The actress died 60 years ago. Many were unable to believe that two characters from two entirely different worlds could have something in common. But the marriage between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe did in fact happen.

Dr Mateusz Werner, philosopher of culture, film critic and a cultural studies academic at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University (UKSW) in Warsaw, stresses that the couple played a historic role in the American culture of the 1950s and 1960s. Marilyn Monroe was the epitome of womanhood who revolutionised contemporary mores. Similarly with Brigitte Bardot in the French cinematic New Wave. Roger Vadim, director of “And God Created Woman”, showed Bardot’s naked beauty, devoid of any ideology. She was just being herself. Werner states that this applies to Monroe too.

Dr Piotr Kletkowski, film critic at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków states “If we look at cinema as the equivalent of contemporary mythology then this cinematic Aphrodite, its tenth muse is Marilyn Monroe.”

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  Arthur Miller, her husband is equally fascinating. Werner continues “Arthur Miller in ‘Death of a Salesman’ showed that the American Dream of prosperity, emancipation and access to cultural and civilisational goods linked to post-second world war economic development is an idealised myth. In this sense we can compare him to Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg. We should add that he owed much to the Frankfurt school of Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.”

His wife was waiting

They met at the beginning of 1951. Monroe already had one marriage behind her and she was on the threshold of a great career. She was a talented actress having played in a minor but respected role in John Houston’s film, “The Asphalt Jungle”.

Miller came to Hollywood together with Elia Kazan, to pitch his screenplay “The Hook” to Columbia Pictures and which to be directed by Kazan himself. Miller was 35 years old and already known for his play writing. In particular, he was noticed for “ All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman” for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. Donald Spoto, Monroe’s biographer, wrote of him “He wore his glasses down on his nose, he was tall and slim, shy as if he were unsure of his own strengths, somewhat unnatural in his lifestyle, a typical intellectual.”

He intended to stay in Hollywood for only a week to later return to New York after settling business. His wife was waiting for him. Mary Grace Slaterry, was his college love and they had two children.

Miller and Kazan stayed at the home of film agent Charles Feldman. After handing over a copy of the screenplay to Harry Cohn, the co-founder and chairman of Columbia, they enjoyed partying whilst waiting for a decision on the matter. Kazan took his friend to the 20th Century Fox studios and they went onto the set of “As Young as You Feel” directed by Harmon Jones, and tin which Marilyn Monroe had a minor role. Kazan introduced her to Miller. At the time, Monroe was involved with a steamy affair with the director of “A Streetcar named Desire”.

The following day, she accompanied the friends to a meeting with Harry Cohn. The head of the studios said that he had to discuss the screenplay with the FBI. He discussed it also with Roy Brewer, the representative of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Brewer was an anti-communist activist and knew Joe Ryan, head of the International Docker’s Union. “The Hook” was intended as a film about the conflict between New York dockers and dishonest and exploitative trade unions. Cohn feared that the premiere would disrupt the work of American ports. This was at a time of the Korean war and the resupply of American forces was made chiefly by sea. It could have serious repercussions.

Miller’s sojourn in Hollywood dragged on, which seem not to disturb him all that much. He spent time with Kazan and Monroe for whom he was gradually falling head over heels. They visited a bookshop where Miller suggested to his future wife poetry by Whitman, Frost and E.E Cummings. They went to parties. During one at Charles Feldman’s where the actress stole the show the playwright wrote in his autobiography “Timebends”, “In this room full of actresses and influential wives, women fashionably dressed with everyone showing their grande dame reserve, Marilyn Monroe seemed challengingly ridiculous, a bird-of-paradise even for the reason that she wore an impossibly tight dress which called out not whispered that her body in her pinion was the best.”

Miller fell in love and she reciprocated. “They did not go to bed once that year. But she excitedly told me that he was the type of man whom she could love to the end of her life” said Natasha Lytess, who taught Monroe acting.

After waiting a long while, Cohn told Kazan and Miller that the FBI had negatively evaluated the screenplay of “The Hook”, regarding it as dangerous. The producer insisted that it could be accepted on condition of introducing some changes. Above all, that the dishonest union bosses and the gangsters who supported them from the shadows should be portrayed as communists. Miller disagreed and withdrew the screenplay, which impressed Monroe.

He recommended Miller’s plays to her

Miller, though he could stop thinking about her, returned to New York, to his wife and children. Monroe occasionally sent him billets doux. “ Most people could hold their fathers in respect, but I never had a father. I need someone whom I could look up to”, she wrote in one letter. The writer tried to keep his distance, not to become the cause of his family’s breakdown. After years, he admitted “There were times when I felt troubled during the evening and I would be close to heading out west with the pedal to the metal.”

Monroe started to take acting lessons from Michael Chekov, an actor and nephew of the famous Russian playwright. The teacher tried not only to hone Marilyn’s skills but her intellectual development. One of the authors he recommended was Arthur Miller himself.

Monroe’s career started to blossom. She played in “On the Edge”, directed by Fritz Lang, starring together with Barbara Stanwyck. Shortly, she started in the leading roles in films such as “Niagara”, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, “How to Marry a Millionaire” and “ The Seven year Itch”. She became one of the brightest Hollywood stars.

Meantime, in 1952, she met baseball player Joe DiMaggio. After two years together, she married him. The marriage lasted only a few months.

He had written the play “The Crucible” which became a huge success. It was seen, with its plot of witch hunting as a metaphor for the McCarthyite trials. Next, he worked on “The View from the Bridge”. Thoughts about Monroe continues to disturb him. Their paths were destined to cross.

Looking for a father

At the turn of 1954 and 1955, Monroe, in a contractual disagreement with Twentieth Century Fox, decided to move to New York. There, she contacted Lee Strasberg, the director of the Actor’s Studio, taking lessons. She attended shows on Broadway, went to museums and bookshops, restaurants and film premieres and, how else, to parties. At one party at Norman Rosten’s, the poet and dramatist who knew Miller from the Studio, she met her future husband.

This time , Miller gave into temptation. Thy met regularly in the luxury Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the 27th floor where she lived. Her former husband Joe DiMaggio was there too. Both lovers were unaware of each other.

Miller lost his head completely over the starlet. He moved out of his home and decided to divorce his wife. For six weeks he lived in the sticks by Lake Pyramid in Nevada. It was easier to get a divorce than in New York. His neighbour was Saul Bellow the writer and 1976 Nobel Prize winner who came to Nevada for the same reason.

Monroe returned to Hollywood to play in Joshua Logan’s film “Bus Stop”. During a stay in Phoenix, Arizona where she was filming, she phoned Miller in a shaken state. She spoke scathingly about the director Logan and her troubles in her work with him; she could not hide her emotions. Miller later wrote “For the first time she revealed her terror and just how much she was looking for my support. Up to now she was hiding it. Now she revealed that she was dependent on me because I was all she had.” He was seriously thinking about marriage to her.

Dr Mateusz Werner continues “ Marilyn was looking for someone who would take her father’s place, a father that she never had who would be an authority figure and who would make her feel secure.”

He asked for his passport back

The couple were under observation by the FBI. Miller was suspected with links to communism and anti-Americanism.

“Two of his works were performed in the Soviet Union,” Dr Paweł Stangret, literature and theatre specialist at the UKSW says, “and he went to the USSR. He was a leftish intellectual who simply criticised the myth of capitalism, and unbridled enrichment.”

In June 1956 he was summoned to Washington where he testified before the House Un-American Affairs committee, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In contrast to Kazan, Miller was reluctant to submit a fuller statement. “I will tell all about myself. But my conscience does not permit me to hand over the names of any other person”, he stated. “In conclusion, Miller stated that it would be catastrophic as well as a matter of great sadness if “the Reds took over the country” and that he had severed links with any communists and had ceased to believe in their ideas, according to Donald Spoto, Monroe’s biographer.

The greatest emotions were saved after the writer requested the return of his passport. He stated that he intended to travel to England with the woman who would shortly “become his wife”. He told journalists after the hearing, that he intended to marry Marilyn Monroe before July 12. She was scheduled to go to London to film “ The Prince and the Showgirl”.

“It was awfully nice on his part that he shared his plans with me”, she reportedly quipped after hearing it on television.

To England

In the evening of June 29, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were married in a Jewish ceremony. She had converted earlier for her husband. Screenwriter George Axelrod congratulated the couple and reportedly joked “I hope that your children have the beauty of Arthur and the brains of Marilyn”. The groom was not amused.

The marriage was one of the most exhilarating unions in 1950s USA. Paweł Stangret states that “ Both fulfilled the expectations of the American public. Marilyn Monroe was a new type of woman-ideal, sexy and rich, a blonde. However Arthur Miller as an exceptional playwright, was a new example of the middle classes who in his works described the lives of ordinary people, their problems and yearning, from one side critical of the American myth and on the other, that each drama brings with it comfort.”

Marilyn’s acting skills

Laurence Olivier greeted the couple at the airport in London. He was both director of “The Prince and the Showgirl” as well as its leading man. After a promising start, the working relationship deteriorated. There was an awkward atmosphere on set which often led to misunderstanding and friction.

Monroe, contrary, inconsistent and emotionally unstable. Marilyn found the situation intolerable. She’d be all these thus irritating the director in the process. Dr Mateusz Werner said of Olivier that he said Monroe was no actress but just a model, playing the role of an actress. He continued “When she was just asked to standing front of the camera, she was perfect. But when she was given a tougher role, an actorly role, she had a problem with this mentally. Teamwork was also a problem. She was often late, had panic attacks, forgot her lines.”

According to Dr Piotr Kletkowski, she had a good actorly range of skills. “She was not at all a bad actress. This can be seen in John Houston’s ‘The Misfits’ her last film [for which and for whom Miller wrote the screenplay]. She was excellent in ‘Some Like it Hot’. She also wanted the major role of Grushenka in the film adaptation of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Dostoevsky wrote that even when Grushenka, one of the main characters in the book, held a knife, no man would not look at her. It was the same with Marilyn,” the film critic said. Also he adds “She was pigeonholed as a bimbo. Her range of skills is really good. In reality , she was well read and intelligent. There’s a photograph of her reading Dostoevsky. It was not just a pose. But directors above all saw in her sultriness and sex appeal.”

He worshipped her as an angel

The behaviour of Marilyn Monroe on the set of “The Prince and the Showgirl” started to worry her husband very much. The situation worsened. Especially when she read a note of his left on a table. “She had read that her husband was questioning their marriage, that he regarded herself as erratic, and a woman-child whom he sympathised with. But he also feared that her constant requests for him demonstrating feelings was interfering with his creativity”, according to Donald Spoto.

Marilyn had asked Paula Strasberg co-founder of the Actors Studio over to London. She told the Strasbergs “There was something that I had disappointed him deeply that he worshipped me as an angel, but now he thinks that he’s made a mistake despite his first wife leaving him, it was me who hurt him. Olivier has started to think me as a immature girlie and Arthur confirmed that he can’t refute that anymore.”

It was the beginning of the end for Marilyn and Arthur’s union. They could not rebuild their relationship like it was before the departure for England.

It was not made any better by the relationship between Miller and Lee and Paula Strasberg, his wife’s closest co-operators. The same for Milton H. Green, the fashion photographer. In private, he worked with Monroe in their newly founded Marilyn Monroe Production (MMP) studios. Miller suspected that Green wanted to exploit her for his own ends. He also supplied various barbiturates to the actress. She became addicted. Green could have suspected Miller for the same reasons. The dramatist , soon after his wedding, complained to Green about his financial troubles. According to Donald Spoto, he was paying USD 16,000 annually in maintenance for his children and he signed over 40 percent of his income to his former wife. He asked for financial help from MMP.

The relationship continued to burn out. Meantime, they tried for children, but Marilyn Monroe miscarried twice.

The actress’s emotional state exacerbated the situation. There was a strong vein of depression caused by a traumatic childhood- the absence of a father, abandonment by a reckless mother, foster homes, orphanages and sexual exploitation in the dark side of Hollywood.

“Marilyn had her dark side,” continues Dr Piotr Kletkowski. “Her difficult upbringing had fixed in her the mechanism that she could not exist without sex. She changed male partners. Her sexual needs were irrepressible.”

Miller was no saint either. On the set of Monroe’s last film “The Misfits”, he began an affair with photographer Inge Morath, his future wife.

Marilyn was cast by John Huston at the side of co-star Clark Gable, also in his last film and Montgomery Clift, but she had complaints against Miller that her character was based on the reality of her own life.

Affair with the President

Donald Spoto noticed that “Marilyn was ready to marry a man who most resembled her dreams about self-development. But his propensity for lecturing her and creating his own persona as a symbol of intelligence deepened her own inferiority complex.” The biographer continued that those who knew them“ it was clear the though Arthur Miller did indeed love her at the start, he fell quickly into a repressed contempt (although indelicately expressed) born from the conviction as to his moral and intellectual superiority”.

Their paths separated when they were divorced on November 11 1961. Miller soon married Inge Morath with whom he later had two children. Monroe fell into a cycle of affairs with whom the most publicised was that with President John F. Kennedy. It started on the set of “Something’s Got to Give” directed by George Cukor. It remained unfinished . She died on August 4 after an overdose of barbiturates.

Dr Pawel Stangret reminds us that Arthur Miller did not attend his former wife’s funeral. “Other former husbands attended, the whole of Hollywood, but not him. Years later we read in his notes that he refused to participate in the ceremony because everyone else came to promote themselves. He accused these people that they had commodified his late former wife. They exploited her in every sense of the word and that they were the ones who really killed her. But Miller also belonged to this set, and after all, they were the subject of his work…”

–Łukasz Lubański

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

–Translated by Jan Darasz