The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Like Miller, Marilyn was pressured by well-intentioned but misguided friends who urged her to protect her career and stay out of the political controversy. The Strasbergs, intervening on her behalf, pressed Miller to be a "friendly" witness and purge his "guilt" for Marilyn's sake. He rejected their self-serving advice, which was prompted by their own dubious history. Miller recalled that "Paula had been a friendly witness. She had been named by Kazan when he was called in 1952, and named persons who were members. Her attitude was that of a very cooperative person and I was [also] expected to be cooperative."

  At the same time that the Strasbergs were offering their advice, Spyros Skouras was trying to keep his biggest star out of trouble. Marilyn, who'd shrewdly rejected the studio's advice about the nude calendar scandal and their warning about breaking her contract to go to New York, now ignored their instructions to dissociate herself from Miller and remain aloof from the struggle. Thinking of Marilyn, Miller once remarked that "whatever psychological security one has had better come from within, because the social support for it is very chancy." Marilyn had very little psychological security and no social support from her friends or the studio. But, braver and smarter than her advisers, inspired by her love for Miller, she stood by him.

  The HUAC investigation put intense and unremitting pressure on both Miller and Marilyn just before and during the first two years of their difficult marriage. Always sympathetic to the underdog, she was naturally influenced by his left-wing political views. When questioned, later on, about the communists, she relied on her instincts and said, "They're for the people, aren't they?"11 Realizing perhaps that she'd unintentionally aroused HUAC's interest in Miller, and identifying with him as a victim, she was absolutely determined to use all her considerable power to defend him.

  Coached and encouraged by his lawyer, she told the press, "I'm fully confident that in the end my husband will win his case." She also confirmed, while alluding to Skouras, that when "Miller was on trial for contempt of Congress, a certain corporation executive said either he named names and I got him to name names, or I was finished. I said,'I'm proud of my husband's position, and I stand behind him all the way.'" Marilyn's loyalty during this crisis was their finest hour, and they would never be as close and as happy again. Impressed by Marilyn's performance, Miller jokingly told Rauh that she would make a fine vice president, though the senators would not be able to concentrate on their work.12

  A sympathetic newspaper article in Miller's FBI file, published after he was indicted, suggested that his relations with Marilyn had made things more difficult for him. His marriage, "and not his brilliant plays, have made him 'hot copy' and fair game for any semi-literate hick politician who wants to make a hit with the folks back home by proving that he can push Marilyn Monroe's husband around." Yet the opposite was also true. Miller admitted that "to marry me in my situation was a disaster" for Marilyn. But the intensely romantic and highly publicized marriage greatly enhanced his image and actually took the pressure off Miller. The courts finally decided it was best not to imprison the husband of America's most glamorous and desirable woman.

  Miller had testified on June 21; he married Marilyn eight days later, on June 29; and they flew to London on July 13, faced with the distinct possibility that he would be convicted and sent to jail. The FBI never forgave Marilyn's loyalty to Miller and kept a file on her for the rest of her life. They recorded that she had applied for a Soviet visa in 1955, had been taken on a tour of Brooklyn by a communist photographer in April 1956 and "associated closely with certain members of the American Communist Group in Mexico" while on vacation in March 1962.13

  On February 18, 1957 (after their return from England) a federal jury indicted Miller on two counts of contempt of Congress, for twice refusing to name writers suspected of communist sympathies. Each count was punishable for up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. Rauh drafted Miller's public statement, which indicated the basis of his appeal, and argued that questions about suspected communists had nothing to do with inquiries about the abuse of passports:

  The contempt citation for which I must now stand trial was based on my refusal, on grounds of conscience, to name certain persons who were present at a meeting of authors nine years ago. I answered fully all the questions regarding myself and asked only that I not be forced to name other people whom I believed to be innocent of wrong-doing.

  I was advised by my counsel that the questions regarding the identity of the authors were not relevant to the investigation of passport abuses, which was the subject-matter of the investigation. I was further advised that a refusal to answer irrelevant questions is not punishable. I understand that this will be among the defenses which counsel will urge on my behalf in seeking dismissal of the indictment.

  On May 14 Miller was tried, without a jury, before Judge Charles McLaughlin in the federal district court, and on May 31 was convicted of two counts of contempt and faced a year in prison. On July 19 the judge reduced his conviction to one count, suspended his one-year prison term and fined him $500. A year later, on June 28, 1958, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Rauh stated that Miller, an honest and cooperative witness, had "answered all but two of the 200 questions. The two questions he refused to answer concerned those present at certain meetings of Communist Party Writers he attended in 1947." In his Paris Review interview, Miller explained the principles that sustained Rauh's successful appeal:

  My legal defense was not on any of the Constitutional amendments but on the contention that Congress couldn't drag people in and question them about anything on the Congressman's mind; they had to show that the witness was likely to have information relevant to some legislation then at issue. The committee had put on a show of interest in passport legislation. I had been denied a passport a couple of years earlier. Ergo, I fitted into their vise. A year later I was convicted after a week's trial. Then about a year after that, the Court of Appeals threw out the whole thing.14

  In August 1958 Rauh triumphantly announced that Miller had followed his conscience, "refused to inform on others and won his case" – which was reversed on a technicality. The Court of Appeals ruled that HUAC had not given him sufficient warning of the risk of contempt. At the same time, Miller publicly stated that he "hoped to stop the inhuman practice of making witnesses inform on long past friends and acquaintances." In another letter Rauh explained how Miller's courageous example had provided a legal precedent that fatally weakened HUAC's oppressive power: "As more people like Arthur refuse to 'inform' and are acquitted . . . more and more people will stand up against the committee and ultimately the principle will receive vindication."15

  In August Miller also wrote Rauh that the workers renovating his Connecticut house had followed his case, and celebrated his victory with a bottle of whiskey and several cartons of beer. He couldn't resist quoting a hypocritical letter he'd just received from Spyros Skouras – the "spiral staircase" himself: "Let me be the first to congratulate you on your acquittal by the U.S. Court. I am delighted with this outcome to your long ordeal and I certainly admire the courage and perseverance with which you met it. I cheerfully must concede that I was wrong in my advice to you. Seriously, it is wonderful to know that you have won out in the contempt proceedings." Miller, punning on the title of Ibsen's play and calling Skouras a pillow of society, was amused by this groveling if insincere apology and said the son of a bitch must feel proud of his magnanimity.

  Miller continued to correspond with Rauh for the next few years. In November 1957, between his conviction and his successful appeal, he agreed to introduce Rauh's speech to the American Civil Liberties Union meeting in New Haven, Connecticut. He invited Rauh to stay with him in his country house in Roxbury, and mentioned that if Rauh flew up from Washington in a small plane, he could land on a private airfield about a mile away. Miller said he'd gone back to his writing and that Marilyn, who was also eager to see Rauh, sent her extreme best regards.

  In 1959, Miller finally sent a
check for half his legal bill. He mentioned how difficult it was to estimate his taxes because NBC had tentatively offered to pay a small fortune for television rights to Death of a Salesman and he didn't know if the deal would actually come through. He said that after their successful appeal, other witnesses had been convicted for contempt of Congress and that the committee was once again looking for blood. He urged Rauh, if John Kennedy were elected president in November, to accept a high judicial appointment and use his liberal influence in the courts. In a letter of 1960, sent from Reno, Nevada, Miller apologized for the late payment of Rauh's fee and promised to send it in the next few days. He thought the Democratic presidential convention had been a bit of a disaster, that Adlai Stevenson had seemed too intellectual and other-worldly, but felt that Kennedy had been a good choice. Both he and Marilyn were working hard on the filming of The Misfits and hoped all their efforts would turn out to be worthwhile.16

  Caught up in one of the most bizarre and disgraceful episodes of American political history, Miller said his battle with the committee was "a fraud and a farce, except it cost me a fortune [$40,000] for lawyers and a year's time lost in the bargain, worrying about it and figuring out how to react to it." When he was invited to Kennedy's inauguration in January 1960, he joked that "it seemed strange to be going [to Washington] without a lawyer."17

  Eleven

  Marriage and England

  (1956–1957)

  I

  Though it seems unlikely, Marilyn's two famous husbands had quite a lot in common. DiMaggio was born in 1914, Miller a year later, and both were more than a decade older than her. They were tall and handsome, capable and conventional men, who felt sorry for Marilyn and wanted to help and protect her. Both were powerful authority figures who seemed able to provide the security she needed as well as absolution for her illegitimate birth and sexual history. Miller's theatrical triumphs from All My Sons to The Crucible were the equivalent on Broadway of DiMaggio's spectacular hitting streak in Yankee Stadium. But Marilyn's fame was greater than theirs. Her marriage to DiMaggio had been good for her career; her marriage to Miller would help his.

  Both men took an active interest in her professional affairs. Though they often had to hang around, with very little to do, while Marilyn worked, she criticized them for ignoring her. She complained that DiMaggio constantly watched television and that Miller was completely immersed in his work – even when he was writing a screenplay for her. DiMaggio thought Marilyn had no talent and resented her absorption in acting. Miller admired her ability, encouraged her and even participated in her career – though he hated Strasberg as much as DiMaggio hated Lytess. Marilyn failed to interest DiMaggio in serious books, but eagerly learned a lot about books from Miller. She found DiMaggio too boring, Miller too intellectual; she was too serious for DiMaggio, too ignorant for Miller.

  DiMaggio loathed Marilyn's sexy outfits and wanted to keep her entirely to himself. Miller liked her to reveal her sensual body and was proud to share her with the public."Why shouldn't she show off her God-given attributes?" he asked. "Why should she have to dress like her maiden aunt?" Marilyn seemed to want with Miller the kind of life that DiMaggio had wanted with her. "I hate [Hollywood], " she told Miller. "I don't want it anymore. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself anymore." She became close to her husbands' families, and after her divorce from Joe traded spaghetti and pizza with the DiMaggios for matzo balls and gefilte fish with the Millers.

  DiMaggio was intensely jealous and even worried about imaginary lovers; Miller ignored and tolerated her infidelities. DiMaggio sometimes lost his temper and slapped her around; Miller always contained his anger under the most extreme provocations. Like the glamorous but essentially unhappy contemporary marriages of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, and (later on) Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, the Miller-Marilyn marriage would have one spouse who was notoriously unfaithful.

  At the time of their wedding the thirty-year-old Marilyn was no longer the unknown starlet whom Miller first met in January 1951. Since then she'd become a world-famous superstar, been married to a wealthy baseball hero, formed her own production company – and was used to getting her own way with everyone. Except for brief periods with Lytess, Karger, Shelley Winters, Greene and DiMaggio, Marilyn had always lived alone. Her radical adjustment from a solitary to a married life, and Miller's from a private to a very exposed existence, was difficult for both of them.

  After Miller announced their impending marriage, rumors quickly spread about where and when it would take place, and the press pursued them to rural Connecticut. In late June, Mara Scherbatoff – a forty-eight-year-old Russian princess and New York bureau chief of the French weekly magazine Paris-Match – was killed in a car accident on a winding country road close to Miller's house. He wrote that Scherbatoff 's teenaged driver, chasing them at high speed, lost control of his car: "Inquiring for my house from a neighbor, he had mistaken a passing car for mine, roared off in pursuit, failed to make this turn and collided with the tree. . . . Returning home later in the afternoon, we came on a Chevrolet askew in the road a quarter of a mile from the house, its front end mangled around this tree. We stopped, and I got out and looked and saw a woman, stretched out on the front seat, her neck obviously broken."

  Miller ran back to help and Marilyn – hypersensitive to pain and suffering – followed before he could stop her from witnessing the grisly scene. They saw "the boy crumpled beneath the steering wheel. Scherbatoff, in the passenger's seat, had been hurled partway through the windshield. Her face was sliced open from the middle of her lip to her forehead. Teeth were missing. Her chest was crushed, her legs broken. Blood gushed from a severed artery in her throat. She was crying softly." Marilyn helped pull the mangled reporter from the car and got bloodstains on her clothes. A photo of the crash, taken before the ambulance arrived, showed the smashed-in car, the dazed and bloodied driver sitting on the ground near the tree and the dying Scherbatoff stretched out under a blanket.1 Marilyn, hysterical and horrified, had to be reassured that the accident was not her fault.

  Miller was furious at the press for hounding them so recklessly. He told Bellow that photographers with telescopic lenses were perched in (and nearly falling out of) the trees across the road from his house. To put an end to the circus they decided to get married right away. Their marriage, announced with the headline: "Egghead Weds Hourglass," began with this fatal omen. Six hours after the car crash, on June 29, 1956, the civil ceremony took place in the courthouse in White Plains, New York. Two days later, they were married again in a Jewish ceremony in the home of his longtime agent, Kay Brown, in Katonah, New York.

  By marrying Miller, Marilyn embraced a new Jewish identity that was already familiar to her. Many of Marilyn's closest associates were Jewish: not only Natasha Lytess, Joseph Schenck and Johnny Hyde, but also Sidney Skolsky, Lee and Paula Strasberg, Milton Greene, Norman Rosten, her agent Charles Feldman, her publicist Arthur Jacobs, her three analysts and most of her doctors. The actresses Carroll Baker and Elizabeth Taylor had (or soon would) set a fashionable precedent by changing their religion when they married Jewish husbands, and Amy had converted when she married Milton Greene. Marilyn told Susan Strasberg, "I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me." Acutely aware that she did not have a family of her own and eager to join the families of her husbands and friends, she converted to Judaism to express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents.

  Miller recalled that Marilyn's tuition in the mysteries of the Jewish faith by Rabbi Robert Goldberg (who also married them) was brief, superficial, even surreal:

  The rabbi was a reformed or liberal rabbi and he sat with Marilyn for a couple of hours and that was it. I'm not religious, but she wanted to be one of us and that was why she took some instruction. I don't think you could say she became a Jewess, but still she took it all very seriously. I would
say she wanted to join me and become part of my life. But her interest in talking to the rabbi had about it an unreality to me.

  Marilyn's perfunctory conversion resembled Rex Mottram's pro forma conversion in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945). In a great hurry and not particularly concerned with the finer points of doctrine, Rex tells the priest: " 'I'll become a Catholic. What does one have to do? . . . I don't pretend to be a very devout man, nor much of a theologian, but . . . a man needs a religion. If your Church is good enough for [my fiancée] Julia, it's good enough for me.' . . . So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens."

  Marilyn took the sacred vow from the Book of Ruth (1:16), one of the most moving passages in the Old Testament, and swore fidelity to the faith of her husband: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." Her Certificate of Conversion stated that "Marilyn Monroe, having sought to join the household of Israel by accepting the religion of Israel and promising to live by its principles and practices, was received into the Jewish faith on July 1, 1956."2 While married to Miller she'd sometimes sprinkle her talk with Yiddish expressions – Hi bubeleh, oy veh, what tsures (rhymes with Skouras) – to confirm her conversion and sense of belonging. When describing her nude calendar, she said "there I am with my bare tuchas out."