Meanwhile, Arthur’s life had been trudging along laboriously. In the four years since they’d parted he looked like he’d aged ten. Writer’s block, marital strife, political censorship, and the HUAC had strained his mouth into a grim line bracketed by two deep Lincolnesque grooves. But Marilyn loved all this. To her they were signs of wisdom and maturity. Best of all, he wore glasses now—horn-rimmed ones.
Arthur didn’t kiss Marilyn that night, and he didn’t take her home. He stewed for two weeks, then picked up the phone and called Paula Strasberg. Paula—thrilled to involve herself in any taboo romance—gave him Marilyn’s number. This time there was no hesitation. Arthur fell in love “completely, seriously, with the ardor of a man released.”
From the very beginning, the tenor of their relationship was irresistibly fugitive—stolen moments of tenderness crossed by silence. They’d hole up in her suite at the Waldorf and order filet mignon, tiny French peas, and (Marilyn’s favorite) vanilla ice cream. After dinner they’d drift to the balcony for hours of smoking and talking.
Confessional by nature but extremely self-aware, Marilyn fought conflicting urges to shut down and open up. She tended to be evasive about her past—and for good reason. Journalists and even friends accused her of embellishing the truth and outright lying. “I’ve never told all about my life,” Marilyn once admitted in an interview with Elsa Maxwell, one of the few press members she trusted. “No one would believe it all could have happened. They would say I was talking for publicity. It was pretty terrible.…”
But Arthur was different. He listened to her. Holding her gaze and lighting her cigarettes, he was just as tender and protective as she’d remembered him. Unlike the slavering skirt-chasers and gossipy press hounds, this man wanted to see her soul—even the deep black pang of her childhood.
Shyly at first but with growing confidence, Marilyn began to talk. She talked about the casting agents who told her to smile while lifting up her sweater for inspection (“Look, her tits tilt straight up!”). About the man who took her to Santa Monica beach, offered her an ice cream, then dug his fingers into the flesh of her thigh, hissing in her ear about her “admirable bones.” About how one night, weak from months of living off crackers, she’d been lured to a Bel Air mansion with the promise of a home-cooked meal. How she was presented with a rubbery omelet, pounced upon, then flung out into the dark clutching her shoes and a handful of aspirin. She told Arthur about the early years: the orphanages, the scratchy frocks, the foster homes full of bellowing Bibles and sexual abuse. Her foster mother hissing under her breath: “I can’t stand the way that kid looks at me.… We’ve got to just get rid of her.” She told him about the death of Aunt Ana, how she slept next to her dead body, how the gravediggers held a ladder for her to climb into Aunt Ana’s grave, and how she lay there gazing skyward, the cold earth black against her back while the gravediggers leaned on their shovels and smoked. It was stories like these that would stun Miller into silence, bury him alive with desire to save her. He called her “the saddest girl in the world,” which she accurately interpreted as a statement of love.
Before she met Arthur, Marilyn thought men wanted “happy girls.” How liberating to be loved for her demons and even her own weaknesses. To meet a man who didn’t flinch at the first hint of darkness, recoil from the spiked thorns under this smooth vanilla sex angel. They fell in love on that balcony, talking past sunrise, urban dawn sounds floating up from the streets—delivery trucks, bakeries, and flower stalls. He could listen to her for hours, this package of beauty and pathos who used to sneak into her foster home’s aviary and put out watermelon rinds to feed the flies. “They would have starved to death if I hadn’t,” she said.
Later, he would find these qualities babyish—even irritating—but right now they were intoxicating, exotic, and completely foreign. His current wife didn’t need him—she had been the one to support him, she had done the cooking, the budgeting and the bookkeeping, kept the icebox stocked and bills paid while he wrote. Like many men, Arthur would ricochet from thin-lipped pragmatism to voluptuous need and back again. “I was alternately soaring and anxious,” he wrote, “that I might be slipping into a new life not my own.”
Journalists pounced on the poetic frisson of the match, which begged to be plied with Freudian issues. Marilyn did refer to Arthur as “her Abraham Lincoln,” and she had a habit of telling strangers that Lincoln (or Clark Gable, depending on the day) was her father. There is a long tradition of pathologizing Marilyn’s passions, diagnosing her choices and curiosities as symptoms of an underlying desperation rooted in her fractured childhood. When applied to her relationship with Arthur, this psychologizing misses the mark. Though Marilyn deeply admired Miller (she’d never involve herself with a man she couldn’t respect), he was not and never would be her mentor. He was her lover.
Besides, Arthur and Marilyn shared many qualities: self-protectiveness mixed with startling candor, stubborn streaks that often got them in trouble. Both were naive idealists with intellectual and working-class sympathies. Both were introspective and obsessively honest. Marilyn’s “bracing candor” had been a major attraction to Arthur, who, in his own quiet way, could be shockingly confessional. Most of all, they shared a need to go gently against the grain—“It was the very inappropriateness,” wrote Arthur, “that made me know it was appropriate.” An odd statement—quixotic, defiant, and utterly Marilynesque.
At its core, their relationship was progressive and thoroughly modern. So what if she lost checkbooks and burned steaks? Arthur didn’t want her in the kitchen, sweating over a pot of Bolognese. (To be fair, neither did Joe. He knew Marilyn struggled with cooking and would rather force down a plate of burned spaghetti than hurt her feelings.) Arthur knew that Marilyn belonged on the stage, just like her beloved Eleonora Duse.
Equally bold were his permissive views on sexuality. Marilyn was far more experienced than he—after all, he’d married his college sweetheart and he was shy with women regardless. But for Arthur there were no double standards, and he didn’t split women into virgins and whores. “I’ve known social workers,” he said, “who have had a more checkered history than she has.” He admired how she challenged the hypocrisy so common in post-war American sexual politics. “America was still a virgin,” he added, “still denying her illicit dreams.”
Unlike Joe DiMaggio, Arthur didn’t flinch at Marilyn’s plunging necklines and skintight skirts. Why shouldn’t she wear them? Besides, he knew that image was vital to her career, and her career was as vital to her as writing was to him. A fellow artist, he respected her work and her opinion. They read aloud to each other and talked late into the night about Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, and her current obsession, James Joyce. After the silence and space of her DiMaggio marriage, this was the romance of Marilyn’s dreams.
Between their high profiles and the shadow of adultery, Arthur and Marilyn kept their romance a secret, even from some of their closest friends. “I knew somehow it was Arthur,” Amy Greene admitted years later, “because he was married, and it was all so secretive. I figured if she was dating Irving Dishman I’d know about it. Milton, of course, knew that they were seeing each other. She needed a confidant, and he was the one she turned to at that time. He never told me, because Milton is such a sphinx. If somebody says ‘This is our secret,’ you can put him on the rack and you’re never going to get it out of him. All he would say to me is ‘Marilyn is keeping company,’ which I think is so sweet. But one day we were driving back from New York, and having been suckled by a Cuban witch many years ago, a bolt of lightning came through the car and I said, ‘It’s Arthur Miller.’ Milton almost went off the road. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, it is.’ The next day, obviously Milton told her, because she seemed to be relieved, and she said that it was Arthur she was secretly seeing. From that moment on, she would just say Arthur, or Art, or she’d be really cute and say AM. She was sharing a confidence, and she enjoyed that kind of thing. She’d talk about him to anyone that would listen. My impression was that they were having a wonderful time in bed and he was going home to his wife.”
A few weeks after the big reveal, Marilyn announced that Arthur was coming to Weston for Sunday lunch. “She started in on preparations, and Kitty had to do this, and Clyde had to do that. We had a wonderful ham, and we had chicken and cornflakes, which is another thing Kitty made that was absolutely marvelous, and we had salads, and another thing that Marilyn loved—Kitty’s carrots with sugar. We had a wonderful sweet potato pie. Marilyn loved Kitty’s sweet potato pies—she was so proud of them—it’s like she’d discovered them herself. So she insisted that Kitty make one of those, and another deep-dish apple pie. She was a typical Jewish yenta, giving the man she was involved with wonderful things to eat. We were all on our best behavior because Arthur was coming. We brought out the good wine, and the house was shiny, and the flowers were wonderful, and I have never been so bored with a human being in my entire life.”
Empathetic, Marilyn could not help but sense Amy’s disappointment. “She would start trying to bring in other conversations—things like ‘Oh, Amy loved Death of a Salesman.’ Then I told the story of the night I saw it. No one clapped at the end, because we were all so moved that it was like a sacrilege to destroy whatever it was that sat with us inside the theater—us meaning the entire audience—by clapping. Well, he loved that. And then he said it was a very common occurrence. Then we got up, and we went into the living room. We had coffee—he was a big coffee drinker. He talked about everything. He talked about the theater, he talked about movies, he talked about films he was going to make and who he wanted to star in them. Marilyn of course loved it, sitting there at his feet. He stayed an entire afternoon. When he’s on, you literally have to sit there and worship at the shrine, and nobody can get a word in edgewise. I will say that he was probably nervous because he was meeting us. I give him credit for making an effort—going into a strange house, especially considering that Milton and I knew he was sleeping with Marilyn. This was the mid-fifties—it wasn’t ’65 when no one cared what you did.”
Despite their awkward first lunch, Amy was touched when Arthur reached out weeks later. “He invited us for dinner in New York,” she said, “and it was a very touchy situation, because there we are with the blonde bombshell, and he’s married, and where could we go where the two of them wouldn’t be recognized? We went to a restaurant called Jimmy’s La Grange—it was in a brownstone and the backroom was quite dark, with candles and smoky partitions. Milton and I had been taking her for some time, and everyone was very cool about it—there was a lovely piano player there. Milton, Marilyn, and I arrived early, and Arthur slipped in later. At this point we were still on our best behavior. This second meeting was better. He was more relaxed, we were more relaxed, and it was sort of Marilyn’s evening. She was the Charming Child. She was wonderful—you could eat her with a spoon. She eased all the factions. Arthur kept quiet—maybe she said to him, ‘Let somebody else talk.’ Arthur asked Milton very pertinent business questions, and he was charming the second time around. It was a lovely evening. That was our best evening out in public, but there were more good evenings to come. One night we had a lovely dinner party in Marilyn’s suite at the Towers. When you were with Marilyn and Arthur at that time, you could feel the passion sparks. There was something there between the two of them, and you could certainly feel it, so it wasn’t phony.”
Gradually, Marilyn and Arthur emerged from the Waldorf and were seen around town together. When A View From the Bridge rehearsals began at New Amsterdam Theatre, he’d walk to Childs’ Restaurant on 46th and Broadway to meet Marilyn for lunch. She’d be waiting for him in a scarf and dark glasses, fresh out of acting class and eager to chat about what she’d learned. The rare actress who never dated actors, Marilyn could finally bond with a lover over the experience of shared work. Arthur talked about his latest project, a screenplay about Brooklyn’s juvenile gangs. The New York City Youth Board had already granted him funding as well as access to local social workers who led him nightly through back alleys of Gowanus and Red Hook. He’d listen in on secret meetings, then cab it back to Manhattan, slipping through the Waldorf’s private entrance and into Marilyn’s bed. “From life on the streets,” he remembered, “to Marilyn high in the Waldorf Tower was a cosmic leap, but not such discontinuity as it would seem.”
The DiMaggio courtship had centered on dates—dinners at La Scala and Romanoff’s, drinks at the Stork Club. But with Arthur, Marilyn explored New York even further. They went to coffee shops in the Village, boating on City Island, and took his dog for walks in Prospect Park. He bought her an English gearshift bicycle, and together they’d ride through Central Park or down Ocean Parkway all the way to Coney Island. They took long, lazy walks through the Heights, past Italianate brownstones and row houses of red brick. The neighborhood’s quiet history was the polar opposite of Hollywood flash.
As she fell in love with Arthur, she fell more deeply in love with New York. They discovered a mutual love of bridges, especially the Brooklyn Bridge, which loomed heavily over Arthur’s imagination and work. Sometimes they’d walk over the bridge down toward the waterfront, where longshoremen did their scrapwork and the dockers heaved loads of heavy cargo. He led her past walls of graffiti, pointing out the chalk-scrawled DOVE PETE PANTO, which had triggered his screenplay The Hook. With Arthur as her guide, Marilyn’s world grew larger each day. For her, Brooklyn was more than a neighborhood, it was her Shangri-la. “Brooklyn became Nirvana to her,” wrote Sam Shaw, “a magical place, her true home.”
“It’s my favorite place in the world,” she raved. “I haven’t traveled much, but I don’t think I’ll find a place that can ever replace Brooklyn. I just like walking around. The view is better from Brooklyn. You can look back over and see Manhattan—that’s the best view. It’s the people and the streets and the atmosphere. I just love it.”
Everything seemed poised for a magical summer. Hand in hand with Arthur, gazing at her beloved East River, Hollywood was the last thing on her mind.
* * *
On June 1—Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday—The Seven Year Itch premiered to blockbuster reviews and dazzling box office receipts. Everyone was thrilled but Marilyn, who shrank under the crush of flashing bulbs, surrounded by reporters with their thrusting pens. Her hair was stiff and overstyled, her face powdered dull, her red lipstick layered red and thick, giving her a sad-clown look. The Van Cleef earrings hung heavy, drooping down toward her shoulders. “I hope it’s the last of those kinds of parts I’ll have to play,” she moaned. “If I thought I had to keep on wiggling in crummy movies, I wouldn’t want to work in movies anymore. I could go back to working in a factory if I had to.”
DiMaggio escorted her, sparking more reconciliation rumors. “They look just like lovebirds,” Photoplay reported. Not really—Joe beamed for the pack, but Marilyn looked distracted and distant. Later that evening she stormed out of the birthday party he’d planned for her at Toot’s Shor. Perhaps she couldn’t handle one more man laying claim to her.
The morning after The Seven Year Itch premiere, Marilyn received two letters. The first from Billy Wilder, his tone urgent and pleading:
Marilyn, I’ve been reading about your desire to do Cordelia, to do The Brothers Karamazov. Stay with what you are doing now. You’ve got a feeling for film comedy which no one else has. You’re creating a very interesting character, and if you stay with it, you won’t fall by the wayside as many actors and actresses do. The older you get, the better you’ll get. There will be parts for you if you continue to create this character. You’ll have a chance to become another Mae West. And as Mae West continued over the years, you can continue your career.
The second was from Cheryl Crawford:
I want to tell you that when you and Lee feel you are ready to do a show I want very much to be your producer. I think I have a deep and sympathetic understanding of your career. I am not interested in exploiting your fame, but in helping you bring your true dream into being in the finest possible way. When you finish I’d like to tell you about my ideas, and I’m also having another play written, which could very much be for you. I would also give Lee an interest from my share for his invaluable assistance, and surround you with the kind of actors in the studio who would truly help you and protect you. There is no rush. I just want to go on record and I’d like to know how you feel about it. I don’t want to see you do any of this ‘dumb blonde’ mishmash, but really present the truth of yourself which I admire.
When would Marilyn present her personal truth? And what would it look like when she finally did?
* * *
That afternoon, Marilyn called Milton and backed out of a trip to Tuscany she’d planned to take with his family. Even amid all the chaos of the previous night, the scene with Joe and the emotional fallout, she recognized this moment as a turning point. Itch had made her the hottest star in the world, and she was becoming aware of her power on both coasts. The press, Fox, and all of Hollywood had finally snapped to attention. Soon they’d make her an offer. And as usual, she would be ready.
Eleven
Fire Island
“Marilyn changed my family’s life, and we changed hers. And nothing was ever the same again.”
SUSAN STRASBERG
By then, the Strasbergs were replacing the Greenes as Marilyn’s surrogate family. She spent weekends at their beach house on Fire Island, roaming the rickety boardwalks for funnel cakes and hot dogs, sketching in the cattails with Susie, or drenching herself in jasmine-y Ambre Solaire. No cars were allowed on the island—just a Jeep taxi cruising up and down the beach in the evenings. They’d walk to Ocean Beach in a little caravan, pulling red wagons strung with bells, packed with books and snacks. Marilyn in the short robe she wore as a cover-up, Johnny sulking in Breton stripes, Susie in a babyish one-piece she hated, Lee in his baseball cap and glasses, and Paula draped in black smocks and wide-brimmed sunhats, hovering over Susie with a parasol.
“There were a lot of theater people at that part of the island,” Susie wrote years later. “They were sophisticates, which meant they stared at Marilyn Monroe from a distance instead of staring up close.” In Ocean Beach Marilyn enjoyed relative anonymity. She’d throw down her towel and sink into Ulysses or wander toward the water’s edge to chat with Lee. “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” would be playing on a nearby radio. Susie would be lying on her stomach, a copy of Photoplay hidden between the pages of War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past. Paula would be rooting through baskets laden with fans and scarves, fussing like a round owl, rubbing sunscreen on Susie’s shoulders. Susie hated this—everyone was looking at her—and besides, she wanted to get tan. “What do you care,” Paula said with a huff. “You’re an actress; this is for your part; you have to stay pale. Anne Frank didn’t go outside for two years.”
This was Marilyn’s first family vacation and her first summer on an East Coast beach. She’d frolicked on Catalina Island and skipped around on Santa Monica, but this was her first blast of salty driftwood and North Atlantic ozone. She’d play in shallow surf, wading out past her knees, maybe to her waist but never over her head. Susie would show off, running deep into the high surf, diving like a dolphin, glancing back in hopes that Marilyn was watching. “Come on in,” she’d taunt, secretly pleased to have one-upped her rival. But Marilyn would wave, kick up some sand and foam, and continue talking to Lee, who rarely went in past his ankles. He’d stand at the ocean’s edge, shirt buttoned to chin in the searing heat. Susie once asked him why he never went further. “Because, darling,” he said staring straight into the sea, “I don’t want to get involved.”
* * *
On Fire Island, Marilyn indulged in happy sunny family things, the things she never really had. She shared a bedroom with Susie, ran around barefoot, went days without makeup, and played with the neighbor’s kids. There were barbecues, picnics, radios blasting “Sugarbush, I love you so…” Lee manned the grill in his baseball hat, boxers, and farmer’s tan: “Who wants hot dogs and who wants chicken?”
That summer Marilyn and Susie lived as sisters. Their room faced east, windows flung open, overlooking the dunes. Lulled by waves and salt breeze, they’d lounge on their twin beds, whispering late into the night about Hollywood and boyfriends. Marilyn’s perfume hung heavy in the air, mixing with the ocean’s marshy, quartzy scent. They’d quote poetry from their beds, usually Whitman—he was a Gemini, just like they were. On nights like these, Marilyn seemed to shed her glamour, a school chum with wet hair and a sunburned nose.
Neither one slept much on Fire Island. Their little room steeped in a dreamy fever. For Susie, this was the happy kind of insomnia—sleepovers and secrets and dreams that come true after Labor Day. She soon realized Marilyn was dealing with a darker sort of restlessness. She’d doze off, then wake to see Marilyn whiling away the hours with beauty rituals—shaving her legs, bleaching her hair, rubbing Vaseline into her cheeks, or simply staring out the window.
Once Marilyn stood naked in the moonlight, brushing her hair in long, sensuous strokes. Susie stared, transfixed by the peachy gleam of her skin. “It had a resiliency and buoyancy, like a child’s.” Open jars of face cream, razors, vials of cuticle oil strewn on the bed, bottles of pills and perfume stacked on the nightstand—tokens of some magical world of sex and glamour.
“I wish I was like you,” Susie whispered. Marilyn, of course, protested. “Oh, no, Susie. I wish I were like you! You’re about to play a great part on Broadway—Anne Frank—and people have respect for you. No, no—I have none of those things.”
* * *
New York entertainers flocked to Ocean Beach, and the Strasbergs’ cottage was their unofficial summer headquarters. A steady stream of guests breezed through their doors that summer—including Anne Bancroft, who lived next door. Lee “hired” ex-boxer and Studio actor Marty Fried for random duties—setting up the beach umbrella, babysitting Marilyn—but mostly, he just clung to Lee all day, listening to him rhapsodize on Stanislavski or his opinions on Japanese Noh.
“Lee would barbecue steaks,” remembers Studio member Jack Garfein, “and Marilyn would be running around barefoot drinking champagne. Other stars would come out to Fire Island to kiss ass with Lee—Shelley Winters, Anne Bancroft. Lee was getting famous because of his association with Marilyn.” On Sundays Paula held her legendary brunches, and bustled about serving bagels and hot coffee before collapsing on a sofa with a battery fan. After brunch, Lee would make his famous ice cream sodas, with extra cherries for Marilyn and lashings of whipped cream. “Everybody came for Lee’s blessing,” wrote Shelley Winters. “We would tell him our problems, we would ask for his help with a script or love affair.” Lee would sit guru-like, nodding and shrugging.
Paula’s summertime feasts were as much of a lure as Lee’s blessing. Bloody Marys at brunch, champagne at night, salads, buttered corn on the cob, caviar blini, and baked potatoes with sour cream and chives. She kept her famous “Jewish icebox” stocked with Zabar’s salamis, triple-cream Brie, honey cakes from fancy Midtown bakeries, and even the occasional Sacher torte.
