Page 27 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

WHY WOULD I want to kill myself? Johnny has given me so much to live for!

Marilyn explains away the earlier “mishap.” Natasha Lytess overreacted, she insists. She’d simply overdone it on some sleeping pills Sid Skolsky had bought her at Schwab’s. She hadn’t drunk enough water to wash them down and they’d crystallized in her mouth, turning the corners green.

She may be stronger physically, but her emotions remain fragile as she embarks on the final role Hyde had negotiated for her. She’s out of sync with the role of Harriet, a secretary who colludes with the sixty-five-year-old president of Acme Printing in his scheme to avoid forced retirement.

Despite living almost opposite the lot, Marilyn often oversleeps and misses her call times.

Her behavior frustrates director Harmon Jones, who finds her “a ridiculous person” and sends runners and assistant directors to hammer on her door.

When she finally wakes, her face is puffy from crying and doesn’t look good on film.

Jones introduces Marilyn to his friend and fellow director Elia Kazan. “I took her to dinner because she seemed like such a touching pathetic waif. She sobbed all thru dinner,” Kazan writes. “She was like all Charlie Chaplin’s heroines in one.”

You can’t help but be touched, Kazan thinks. She’s talented, funny, vulnerable, helpless in awful pain, with no hope, and some worth and not a liar, not vicious, not catty, and with a history of orphanism that’s killing to hear.

Kazan’s interest in Marilyn is more carnal than merely protective. He affectionately calls her “Darling” and visits her on set, bringing with him his playwright friend Arthur Miller, a mutual pal of As Young as You Feel screenwriter Chayefsky.

Miller’s drama All My Sons won him an award for Best Author of a Play at the inaugural Tony Awards in 1947, as well as a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play.

Kazan, who directed All My Sons and won the Best Director Tony for the play, then went on to direct Gregory Peck in the film Gentleman’s Agreement, winner of the 1948 Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture.

He and Miller next returned to Broadway in 1949 for Death of a Salesman, which garnered even more awards: six Tonys, including Best Director, Best Author, and Best Play; the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play; and the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

It’s a coveted playwright’s “triple crown” for the then thirty-three-year-old Arthur Miller, and a smash hit on stage, earning $2 million.

“I tell ya, kid, art pays,” an ecstatic Miller wrote to Kazan.

Now, on the set of As Young as You Feel, Miller is transfixed by “the saddest girl he ever saw.” Backlit by a white spotlight and positioned in profile, she is wearing a black lace veil and dabbing her eyes.

Marilyn is still in mourning for Johnny Hyde.

It’s barely been a month since the death of “the kindest man in the world.”

Kazan makes introductions. Marilyn extends a soft white hand toward the tall, bespectacled Miller. He later remarks that the touch sent electricity coursing through his body. Marilyn, however, carries on with her scene, apparently failing to notice him at all.

Columbia Pictures will release its film adaptation of Death of a Salesman in December 1951, so Miller is in town for meetings.

He and Kazan pitch studio head Harry Cohn The Hook, Miller’s new screenplay about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront.

It’s not easy following up the massive success of Death of a Salesman, however.

Cohn shows Miller’s screenplay to the FBI. If Miller would simply change his gangster villains into Communists, Cohn insists, the script would be viable.

Miller refuses.

Cohn fires off a telegram. “The minute we try to make the script pro-American, you pull out.”

The Hook is not picked up.

The “Red Scare” campaign, led by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy, the right-wing senator from Wisconsin, is intensifying the hunt for a perceived domestic Communist threat, insisting that Hollywood is teeming with Trots, Marxists, and Commies.

Elia Kazan and Arthur Miller are both staying at the Coldwater Canyon home of agent Charles Feldman of Famous Artists Corporation while they’re in Los Angeles. Feldman’s a producer on Kazan’s latest directorial project, A Streetcar Named Desire.

Marilyn’s often at the house, visiting Kazan and driving Miller to distraction.

Feldman throws a party in Miller’s honor. Marilyn sits beside Miller on a sofa, drinking champagne while he tickles the arches of her feet. By the time Kazan arrives, late, “the lovely light of desire in their eyes” is unmistakable.

“It was like running into a tree. You know, like a cool drink when you’ve had a fever,” Marilyn says of Miller. That he doesn’t make a pass at her only heightens the attraction.

Miller’s been married since 1940 to Mary Grace Slattery, who works as a proofreader at Harper’s magazine and with whom he has two children. He hasn’t broken his vows. Yet.

But the playwright keeps extending the length of his visit—until he runs out of excuses and must return to New York.

The sight of her was something like pain, and I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing.

With all her radiance, she was surrounded by darkness that perplexed me is Miller’s impression of Marilyn.

I was retreating to the safety of morals, to be sure, but not necessarily truthfulness .

At the airport, he embraces Marilyn and gives her a goodbye kiss on the cheek. They promise to write.

Flying home, her scent still on my hands, I knew my innocence was technical merely, and the secret that I could lose myself in sensuality entered me like a radiating force.

Marilyn frames a photo of Arthur Miller and keeps it by her bedside.