Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  On her first visit, Hohenberg found Marilyn in a state of deep depression. As she told Iselin Simon, Marilyn hadn’t slept in days. She’d been threatening to walk out on the film as well as on her husband. She’d removed Arthur Miller’s photo from her dressing room and replaced it with a snapshot of Joe DiMaggio. Hohenberg managed to calm the patient, but after the therapist returned to New York, she again heard from Milton Greene. Arthur and Marilyn had argued, and Marilyn had suffered a setback. Could the good doctor kindly return?

  On her second visit, Dr. Hohenberg listened as Marilyn read excerpts from her notebooks. Monroe’s written musings reflected the depth of her despair. Arthur Miller’s “betrayal,” she noted, what she’d “always been deeply terrified of, to really be someone’s wife, since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.” From another page, she read: “And I in merciless pain . . . but we must endure, I more sadly because I can feel no joy.” She read Hohenberg a letter she’d written to Lee Strasberg in which she said: “I’m embarrassed to start this, but thank you for understanding and having changed my life—even though you changed it I still am lost. I mean I can’t get myself together.”

  Before leaving London following her second visit, Hohenberg contacted Anna Freud, whom she’d known in Vienna, and asked the eminent psychiatrist to meet with Marilyn during her absence. An appointment was arranged. High on the sedative Dexamyl, Marilyn drove to Dr. Freud’s home office at 20 Maresfield Gardens. Paula Fichtl, Anna Freud’s housekeeper, recalled Monroe “arriving in a black Rolls-Royce, wearing white slacks and a plain blue gabardine jacket with its collar up. No makeup. A soft white hat covered her platinum blonde hair, and her large, dark sunglasses rendered her almost unrecognizable.

  “Before their session, Dr. Freud took Miss Monroe next door to the nursery school she helped run and where she conducted much of her research, children being a key [according to Sigmund Freud] to an understanding of the development of the adult psyche. Marilyn played with the children for nearly an hour. She then returned with Dr. Freud to her office. She came every day for more than a week.”

  Anna Freud’s diagnosis, as recorded in her clinical files, indicated a far more serious condition than that which Hohenberg had previously rendered. Freud described Monroe as “emotionally unstable, highly impulsive, and needing continuous approval from the outside world. She cannot bear solitude and gets profoundly depressed when faced with rejection. She is paranoid with schizophrenic undertones, in other words a paranoid schizophrenic.”

  Schizophrenia: the term terrified Marilyn. Her mother suffered from schizophrenia. Other forebears on her mother’s side of the family had been similarly afflicted. Thankfully, Freud didn’t disclose her diagnosis to Marilyn, though she sent a copy of her report to Dr. Hohenberg in New York. After receiving the report, Hohenberg phoned Milton Greene, her other “celebrity” patient, and advised him that he’d made a mistake to go into business with Monroe. Hohenberg said she didn’t know how long the arrangement could continue under the present circumstances. Eventually learning of the conversation, Marilyn used it to terminate her treatment with Hohenberg, citing it as an example of unprofessional conduct, a violation of her right to privacy. Hohenberg’s harsh words following the breakup with Monroe turned out to be prophetic. “When she left me,” she said, “I knew sooner or later she would kill herself.”

  For the moment, matters grew worse before they got better. In mid-August, after she’d returned to work on the film, Marilyn learned from a British gynecologist that she was pregnant. Above all, Milton Greene thought it necessary to keep the pregnancy from Laurence Olivier. Greene needn’t have concerned himself. On Saturday, September 8, Marilyn miscarried, enduring the same fate purportedly suffered by Vivien Leigh. Monroe later told Lotte Goslar she was extremely disappointed because she’d hoped, despite her earlier sense of betrayal, to show Arthur she could be a devoted wife and a good mother. Starting a family, having a baby, would rectify everything that wasn’t right in their marriage.

  Somehow The Prince and the Showgirl neared completion but not before Hedda Rosten and Paula Strasberg returned to New York, and Marilyn spent additional time with Anna Freud. When filming finally ended, Monroe distributed a letter of apology to the entire cast and crew, including Laurence Olivier: “I hope you will all forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very sick all through the picture. Please, please don’t hold it against me.”

  There was a light moment, one of the few, when Marilyn Monroe met Queen Elizabeth. In October the Queen walked down a reception line of twenty international actors at the Empire Theatre in London, greeting each in turn as they performed the usual bow or curtsy. Included in the group were Brigitte Bardot, Victor Mature, and Joan Crawford. Arriving late, Marilyn stood at the end of the line. When the Queen reached Marilyn, she stopped and stared. Wearing an off-the-shoulder gown that left little to the imagination, Monroe once again became the talk of the town.

  That same month, Monroe accompanied her husband to the London premiere of A View from the Bridge. Following the performance, Miller proudly wrote Norman Rosten that Marilyn had worn “a garnet-colored velvet gown, halting traffic as far north as Liverpool, and had conquered everyone.”

  Five weeks later, the Millers were back in the United States. Browsing through a stack of back-issue magazines, Marilyn came across a Newsmaker item in a three-month-old issue of Time that caught her attention. Joe had been spotted playing in the annual Old Timers’ Day game at Yankee Stadium, which amused Marilyn. She sent a handwritten note to George Solotaire: “George, sweetie—Please tell Joe congratulations on his gargantuan homer this past August at Yankee Stadium. Also please tell him that as far as I’m concerned, he’s no Old Timer! Love, Marilyn.”

  Solotaire gave DiMaggio the letter and advised him to contact Marilyn. DiMaggio decided against it. “She’s impulsive,” he told Solotaire, “and often does things she later regrets. I’ll wait.”

  Chapter 13

  ENGLAND WITH MARILYN MONROE HAD been an eye-opening experience for Arthur Miller. The couple had departed from the States only two weeks after their marriage. The trip constituted their first extended period together, the first time Miller had been exposed to the “real” Monroe as opposed to the fantasy figure he’d concocted for himself based on more than four years of letter writing and a year of informal dating. The journal entry that Marilyn had seen in London reflected Miller’s awakening; his having to deal firsthand with many of the same forces that had driven Joe DiMaggio half mad: her sleep deprivation, insecurities, anxieties, fears, paranoia, and increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol.

  Looking back on his own growing addiction to Marilyn, Miller would assert that he hadn’t been “sophisticated enough” to have recognized the multitude of issues that would ultimately destroy his marriage and then Marilyn herself.

  Calling Marilyn “an extraordinary child of nature,” Arthur Miller would say, “I began to dream that with Marilyn I could do what seemed to me would be the most wonderful thing of all—have my work and all that this implied, and someone I just simply adored. I thought I could solve it all with this marriage. She was simply overwhelming, as I guess I was to her, for a while. It was wonderful to be around her. Until she got ill.”

  What seemed most disconcerting for the playwright—what the marriage to Monroe came to represent to him—was his inability to get any meaningful work done during that period. There was always something on his plate to distract him from his desk and typewriter. The distractions weren’t always related to Monroe.

  When the couple returned from England, Joseph Rauh, Miller’s attorney, notified them that the FBI had launched a new investigation, partially aimed at Monroe but mainly directed at Miller. Identified in FBI files as the “darling of the left-wing intelligentsia,” Marilyn (and Miller) had been accused of diverting funds through Marilyn Monroe Productions into the coffers of several pro-Communist organizations, none of which were specified. In February 1957, after Arthur
and Marilyn returned to New York from a vacation in Half Moon Point, Jamaica, the playwright was indicted by a federal grand jury for two counts of contempt of Congress. At a first hearing in March, Miller pled not guilty. In May, accompanied by Marilyn, he attended another hearing and this time was found guilty of contempt. The conviction carried with it a $500 fine, a thirty-day prison sentence, and the mandatory revocation (for a second time) of his US passport. A year later, his conviction was overturned by a court of appeals, which ruled that the chairman of HUAC had provided Miller’s attorney with misleading information. Marilyn helped pay her husband’s legal costs.

  While all this went on, Miller and Monroe became embroiled in a legal skirmish with Milton Greene, who, they claimed, had “swindled” Marilyn out of thousands of dollars by his intentional mismanagement of Marilyn Monroe Productions. In addition, Miller questioned Greene’s artistic sensibility and credentials. “He may be a good photographer, but he knows nothing about filmmaking,” claimed Miller, citing as an example of Greene’s incompetence his selection of The Prince and the Showgirl as a vehicle for Monroe to demonstrate her acting skills.

  After months of vituperative legal threats, conferences, and strategies, Milton Greene settled for a single lump-sum payment of $100,000 in exchange for his stock holdings in MMP. Eager to break her contract with Greene and thereby mollify her husband, Marilyn thoroughly embarrassed her former business partner by announcing publicly that he’d taken advantage of her. She told the press: “My company wasn’t organized to parcel out nearly half of my earnings to Mr. Greene for seven years.” Arthur Miller, also quoted in the press, said, “Milton Greene . . . lived off my wife’s work. She prevented him from gaining majority control and then had to pay a hundred thousand dollars to rid herself of him. The company was doomed from the start. The contract my wife made with Mr. Greene was completely disadvantageous to her. Milton Greene thought she was working for him, instead of the other way around. He never separated his personal expenditures from company expenses. The finances were a mess. As for Mr. Greene’s work ethic, he was all talk and no action.”

  The termination of Marilyn Monroe’s agreement with Milton Greene ended his brief film career. He went back into magazine photography. For all intents and purposes, it likewise marked the end of Marilyn Monroe Productions. According to Amy Greene, Marilyn told her that Milton had been “the only man she ever trusted, and she regretted that she hadn’t had the strength to stand up to her husband.” Indeed, Marilyn’s main impetus at this stage may well have been directed at trying to save her shaky marriage. Prior to the dissolution of MMP, Marilyn and Milton Greene had been exploring the possibility of doing a production either of The Brothers Karamazov or The Jean Harlow Story, neither of which came to pass.

  In subsequent years, Joshua Greene, Milton and Amy’s son, offered a similarly slanted comment defending his father’s honor: “Arthur Miller wanted my father out of the picture so he could have all the money. My father was the only man in Marilyn’s life that never took her for granted and never took things from her.” Apparently Milton Greene’s son never heard of Joe DiMaggio.

  The only residual connection between the Greenes and Joe DiMaggio involved the $225 outfit Marilyn wore in January 1954, when she and Joe married in San Francisco. While staying with the Greenes at their Connecticut home in early 1955, Marilyn let Amy Greene’s mother borrow the outfit for a special occasion. Forgetting to return it, Amy’s mother stowed it away in her wardrobe closet, where it remained until 1999, thirty-seven years after Monroe’s death. In September of that year, Amy Greene found it and sold it at auction at Sotheby’s for the considerable sum of $33,350. Although Milton Greene and his family no doubt benefited financially from their association with Monroe, it can be argued that not only did he recognize Monroe’s undeniable talent but he also put his own career on the line in order to help the actress further her own cause. “Milton Greene may have been a charlatan,” said Truman Capote, “but at least he was an honest charlatan.”

  • • •

  In mid-1957 Marilyn gave up her sublet at 2 Sutton Place and purchased a much larger thirteenth-floor cooperative apartment at 444 East Fifty-Seventh Street, not far from her previous apartment building. Her new apartment consisted of a master bedroom, guest bedroom, living room (with a working fireplace and floor-to-ceiling bookcases), a small study, dining alcove, three bathrooms, and a modern kitchen. Over time Marilyn fashioned the apartment according to her own taste. She carpeted the residence in white, brought in the white-lacquered baby grand piano her mother had given her as a child, acquired a mirrored table for the dining area, a pair of off-white love seats, a white tub chair, a large white sofa, a rare oriental vase painted with white flowers, white draperies, and other select pieces of furniture for the living room. She owned a small bust of the ancient Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and soon bought a painting by Toulouse-Lautrec and a black metal female nude sculpted by William Zorach. She tore down several walls and built several new ones. On one of the living room walls she mounted an enlarged photograph Cecil Beaton had taken of her the year before. She placed Marlon Brando’s jocularly inscribed photo of Albert Einstein atop her baby grand. On the nightstand next to her queen-sized bed sat two photographs: Abraham Lincoln and Marilyn’s mother. Also perched on the nightstand was a first edition of Carl Sandburg’s 1926 biography of the sixteenth president. Despite her work on the apartment, she was never satisfied with the results, and for the rest of her life she constantly changed furniture, furnishings, ornaments, and accessories. Although she’d insisted on sharing a bed and bedroom while married to DiMaggio, she gave Arthur Miller the guest bedroom, which later doubled as a laundry and sewing room. Arthur also had full run of the study, though by his own admission he got little work done in it.

  Patricia Rosten, the then eleven-year-old daughter of Norman and Hedda Rosten, had vivid memories of Marilyn and the apartment. “The guest bedroom and bath had lovely white porcelain doorknobs with flowers painted on them,” she noted. Marilyn’s bedroom, on the other hand, “was kept dark, slightly mysterious,” and everything in shades of beige: “rugs, curtains, bedspread. She had a champagne-colored quilt on the bed, which I used to flop on when I visited.” Patricia remembered diving into Marilyn’s makeup box. “She used to act like it was the most natural thing in the world to find me there. She plunked me down at her vanity table, and since I was intrigued by the art of makeup, she would show me how to do the job right. For the next twenty minutes, I was in a dream as I watched her skillful hands transform my kid’s face into something glamourous. She made my eyelids glimmer, my cheekbones appear accentuated, and my mouth rosy. She also arranged my hair into an elegant French twist.”

  Patricia Rosten went on to say that she adored Marilyn because the actress “had real empathy” for children and thought nothing of “breaking the rules,” and she also believed that young people love adults who aren’t afraid to break the rules.

  She recalled her visits to Arthur Miller’s Roxbury, Connecticut, farmhouse, which Marilyn had decorated and where the couple often spent their weekends. In an article Patricia Rosten wrote concerning her childhood experiences with Marilyn, she observes that the star “would not hesitate to allow Hugo,” Arthur’s dog, to come into the house “rain-soaked and muddy” from the garden. “She would let the front part of him in and carefully wipe off his front paws, then, coaxing in the rest of him, she would carefully wipe off the back ones.” When Hugo needed a soft bed, Marilyn gave him the best, most expensive wool blanket she owned.

  Marilyn once rescued a “small half-starved beagle-type puppy that staggered in out of the woods.” She “nursed it back to health, brought it to New York,” and gave it to Patricia.

  Reiterating her point about Marilyn’s natural love for children, Patricia Rosten ventured the opinion that Marilyn might have been happier with a child or children of her own. “When Marilyn touched me or held me,” she wrote, “I felt a warmth and softness (dare I use the word mater
nal in relation to her?) that was very reassuring. It was not unlike falling into that champagne-colored quilt that graced her bed. She, who was so much like a child herself, always had a sympathetic word or touch for ‘another’ child, and it was this that endeared her to me.”

  So far as children were concerned, Jane and Robert Miller, Arthur’s offspring by his first wife, visited their father and glamourous stepmother on alternate weekends, usually in Connecticut, and sometimes in Amagansett, Long Island, where the couple rented a cottage from early 1957 to July 1958. There Marilyn enjoyed nothing more than to take long walks along the beach or to play tennis at a nearby court.

  Rupert Allan, originally a West Coast editor of Look and later a publicist with the Arthur Jacobs firm, reflected on Monroe’s relationship with the two children, acknowledging that while she felt close to both, she felt closer to Robert. “In 1957 the boy was about ten, and his sister was three years older. So the girl, being around thirteen and very sensitive, felt a trace of resentment toward Marilyn. She liked Marilyn, but I imagine she regarded her as the person most responsible for breaking up her parents’ marriage.”