Page 46 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
On weekdays, Miller observes “misfit” cowboys wrangle wild horses.
These authentic scenes from Western life spark the idea for a story.
Miller makes notes—until the phone rings at the ranch house with a daily call from a “Mrs. Leslie” for a “Mr. Leslie.” Then he rushes from his isolated desert cabin to talk to her for hours.
“I don’t want this anymore, Papa, I can’t fight them alone, I want to live with you in the country and be a good wife,” “Mrs. Leslie” tells him.
On weekends, Miller crosses the state border to Idaho or California for clandestine meetings with Marilyn in Reno. His FBI surveillance detail is never far behind.
Though questions about the couple’s future are unavoidable, Miller agrees to sit with Goodman for Time ’s cover story on Marilyn, with a cover portrait from illustrator Boris Chaliapin, Marilyn’s name drawn on a piece of motion picture film.
“I can’t afford to get married for a long time,” Miller tells the magazine’s reporter.
“Where will I get the money to support two families? My play A View from the Bridge just closed on Broadway. I got thirty-five thousand dollars, and that will have to last me for two years until I can write another one.”
June 2. Miller writes to Marilyn from the Pyramid Ranch, as Bus Stop is wrapping: “It is ten to eight here … the radio is playing ‘Let’s Fall in Love,’ in a corny Dorsey brothers arrangement, and I have just walked over to my wall and kissed your lips that kiss the glass.
How in love I am! … I adore you … I love your every lunacy.
Only love me. I will make you so happy you will not really believe it is possible.
I want to be your lover and your husband and the papa of your new family and our home. ”
“We’re so congenial,” Marilyn tells her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-star Jane Russell. “This is the first time I’ve been really in love. Arthur is a serious man, but he has a wonderful sense of humor. We laugh and joke a lot. I’m mad about him.”
June 11. Reunited in New York, the newly divorced Miller and Marilyn make plans for their life together. First, they’ll travel to London, where The Prince and the Showgirl begins filming in August and where A View from the Bridge will have its West End opening in October.
Before then, Miller is subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, on June 21.
It’s not his first run-in with them.
In 1952, celebrated director Elia Kazan had been called to testify before HUAC. Kazan, himself once a member of the Communist Party, named seventeen others, reasoning that he was doing no harm by calling out those who’d already been blacklisted.
Miller is one of many on Broadway and in Hollywood who vehemently disagree with Kazan’s choice, to the point that when Miller sees his former friend and collaborator on the street, he turns away, refusing to acknowledge him.
Miller writes The Crucible, in which the Salem witch trials of 1692 act as an allegory for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dangerous and circumstantial anti-Communist crusades.
The drama opens on Broadway in January 1953 and wins four Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author of a Play.
But in March 1954, Miller is blocked from attending a premiere of The Crucible in Brussels, Belgium, when the US State Department denies his passport renewal due to suspicions that he supports Communism.
The issue returns when Miller applies again for a renewal, now amplified by Marilyn’s celebrity aura, and he is hauled into court.
“The next stop is trouble,” Walter Winchell writes in his column. “The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena will check into his entire inner circle, which also happens to be the inner circle of Marilyn Monroe—and all of them are former Communist sympathizers.”
Months earlier, Winchell—a stalwart friend to Joe DiMaggio—had likewise stoked these rumors, declaring on his radio show, “America’s best known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia, several of whom are listed as red fronters.”
Fellow columnist Vincent X. Flaherty speculates that Marilyn’s fame risks making Communism appealing to young Americans.
Since “teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn,” Flaherty argues, if “Marilyn marries a man who was connected with communism, they can’t help but start thinking that communism can’t be so bad after all! ”
June 21. Representative Francis Eugene Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, presides as Richard Arens, HUAC counsel and former aide to Senator McCarthy, questions Arthur Miller in Washington, DC.
The committee lays out a lengthy timeline dating back sixteen years, specifying Miller’s attendance at a Marxist study group in 1940 and a gathering of Communist Party writers in 1947, fewer than a dozen meetings in total.
“The record reflects that this witness has identified these meetings as the meetings of the Communist writers,” Arens says. “In the jurisdiction of this committee he has been requested to tell this committee who were in attendance at these meetings.”
Doing so, Miller knows, can mean careers ended and livelihoods lost. Blinking behind his glasses, Miller does what Elia Kazan would not. He defies Congress.
“I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him. These were writers, poets, as far as I could see, and the life of a writer, despite what it sometimes seems, is pretty tough. I wouldn’t make it any tougher for anybody. I ask you not to ask me that question.”
Miller confers with his lawyer before continuing, “I will tell you anything about myself, as I have.”
During a break in the testimony, reporters cajole Miller into revealing more information about his personal life than he intended.
“Mr. Miller, why did you file an application for a passport?” he’s asked.
“I wanted to go to England.”
“For what reason?”
“I want to be with the woman who is going to be my wife.”
“Marilyn Monroe?”
“That’s correct.”
He’s been busy, the playwright says, far too busy to set a wedding date with Marilyn, who’s leaving in three weeks on July 13 to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl .
“I hope to settle it all right soon,” he says, adding, “When she goes to London, she will go as Mrs. Miller.”
“Have you heard?” an emotional Marilyn telephones poet Norman Rosten. “He told the whole world he was marrying Marilyn Monroe. Me!”
The press immediately descend upon Marilyn’s apartment building in New York following Miller’s slip, dozens of reporters crowding in her face.
Marilyn is delighted but flustered, and not entirely prepared for a press conference. She smiles widely and touches her face as the questions come thick and fast.
“How long ago did you decide to get married? Was there talk about it before the formal engagement?”
Marilyn dips her head and smiles. “Well, um … a little, maybe.”
“Miss Monroe, do you think your marriage plans are going to change your career any?”
She lifts up both hands. “Well, ah, I don’t think so, I mean, Mr. Miller is a playwright and I think he would like me to be a good actress too, as much as I would like to be.”
“When are you planning to have some children?” one of the female reporters asks.
Marilyn pauses a moment, then says, “Well, I’m not married yet, dear!” The crowd laughs appreciatively.
“Miss Monroe, this is rather a personal question, but is there anything in particular about Mr. Miller that attracted you?”
“Have you seen him?”
The crowd laughs again, unsure what to make of her answer. He’s the intellectual; she’s meant to be the beauty.
Marilyn couldn’t be more serious. I am so concerned about protecting Arthur, she writes in her journal.
I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses—but he is the only person—as another human being that I trust as much as myself.
Miller is granted his passport. Overnight the playwright is transformed from a leftie Communist Red to the harried lover of Hollywood’s most glamorous star.
It’s the last week of June and the press demand details about the upcoming wedding.
They continue to surround Marilyn’s New York apartment, effectively imprisoning her until Miller collects her in his ancient station wagon and drives her at speed to his colonial house on Tophet Road in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Almost a decade earlier, in 1947, Miller purchased forty-four acres in Litchfield County.
An accomplished carpenter, he built a writing studio on the hillock behind the house, crafted a desk from an old door, and began to write.
The first act of Death of a Salesman emerged during a single day, and Miller finished the play in the days and weeks that followed—later creating The Crucible in this same space.
This quiet, contemplative location suits the solitary work of a writer. Or a person contemplating faith.
Miller is Jewish, though since his 1925 bar mitzvah, he’s preferred a secular life. Despite no pressure from him, Marilyn wants to convert to Judaism before they marry. She’s never had any formal religious education, and she feels no attachment to the Protestantism she was born into.
Beyond attending synagogue at the High Holidays, the Millers aren’t especially observant, though they’re close to Rabbi Robert Goldburg.
The rabbi travels from New Haven to Roxbury to guide Marilyn through an expedited course of study.
Studying Jewish texts and practicing the rituals brings her great comfort and fulfillment.
And solidarity. Marilyn had once told Lee and Paula Strasberg’s daughter Susan that she could “identify with the Jews” because “Everyone’s always out to get them, no matter what they do. Like me.”