Marilyn Monroe

by Donald Spoto

  But it is in her long speech on the bus that Marilyn gave shape and substance to the character, somehow reaching into herself with a wistfulness that never seems self-indulgent: the character’s hopes collide with her fragility in one of the great performances of the decade. In a voice poised between tremulous confession and a great ache of longing, she spoke of Marilyn as well as of Cherie, and this gave her the truth she so immediately conveyed:

  I’ve been goin’ with boys since I was twelve—them Ozarks don’t waste much time—and I’ve been losin’ my head about some guy ever since. . . . Of course I’d like to get married and have a family and all them things. . . . Maybe I don’t know what love is. I want a guy I can look up to and admire. But I don’t want him to browbeat me. I want a guy who’ll be sweet with me. But I don’t want him to baby me, either. I just gotta feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me—aside from all that lovin’ stuff. You know what I mean?

  She assures that we do.

  When the picture opened on August 31, the critics were reaching for superlatives. Typical was the New York Times review: “Hold onto your chairs, everybody, and get set for a rattling surprise. Marilyn Monroe has finally proved herself an actress in Bus Stop. . . . [She is] the beat-up B-girl of the [Inge] play, down to the Ozark accent and the look of pellagra about her skin, and [there is] the small flame of dignity that sputters and makes of her a rather moving sort.” The Saturday Review of Literature added that in this film Marilyn “effectively dispels once and for all the notion that she is merely a glamour personality.”

  Logan—who quickly became her adoring director—proclaimed Marilyn

  one of the great talents of all time, and the most talented motion picture actress of her day—warm, witty, extremely bright and totally involved in her work. I’d say she was the greatest artist I ever worked with in my entire career. . . . Hollywood shamefully wasted her, hasn’t given the girl a chance. She has immense subtlety, but she is a frightened girl, terrified of the whole filmmaking process and self-critical to the point of an inferiority complex.

  At the end of May, Bus Stop was complete and Marilyn prepared to return to New York, where Arthur was soon due to return from Nevada. Her departure from Hollywood was delayed, however, when President Sukarno of Indonesia requested an introduction to her. Almost fanatically devoted to American movies and American actors—“I go to three or four Hollywood movies a week!” he boasted—Sukarno was in Los Angeles touring movie studios and addressing the Association of Motion Picture Producers. To make his journey really memorable, he told the press, he would like to meet Miss Marilyn Monroe. There was much scurrying to telephone booths, and hours later Miss Marilyn Monroe was dragooned for a diplomatic command appearance. She later recalled Sukarno’s charm and courtesy, adding that “he kept looking down my dress, although you’d think with five wives he’d have enough.” By this time, she had enough of just about everything, and after the presidential introduction Marilyn collapsed into bed. It was her thirtieth birthday.

  Finally, Marilyn departed on June 2; the Greenes remained to pack and close up the house on Beverly Glen. This was no easy task, for the renters had been a messy and careless lot during their three-month stay, and it looked as if the house had been taken over by an unusually high-spirited and reckless fraternity.

  “The Greenes have lost or misplaced the inventory,” wrote Al Delgado of MCA to his colleague Jay Kanter.

  This is quite serious because this is an expensive house with expensive furnishings and the inventory is probably over forty pages long. When the owners of the house return, I feel that Milton will have trouble and may possibly have a lawsuit on his hands. . . . I will do everything in my power to rectify the condition of some of the furnishings and feel very badly about the whole thing, as the house was in perfect condition when they moved in.

  For months, there followed an angry exchange of letters, invoices and threats of legal action. The matter was still being adjudicated that autumn, when Irving Stein had to deal with the owners, who were due reimbursement for many damaged and destroyed items in their home: two electric blankets; six pillows; eight sheets; five wool blankets; ten chair slipcovers; a three-hundred-dollar invoice for carpet and furniture cleaning; an unpaid telephone bill for the same amount; more than a dozen smashed cups, saucers, glasses and antique crystal goblets; three broken lamps; three sets of curtains; and two pieces of outdoor furniture. In addition, workmen had to remove the heavy black fabric Marilyn had nailed against the windows of her bedroom, for the slightest exterior light roused her from sleep, pills or no.

  The causes of such exceptional ruin are not easy to explain (nor did anyone attempt a justification), but surely one puppy and two-year-old Joshua could not have accomplished so much unaided. But the house was also Milton’s studio, and he and Marilyn were, as Amy conceded, “intense and excessive. When they loved and hated, it was with all their being. When they drank and drugged, they did so with great passion.” The demolition job seems to have been the combined result of wild parties, an overburdened photographer trying to cope with multiple new responsibilities, an occasionally unstable movie star and an atmosphere in which there was a prodigal consumption of alcohol and drugs.

  On June 11, Arthur Miller was granted a Reno divorce, and the next day he joined Marilyn in New York. At once, the press camped outside 2 Sutton Place South, following the couple when they went to dinner at the home of Arthur’s parents in Brooklyn.

  A week later, Marilyn telephoned Irving Stein to announce that she wanted to redraft her will, leaving everything she owned to Arthur. “I told her about the possibility of a pre-nuptial agreement, but she said she didn’t want one,” Irving noted in a memorandum dated June 19. “She also asked about obtaining film rights to Miller’s literary properties.” Marilyn did not, however, forget her mother: the revised will left seven-eighths of her property to Arthur, the balance for Gladys’s care.

  With good cause, Milton was alarmed: what did these issues portend for the future of Marilyn Monroe Productions? To what extent did she intend to bring Arthur into the corporation? To what extent might Arthur desire or even demand association with MMP? That year, his only professional prospect was a forthcoming London production of A View from the Bridge, which he was expanding from one act to two. Jealous though he might have been, Milton suspected that Arthur’s love might be alloyed with financial self-interest: Miller had, after all, considerable alimony to pay and very little income. But these were not matters Marilyn would discuss with Milton, and from this month a net of suspicion surrounded them all, with Marilyn at the center of a fierce battle for control.

  There were other concerns, too, for Arthur was summoned to appear in Washington before the House Un-American Activities Committee to answer questions about his Communist party affiliation. But this committee had a problem of which Arthur was then unaware, and which they were scrambling to resolve. They had no proof of any treasonous activities by Arthur Miller—much less could they come up with “a live witness that can put him in the Party, [or even] a photostat of Miller’s Communist Party card.” Ironically, when HUAC staff director Richard Arens turned for help to J. Edgar Hoover (working through the mediation of Hoover’s aide Clyde Tolson), he was told that the FBI had no such data—this despite the efforts of Hoover’s friend Walter Winchell, who had tried to summon anti-Miller support by proclaiming that “Marilyn Monroe’s new romance [is] a long-time pro-lefto.” With further irony, this would have exactly the opposite effect.

  And so on June 21, Arthur left Marilyn and his parents, went to Washington, sat before the HUAC and made several important statements. He admitted that although he had attended Communist party writers’ meetings four or five times in the 1940s and signed many protests in the last decade, he was never “under Communist discipline.” Calmly and articulately, he also said: that he had indeed denounced HUAC when it was investigating the “Hollywood Ten” (a group of writers blacklisted for what were considered dangerous politi
cal beliefs); that he had opposed the Smith Act, which outlawed advocating the overthrow of the government, for “if there is a penalty on advocacy, if it becomes a crime even without overt action, then I cannot operate and neither can literature: a man should be able to write a poem or a play about anything”; and that he would not provide HUAC with the names of those he saw at meetings a decade earlier. “The life of a writer is pretty tough,” he said, “and I don’t want to make it tougher on anyone. I’ll tell you anything about myself, but my conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person.” He concluded that he believed it would be “a disaster and a calamity if the Reds ever took over this country,” and that he had long since abandoned any connection with Communists or belief in their principles.

  Arthur’s statements appeared in print all around the country and—much to Marilyn’s delight—he became something of a maverick hero in the fight against censorship and repression. But immediately there was the threat of a contempt citation, spearheaded by Congressman Francis E. Walter, who claimed that “moral scruples do not constitute legal grounds for refusing to answer a Congressional investigator.” Walter’s cronies were quick to agree: “No question about it,” said Congressman Gordon H. Scherer flatly. “Miller is clearly in legal contempt.”

  During these fantastic proceedings, there was a recess during which two things occurred, each of them more surprising and more welcome to newsmen than what had just transpired within chambers.

  First, Representative Walter had an idea. He informed Arthur’s lawyer, Joseph Rauh, that the entire hearing and the possibility of a contempt citation would be dropped “provided Marilyn agreed to be photographed shaking hands” with Walter. This condition Arthur at once rejected and denounced, and so on July 10 a contempt citation against him was issued in Congress by a vote of 373 to 9.

  Arthur himself had something to say. During the hearing, he had asked for his passport to be returned to him so that he could travel to England that summer for a production of his play—“and to be with the woman who will then be my wife.” Reporters shouted the obvious question, and then Marilyn Monroe, who was seated before a television set in New York, heard Arthur say, “I will marry Marilyn Monroe before July 13, when she is scheduled to go to London to make a picture. When she goes to London, she will go as Mrs. Miller.”

  The announcement surprised her more than the country. “Have you heard?” she asked Norman and Hedda Rosten, whom she telephoned almost hysterically. “He announced it before the whole world! Can you believe it? You know, he never really asked me. We talked about it, but it was all very vague.” To Amy Greene, Rupert Allan and others she added with unveiled sarcasm, “It was awfully nice of him to let me know his plans.”

  The contempt citation would take a year to adjudicate, but meantime Arthur Miller’s passport was granted (not for the then normal term of two years, but for six months only, beginning July 6). A lover—especially the fiancé of America’s favorite beauty—simply could not be dangerous to the United States, for Communists were not romantics, now, were they? On the contrary, a serious man affianced to Marilyn Monroe legitimized the public’s adoration of her, just as her acceptance of him made Arthur Miller somehow less threatening and toned down his role as a controversial figure. His announcement had made him—well, simply a man in love wishing to take his bride on a honeymoon. Just as in a Marilyn Monroe movie, love was conquering all. For the moment it could be forgotten that in the committee hearings he was raised to almost heroic status among liberal-thinking Americans confronting the Orwellian spirit of the times.

  “Arthur was learning from Marilyn,” as Susan Strasberg noted. “In one day, he was already a master of the media.” Cameras, microphones and reporters—not to say his presumption of Marilyn’s response—would counteract anything a crew of Washington zanies could do to him. For his courageous stand in Washington, “she admired him from that day,” according to Rupert Allan, “although his tactic for the wedding announcement greatly distressed her. And in Marilyn’s case, admiration was always linked to love. She thought he was a great writer. But I’m sorry to say that at that moment I think he used her.”

  Dr. Hohenberg, still wielding enormous influence over every aspect of her client’s public and private life, approved the marriage (thus Irving Stein noted, perhaps with some astonishment, in a corporate memorandum dated June 22) and then Hohenberg advised Marilyn to go right ahead and meet the press. Of course she would marry Mr. Miller, Marilyn announced, putting aside her reservations. But from June 22 until the marriage date (which they would not divulge), Marilyn pondered. Her imminent departure for London to make a film with the formidable Olivier was one challenge, the wedding another.

  Life was, therefore, suddenly filled with another set of claims on Marilyn’s courage, talents and self-awareness. No one permitted her to go just a bit more slowly, to think things out for herself over an arc of time. Certainly she was eager to prove herself, to feel she had passed from childish dependencies to adulthood. But there was no one who encouraged the necessary apartness and reflection. The fortunes of many—their self-interest, careers, future and fame—were allied to that of a talented, sensitive, highly strung thirty-year-old.

  Marilyn was poised to marry a man who very much appealed to her desire for self-improvement. But his tendency to lecture her and to be the wisdom figure fed her sense of inferiority. Many who knew them realized that try though he might, and love her though he surely did at the outset, Arthur Miller was soon wandering into the dangerous territory of suppressed disdain, effected (however subtly) by his assumption of moral and intellectual superiority.

  In this regard, Marilyn was again replicating the life of Jean Harlow, whose second marriage was to cameraman Harold Rosson, sixteen years her senior. They were soon divorced, and Harlow took up with actor William Powell, nineteen years older. “[Jean] was always anxious to increase her knowledge,” said her friend Maureen O’Sullivan, “and she felt she could learn a lot from Powell.” Marilyn and Jean each contracted three marriages, and each longed to be a serious actress, to transcend the common presumption that they were only sexpots. That Marilyn was at least generally aware of these parallels is clear from her continued discussions with Milton Greene, throughout 1955 and 1956, of how they might somehow produce a film about Harlow’s life—with or without her old ally Sidney Skolsky, with whom she had originally discussed the project and whom she had now replaced with Milton.

  Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller promised to meet the press at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, at four o’clock on Friday, June 29. But first they were to have a quiet lunch with Miller’s parents at the home of his cousin Morton, a few miles distant. A crew of reporters and photographers was gathering at Miller’s home on Old Tophet Road meanwhile, supervised by Milton.

  But one team heard of the family lunch at Morton’s and decided to get the jump on their colleagues. Mara Scherbatoff, a Russian princess in exile who was New York bureau chief for Paris Match, asked her companion to drive her over to Morton’s for some advance pictures and perhaps even a preemptive statement. Just before one o’clock, Marilyn, Arthur and Morton emerged from Morton’s house, said nothing, leaped into Arthur’s car and sped along the narrow, winding route toward Tophet Road, with Scherbatoff and her driver in hot pursuit. But on a blind curve near Arthur’s house, the photographer’s car hurtled from the road and smashed into a tree. The Princess Mara was thrown through the windshield and hideously injured.

  Hearing the crash, Miller stopped his car, and the three ran back to the accident; the sight was so dreadful that Arthur would not let Marilyn come near. They then drove home to telephone for help, Marilyn trembling and pale, leaning on Arthur for support. They had seen enough to know that no one could help, and in fact the aristocrat-reporter died at New Milford Hospital less than three hours later.

  But the press conference, held outdoors under a luxuriant tree, was not delayed. Extant film footage, in which Arthur mumbles banal replies to
questions and Marilyn seems distracted and less than joyful, must take into account the tragic prelude. In fact, neither of them said much at all, making a hasty retreat to the house after less than ten minutes.

  When the last reporter had departed, the casually dressed couple departed with Morton and his wife for the Westchester County Court House in White Plains, New York. Just before seven-thirty that evening (Friday, June 29), Judge Seymour Rabinowitz pronounced them husband and wife in a four-minute, single-ring ceremony. Not one member of the press knew, and the newlyweds were able to return to Roxbury without hearing the pop of one flashbulb.

  On Sunday, July 1, a second ceremony was held at the home of Arthur’s agent, Kay Brown, near Katonah, New York. But while friends and relatives gathered for the traditional Jewish marriage rite and a buzz of happy conversation prevailed downstairs and on the lawn, the Greenes were busily attending a nervous Marilyn in an upstairs guest room. She had in fact been withdrawn since Friday, and although Milton and Amy could but privately speculate, he had already put through a call to Irving Stein, advising the lawyer to “stand by in case of immediate difficulty about Marilyn’s marriage.”

  The reason for this warning was soon clear to Amy and Milton.

  “Do you really want to go ahead with this marriage?” Milton asked Marilyn. “You don’t have to, you know.” Her eyes were glazed with tears, and Amy tried to comfort her: “We can put you in a car and we’ll deal with the guests.” The civil marriage, they guessed, could somehow be annulled before the religious rite solemnized the union.

  “No,” Marilyn said quietly. “I don’t want to go through with it.”

  But as Milton prepared to attend to this awkward task, Marilyn called him back.

  “No, Milton!” she cried. “We’ve already invited all these people. We can’t disappoint them.”