Marylin Monroe and Arthur Miller: a love affair and a horror ending
It is 63 years since the wedding between the most sensual actress in Hollywood and one of the most prestigious playwrights. However, what seemed like a dream marriage ended in frustration because as one of the writer's characters wonders: "Can a man smile when he looks at the saddest woman in the world?"
In 1951, Marylin Monroe is a rising star and Arthur Miller displays the medals for "Death of a Salesman", the play with which he swept the Broadway billboard and shook the foundations of American society. They are both invited to one of the many Hollywood parties. The one who promotes the meeting and, much to his regret, acts as a matchmaker is Elia Kazan, comrade of the writer and who also maintains a free and uncompromised relationship with the sexy blonde.
At one point at the party Kazan asked Miller if he could entertain "his girl" from him, since he wanted to attend an engagement with another actress who was hanging around the place. Arthur gladly agreed, not every day you can talk to a sexual icon ...
Against all prejudices, the young actress who for many represented the American dream and the writer, spokesperson for the hidden side of that dream, were immediately attracted. She was enchanted by this man who seemed "the champion of the lost and the wounded." He appealed to her dancer skills and invited her to dance. She couldn't stop laughing in his arms. It was a dream night, in which, in addition to their different artistic origins, they forgot some "little" details. Miller was ten years older than him, which might be less if it weren't for the same amount of time he'd been married to Mary Slattery, his teenage sweetheart, and mother of her two children.
For five years Arthur and Marylin had some occasional encounters that became more and more frequent. She was already Marylin Monroe, the goddess of Hollywood, but also the actress in conflict with herself, the woman who in less than two years had fallen in love, married, fought, reconciled and divorced with Joe Di Maggio, baseball star from the New York Yankees. That's why thousands of Americans suffered a knockout punch when she transcended her affair with Arthur Miller. Yes, that acid writer who questioned the status quo, the intellectual suspected of being "communist", and therefore targeted by the witch hunt that his former friend Elia Kazan had uncovered and led by Senator Joseph McCarty.
The first person to attack prejudice was Marylin herself. Her words were not those of a star but those of a happy girl: "This is the first time that I am really in love. Arthur is a serious man but he has a wonderful sense of humor. I am crazy about him." The couple announced their engagement on the doorstep of their home in New York, before a mini crowd of journalists and photojournalists who did not want to miss any details. The story couldn't be more compelling. Miller had just signed her divorce and Marilyn was ready to convert to Judaism, in a show of loyalty to her future husband and her parents.
On the day of their civil wedding, June 29, 1956, the couple planned to attend the press at Miller's house in Conecticut. But before the ceremony, they had agreed to have lunch at the writer's cousin's house. Some journalists anticipated the play and the wedding that had surprised the United States had a tragic scene in store.
Mara Scherbatoff, a Paris Match reporter, saw no signs of the couple on duty in Roxbury, and she also had the tip that one of Miller's cousins had a home nearby. She spoke with his partner Paul Slade and they handed out chores. He would stay at the farm preparing his photographic equipment, and she would travel to check his data.
When she saw a green Oldsmobile come out carrying the most wanted couple, she realized that her journalistic nose was correct. Upon discovering her, Morton, Arthur's cousin stepped on the gas. The journalists followed him as best they could along a winding and unknown route, in a sharp curve, the car left the road and collided with a tree.
Mara smashed through the windshield and fell onto the road. Morton braked his car and approached the crash site. Arthur ran to a house to call the ambulance and the police, while Marylin remained in shock. She was no longer a happy bride but a scared girl in a blouse stained with blood.
The press conference was chaotic. The future boyfriends standing up, shocked, he smoking, she with an absorbed look, answering the journalistic request with evasions and common places. It was ten eternal minutes. Meanwhile, Mara Scherbatoff could not resist the operation and died in hospital.
The couple found out as soon as the press conference ended. Marylin was seized by a feeling of guilt, and she kept repeating that if she had not been for them, the young journalist would be alive. He consoled her by blaming the frenzied culture of paparazzi, capable of doing anything for a scoop. Lovingly but firmly he persuaded her to marry, despite everything, and they did so in the evening, in the Wetchester County courthouse with his cousin Morton and his wife as the only witnesses. No journalist found out, and everyone present vowed to remain silent until the official wedding took place. The pact was strictly fulfilled, the justice of the peace did not even tell his wife about it.
Little by little, calm returned. On July 1, Marylin and Arthur celebrated their wedding. It was a traditional and intimate Jewish ceremony in a country house on the outskirts of New York. Only 26 guests attended the party between the Hollywood diva and the star writer of her generation. The actress was led down the aisle by her teacher and her confidant Lee Strasberg. The rings were engraved with the phrase "Now is forever." They seemed happy and were ready to change their life. She was fed up with Hollywood and wanted to be closer to the canons of the wife of the time. She longed to play the role of housewife for once, in the service of her husband. To achieve her desire, he had something in her favor: a great relationship with her political children, aged 12 and 9, and with her in-laws and something against her: she did not believe her own tale of her.
The official story tells that the marriage began to collapse when Marylin read in her husband's diary something as hurtful as that he regretted "having married a girl and not a woman." The concrete thing is that they lived a history of twists and turns, infidelities and excesses until in 1961 they separated with the same secrecy with which they had married. They reported it with a brief press release and ratified it with an express divorce signature in a court in Michoacán, Ciudad Juárez.
During the four and a half years in which they were formally married, the artistic production of both was scarce, not only in quantity but also in quality. It was as if they were booking for The Misfits.
misfits), the play Miller wrote with his wife in mind. That text was used to film a film directed by John Houston and the leading role of Clark Gable and Montgomery Cliff supporting the diva. But fate hung the cursed sign on him.
The film set was a real disaster. Marylin could barely control her demons and the abuse of psychotropic drugs. Her emotional frailty, her lack of sleep, and her crumbling marriage forced her into a two-week intern in Los Angeles. There was a domino effect on the rest of the cast, Clift lost himself in his own drug and alcohol mazes, Houston in the game, Gable in the never-surpassed sadness of his wife's death, in fact he passed away three days after finishing to film. The situation for the actors was so dramatic that the studio hired doctors to monitor its stars on an ongoing basis. The exception was Miller himself, who in the middle of filming fell in love with the photographer Inge Morath, whom he would marry in February 1962.
Six months after that wedding, on the night of August 4-5, 1962, Marylin was torn between life and death in California, Arthur was in the middle of the Nevada desert. A phone call brought him to the attention, he passed out and had to receive medical assistance. This is all the playwright reveals in "Timebends", his autobiography published in 1987.
A connoisseur of the game, Miller limits himself to excluding the spicy data and writes with an honesty that sounds brutal and cold. He admits to having fantasized that his marriage to his diva would allow him to "unify mind and body, sexual appetite and justice." And also, naturally, like any two of the bunch who love each other, "support each other, help each other at work, respect and love each other." The playwright's conclusion seems to give reason to those who questioned the relationship from the beginning. "Marilyn Monroe is the supreme proof, as far as I am concerned, that sexuality and seriousness are incompatible, and cannot coexist in the American mind." Very harsh words from a man who knew anything about using his words to make him fall in love, to shock and also to hurt.
Marylin Monroe and Arthur Miller lived one of the most striking and passionate romances of the 20th century but it did not have a happy ending. Perhaps because she, that "beautiful creature" as Capote once described her, knew that life allows you to star in a good story in a good movie, but living it… living it is something else.
