Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller: a novel love, a tragic wedding and a horror ending
She was the most sensual actress in Hollywood and he was one of the most prestigious playwrights. However, what seemed like a dream marriage ended in pure frustration.
Year 1951, Marilyn Monroe is a rising star and Arthur Miller exhibits the medals of "Death of a Salesman", the work with which he swept the Broadway billboard and shook the foundations of American society. Both are invited to one of the many Hollywood parties. The one who promotes the meeting and, much to his regret, officiates as matchmaker is Elia Kazan, the writer's comrade and who also maintains a free and uncompromising relationship with the s-xy blonde.
At one point during the party Kazan asked Miller if he could entertain "his girl of his" from him, since he wanted to attend an engagement with another actress who was hanging around the place. Arthur gladly agreed, it's not every day you get to talk to a s-x icon...
Against all prejudice, the young actress who for many represented the American dream and the writer, spokesman for the hidden side of that dream, immediately attracted each other. She was enchanted by this man who seemed "the champion of the lost and the wounded." He appealed to her talent as a dancer 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 "small" details. Miller was ten years older than him, which might have been less if it weren't for the same amount of time he had been married to Mary Slattery, his teenage sweetheart, and mother of his two children.
For five years Arthur and Marilyn had occasional encounters that became more and more frequent. She was already Marilyn 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 Joe Di Maggio, baseball star from the New York Yankees. That's why thousands of Americans suffered a knock out punch when she leaked her romance with Arthur Miller. Yes, that acid writer who questioned the status quo, the intellectual suspected of being a “communist”, and therefore targeted by the witch hunt that his former friend Elia Kazan had uncovered and that Senator Joseph McCarty commanded.
The first person who came out to attack prejudice was Marilyn herself. Her words were not those of a star but those of a happy girl: “It 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 for him". The couple announced their engagement outside their New York home, before a mini-crowd of journalists and photojournalists who didn't want to miss a thing. The story couldn't be more captivating. Miller had just signed her divorce, and Marilyn was about to convert to Judaism, in a show of loyalty to her future husband and her parents.
On the day of the civil wedding, June 29, 1956, the couple planned to meet the press at Miller's home in Connecticut. But before the ceremony they had agreed to have lunch at the house of the writer's cousin. Some journalists anticipated the move and the wedding that had surprised the United States had a tragic scene in store.
Mara Scherbatoff, a reporter for Paris Match, did not notice signs of the couple in the journalistic guard in Roxbury, in addition she had the information that one of Miller's cousins had a house near there. She talked to his partner Paul Slade and they divided tasks. He would stay at the farm preparing his photographic equipment, and she would travel to check his data.
When she saw a green Oldsmobile pull out carrying the most wanted couple she knew that her journalistic nose was correct. Discovering it, Morton, Arthur's cousin stepped on the accelerator. The journalists followed him as best they could along a winding and unknown route, in a sharp curve, the car left the road and crashed into a tree.
Mara went through the windshield and fell onto the road. Morton stopped his car and approached the scene of the accident. Arthur ran to a house to call the ambulance and the police, while Marilyn stood in shock. She was no longer a happy bride but a scared girl with a bloodstained blouse.
The press conference was chaotic. The future bride and groom standing, shocked, he smoking, she with an absorbed look, answering the journalistic request with evasions and platitudes. 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. Marilyn was assailed by a feeling of guilt, and she kept repeating that if it hadn't been for them, the young journalist would be alive. He consoled her by blaming the frenetic paparazzi culture, capable of doing anything for a scoop. Lovingly but firmly he persuaded her to marry, in spite of everything, and they did so at sunset, in the Westchester County courthouse with Cousin Morton and his wife as only witnesses. No journalist found out, and everyone present swore to silence until the official wedding took place. The pact was fulfilled to the letter, the justice of the peace did not even tell his wife about it.
Gradually calm returned. On July 1, Marilyn 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 walked down the aisle by her teacher and confidant Lee Strasberg. The rings had the phrase “Now is forever” engraved on them. They seemed happy and were willing to change their lives. She was tired of 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, serving her husband. To achieve her wish, she had something in her favor: a great relationship with her sons-in-law, 12 and 9 years old, and with her in-laws, and something against her: she did not believe her own story of her
The official story tells that the marriage began to collapse when Marilyn 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 comings and goings, 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 saving each other for The Misfits, the play Miller wrote with his wife in mind. That text was used to film a movie directed by John Houston and starring Clark Gable and Montgomery Cliff supporting the diva. But fate hung the damn sign on him.
The film set was a real disaster. Marilyn could barely control her demons and drug abuse. Her emotional frailty, her lack of sleep, and her crumbling marriage forced her into a two-week hospital stay in Los Angeles. There was a domino effect on the rest of the cast, Clift lost in his own labyrinths of drugs and alcohol, Houston in the game, Gable in the never-overcome sadness of his wife's death, in fact he passed away three days after finishing school. to film. The actors' situation was so dramatic that the studio hired doctors to monitor its stars permanently. The exception was Miller himself, who fell in love with the photographer Inge Morath while filming, whom he would marry in February 1962.
Six months after that wedding, on the night of August 4-5, 1962, Marilyn was torn between life and death in California, Arthur was in the middle of the Nevada desert. A phone call brought him to his attention, he passed out and had to receive medical assistance. This is all that the playwright reveals in “Timebends”, his autobiography published in 1987.
A connoisseur of the game, Miller simply leaves out the piquant facts 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, s-xual 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 agree with those who questioned the relationship from the beginning. "Marilyn Monroe is the ultimate proof, as far as I'm concerned, that s-xuality and seriousness are incompatible, and cannot coexist in the American mind." Very harsh words from a man who, if he knew anything, was to use his words to fall in love, to impact and also to hurt.
Marilyn 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.
