The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Long before he met Marilyn, Miller's marriage was strained and unhappy. A crucial incident in 1943, four years before his fame, revealed Mary's puritanical nature. Extremely intolerant and censorious, she took the thought for the deed when he merely fantasized about other women. While discussing the Ernie Pyle project in Washington, Miller was introduced to an attractive war widow, who excited him by confiding that she'd compensated for her loss by sleeping with a number of young sailors. When, Miller wrote, "I blithely told Mary of my attraction to this woman, saying that had I not been married I would have liked to sleep with her," his mild confession "was received with such a power of disgust and revulsion . . . that her confidence in me, as well as my mindless reliance on her, was badly damaged."8 Mary's reaction to his affair with Marilyn was even more furious; and his next two plays were suffused with his own shame and guilt.

  1. Norma Jeane and her mother, Gladys Baker, Los Angeles beach, 1928

  2. Norma Jeane and her first husband, Jim Dougherty, 1943

  3. Arthur Miller, Norman Rosten, Hedda Rosten and Mary Slattery Miller, 1940

  4. Miller with Mary and his children, Jane and Robert, 1953

  5. Marilyn and Johnny Hyde, late 1949

  6. Marilyn and Natasha Lytess, c. 1952

  7. Marilyn and Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

  8. Marilyn with Anne Baxter, Bette Davis and George Sanders in All About Eve, 1950

  9. Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio, 1953

  10. Marilyn entertaining troops in Korea, February 1954

  11. Marilyn with Milton and Amy Greene, 1955

  12. Lee, Paula and Susan Strasberg, 1963

  13. Marilyn in airport bathroom, April 1955

  14. Marilyn, signed studio photo, 1956

  15. Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, 1955

  16. Marilyn and DiMaggio at premiere of The Seven Year Itch, June 1955

  Seven

  Secret Courtship

  (1954–1955)

  I

  Toward the end of 1954, after her failed marriage to DiMaggio, Marilyn went to New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and to resume her liaison with Miller. She moved from her native city and the fake glamor of the unintellectual movie industry, into a completely different culture – literary, theatrical and highbrow. She understood Hollywood and had made her career there; now, financially and emotionally dependent on Milton and Amy Greene, she was starting again. As she tried to enter this unfamiliar society, she made daily visits to a psychoanalyst and took classes with a famous teacher to improve her acting skills. She was lonely until she met Miller, who belonged to this world and helped – as companion, guide and teacher – to bring her into it. He, in turn, was fascinated by Marilyn's extraordinary power to attract and interest eminent writers.

  It was difficult for her to contact him, since he worked at home. The photographer Sam Shaw introduced her to Miller's college friend, Norman Rosten, who told Miller she was in town, and they finally met at one of Strasberg's theatrical parties in June 1955. Miller, meanwhile, still trying to stay out of the emotional vortex and sustain a marriage destroyed by "mutual intolerance," was torn between desire and guilt: "I no longer knew what I wanted – certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable." So he renewed his secret courtship in a series of romantic settings: the Greenes' country house in Weston, Connecticut; the Rostens' summer cottage in Port Jefferson, Long Island; the Strasbergs' summer place on Fire Island; and Marilyn's posh suite high up in the Waldorf Tower.

  Mary Miller's reaction to her husband's relationship with Marilyn helped propel him into his eventual marriage to Monroe. Mary had renounced her Catholic faith, shared Miller's left-wing politics, and tried psychoanalysis in an attempt to understand and perhaps solve their problems. In October 1955 she discovered that Miller was having an affair. Their son Robert, then eight years old, later remembered that there was a lot of anger and tension in the air and that he tried in vain to play the peacemaker. Mary, who'd made many sacrifices in the early years of their marriage while her husband struggled for success, was both wounded by his infidelity and furious about his betrayal. She threw him out of the house; and he moved into the Chelsea Hotel, a refuge for bohemians and artists, on West 23rd Street.

  Kazan, sympathizing with Miller, described the tense situation that followed: "Month after month he'd begged Mary to take him back, but she couldn't bring herself to forgive her husband. . . . He'd been doing his best to hold their marriage together, but according to him, his wife was behaving in a bitterly vengeful manner." Miller's sister, Joan Copeland, said the break-up of his marriage came as a big surprise:

  I would hear snippets of rumors but I'd just pooh-pooh it because when you're in that position of celebrity, people are going to say and write all sorts of terrible things about you. So I was guarded against any kind of malicious rumor. I just didn't believe it and I didn't ask Mary or Arthur about it. But Marilyn would search me out at the [Actors] Studio and we'd have lunch, talk about scenes. I guess she was trying to curry my favor, or maybe she just liked me.1

  Miller finally decided to get a divorce in Nevada, which was much easier to obtain than in New York. In order to qualify, he had to reside in the state for six weeks. Saul Bellow was already living out there, divorcing his first wife in order to marry his second. On March 15, 1956, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Pascal Covici, Miller wrote to Bellow. He asked for advice and, in a bit of one-upmanship, expressed pride in possessing the woman whom millions of other men longed for:

  Congratulations. Pat Covici tells me you are to be married. That is quite often a good idea.

  I am going out there around the end of the month to spend the fated six weeks and have no idea where to live. I have a problem, however, of slightly unusual proportions. From time to time there will be a visitor who is very dear to me, but who is unfortunately recognizable by approximately a hundred million people, give or take three or four. She has all sorts of wigs, can affect a limp, sunglasses, bulky coats, etc., but if it is possible I want to find a place, perhaps a bungalow or something like, where there are not likely to be crowds looking in through the windows. Do you know of any such place?

  Bellow was then living in one of two isolated cabins on Sutcliffe Star Route, on the western shore of Pyramid Lake, and in due course Miller rented the one next door. Both the cabins and the lake, about forty miles north of Reno, were on the Paiute Indian reservation. In those days there was almost no one else around, and the lunar landscape seemed just the way it was when the world was first created. Ten years earlier, Edmund Wilson had stayed in Minden, south of Reno, while waiting for his divorce. He'd amused himself in that debauched and dehydrated part of the world by exploring the desert, lakes and wildflowers, walking around the pleasant town square and doing a bit of gambling. In a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, he described it as "a queer and desolate country – less romantic than prehistoric and spooky."

  A motel near the cabins had once put up people waiting for a divorce, but now housed only the owners, who had the only pay phone between the cabins and Reno. When a call came, they'd drive over to summon one of the self-absorbed writers to the outside world. The companionable highlight of the week was the drive to Reno in Bellow's Chevy to do their laundry and buy groceries for their spartan meals. Bellow stayed longer than the required six weeks, with his new bride Sondra Tschacbasov, in order to continue work on his novel Henderson the Rain King. (His second marriage lasted only three years, and he would satirize his ex-wife as Madeleine in Herzog.)

  In a letter of May 12, 1956 to his college teacher Kenneth Rowe, Miller emphasized his strange isolation: "There is no living soul nor tree nor shrub above the height of the sagebrush. I am not counting my neighbors, Saul Bellow, the novelist, and his wife, because they are on my side against the lunar emptiness around us." Miller recalled that Bellow, in a Reichian catharsis, liked to scream into the landscape: "Saul would sometimes spend half a
n hour up behind a hill a half-mile from the cottages emptying his lungs roaring at the stillness, an exercise in self-contact."

  Sondra Bellow – who rode horses from the dude ranch into the hills behind the house – recalled that the two writers did not, as one might expect, have intense and stimulating conversations:

  Miller came out perhaps in mid- or late May for his six-week residency. We overlapped maybe three weeks at most, since we left Nevada the beginning of June. The conversations with Miller at that time were less than fascinating, at least from a literary point of view. He talked a bit about his marriage and how difficult it was to make the decision to get a divorce. But his attention was almost totally focused on Marilyn Monroe. He talked non-stop about her – her career, her beauty, her talent, even her perfect feet. He showed us the now famous photos by Milton Greene – all quite enlightening since neither Mr. Bellow nor I had ever even heard of her before this. To my disappointment, Monroe was filming Bus Stop at the time, and never did get to visit Miller in Nevada.

  I actually spent more time with Miller than did Bellow, who dedicated much of his day to writing, and believe me, conversation was not at all literary, as you can surmise from the above. Miller occupied himself mornings in his cabin, and also spent a huge amount of time talking (presumably to Monroe) on the only available telephone in the area. This was a pay telephone booth a half mile away on a dirt road used primarily – and rarely – by hunters traveling north. He and I would spend some afternoons together – sightseeing, or going into Reno, or hiking around Pyramid Lake. He generally had dinner with us, during which he repeated all the Marilyn stories he had already told me during the day.

  I believe the "bond" between [Bellow and Miller] at this time had much less to do with their being writers, and more to do with their being in somewhat the same place in terms of ending a long-term marriage and starting anew with a much younger woman. I never heard a single literary exchange between them.

  They sort of metaphorically circled each other, and pawed the ground. You just knew it from their body language. They told jokes – especially shaggy dog stories with a Yiddish flavor – and gossiped rather than have significant conversation.

  Miller had all those Hollywood connections that Bellow would have felt was "selling out." But it was fun to hear his stories. He also thought Miller was not a real intellectual (like the Partisan Review crowd). Bellow came from a rabbinical intellectual tradition and Miller's father didn't read or write but had his wife help him.

  Miller also was soon to be testifying in Washington before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but there was little substantive discussion about this as well, mostly because Miller was caught up in the Monroe romance, and also, in part, because Bellow and Miller had very different political philosophies. [Bellow was a Trotskyite at the time and Miller was not.]2

  Miller and Bellow were both born in 1915 to Jewish immigrant parents. Bellow had reviewed Miller's novel, Focus (1945), in the New Republic and thought the sudden transformation of the main character from Jew-hater to a man who accepts his enforced identity as a Jew was unconvincing: "The whole thing is thrust on him. . . . Mr. Newman's heroism has been clipped to his lapel. . . . If only he had had more substance to begin with." Miller accepted the criticism and didn't hold it against him. He published his short story, "Please Don't Kill Anything," in Bellow's little magazine, the Noble Savage, and later commended Bellow's work: "I like everything he writes. He still has a joy in writing. . . . He is a genius. . . . He's kind of a psychic journalist – which is invaluable. He's just simply interesting. . . . His work seems necessary, which is high praise. It seems to mark the moment." Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Miller did not, which may account for his rather patronizing tone.

  Miller didn't spend all his time with his companions at Pyramid Lake. Marilyn, working on Bus Stop, never visited him in Nevada. But Miller, risking the loss of continuous residence that was required for his divorce, secretly slipped into Los Angeles for a series of romantic encounters on Sunset Boulevard. (The FBI, tracking Miller's movements, knew he was leaving Nevada to see Marilyn.) Amy Greene recalled that "Arthur would come out on weekends . . . they'd lock themselves up at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. He would arrive on Friday, she would go to the Marmont that night, come back to us Sunday night and she would be a mess on Monday. He was still married and she would be upset because she couldn't show this man off to everyone because he still had a wife and two children in Brooklyn."

  On June 2, after Bellow's departure, Miller told him that conditions had radically changed at Pyramid Lake and described the intrusive publicity that would both excite and plague them throughout their marriage. Marilyn was protected by the studio, which controlled access by the press. But Miller, though a famous playwright, had never experienced such aggressive attention: "The front page of the [New York Daily] News has us about to be married, and me 'readying' my divorce here. All hell breaks loose. The [imported] phones all around never stop ringing. Television trucks – (as I live!) – drive up, cameras grinding, screams, yells – I say nothing, give them some pictures, retire into the cabin. They finally go away."3

  Miller, not Mary, was granted a divorce on the grounds of her extreme mental cruelty, but she exacted harsh terms and made him pay dearly for his betrayal. She "was awarded custody of their two children, Jane (b. 1944) and Robert (b. 1947), child support payments (including rises in the cost of living), the house they had recently bought on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights, plus a percentage of all his future earnings until she remarried (she never did)."He managed to keep their weekend house in Connecticut, but was responsible for all her legal costs as well as his own. He felt guilty and was willing to pay for his mistakes in order to marry Marilyn. Most of his friends never saw Mary again. She just disappeared and seemed to be wiped out of existence. During our conversation, Mary refused to discuss her contribution to Miller's early success. I told her that she'd been repeatedly characterized as a dull, boring, sexless wife who'd been cast off when someone better turned up. Instead of defending herself, she self-effacingly said: "Maybe I was."4

  II

  Many men had slept with Marilyn, both before and after she'd become a famous sex symbol, and thought nothing of abandoning her the following day, but Miller was devoted to her and always treated her with respect. He perceived her innocence beneath the sexy image, found her waif-like quality appealing and instinctively felt sorry for her. He thought she was opaque and mysterious – not at all the happy, dizzy blonde – and wanted to rescue her from her profound misery. At the same time, he saw her talent and realized he could write material for her and about her. She was a personal and artistic challenge, a tragic muse. She was also fascinating because she was so extraordinarily desirable in the eyes of the world. Miller was famous, but Marilyn was a phenomenon.

  Miller was particularly susceptible to Marilyn's lively spirit and devastating charm. He basked in her unqualified adoration, a soothing contrast to Mary's stern disapproval, unremitting criticism and bitter vengeance. He'd met Mary at Michigan and married her when he was twenty-five; he was tortured by shyness in college and felt he'd never experienced real passion in marriage. Marilyn was only the second woman he'd ever known intimately. Miller (like Mary) was rather solemn; Marilyn was funny and her wit released his emotional constraints and made him relish his life with her. He thought he'd discovered hidden depths in Marilyn – and in himself. It flattered his ego to possess the most glamorous movie star in the world. Yet he believed he could spirit her away from her fame and give her a rooted, respectable life; that he could teach, protect and take care of her; and that they could pursue their dramatic careers together.

  He called Marilyn "the most womanly woman I can imagine. . . . She's a kind of lodestone that draws out of the male animal his essential qualities." There was also, in his passionate turmoil, a strong irrational element. "Miller was in love," Rosten noted, "completely, seriously, with the ardor of a man released. His first marriage had e
nded badly; now his second chance had come, and it swept him into channels of newly discovered emotion." When asked if he'd foreseen the problems that would later destroy his marriage and then Marilyn herself, Miller replied, "If I had been sophisticated enough, I would have seen them. But I was not. I loved her."5

  When Marilyn came to New York she was lost and looking for a savior. Confused, friendless and mentally fragile, constantly exploited, both personally and professionally, she was emotionally needy. She saw safety in Miller's cautious reserve, security in his personal success. In contrast to many alcoholic playwrights – O'Neill, Williams, Inge and Albee – he was sane and sober. Unlike all her other friends, he didn't want to make money out of her. She had always been attracted to older, smarter men, especially to those who wore glasses. Always in search of heroes, she had admired Abraham Lincoln as wise and good, and now saw Miller as an attractive version of Lincoln himself. "He's so gorgeous," she told Lee Strasberg's actress-daughter Susan, "I love to cuddle with him. He's the most beautiful man I've ever seen. . . . And he's so brilliant. He and your father are the two most brilliant men in the world" – which is exactly what Miller wanted to hear. In a dubious compliment, she also said his mind was better than that of any other man she'd ever known. She was pleased that he understood and sympathized with her desire to improve herself. He became her guide, philosopher and friend, and introduced her, partly through his personal example, to the idea of political freedom.