Arthur set his Corona by Feldman’s pool—officially he was here to work. The plan was to edit his screenplay The Hook, then shop it around the studios with Kazan. Their first stop was Twentieth Century Fox, where Kazan hoped to run into one of his girlfriends. They dropped in on the set of As Young As You Feel, where a young blonde actress was rehearsing a scene. “That’s Marilyn Monroe,” Kazan whispered, nudging Arthur. “Fair game and easy prey,” he grinned, staring straight ahead. As if to confirm, Marilyn shot him a look, eyes brimming with tears. Maybe it was her honest tears, or the way she swayed in her dress of black openwork lace, but something struck Arthur, triggering a protective response that would last for a decade.
Of course she recognized Arthur Miller—the literary Lincoln and working man’s Hemingway. He fished; he hunted; he even boxed. He certainly looked the part, with his corncob pipe, lumberjack plaids, and Brandoesque tees. Arthur’s quiet reserve and lanky grace appealed to Marilyn, who preferred the congressman to the dandy, the simple tie and jacket to the chichi dinner suit. Instead of swooning over Tony Curtis, she liked her sixty-something acting coach or Jawaharlal Nehru. Her ideal man had the soul of Thomas Wolfe and the heart of Abraham Lincoln, masculine without bravado. No wonder she was lonely and dateless. There weren’t many Wolfes and Lincolns in this town of flashy cads and clammy bullies.
The next day, Feldman threw a party in absentia for Miller, with an orchestra, lavish buffet tables, and a fully stocked bar in each room. “I asked Art to cover for me,” wrote Kazan, who was working late that night and unable to pick up Marilyn. “When he called to tell her he’d pick her up she said no, she’d take a taxi and meet us at Feldman’s. Art wouldn’t allow it—he’d come and pick her up. Again she demurred. I said don’t worry about it, she’s used to that, but Art insisted. And the first thing that impressed Marilyn about her future husband was that he refused to let her come to the party in a taxi. How little these glamour girls expect out of life.”
Within minutes, they were dancing together. Arthur rarely flirted with women and usually required a few stiff drinks before he could force out a greeting, much less a fox-trot. But the orchestra and the moonlit pool, the heady scent of perfume mixed with amaryllis—even the dizzying proximity to celebrity—disarmed him. Best of all was this dazzlingly warm-blooded creature, fresh and alive in his arms. He shivered, thrilled to know that he could in fact “lose himself in sensuality.”
By the time Kazan showed up, the spark was obvious. “When I arrived, I could see that need had met need, and the lovely light of desire was in their eyes. I watched them dance. Art was a good dancer—and how happy she was in his arms.”
Not everyone was so pleased. Catty observations abounded from men and women alike. “She looks like the prow of a ship,” snarked one, nodding at Marilyn’s cleavage. “In this roomful of actresses and wives of sybaritic men,” wrote Arthur, “all striving to dress and behave with an emphatically ladylike reserve, Marilyn Monroe seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along with her and it was the best body in the room. The female resentment that surrounded her at Feldman’s approached the consistency of acrid smoke.” He watched her dance with another man, transfixed by her intoxicating mix of boldness and vulnerability. Clutching her drink, eyes half shut, he was suddenly struck by how fragile she was. Actress Evelyn Keyes seemed to read his mind. “They’ll eat her alive,” she said softly and took another sip of scotch.
Perhaps that’s why Marilyn avoided these parties. She rarely danced and usually hid in the kitchen for an hour or two before slipping out early to chat on the phone with Sidney Skolsky. But tonight she stayed late, curled up on the couch, legs folded under her dress. Arthur slowly began to caress her foot, and held her little toe. She was touched by the gesture’s tender audacity. All her life she wanted to be protected, not seduced.
She also wanted to be understood. Maybe it was the toe-holding, or the way he’d insisted on picking her up for the party, but Marilyn trusted Arthur. She found herself talking, mostly about Hollywood, its daily brutalities and exploitation. The cigarette girls and sinister men and garish laughter settling out in a haze of cigars and liquor around Calabasas pools. The humiliating “dates” she forced herself to endure because she’d spent her last dime on acting lessons and couldn’t afford dinner. Arthur listened for hours without revulsion or judgment, washing all those ugly little acts clean away. He simply nodded and squeezed her toe tighter. After all, even he knew that “to survive in this velvet jungle of Hollywood, one had to reckon with wolves.”
* * *
They spent the next few days teaming around as a threesome—Miller, Monroe, and Kazan—browsing Hollywood’s secondhand shops, driving around the Canyons, picnicking on Malibu beach, strolling the Santa Monica Pier. Marilyn even crashed their business meeting with the tyrannical Harry Cohn. With cat eyeglasses and a stenographer’s pad, she passed unrecognized as their personal secretary. (This was her secret revenge on the lecherous Cohn, who’d promised Columbia’s good roles if only she’d join him in bed.) Cohn rejected The Hook, but they had a good laugh at his expense.
Driving through the Canyons, head flung back, sandwiched between those two talented men, Marilyn’s affections began to transfer to Arthur. She wasn’t that crazy about Kazan anyway. It was one of those breezy little flings so common in Hollywood—more like a friendly favor—kind of like taking someone to lunch with your agent or passing along an important phone number. But Marilyn was Hollywood’s ultimate freak of nature—a romantic—who’d somehow emerged from years of abuse with her ideals unscathed.
“Her romantic innocence was something you did not usually run across in the picture business,” wrote Maurice Zolotow. “The goings on behind the walls of some Hollywood homes are like scenes that may be observed in the violent wards of psychiatric institutions. You have the Don Juans and the nymphomaniacs who bounce like ping pong balls.…” Men still ruled the business, from moguls such as Zanuck to the talent scouts who promised bit parts in musicals or electrolysis and rhinoplasty in exchange for sex. But Arthur had grown up simply, worked as a dishwasher, and barely mentioned his Pulitzer. He had looked into her eyes and held her toe, and that impressed Marilyn more than all the yachts in Malibu, all the Cadillacs in Beverly Hills.
For Arthur, this had been an out-of-body experience, like he’d been plucked from Brooklyn Heights and dropped straight into Candyland. The past three days had hardly seemed real.
Their goodbye had all the trappings of a film noir romance, including a dramatic airport farewell witnessed by Kazan. Marilyn wore a straight camel skirt and white silk blouse, her blonde hair brushed over her left brow. Panic set in as Arthur waited to board, and he felt fated to protect this angelic creature with her “radioactive core.” Grimly determined to stay faithful to his wife, he kissed Marilyn’s forehead and flew to New York, the scent of her Nivea cream on his hands.
* * *
For the entire ten years that Arthur knew Marilyn, he was running—away from her, toward her, but always running, and running for his life. When he returned to his life back on 155 Willow Street, he wrote to Kazan of his desire for Marilyn, and his “situation at home,” which seemed to grow worse and worse. In one particularly theatrical plea, Arthur begged Kazan to take “one last look at her.” (Kazan was more than happy to oblige.) Two days later he wrote Kazan again—this time for Marilyn’s address.
Their correspondence was exploratory, confessional, and on Miller’s part, fraught with guilt. When she wrote of her need for a role model, Arthur suggested Lincoln, and recommended Carl Sandburg’s recent biography. Marilyn dashed to Martindale’s books and lugged back six volumes, with a copy of Miller’s Focus thrown in for good measure. Eventually his letters dwindled, but she kept them in a stack on her nightstand, right next to her portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
* * *
Years passed. Arthur threw away Marilyn’s letters. But his dreams of her crept back, as much as he tried to keep them at bay. Marilyn surfaced in his work, his reading habits, his correspondence with friends. He couldn’t shake her, this “whirling light” that never left him. Not even four years later, in the spring of 1955, when he spotted her at a New York party, standing alone sipping vodka and orange juice.
He approached her tentatively, gingerly, asked about her work at the Studio, told her a little about his new play. Much had changed. In three years Marilyn had gone from starlet on the verge to full-blown movie star. She’d married the ultimate celebrity athlete and was now newly separated. As usual, her life was moving at warp speed.
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.”
