Marilyn

by Lois Banner

  Marilyn can’t be understood without understanding Arthur Miller, with whom she lived for nearly five years. His autobiography, Timebends, reveals his thoughts and behaviors, hopes and dreams, and it often focuses on Marilyn. Understanding their relationship requires understanding the immense pressures that fame placed on them. A marriage between two famous people is never easy, and Marilyn and Arthur had to deal with the public’s idolization of her. Fans stopped her on the streets; reporters and paparazzi followed her; she received anonymous phone calls. Life with her was like living in a goldfish bowl, as both DiMaggio and Miller separately declared. In addition to the pressures from the public and the press, both Arthur and Marilyn were already under the pressures that come from being deeply complex people, both of them idealists trying to discipline and refine their emotions as well as narcissists promoting careers that could easily go sour.

  When Arthur and Marilyn reconnected in New York in the winter of 1955, he’d been married for fifteen years to Mary Grace Slattery, whom he’d met when they were undergraduates at the University of Michigan, involved in radical politics there. After their marriage, they’d settled in New York, where Mary worked as an editorial assistant in a publishing house, supporting them while Arthur worked on his writing. They had two children, Robert, born in 1941, and Jane, born in 1944. As early as 1951, when Arthur met Marilyn on the set of As Young as You Feel, the fire had left the marriage. Filled with guilt, however, he couldn’t leave it. He would follow the same pattern in his marriage to Marilyn.

  Mary Slattery Miller wasn’t sophisticated or stylish. A small-town girl, she was ill at ease in the worldly circles that opened to Arthur once he became famous. Raised a Catholic, she never entirely rejected Catholicism’s rigid morality. She didn’t know about his first meeting with Marilyn in 1951, but when he had sex with a woman at a conference of intellectuals and told Mary about it, she became furious. Viewing his act as an ultimate betrayal, she became cold and sexually unresponsive. Then Marilyn appeared in Arthur’s life in 1955, and Mary figured out what was going on. A friend advised her to wear sexy clothes and makeup, and to restyle her hair.1 But she refused to compete with Marilyn.

  Arthur was attracted to Marilyn because of her beauty, wit, gaiety, and identification with the working class, which he nurtured into a left liberal stance. She also met deep needs of his of which he was only partly aware. She resembled certain randy women in his extended family who had always attracted him. Both his mother, Gussie, and his uncle’s wife, Stella, had “a lust for foul jokes, filthy punch lines, sex scandals, the whispered world of frank women and their scents.” He was fascinated by his uncle Manny Newman, whose house seemed “dank with sexuality.” Even as a child he competed with Manny’s son, Abby. Abby failed in his career, but he became a sybarite who bested Arthur in sexual prowess: Arthur had once visited Abby in his apartment and encountered two prostitutes leaving Abby’s bedroom after an obvious threesome. Now Arthur was involved with Marilyn Monroe, the world’s major sex symbol. No man could top that.2

  His memoir, Timebends, opens with a telling scene. Five years old, Arthur lies on the floor, looking up at his mother’s clothed body. He sees “a pair of pointy black calf shoes … and just above them the plum-colored skirt rising from the ankles to the blouse.” He admits to an incestuous desire for her. “As innocent as I was at five,” he writes, “I was still aware of an exciting secret life among the women … And I knew that somewhere behind my sexual anxieties lay incestuous stains that spread toward sister and mother.” He views his incestuous desires as metaphorical, not real, as an inevitable component of Freud’s oedipal family drama, which is driven by repressed sexual desire.3

  He’d initially bonded with Marilyn through Elia Kazan, his “blood brother,” in a triangle driven by sexual tension, with Marilyn in the middle. But their friendship had broken apart in 1952 when Kazan named friends as communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, an act that Miller found reprehensible. He criticized Kazan in The Crucible, which he wrote in 1953. It is an implicit attack on both the House committee and those who informed on friends as communists. By 1955, however, Arthur and Elia were slowly reconnecting. When Arthur testified before the committee in June 1956, he refused to name names, but he criticized communism as anti-American. Both Miller and Kazan had become left liberals.

  When he first met Marilyn, Arthur overlooked her sexual past. In an interview in Time magazine he maintained that she may have had lovers, but she hadn’t been promiscuous. “Any relation she ever had was meaningful to her, built on a thread of hope, however mistaken.” He concluded with a flourish: “I’ve known social workers who have had a more checkered history than she has.”4

  Amy Greene was correct when she said that Marilyn parroted Arthur’s political ideas, but he was deeply influenced by her beliefs, what he called her “revolutionary idealism.” He had soured on Marxism and was exploring existentialism and Freudianism, but Marilyn offered another possibility. “Now that I know her somewhat better,” he wrote, “I began to see the world as she did, and the view was new and dangerous.” Marilyn was outraged by the sexual conservatism of the 1950s, which she found hypocritical. Arthur wrote, “America was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams.” Marilyn was a central target of the nation’s deep Puritanism. Salem in the 1690s had been deeply Puritan and thus sexually repressive, in his point of view. He interpreted the new Puritanism of the 1950s as a form of anticommunism taken into the moral realm.

  “She had accepted the role of outcast years before, even flaunted it,” he wrote in Timebends. She had constructed herself “first as a casualty of puritanical rejection but then with victorious disorder; from her refusal to wear bras to her laughing acknowledgment of the calendar photos.” “Her bracing candor,” he contended, “was health. It was the strength of one who has abandoned the illusions of a properly ordered life for herself.” Arthur found her heroic, “the astonishing signal of liberation and its joys.” She had accomplished a “healthy and generous confrontation with catastrophe. Out of the muck, the flower, and soon an amazing life.”5

  Moreover, her sexuality overwhelmed him. Arthur had married the first woman he dated seriously—Mary Grace Slattery—and he had remained faithful to her for fifteen years, except for the one-night stand at the conference. When he met Marilyn, he was a sexual naïf. Marilyn, on the other hand, was sexually experienced. In Timebends he described her sexuality as a whirling fire, accompanied by a magnetic spirituality, a combination he couldn’t resist. In a screenplay he adapted from After the Fall, he called her a “naked spirit like something come out of the sea. The spirit of such love, such absolute selflessness that … there was almost a sense of holiness in it. When she was ill I was ill. I shared her skin, her blushes, her cold frights.”6 Marilyn had become a great actress, arguably more effective in her private life than on the screen. She told people what they wanted to hear, sensed the person they wanted her to be and became that person.

  Given her manicdepressive tendencies and the anger she had brought to the surface of herself, Marilyn wasn’t easy to live with. “She could say things that put a hook in my belly. Cruel, vicious insights,” Arthur wrote. But she easily turned back into the women he loved. She knew how to use sex to woo him. “It’s easy to mistake a wife for god,” he wrote. “You make her happy some night and you begin to think you settled something global. A wife’s contented smile gives purpose all day.” Underlying their relationship was a euphoric sexuality that sustained the marriage.7

  Arthur had his own power drives. On some level he relished the role of savior into which Marilyn had cast him. As she did with all her husbands, she called him Papa and Daddy in private. (She called him Arturo in public.) Like Lee Strasberg and Ralph Greenson, her last psychiatrist, Arthur thought that he could nurture her into mental stability. He knew he was her anchor against abandonment, but he didn’t realize she might use her dependence to gain control over him by manipulating his own masochistic dri
ves, of which he was hardly aware. At the beginning of their relationship, Marilyn idealized him. She realized he was frugal, impatient, and self-righteous; she wrote Berniece Miracle that these qualities in him made her nervous.8 Before too long, they would make her impatient and angry.

  Like Marilyn, he was focused on his career. Like hers, his ambition knew no bounds. When mired in an argument he became silent, which was guaranteed to frustrate an emotional antagonist like Marilyn and increase her rage. In some ways he resembled Joe DiMaggio, another man who fell silent for long periods of time. People said that from across a room he and DiMaggio looked alike. Norman Rosten reflected on the similarity. They were both stern authority figures, powerful public men. She gravitated toward power. This kind of figure, according to Rosten, gives a woman “security and absolution.”9 On the other hand, this kind of figure can be self-centered and controlling.

  Even as a young writer, Arthur had been a workaholic. He put his emotions into his writing and hid them from others. His father had similarly retreated into himself in the face of his mother’s anger over their sudden descent into poverty after the 1929 stock market crash. With his first financial rewards from his success, Arthur bought a farm in Connecticut, where he built himself a separate studio. Many successful New York artists and writers had second homes in Connecticut; to Arthur it was a place where he could write in solitude—and retreat from emotional confrontation.

  There was another connection between Marilyn and Arthur. She had been raised in working-class and lower-middle-class families; he was also a man of the people. His father, Isidore Miller, had been born in a Polish shtetl. Sent as a young child to live with relatives in New York, Isidore followed a standard Jewish path to upward social mobility by establishing a clothing sweatshop in an apartment. By the 1920s he had turned it into one of the largest women’s coat factories in the nation. Arthur had spent the 1920s as a child of wealth, living in an apartment off Central Park. But after his father lost his money in the 1929 crash, his family moved far out in Brooklyn, to a modest frame house in Flatbush. They now scrimped to get by.

  Arthur got odd jobs to help support his family. He learned carpentry; played football in high school; did some singing on a local radio station and wanted to be a “crooner,” like Bing Crosby. Working as a laborer in the Brooklyn shipyard, he was converted to Marxism. He decided to go to college, and he persuaded an admissions officer at the University of Michigan—then a center of student radicalism—to admit him. Once there, he watched his roommate write a play for a class. The process looked easy, so he wrote one himself. That episode launched him as a writer, leading to his great success with All My Sons (1943) and Death of a Salesman (1949), which won him a Pulitzer Prize.

  On July 14, 1956, hardly six weeks after Marilyn had finished Bus Stop and two weeks after their marriage, Marilyn and Arthur flew from New York to London to film The Prince and the Showgirl. Once again, as she so often did, Marilyn was living her life at a breakneck pace. When they took off at Idlewild Airport, they were swamped by fans, while four hundred journalists, photographers, and fans were waiting at London’s Heathrow. Several days later Milton Greene rented the ballroom at the Savoy Hotel in London for another press conference. This one drew seven hundred reporters and photographers. Laurence Olivier called it “the largest press conference in British history.”10

  At the conference, members of the British press were hard to handle, since cutting humor was their specialty and they disliked Olivier because he closed his sets to them. On the other hand, they considered Arthur Miller heroic because he’d stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee; although he was so dull on this trip that they began calling him a “cold fish.” Fleur Cowles thought Marilyn charmed the British press, but Maurice Zolotow, who was also there, thought they made fun of her. When they asked her what roles she hoped to play, she replied “Lady Macbeth.” That reply seemed curious to the Brits, even though both Michael Chekhov and Lee Strasberg thought she could do it. Lee’s concept of Lady Macbeth was as a sensitive, sexual, and compulsive woman who uses her sexuality to persuade her husband to commit murder.11 That sounds like Marilyn.

  The British public stalked Marilyn even more aggressively than the Americans. When she ate in a Regent Street restaurant, eight policemen had to be summoned to control the crowd. When she shopped in a department store, it was closed to the public. What she wore was described endlessly. The most photographed dress of the year was the one she wore at the Savoy press conference. Black in color and tight in fit, it was tailored decorously to the neckline, but an inset band made of see-through fabric bared her midriff. The international New York Herald Tribune reported that “you could see a strip of Miss Monroe’s famous body, starting just above her hips to a position slightly south of her chest.” The dress, designed by Norman Norell, was widely copied; it was even featured in home-sewing books.12

  During the filming, Marilyn and Arthur were housed in an eleven-bedroom Georgian mansion just outside Windsor Great Park, where Queen Elizabeth’s castle was located. The mansion was set on ten acres of land, with a small lake with swans near the house. It had a household staff. Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s coach, and Hedda Rosten, now her secretary, lived with them. Hedda had been close to Mary Slattery Miller, Arthur’s first wife, but she had switched her loyalty to Marilyn. She had been a psychiatric social worker until she gave up her career to raise her daughter, Patricia. Long before feminism appeared, Arthur Miller later stated, Hedda regarded Marilyn as the quintessential victim of the male.13

  Milton was the film’s producer, but he and Amy lived elsewhere in London. Amy became close to Olivier’s elegant wife, Vivien Leigh, and she and Marilyn grew distant. Vivien was determined to outclass Marilyn. Vivien had played the showgirl in The Sleeping Prince in London, and she made Marilyn feel insecure. Close to manic during the shooting, Vivien was both charming and intensely critical. Whitey Snyder and Sydney Guilaroff were there to do Marilyn’s makeup and hair and give her emotional support, but they couldn’t do much about the tension that was emerging among the stars making the film.14

  Problems immediately erupted between Marilyn and Olivier. She found him patronizing, especially since he wanted her to copy Vivien in playing her role. He tried to control her, even though Joshua Logan, who had directed Marilyn in Bus Stop, told him that he should let her loose and keep the camera running, then edit her takes into a final cut, which would produce superb results. It took Olivier weeks of being overbearing before he followed Logan’s advice. Even Arthur, who went out drinking with Olivier and commiserated with him about their difficult wives, found him quick to make cutting remarks, as when he told Marilyn to “be sexy,” deeply offending her. Then Olivier told her that her teeth looked yellow and she should whiten them with lemon juice and baking soda. That advice infuriated her. She was the beauty expert, not Olivier. Marilyn began to call Olivier Mister Sir, not Larry, as everyone else did.15

  Marilyn had never known anyone like him. A member of the English upper class, already knighted, he was a product of the elite English public school system. Rupert Allan, her publicist and friend, had gone to Oxford, but he’d been raised in the United States. His Englishness was a patina, not deeply engrained, as was Olivier’s. She decided that he was doing the film because he wanted the large box office returns that she would produce. She told W. J. Weatherby that he acted with her like someone who was slumming, so she asserted control by being late and calling in sick.16

  She retreated to the safety of Paula Strasberg, using her as a go-between with Olivier. Olivier would rehearse a scene with Marilyn, showing her how he wanted her to do it. She would then consult with Paula. Olivier waited, humiliated, for her to begin filming. Sometimes she left him in midsentence and telephoned Lee Strasberg in New York for advice. Olivier tried to throw Paula off the set, but Marilyn got her back. After all, Marilyn’s production company was in control of the filming and Marilyn was its producer, although Milton Greene did most of the productio
n work. She took great pains with her appearance, on which she had built an empire. Asserting her prerogatives as producer, she would stop the filming to fix her hair, her makeup, or any other aspect of her look she felt was flawed.17

  Arthur defended Olivier to her; he thought she was being too harsh on him. But Arthur soon realized that, like his first wife, Marilyn saw the world in black-and-white terms. People were either for her or against her; it was difficult for her to understand individuals in the middle. She berated Arthur for defending Olivier. To keep peace, he kept quiet.

  As filming proceeded her insomnia became severe, and the pills that usually put her to sleep didn’t work. Milton Greene got more from a doctor in the United States, since prescription drugs were carefully regulated in England (although Milton denied he had done so). He admitted he spiked her morning tea with vodka, as she requested, although he said he always watered it down. Marilyn defended the vodka drinking: “Here was the world’s greatest actor, and I was supposed to match him scene for scene. Without the vodka, I couldn’t have done it.”18

  According to a number of her friends, her major drug habit dated from the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl. She had been taking pills for years when making films, but the problems shooting this movie were especially severe. Arthur became the pill monitor, staying up late with her to restrict her intake, while Paula doled out amphetamines to her during the day to keep her going. Despite her physical issues, however, she looked brilliant in the evening rushes, with her glow intact and her fey personality dominating the film. Olivier, on the other hand, appeared wooden. Playing the ruler of a Balkan principality, he wore a heavy felt costume, adorned with cumbersome medals, to simulate royal clothing. He also wore thick makeup and a monocle. It’s hard to believe that even a showgirl would be attracted to him. Sibyl Thorndike, a legendary British actress who played a dowager queen in the film, stated, “That little girl is the only one here who knows how to act before a camera.”19