On February 18, 1957, a federal grand jury indicted Arthur Miller on two counts of contempt of Congress. Each count was punishable by up to one year of prison and a $1,000 fine. Joe Rauh and Lloyd Garrison planned to argue that the questions Miller had refused to answer had nothing to do with the hearing’s stated purpose. HUAC was supposed to be investigating passport abuse. Miller, the lawyers insisted, should never have been asked to name names in the first place. Rauh and Garrison were confident of winning the case. Still, as Garrison told the Attorney General, whatever the outcome the indictment would do Miller irreparable harm.
The Millers had returned to America intent on settling down. To Arthur that meant being able to write. In England, Marilyn’s problems had drained his energies. He was often up half the night. He had revised A View from the Bridge in extremely stressful circumstances. Kermit Bloomgarden, eager to have a new play for the fall, expressed the wish that Miller would be able to calm down enough to plunge into his own work.
In England, Marilyn’s belief in her own ability to become a serious actress had been badly shaken, if not destroyed. The Sleeping Prince seemed to have killed something in her. She was no longer confident of finding salvation through her work. She no longer felt certain that things were going to change because of her new contract. She’d pinned her hopes on the success of her first independent production, yet in the end the experience had left her feeling utterly defeated.
Marilyn, having lost one dream, was terrified of losing her marriage as well. In New York, she did everything possible to be certain that did not happen. Intent on disproving Arthur’s sense that their life together was worse than it had been before, Marilyn threw herself into creating what she thought of as the ideal life for him. She put her own needs aside. She struggled to be, as one of Miller’s lawyers fondly called her, “Mrs. Arthur.” She would create a perfect home. She would make it possible for her husband to write. She would be at his side throughout his political troubles. And above all, she would give him a baby. Marilyn began treatments at Doctors Hospital in order to allow her to carry a baby to term.
Though she certainly didn’t care to return to work right now, Marilyn owed Twentieth Century–Fox three films on her four-picture deal. In December 1956, the studio had paid the second $75,000 installment for the screen rights to Horns of the Devil. The money enabled Marilyn to take some time off, as Miller told Bloomgarden she very much needed to do. Still, the payment was a reminder that her second contract year commenced on December 31. Any time after that, Twentieth had the right to ask her to start a film.
The studio came up with the idea of putting Marilyn in a remake of The Blue Angel with Spencer Tracy as the obsessed Professor Unrat. Marilyn would play the seductive, unscrupulous Lola Lola. Tracy agreed in principle, but there was a scheduling problem because of difficulties in completing The Old Man and the Sea. The need to postpone The Blue Angel on Tracy’s account played right into Marilyn’s hands.
Meanwhile, she decorated a new apartment at 444 East 57th Street, Arthur having sold the Roxbury farmhouse. She set up a cozy writing room off the living room, and furnished it with a desk, bookshelves, and a sofa. Jack Cardiff’s black-and-white portrait of Marilyn as a windswept Renoir girl, Arthur’s favorite picture of her, adorned the wall. Cardiff had photographed her through a Vaseline-smeared glass. Marilyn tiptoed about the white-carpeted, mirror-filled MGM film set of an apartment solemnly warning the servants not to make noise while Mr. Miller was at work. Arthur told Joe Rauh how pleased he was to be back in the business of writing.
Once he was indicted, however, inevitably the case stole the playwright’s time and sapped his brainpower. That, in part, is what Lloyd Garrison meant when he said that, win or lose, the damage would be irreparable. A good deal of preparation for the trial was required, which of course meant huge legal bills. On March 1, Miller was arraigned before Judge Charles F. McLaughlin in Washington, D.C. He pleaded not guilty and a May trial date was set. He was released in Rauh’s custody until he could post a $1,000 bond.
The waiting period was hardly a tranquil one. Marilyn, eager to turn her affairs over to Arthur and his associates, had gone to war against Milton Greene. In England, Greene had had reason to believe that his days with Marilyn Monroe Productions were numbered. Certainly he had outlived his usefulness. In New York, Marilyn announced that she was severing all ties with him. She accused him of mismanaging her company and said she had expected more of him. She declared that they had been at odds for a year and a half.
Greene, who had once engineered her break with Charlie Feldman, now found himself in Feldman’s position. Like Feldman, Greene had worked hard to advance Marilyn’s career, only to be banished before he could profit. Like Feldman, Greene had become the object of Marilyn’s anger, resentment, and derision. Ironically, at this very moment, Feldman was badgering Marilyn to be repaid the money he had advanced for Horns of the Devil.
Asked about the breakup and about Marilyn’s unflattering remarks, Greene exercised restraint. “It seems Marilyn doesn’t want to go ahead with the program we planned,” Greene declared. “I’m getting lawyers to represent me. I don’t want to do anything now to hurt her career, but I did devote about a year and a half exclusively to her. I practically gave up photography. You can’t just make a contract with someone and then forget it.”
He wanted $100,000 to end the partnership. The sum was hardly excessive, Greene having financed Marilyn for a year before she signed her new studio contract. Marilyn returned his investment. In one fell swoop, Greene, Irving Stein, and their accountant were removed from the board of Marilyn Monroe Productions. Marilyn replaced them with George Kupchick, George Levine, and Robert H. Montgomery, Jr.—respectively Arthur’s brother-in-law, Arthur’s boyhood friend, and an attorney at the law firm Arthur used in New York.
Marilyn also broke with the psychiatrist Greene had recommended. Margaret Hohenberg was replaced by Dr. Marianne Kris. Dr. Ernst Kris, her recently deceased husband, had been the writing partner of Rudolph Loewenstein, Arthur’s former psychoanalyst. Marianne Kris was the daughter of Sigmund Freud’s great friend Oscar Ries. Freud called her his adopted daughter, and all her life she remained close to his real daughter, Anna. Conveniently, Dr. Kris’s office was in the same Central Park West building where the Strasbergs lived. An elevator carried Marilyn from her psychoanalytical sessions to private acting lessons upstairs.
She continued to take treatments at Doctors Hospital. As Arthur’s trial date approached, Marilyn learned that she was pregnant. Euphoric, she seemed to put out of her thoughts the physician’s warning that she might have an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized ovum develops outside the uterus. It seemed to Olie Rauh, the attorney’s wife, that Marilyn regarded having a baby as the most important thing in her life.
On May 13, the day before the trial, Marilyn accompanied Arthur to Washington, D.C. She insisted on going with him this time. In order to avoid a circus, it was agreed that Marilyn would steer clear of the courthouse. Miller, fearful that Marilyn would be mobbed at a hotel, asked to stay at the Rauhs’ Appleton Street home. Marilyn remained with Olie during the day while Arthur and Joe were in court. They hoped to keep Marilyn’s presence there a secret for as long as possible.
The Rauhs hadn’t met Marilyn before, but Joe Rauh had talked briefly to her on the phone when Arthur was out. From first to last she had taken an active interest in the case. When the lawyers prepared a public statement about the indictment, Marilyn as well as Arthur had reviewed the text. In Washington, she barraged the Rauhs with questions. At night, she studied transcripts of the proceedings, which were delivered to the house every evening around dinnertime.
During the day, Marilyn would not leave the house in case Arthur called or showed up suddenly. Marilyn was there to support Arthur, and she craved an intense emotional connection. His tendency to close himself off when in crisis made her feel like a rejected wife.
By Miller’s own account, he had difficulty showin
g weakness to women. Perhaps he inherited that from Isadore Miller, who had always preferred to keep his troubles bottled up inside. As a boy, Arthur had regarded his father’s stoic refusal to disclose bad news as a sign of strength. But Marilyn was frightened by Arthur’s inability to share his troubles with her. Sensing her fear, Arthur found himself apologizing to her for the first time.
On the first day of the trial, Federal District Court overflowed with reporters; it had been rumored that Marilyn Monroe was to appear. During a break, Miller explained her absence to the disappointed press corps. “I think we should keep the issue where it is.” Many fewer journalists attended in the days that followed.
The trial lasted six days. There was no jury, since Judge McLaughlin had determined that the case hinged on a point of law which was strictly for the courts to decide. Rauh argued that the identity of those present at the 1947 Communist writers’ meetings was not pertinent to the topic of passport abuse. Assistant United States Attorney William Hitz contended that it had been necessary to ask Miller for those names in order to assess his credibility. Miller did not testify. He sat silently in a green leather swivel chair at the defense table. But his demeanor differed from what it had been at HUAC. Then Miller had been low-key and respectful. Now he let his anger show. During the testimony, he bent over a legal pad to draw caricatures of the government witnesses. When Richard Arens took the stand, Miller’s dancing pencil depicted the committee counsel as a scowling vaudeville villain. Sketched in full view of reporters, this appeared to be Miller’s comment on the proceedings.
It was only a matter of time before the press discovered that Marilyn was in town. Soon, the phone at Appleton Street was ringing incessantly. But Marilyn refused to take calls until she had a chance to confer with Arthur. On May 23, the last day of the trial, she talked to reporters on the phone in the morning and met four journalists in the Rauh living room at 2 p.m. Wearing a brown and white knit dress and white gloves, Marilyn, having steadied herself with a glass of sherry, announced that she had come to Washington in the belief that “a wife’s place is with her husband.” Asked what she had been doing for the past few days, Marilyn replied, “Mostly reading all of the time. Just odds and ends from Mr. Rauh’s library. And I’ve been poring over the court records, learning a little about law.” Marilyn’s appearance was most effective. Lillian Hellman later jestingly told Joe Rauh that perhaps during her own troubles with the government, she would have done well to marry Clark Gable.
Nonetheless, Miller was convicted on two counts of contempt of Congress. Rauh implored the judge not to send him to jail. Soon afterward, a Supreme Court decision on a related case compelled Judge McLaughlin to reconsider his verdict. He reduced the conviction to one count, fined Miller $500 and gave him a suspended one-month jail sentence. Miller promptly appealed. The case was passed on to the Court of Appeals.
In an intensely hopeful mood, the Millers spent the summer on Long Island. They rented a weatherworn, brown-shingled house overlooking potato fields and horse trails in Amagansett. Norman and Hedda Rosten had a summer retreat in Springs, and the Bloomgardens were also nearby.
A few steps from the house was an artist’s studio where Arthur could write in tranquility. Bloomgarden was making noises in the press that he planned to stage Miller’s new play on Broadway in the fall. According to Bloomgarden, Miller had been working on the as yet untitled drama about “marital complications” since 1952. Indeed he had. It was the autobiographical play that Miller had begun after meeting Marilyn in Los Angeles with Kazan. At one point, he read aloud to Bloomgarden and his wife, the actress Virginia Kaye, a fragment about Mary. Miller probably could have used Kazan’s help at that moment; he was admired for his ability to infuse a play with narrative drive. Miller kept writing and writing, but the material had yet to take shape.
On the morning of Thursday, August 1, Marilyn was working on her hands and knees in the cottage garden. Suddenly she was overcome by excruciating pain. She screamed and Arthur ran out. They were more than one hundred miles from New York City, but Marilyn felt certain that if only she could see her regular doctor, the baby might be saved. Arthur, frantic, called Bloomgarden, who arranged for an ambulance to take them to New York.
It was noon before they reached Doctors Hospital at the edge of the East River. Marilyn, partly covered by a white sheet, was wheeled in on a stretcher. Dr. Hilliard Dubrow examined his patient and told the Millers that he wanted to operate immediately. Precisely as feared, Marilyn had had an ectopic pregnancy. The baby could not be saved. In the interest of protecting Marilyn’s life, the pregnancy had to be terminated.
Marilyn, terribly depressed, remained in the hospital for ten days. The doctor’s opinion that she might be able to have a child later did nothing to reassure her. She said little. It seemed to Virginia Kaye that Marilyn acted as though she were “ashamed.” Kaye’s heart broke for her. Arthur was constantly at her side; nonetheless, Marilyn seemed sure that her husband really would abandon her now. In England, Marilyn had lost her dream of being a serious actress; in New York, she seemed about to lose the dream of being a wife. Though it was all in Marilyn’s mind, Arthur knew she believed she was going to lose him. He was desperate to find some way to show Marilyn how he felt about her.
The screenplay for The Misfits began as Arthur’s effort to show Marilyn how much he loved her. But these things have a way of backfiring. The script—and the fears, suspicions, and hurt feelings that swirled around it—would at length lead to a divorce. Meanwhile, the struggle to film The Misfits would bind the Millers to each other long after, to all intents and purposes, the marriage was over. If The Sleeping Prince had been Act One of the Miller–Monroe marriage, the debacle of The Misfits was Act Two.
It started sweetly and innocently enough. Sam Shaw came to see Marilyn at Doctors Hospital. Shaw, it will be recalled, had a keen eye for movie material. He regularly made suggestions to Feldman and others about things he had seen, read, or heard that would make a good film. That’s what he did now as he and Arthur sat on a bench overlooking the East River near the hospital. Marilyn took the loss of her baby as a sign that something was wrong with her. Miller was saying that perhaps the right sort of role would make her feel better about herself.
The conversation turned to his short story “The Misfits.” Miller related the plot. The intensely visual story, full of light and color, was about three cowboys who hunt wild horses in the Nevada back country. One of the men has a girlfriend named Roslyn. In the story, the reader knows about Roslyn through what others think and say about her. Obviously, her character would have to be filled out in the screenplay, but Shaw was convinced it would be a great part for Marilyn.
Marilyn was released from Doctors Hospital on Saturday, August 10. That morning she put on a full-skirted, sleeveless sundress that made her look a bit like a child on the way to a birthday party. She applied lip liner and an eye pencil. She had her hair curled by a hairdresser. There was something terribly poignant about the elaborate preparations. Marilyn knew the press would be waiting downstairs. Her costume, hair, and makeup were a tacit acknowledgement of their right to be there. She put on a good face as photographers clamored grotesquely at the windows of her ambulance.
During the slow, three-hour drive to Amagansett, she and Arthur hardly spoke. He could think of nothing to say to comfort her. She was devastated that she was probably never going to give him a child. Not long after she arrived home, Marilyn took an overdose of sleeping pills. Her husband found her collapsed in a chair, her breathing irregular. In the course of the marriage, that sound would become terrifyingly familiar. But now he needed a moment to grasp what it meant. Once he did, he phoned for help, saving Marilyn’s life.
In hopes of giving Marilyn a gift, Miller put his autobiographical play aside—it hadn’t been going particularly well anyway—and began work on The Misfits. The author of Death of a Salesman intuitively knew the importance of retaining one’s dream. Isn’t that what Willy Loman had been d
esperately struggling to achieve? And wasn’t it a failure to do so that drove Willy to suicide? Perhaps Miller could write a script that would enable Marilyn to live up to her ideals.
He burrowed in his studio from breakfast until suppertime. He had not worked in such a sustained fashion since the marriage began. Knowing the degree to which he valued and protected his work, how could Marilyn fail to see that writing a screenplay for her was Arthur’s way of publicly declaring his faith in her?
At the same time, spending hours away from her may have been the worst thing Arthur could have done. In the weeks after Marilyn left the hospital, there was a substantial change in his work habits. If he wanted to reassure her of his love, disappearing all day was likely to have the opposite effect. At a moment when, as he understood, Marilyn most intensely feared rejection, their days apart could only feel like a confirmation that, yes, Arthur was withdrawing.
Probably there was some truth to it. Though Miller told himself he was doing this for Marilyn, he seems to have retreated from the emotional chaos of his marriage to the familiar safety zone of work. He couldn’t handle Marilyn’s problems any better than she could. Bent over a typewriter in the quiet of his studio, a cigarette or pipe stem jammed between his teeth, at least he had the comfort of being in control.
To understand the fears on both sides of the marriage, it’s useful to consider the metaphors Arthur and Marilyn used in speaking about themselves. On Miller’s side, there was a sense of threat. He had complained to Laurence Olivier that Marilyn was devouring him. He compared her to a vase—lovely when intact but dangerous broken, the shards having the capacity to cut and kill.
Marilyn, for her part, focused on what was driving Arthur away. She spoke of the monster inside her. By that she seems to have meant the rage that was in sharp contrast to the shyness and sweetness she tended to project. In the beginning, Marilyn said, Arthur had perceived her as a victim, beautiful and innocent. She tried to be those things for him. When inevitably the monster disclosed itself, Miller was shocked and disappointed. He started to pull back.
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