Page 47 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe
“This is the girl I’m going to marry,” Miller tells his parents, Isidore and Augusta.
He’d been nervous about getting their blessing, and greatly relieved when they gave it to him.
“It is not that I would hesitate to marry you if they disapproved,” he’d written to Marilyn.
“Truly, sweetheart, that was not it. It was that somewhere inside me I wanted their love to flow toward both of us because it would give me strength, and you too. It is not that they are my judges, but the first sources of my identity and my love.”
Marilyn pours out her longing for family in the kitchen of their home on East Third Street, near Avenue M, in Brooklyn. “For the first time in my life,” Marilyn tells them, “I have somebody I can call Father and Mother.”
The Millers have three children: oldest son Kermit, then Arthur, then youngest child and only daughter Joan, an actress who uses the name “Joan Copeland” professionally. As an early member of the Actors Studio, Copeland’s known Marilyn via the New York theater scene for quite some time.
“She didn’t think of herself as a fully qualified actress.
She felt out of her depth at the Actors Studio, though she shouldn’t have,” Copeland says.
Marilyn would shyly nod and smile at Copeland when they crossed paths, and eventually “would search me out at the Studio and we’d have lunch, talk about scenes. ”
“She wanted to be part of our family,” Copeland says.
“My mother made it comfortable for her, and my dad did. I did. So now she was in heaven because she had a nice boyfriend, she had a father, and a girlfriend. So it made her feel like an ordinary person. A real person who has a family … She loved being in the family, and the idea of having a family was sacred to her.”
Hundreds of press descend upon Miller’s Connecticut property in the days after the news of the engagement breaks.
A wedding between “America’s foremost foremosts,” as one columnist dubs them, is major news.
Reporters are looking for quotes and details to fill their columns and double-page spreads.
In the summer heat, they’re knocking on doors, hoping for water, food, cups of coffee.
The Roxbury paper runs a brief announcement: LOCAL RESIDENT WILL MARRY MISS MONROE OF HOLLYWOOD , noting, ROXBURY ONLY SPOT IN WORLD TO GREET NEWS CALMLY .
But Miller is a private man who wants to be left alone. He puts off answering their questions by promising a press conference at the end of the week.
On Friday, June 29, 1956, some five hundred reporters surround Miller’s colonial house, smoking cigarettes while they wait for a joyous announcement.
Their vigil is interrupted by tragedy.
Around one o’clock in the afternoon, brakes screech, glass shatters, and metal smashes. The assembled reporters collectively hold their breath and turn to look up the narrow lane toward the source of the terrible sound.
Careering around the corner comes the old station wagon with Arthur Miller and his cousin, Morton Miller, at the wheel. The car comes to a hard stop. Out bolts Marilyn. Her face is tearstained, and there’s blood on her shirt. She runs into the house, Miller following closely behind her.
Cousin Morty tearfully relates that there’s been a car crash.
The driver of a press car in pursuit of the soon-to-be Mr. and Mrs. Miller lost control on the unfamiliar road and has smashed head-first into a tree.
Its passenger, Mara Scherbatoff, the New York bureau chief of Paris Match, has fatally severed an artery in her neck.
The poor woman. How did that happen? We’ve just come from getting our marriage license. It’s a bad omen for our future. Marilyn’s thoughts run together as she paces the kitchen. Now television cameras are being set up on the lawn.
There’s no avoiding the promised press conference now. But Miller still refuses to answer any questions.
Inside the house, Marilyn takes her friend and business partner Milton Greene aside and begs his advice.
“Arthur wants me to marry him,” she says. “Now—tonight. Tell me if I’m making a mistake. What do you think?”
Greene is stunned that after all the couple’s fervent declarations of love, Marilyn doesn’t know her own heart.
“Marilyn, you must do what you think best,” Greene tells her.
They concoct a secret plan. Once the crowd dissipates, the couple drives across the Connecticut state line to New York.
There, at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains, Judge Seymour Robinowitz cuts short his own anniversary celebration to perform a four-minute civil ceremony at 7:21 in the evening before two witnesses, Morty Miller and his wife.
Other attendees include Milton Greene and Samuel Slavitt, Miller’s lawyer.
On the marriage certificate, Marilyn records her true age, thirty. Miller is forty, nearly forty-one.
The New York Times later reports that “Miss Monroe wore a sweater and a skirt and no hat. Mr. Miller wore a blue suit and a white shirt but no tie.”
They have successfully evaded the press.
But in all the haste, there’s been no time to buy a ring. Just as in Marilyn’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio, her groom borrows a family ring to slip on his bride’s finger, a 22k gold family heirloom from 1876.
Two days later, Rabbi Goldburg signs the certificate of Marilyn’s conversion to the Jewish faith. A Jewish ceremony is planned for later in the afternoon, at the French-country-style home of Miller’s entertainment agent, Kay Brown.
Arthur Miller has a vision for their wedding.
“I have been thinking crazy thoughts. For instance, a wedding with maybe fifty people. Maybe in Roxbury, maybe somewhere else in a big house. And Bob and Jane there. And just a little bit of ceremony,” he writes.
“I want the kids to see us married, and to feel the seriousness and honorableness of our marriage … I want this for their sakes as much as for my own pride and my joy; so that they will see their Grandma and Grandpa full of happiness.”
His vision is largely realized.
Marilyn trades the simple pencil skirt, shirt, and gloves she wore to the courthouse for an empire-waist tea-length muslin chiffon gown with ruched sleeves by designers Norman Norell and John Moore, along with a short chin-length veil Amy Greene has soaked in coffee to more closely match the dress’s beige color.
Hedda Rosten is the maid of honor, and Marilyn’s acting guru, Lee Strasberg, gives the bride away.
The couple is married by Rabbi Goldburg in the home’s living room, in front of around twenty-five friends and family, including Miller’s parents; his children; his brother, sister, cousin, and their spouses; the Strasbergs; the Greenes; the Rostens; and a handful of others.
Kermit Miller and Lee Strasberg witness the couple’s traditional Jewish ketubah, and list their wedding date as “July 1, 1956, 22nd of Tammuz 5716.”
“I’m just warning you,” Miller had told Marilyn. “You’ll be the most kissed bride in history when my family is there. I’ll have to fight the bastards off. I’m going to put up a sign, ‘ONE KISS TO A RELATIVE!’”
“Marilyn, if you have a sister, introduce me to her,” jokes Goldburg.
But there was nobody from her side there, Marilyn’s new father-in-law notes. Still, the mood is of overwhelming happiness as the newlyweds and their guests enjoy a champagne reception on the rolling lawn, complete with lobster and a tiered wedding cake.
“The fairy tale came true,” says Norman Rosten. “The Prince appeared, the Princess was safe.”
The newlywed couple gifts the rabbi a recording of Arthur Miller’s works, with the inscription, “For Bob Goldburg, With all my (our) thanks for a beautiful wedding—July 1, 1956,” each signing their names: Arthur Miller, and Marilyn Monroe Miller , her new last name underlined.
New gold wedding bands come from Cartier. Marilyn lets Susan Strasberg try on her ring, engraved with the wedding date and “A to M, Now is Forever.”
“Forever is so romantic … I can’t even imagine forever, can you?” sighs the teenager.
I feel like I was at Fox forever, and when I get the blues it feels like I’m in hell forever, Marilyn thinks. “I don’t think you can ‘think’ forever, it’s more a feeling,” she says.
But she’s hoping hard for happily ever after.
On the back of their wedding photograph, Marilyn writes the words, “Hope, hope, hope.”