Page 49 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

MARILYN AND MILLER chase the happiness that eluded them in the first six months of their marriage all the way to the Caribbean island of Jamaica. They’ll spend the next sixteen days relaxing at a seaside villa in Ocho Rios on Jamaica’s exclusive north coast.

From behind dark glasses, Marilyn dodges questions about her next film project, though she softens at a personal one.

“If you had to choose between your husband and your career, which would you pick?” a journalist asks.

“I don’t have to choose,” she says. “But if I had to, my husband.”

Back in New York in their rental apartment on 444 East 57th Street, the Millers enjoy hosting friends and family.

“There was good talk there about books and plays,” says Miller’s father, Isidore. “Everybody sat on the floor.”

Everything in the large living room is white; the carpets, the walls, the furniture, even the marble torso of Aphrodite—and a white-painted piano. It’s the same one from Marilyn’s childhood, the one her mother had bought.

“When I was beginning to earn some money modeling,” Marilyn explains, “I started looking for the Fredric March piano. After about a year I found it in an old auction room and bought it. It’s been painted a lovely white, and it has new strings and plays as wonderfully as any piano in the world.”

Miller would write in one room of their Chanel-scented, white-on-white apartment, occasionally interrupting his typing to come gaze upon his bride.

When journalist Donald Zec visits the couple for tea, he notes, “They looked at each with a tenderness that a single sound would have shattered.”

Miller turns his attention to Marilyn Monroe Productions (MMP).

Last year, while at Pyramid Ranch awaiting his divorce while Marilyn was filming Bus Stop, Miller had promised her, “ALL of these Milton troubles and Josh troubles and all that crap is nonsense that will fade off as soon as I can take charge. You will simply have a business relationship with these people.”

Yes, Joshua Logan directed Marilyn to her most acclaimed performance to date.

And Milton Greene inspired Marilyn to challenge the studio system and demand the contract she deserved.

But despite Greene’s expertise as a celebrity photographer, he has no experience with motion pictures.

He’s invested what money he could, but he’s failed to secure any major backers.

The Greenes seem to live luxuriously, and the fear is that Marilyn is paying. During filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, there were rumors of Greene buying a Jaguar and antiques in England and charging the expenses through MMP.

Of the company’s one hundred shares, fifty-one are controlled by Marilyn and forty-nine by Greene. Miller begins to edge Greene out, replacing Greene as vice president of MMP.

Marilyn cuts Greene off, ignoring his calls and letters much as she did to Natasha Lytess before him.

In a collateral breakup, Marilyn replaces Dr. Margaret Hohenberg—the psychoanalyst she’d previously shared with Greene—with Dr. Marianne Kris, who comes recommended by no less than Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna.

At Kris’s Central Park West office, Marilyn attends up to five sessions a week as the negotiations with Greene progress toward their acrimonious conclusion.

Greene accepts a buyout of $100,000, and although he will retain producing credit for The Prince and the Showgirl, his Hollywood career is over.

Marilyn takes to calling herself “MMM,” for Marilyn Miller Monroe. The couple envisions a summer entwined by the sea in eastern Long Island. “What a lovely place this is—it’s got water all around it” is Marilyn’s first impression of the area.

They rent Hill House on the private one-hundred-acre oceanfront estate at Stony Hill Farm. “Now we could take easy breaths in a more normal rhythm of life,” Miller says.

But on May 31, the House Committee on Un-American Activities finds Arthur Miller guilty of contempt of Congress for his earlier refusal to name names.

“Although he testified frankly about his own relationships with persons of Communist bent or membership, he said that his conscience had forbidden him to tell about others,” the New York Times reports.

“At his apartment, 444 East Fifty-seventh Street, Mr. Miller declined yesterday to comment on his conviction.”

The consequences of refusing to cooperate with HUAC are harsh.

Miller is denied a passport and may face a fine and even a prison sentence.

Marilyn’s advised to persuade him to comply with the court’s demands or risk her own career, but she refuses, saying, “I’m proud of my husband’s position and I stand behind him all the way. ”

The couple slips away. Reporters know the location of Hill House, but not of their second rental retreat at 64 Deep Lane in Amagansett. Marilyn is charmed that a windmill is built into the 1830 house, but privacy is its most valuable feature.

The Prince and the Showgirl —jointly released by Marilyn Monroe Productions and Warner Bros. Pictures—makes its world premiere at Radio City Music Hall on June 13, 1957, as a charity event hosted by Marilyn Monroe Productions to benefit the Milk Fund for Babies.

Marilyn appears at the premiere in a white satin mermaid-tail gown, an evening variation on her most memorable costume in the film.

Fans clamor for a glimpse, one getting close enough to brush one of Marilyn’s chandelier earrings out of her ear.

Arthur Miller, elegant in black tie, replaces the bauble.

Photographers never stop shooting, trailing the stars to a gala champagne supper-dance at the Waldorf Astoria.

The film is a light amusement, critics agree, though many lavish Marilyn’s performance with praise. “Her best cinema effort” proclaims the Los Angeles Times . The New York Post says, “Marilyn Monroe has never seemed more as a person and as a comedienne.”

Despite the issues during shooting, the film is a financial success.

“When you look at the film,” Miller’s sister Joan Copeland notes, “it is apparent who won the battle, and Marilyn! Marilyn was quite wonderful, the best of all. So. What do you know?”

To her stepchildren, twelve-year-old Jane and ten-year-old Robert, Marilyn writes warm, funny letters in the voices of Sugar Feeny, the family cat, and Hugo the Basset Hound.

“Hugo” confesses to Bobby: “I made a mistake and I am sorry but I chewed up one of your baseballs. I didn’t mean to. I thought it was a tennis ball and that it wouldn’t make any difference but Daddy and Marilyn said they would get you another one.”

Before they married, Miller wrote Marilyn of the blissful domesticity he imagined they’d share.

“How happy I will make you! What beautiful children I will give you!”

Those are Marilyn’s dreams, too.

She’s prayed on it over Daily Prayers, the book she received from the Avenue N Jewish Center after her conversion.

But faith can’t cure her chronic endometriosis.

Neither can the surgery she underwent back in 1954, days before she moved to New York.

The doctor had cautioned her that endometriosis scarring increased the chances of an ectopic pregnancy occurring outside the uterus.

Marilyn is not afraid to take that risk, and she is delighted to become pregnant again in the summer of 1957.

Miller is more tempered in his joy. “The doctor, having administered a series of treatments over a period of weeks, had confirmed that she was pregnant, but could still not rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy,” he says.

“But she was deaf to this cautionary tone. A child of her own was a crown with a thousand diamonds. I did all I could to throw myself into her anticipatory mood.”

To Hedda Rosten, Marilyn confides: “I think I’ve been pregnant for about three weeks or maybe two.

My breasts have been too sore to even touch—I’ve never had that in my life before—also they ache—also I’ve been having cramps …

I did not eat all day yesterday—also last night I took 4 whole amutal sleeping pills—which was by actual count 8 little amutal sleeping pills.

“Could I have killed it by taking all the amutal on an empty stomach? (Except I took some sherry wine also).

“What shall I do? If it is still alive, I want to keep it.”

On August 1, Miller is at his writing desk when he hears screams from the garden. He rushes to Marilyn’s side. Her pain is so severe that she briefly loses consciousness.

In the back of the ambulance, she gives way to her agonizing sorrow. All she wants is a family. All she has ever wanted is family. Someone to love. Will she never be allowed that?

Newspapers report: “MISS MONROE was rushed 100 miles to the hospital Thursday afternoon. A hospital spokesman said she was in great pain during the operation and was given a blood transfusion.

“On her admittance to the hospital Thursday afternoon, Miss Monroe’s doctor said she was ‘five or six weeks pregnant’ and that her baby was expected ‘around the end of March.’”

The doctors operate, and confirm it was a non-viable ectopic pregnancy. They assure her that she can have more babies. But as Miller tenderly oversees her recovery, he sees how far Marilyn has fallen. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she sleeps. Mostly, she looks blankly at the wall.

“She lay there sad beyond sadness,” Miller observes. “And there were no words anymore that could change anything for her.”

Miller has sold his original property on Tophet Road in Roxbury, Connecticut, and purchased land enough for an expansive country estate.

On a spread of over three hundred acres, Miller and Marilyn seed fruit trees and a pine forest. A house built in 1783 still stands, with its massive wood-beamed ceilings.

“All our friends agreed the land was beautiful,” Marilyn tells a columnist, “but they said the house was just uninhabitable. I looked at it, and thought how it had been standing there, weathering everything for more than 180 years. And I just hated the idea of its being torn down or even left unoccupied.”

She contacts the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright and drives the ninety-year-old all the way from Manhattan to view the property.

“Ah, yes, the old house. Don’t put a nickel in it,” the architect immediately pronounces. But his plans to construct a new home in the side of the hill would require, Miller estimates, “heavy construction on the order of the Maginot Line.”

Instead, they embark on a modernizing renovation that includes a new writing studio for Miller.

They keep company with Hugo the Basset Hound, along with an expanding menagerie, including a mongrel dog called Cindy and Butch the talking parakeet, who repeats, “I’m Marilyn’s bird. I’m Marilyn’s bird.”

But this bucolic life fails to keep her anchored in the physical world.

To temper her wild emotional swings, she drinks champagne and vodka in the morning with whatever pills she needs.

Sometimes she cracks open the capsules and pours the powders directly into her drink; other times she sprinkles them under her tongue.

At night, she pricks holes into the casings of her barbiturates to speed the effects.

When Miller walks into the sitting room to find Marilyn slumped on the sofa, he’s not immediately sure that she’s overdosed.

“There’s no words to describe her breathing when she is in trouble with pills,” he writes. “The diaphragm isn’t working. The breathing is peaceful, great sighs. It took me an awfully long time before I knew what was coming on.”

An ambulance arrives to revive her once again.