreign affairs. This report on Marilyn was also routed to the Deputy Director of Plans, at the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Other documents on Monroe for the period were withheld altogether, many of them under the national security classificati
on. Those irritated by the FBI’s procedures may find light relief in a revelation about its director. J. Edgar Hoover, whose only close friend in forty years was a male colleague, proudly displayed in his home an original copy of Marilyn’s nude calendar.

  On June 21, 1956, in the middle of his congressional testimony, Arthur Miller broke his own security. Asked why he currently wanted a passport to go to England, Miller replied, ‘The objective is double. I have a production, which is in the talking stage in England, of A View from the Bridge, and I will be there with the woman who will then be my wife. That is my aim.’ Afterward, talking to reporters in Washington, Miller ensured that any adverse publicity was totally defused. He said flatly that he would marry Marilyn Monroe ‘very shortly.’

  That same day, at lunchtime in New York, Marilyn called Norman Rosten. She sounded almost hysterical. ‘Have you heard?’ she asked, ‘He told the whole world he was marrying Marilyn Monroe. Me! Can you believe it? You know he never really asked me. You’ve got to come down right away. I need moral support. I mean, “Help!” I’m surrounded here, locked in my apartment. There are newspapermen trying to get in, crawling all over the place, in the foyer, in the halls.’

  As the reporters milled around outside, Marilyn chatted with a repairman fixing the air-conditioner. It was he who finally emerged to announce triumphantly, ‘She told me: “Sure I’m going to be married.” ‘The journalists raced for their telephones, and the wedding circus began.

  Soon the apartment building in New York’s exclusive Sutton Place was besieged by a crowd three hundred strong. Marilyn and Miller climbed into an old station wagon and fled to the country retreat at Roxbury, Connecticut. The newsmen followed, and enraged Miller by camping on the doorstep. He finally persuaded them to go away by promising a press conference at the end of the week.

  In their few days of relative peace, the couple juggled with wedding plans and waited to know whether Miller would be granted a passport to travel to England. With them at the house were Miller’s seventy-two-year-old father, Isadore, and his mother, Augusta. Marilyn had told them in tears: ‘For the first time in my life, I have somebody I can call Father and Mother.’ The Millers were Jews, devout though not overzealous, and Marilyn announced that she wished to marry in the Jewish faith.

  For the past year Miller’s bride had been surrounded by Jewish friends — the Rostens and the Strasbergs — and had latched on to their traditions. She had celebrated Passover with Milton Greene during Bus Stop, and had eaten bagels and gefilte fish with Eli Wallach. Friends had explained the mezuzahs, cylindrical containers bearing the Ten Commandments on Jewish front doors.

  Things reached the point where Marilyn was more enthusiastic about Jewish customs than Miller. At the Roxbury house, she bustled about learning Jewish recipes from Miller’s mother. That week, at Marilyn’s insistence, a phone call was placed to a rabbi of the Reformed branch of Judaism. He agreed to give Marilyn instruction and to perform the marriage ceremony.

  Arthur Miller was happy. Marilyn behaved as if she were happy, but there was something frenetic about her. She was, the press learned, ‘under doctor’s orders to rest.’ Miller’s father, who was to become one of Marilyn’s loyal friends, wondered, ‘Have they weighed this step carefully?’

  The reporters, meanwhile, were never far away. They discovered the couple had taken blood tests, as required under local marriage laws, and Miller’s cousin, Morton, had rushed the vials of blood to the laboratory in his car. There were rumors the couple had obtained a wedding license, but the journalists checked fifty registry offices in vain.

  The next day, June 29, was the day Miller had promised a press conference. The reporters returned in a horde, four hundred of them swarming around the intersection of Old Tophet and Goldmine roads. Soon they were wandering all over the Miller property, trampling the grass and dangling from the trees. There was no sign of the quarry.

  At about one o’clock, from the near distance, came the sound of a crash and rending metal. Minutes later a car abruptly pulled up short of the crowd, and disgorged Marilyn and Miller, who ran wordlessly for the house.

  Minutes later, fighting back tears, Miller’s cousin explained that there had been a tragedy. He had been taking Marilyn and Miller home, driving fast along the country road to evade a pursuing press car. The driver behind, who did not know the road, had lost control of the wheel and cannoned into a tree. His passenger, Mara Sherbatoff, a White Russian aristocrat and New York bureau chief for Paris-Match, had been hurled through the windshield. She was bleeding profusely from a severed neck artery, and would die later on the operating table.

  Inside the Roxbury house Marilyn alternated between hysteria over the accident, and rage at her press assistant because television sound cameras were being set up outside. Marilyn hated television. She finally appeared with Miller and his parents for a travesty of a press conference.

  Milton Greene ran about issuing instructions and trying to keep the peace. The actress in Marilyn offered seeming serenity. Miller, a cigarette dangling unlit at his lip, almost snarled at the newsmen. He still refused to say where or when they would be married.

  That afternoon Marilyn called Milton Greene into the bedroom and asked for advice on a matter Greene thought long settled. ‘Arthur wants me to marry him,’ she said, ‘now — tonight. Tell me if I’m making a mistake. What do you think?’ Shaken, Greene walked to the window and back again. Then he said lamely, ‘Marilyn, you must do what you think best.’

  That evening, after a flurry of phone calls to lawyers and local authorities, Miller and Marilyn drove across the state line to White Plains, New York. For the second time in less than three years, a Marilyn Monroe wedding interrupted a judge’s dinner appointment.

  Judge Seymour Robinowitz, postponing his own anniversary celebration, hurried to the courthouse. Marilyn, in sweater and skirt, once again filled out a marriage license. She said her father had been Edward Mortenson, made no mention of any marriage to Robert Slatzer, and this time told the truth about her age. Marilyn had turned thirty at the beginning of the month. Miller, now nearly forty-one, wore a blue linen suit and no tie. He produced a borrowed ring.

  The couple were married at 7:21 P.M., in the steamy heat of a New York summer evening. The press knew nothing till afterward.

  Two days later, again in secret, Marilyn got the Jewish wedding she wanted. She had taken brief instructions from Rabbi Robert Goldburg, who explained the basic tenets of Judaism. Marilyn satisfied him that any children of the marriage would be brought up in the Jewish faith.

  This second ceremony took place in front of a marble mantlepiece at the home of Miller’s literary agent, in Waccabuc, New York. This time Marilyn looked like a bride in gown and veil, and Miller managed a tie and a flower in his buttonhole. The couple drank wine, exchanged rings, and the bridegroom crushed a goblet in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem by its ancient foes.

  The weeks of tension now ended in a bucolic scene. Twenty-five wedding guests went outdoors to lunch on lobster, turkey, and champagne. Marilyn and her husband cut the wedding cake, made overnight by a New York baker after eight others had refused to bake one on twenty-four hours’ notice. Bride and groom kissed and cuddled without restraint, with Miller exhibiting the physical abandon that had transformed him in recent months.

  ‘It was a fairy tale come true,’ Norman Rosten later recalled. ‘The Prince had appeared, the Princess was saved.’

  By now Miller had purchased a gold wedding band. It was inscribed ‘A. to M., June 1956. Now Is Forever.’ Marilyn, for her part, wrote three words on the back of a wedding photograph: ‘Hope, Hope, Hope.’

  22

  TWO WEEKS AFTER THEIR wedding, in an elegant English country house, Mr and Mrs Miller were dancing cheek to cheek to the tune of Gershwin’s ‘Embraceable You.’ Miller’s passport had been issued after all, and they had arrived in Britain to make The Prince and the Showgirl with Sir Laurence Olivier.

  Terence Rattigan, author of the
original stage play, had invited a glittering assemblage to welcome the honeymooners. Joining them on the dance floor were Sir John Gielgud, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Lewis Casson, Dames Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans and Margot Fonteyn, assorted dukes, duchesses, and knights, and the American ambassador.

  At a more plebeian level, Britain had been excited about Marilyn for weeks. The national newspapers now rushed to outdo each other in fatuous headlines and overblown trivia about Marilyn. The story of her arrival dominated the front pages, eclipsing Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s speech warning that the nation faced economic disaster. One newspaper presented Marilyn with a bicycle to ride around the English countryside, then complained when her servants were seen riding it instead. Little old ladies crocheted Marilyn’s image in gold and silver thread. Marilyn was invited to attend cricket matches, shoot grouse in Scotland, and eat fish and chips with Teddy Boys. A band of students sang bawdy songs — and the 23rd Psalm — beneath the Millers’ window.

  None of the approaches, even more sensible ones, met with any response. Gone was the Marilyn who once courted and indulged the press. In her place was a withdrawn woman and a shy husband, hiding behind the gates of Parkside House, the country mansion rented from Lord Moore.

  The staff had been warned in advance that ‘Miss Monroe must have complete darkness when she sleeps,’ and special window blinds had been installed. The bedroom had been fitted out in white — white bed, white curtains and furnishings, white carpet — to match Marilyn’s Manhattan apartment. (The butler and cook, who dared mention such secrets to the press, were soon fired.) Marilyn was accompanied everywhere by a hulking ex-Scotland Yard police superintendent. She appeared, people noticed, to have lost her sense of humor. She was now a star in all the worst senses.

  Months earlier, when he had heard of Olivier s plans, Noel Coward had written in his diary. ‘Larry is going to make a movie of the Sleeping Prince with Marilyn Monroe, which might conceivably drive him round the bend.’