Away from the illicit atmosphere of hotels, Marilyn and Arthur relaxed into domesticity. They went to the Rostens’ for low-key dinners or spent quiet evenings at home together. Jimmy Haspiel was shocked to spot Marilyn toting grocery bags stuffed with spinach, carrots, and celery stalks, loaves of sourdough and thick chunks of Parmesan. For Marilyn, these weren’t just required ingredients for Sunday dinner—the parsley and celery and wedges of cheese were infused with all the hope and magic of a budding relationship. Marilyn’s kitchen attempts usually ended in chaos. But she tried—clipping recipes from magazines, bookmarking pages in Fannie Farmer, stuffing typed shopping lists into Joy of Cooking. She called Norman and Hedda to test her concoctions: strange stews, wild omelets, bowls of sauce with meat tossed in as an afterthought. Bizarre salads: iceberg lettuce with olive oil and no vinegar or sometimes plain vinegar with shredded lettuce. Sometimes she’d throw together something simple such as peas and carrots—half starlet, half nursery food. If a dish was too spicy, she’d grab her hair dryer and point it at the pot, injecting a bit of whimsy into the impossibly mundane. As with many other artists, it pained Marilyn to pull herself from dream life into reality. That’s why she struggled with the basics yet managed to whip up a stunning bouillabaisse.
That fall, Marilyn threw her first dinner party. She fussed for days, scrawling recipes and shopping lists on receipts, hotel stationery, and promotional notepads from City Title Insurance. She simmered mushrooms in butter, trussed up a pheasant, chopped walnuts with parsley, soaked French bread in cold water for stuffing. She ordered flowers from Judith Garden, a birthday cake from Greenberg’s, and rushed off to Bloomingdale’s for flatware, crystal, and two dozen ramekins. “She did nothing else for two days,” recalled a bemused Arthur Miller, who watched Marilyn desperately measure out cups of grated cheese and teaspoons of oregano. “I never saw anyone so worried about a simple meal. Actually the whole thing was overdone, too formal, too meticulous, too manicured.”
The cooking, the quiet dinners, the scaling back on late nights at the Copa, even the russet cat—Marilyn was attempting domesticity. She wanted it to work. She’d tried it before with Joe. As usual, she’d wished hard and dreamed big—incapable of having realistic aspirations. She wasn’t going to be a housewife—she’d be Demeter, a domestic goddess. She’d learn all of Arthur’s favorite recipes, starch his shirts, fill bowls with fresh cut flowers—even take flower arranging classes! She’d light the table with candles in antique candlesticks, serve French wine. “I’ll treat him like a king,” she vowed. A life of infinite courtship, castles in the air.
It never worked. Domesticity didn’t suit Marilyn. Her career provided structure—not housekeeping. The everyday realities of a live-in relationship either numbed her mind or cramped it into anxiety. As she gypsied from the Greenes to the Gladstone to the Waldorf to that cozy little sublet on Sutton Place, Marilyn found herself uneasy with permanence, more confident amid chaos. But she never stopped trying to make a home for herself, and came closer than she ever would that year in New York.
* * *
In late September, Arthur’s wife kicked him out of their Willow Street brownstone and into the Chelsea Hotel. The two grew even closer: Marilyn opening up more than ever, Arthur remaining an engaged and highly imaginative listener. Like Marilyn, Arthur had a soft spot for underdogs. He began to identify with her, especially her status as victim of a hostile, puritan society. He himself struggled daily with censorship, HUAC, and the slippery kinks of public opinion. At that moment, Arthur and Marilyn were very much the same—idols and outcasts in a culture driven by fear.
Marilyn’s best friends responded to her vulnerability with compassion, but above all respected her strength. Milton, Norman, Eli, and Sam never viewed her as a victim. “At the beginning, maybe you could use that word, low pay, all kinds of hours, industry exploitation,” wrote Sam Shaw. “But Marilyn fought back.” Instead of focusing on Marilyn’s strengths, Arthur fetishized her weaknesses, obsessing over the sordid, darkest details of her Hollywood exploitation. “It is your suffering in the past,” he wrote to her in an early letter, “that I respect and even bow down to.”
Old wounds are seductive—and the memory of old wounds is more seductive still. Arthur obsessed over Marilyn’s lovers and the concept of sin, which he referenced repeatedly in their correspondence. “I have sinned, Marilyn,” he wrote. “I am no better than you in any way. I can hate every man you were ever with, but I can’t hate you.”
For Arthur, promiscuity was linked to vulnerability—and vulnerability was the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Like many other writers, Arthur was a bit morbid. A whiff of death lured him in like the sexy haze of Shalimar. When he met a young war widow on a train to DC, he felt a mystical attraction to her: “The brush with death had made her sensually attached to life, to sex, and had given her a taste for the catastrophic.” She’d confessed to him that she was sleeping with random soldiers on the docks. To his credit, Arthur wasn’t judgmental—he was excited by her “dangerous sex and her desperation.” Instead of recoiling at her sexual past, he relished in the vicarious thrill of decadence, passion, transgression—all the things he never had. Arthur obsessed over having sex with her, then promptly reported this fantasy—to his wife.
For all his sensitivity, Arthur could be remarkably dense in his understanding of women. Arthur was actually shocked that this blithe announcement had damaged his wife’s trust in him.
Arthur vacillated between idealizing women and recoiling when they dared to violate his expectations. Just as Marilyn was expected to be his high-minded flesh goddess, Mary Slattery was his unflappable pillar of strength. He’d expected his “cool wife” to brush off the incident as “one more male inanity.” Even worse, Mary’s “silly and overblown” reaction had weakened his “mindless” faith in her.
Surely a prizewinning playwright is allowed his “male inanity,” yet Arthur’s jealousy of Milton Greene knew no bounds. And while he never begrudged Marilyn her sexy clothes or career, he grew alarmingly jealous of Milton. Within two years Miller would break up Marilyn and Milton, destroying the most vital friendship of her short life.
Of all the men in Marilyn’s blonde orbit, Milton was the one who never intimidated her, who always listened, who never bossed her around and most importantly never underestimated her. Years later, Lee Strasberg would talk her out of roles she wanted: Rain, even The Brothers Karamazov. He never thought Marilyn was ready. And Marilyn—who could spend three hours applying and reapplying lipstick—would readily agree.
It’s unclear whether Arthur thought Marilyn and Milton were lovers. Regardless, the more Marilyn saw of Miller, the less she saw of her supporter and friend.
Joe had never felt threatened by Milton Greene—or any of Marilyn’s friends. Despite his reputation for chaining her to a pot of spaghetti, Joe had been remarkably lax with Marilyn’s time. If anything, he had been grateful for men like Sid Skolsky and Sam Shaw—men he trusted, who genuinely cared about Marilyn and could keep her happily out of his hair for a while. He’d encouraged Sam to take Marilyn antiquing. God knows he didn’t want to. He never complained about the hours she spent at Schwab’s with Sidney trading gossip and pills. (Joe affectionately referred to the two of them as “pill-pals.”) DiMaggio had old-fashioned ideas about marriage. He wanted to know his girl was happy, busy, and safe while he watched baseball, bet on horses, or played cards. Joe’s love—no matter how crudely literal—was unconditional. He could be scowling in his chair watching baseball, the television drowning out Marilyn’s disappointed pleas—but he simply loved her because he had decided to love her, and he’d continue to love her no matter what.
But now Joe was in Sicily with the Shaws—drinking thick black espresso (having cut down on bourbon) and exploring his family roots. He made occasional dates with curvy blondes who looked vaguely like Marilyn, but focused primarily on self-improvement, though it wasn’t called that back then. Still hoping for a reconciliation, he wrote notes to himself on his failings with Marilyn, how to be a better man and how to win her back. “Forget ego and pride,” he scribbled on the back cover of Sports Illustrated. “Be warm, affectionate and love. Be patient no matter what. Remember,” he warned, “this is not your wife. She is a fine girl and remember how unhappy you made her. Happiness is what you strive for—for HER. Don’t forget how lonesome and unhappy you are—especially without her.”
* * *
On September 29, Marilyn emerged from 2 Sutton Place in a gray blouse, a gray skirt with matching belt, gray pumps, and pale pink lipstick, her hair swirled in a buttery chignon. She looked oddly schoolmarmish. This wasn’t really her style, but to Jimmy Haspiel, who happened to be lurking close by, “She was unspeakably beautiful, just unspeakably.”
That night, she met Arthur Miller’s parents, Augusta and Isidore, at the Coronet Theatre for the View From the Bridge premiere. They adored Marilyn and immediately invited her to lunch at their Brooklyn home. Ever the old soul, Marilyn immediately bonded with Isidore. “She loved Arthur’s father very much,” remembered Amy. “She was crazy about Isidore. Her enthusiasm brought his out. She always loved my mother-in-law, Celia. She sort of venerated old age.”
Marilyn always clicked easily with in-laws, grandparents, stepchildren, and pets—it was daily intimacy that she couldn’t quite handle. But here was Arthur, pushing things ahead at an alarming speed. Dressed in a black blouse and gray skirt, Marilyn was sitting in the kitchen over a bowl of borscht when she overheard Arthur announce to his father, “This is the girl I’m going to marry.”
Fourteen
Baby Doll
On the screen of pitch blackness comes/ reappears the shapes of monsters my most steadfast companions … and the world is sleeping ah peace I need you—even a peaceful monster.
MARILYN MONROE
Autumn, Greenwich Village, 1955. A Checker cab containing one driver, two actors, one bottle of Dom Pérignon, a pack of Dixie cups and a mystery woman inched down Macdougal Street. The woman in the rumpled slacks, fern-green raincoat, and Saks loafers (no socks) was Marilyn Monroe, but the driver didn’t recognize her under the black scarf and matte-black sunglasses. To her right was the journalist John Gilmore, to her left Ray Myers—one of the Studio’s youngest students and Marilyn’s babysitter for today, per Lee’s instructions. He often “hired” his youngest actors to trail Marilyn, keep her happy, (relatively) healthy, and out of trouble.
Marilyn whispered something to Ray, who leaned forward and tapped on the glass: “The lady wants to walk barefoot on the grass in Washington Square.”
It started to rain—lightly, almost a mist. The driver flipped on the windshield wipers.
“Which side of the park?”
Marilyn slipped off her loafers and passed them to Ray. John carried the champagne. Flanked by both men she walked, head bowed, hands in pockets, her bare feet in the wet grass. She chose a bench, and John popped the bottle. Ray fumbled with the Dixie cups in his coat pocket. Marilyn wished they were listening to Vivaldi.
She said that Arthur once sneered at her—what could she possibly know about Vivaldi? “I know about Vivaldi, for God’s sake,” she muttered today, fists balled up in her pockets. Tears spilled out from her sunglasses. John fought to light a Chesterfield in the rain, and Ray wrapped his arm around Marilyn’s shoulder, advising her to take deep breaths. (Method training?) “I know how to breathe,” she said with a sigh, shrugging off Ray’s hand and reaching for a cup.
The rain beat down harder, soaking their skin and their cigarettes, but they went on refilling their Dixie cups, chasing Seconals with champagne, breaking open the capsules, little beads swallowed straight to the brain.
Ray wanted to get out of the rain. Why don’t they run across the street to Rienzi’s? But Marilyn refused—someone might steal the bench—and besides, what if Rienzi’s was full?
She brought up Joe and the Seven Year Itch fiasco—how he wanted a good Catholic wife, not some starlet “showing her damn-near-bared crotch to half of New York.” Her face blanched: “I had no way to love him, because he didn’t want me to be who I have to be.”
Marilyn leaned forward, about to be sick. (“I don’t want to throw up—what if someone steps in it!”) Ray leaped up to get paper towels from Rienzi’s—finally an excuse to go to Rienzi’s!—and John sat there, drenched in his Brooks Brothers jacket, thinking that he’d fling himself under a taxi right then and there, if only Marilyn wanted him to.
* * *
Despite her general glow, Marilyn’s life in New York was still peppered by doubts, particularly involving Miller. By sleeping with a married man, she was at war with herself. “Her least favorite word was ‘homewrecker,’” remembered Amy Greene, who witnessed Marilyn’s inner torment.
Increasingly burdened by guilt, Marilyn was in need of a confidant. But who? Thanks to Arthur, the Greenes had already begun to fade from her life. Lee Strasberg was wholly uninterested in relationship talk, and Susie was only a teenager. Paula thrilled at the chance to discuss Arthur for hours, but her horoscopes and glassy-eyed talk of “fated love” left little room for substance. And Marilyn’s “brothers”—Eli Wallach, Sam Shaw, and Norman Rosten—were all married. Particularly Norman—not only had he known Arthur’s wife for years, he had a wife of his own who spoke French, cooked beef bourguignon, and hosted chic poetry readings. How could he relate to this sordid affair, safe in his warm little penumbra of Brooklyn Heights domesticity?
One night that fall, Marilyn found herself walking alone along the East River. The Monroe Six trailed her, solemn and silent as a pack of baby wolves. She stopped to look across the murky water toward Queens and its industrial skyline. A lone policeman spotted her—an incandescent kitten lost in the urban jungle. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you mind if I talk to you for a while?” she peeped, glancing up. The policeman kept her company for more than an hour, side by side on a bench, discussing, according to Jimmy, “life and what it all meant and why people did things.”
As the finalization of the DiMaggio divorce drew near, Marilyn wondered if she was making a mistake, if a relationship with Miller really would lead to happiness. Yes, Arthur loved the “special warmth” Marilyn felt toward his father, which would continue long after their divorce. He loved how “she was able to walk into a crowded room and spot anyone there who had lost parents as a child or had spent time in orphanages.” If he did acquire some of Marilyn’s empathy, it was only a sliver. For Miller, a level of frosty detachment was vital “for the sake of getting on with life.” Joe’s red temper had sent Marilyn running, but did Arthur’s ruthless cool pose an even greater threat?
Amy Greene disliked Arthur from the beginning, though she held her tongue for Marilyn’s sake. She worried Arthur triggered Marilyn’s deepest insecurity—her lack of formal education. Sometimes she’d call Amy or Norman with a dictionary in her hand, panicked over mispronouncing or misusing a word. Even this early into their love affair, she sensed that Arthur might be ashamed of her.
Marilyn’s unruly intelligence threatened Arthur, as did all strong emotion and chaos. He admired what he called her “perceptive naïveté.” He marveled at her ability to toss aside any book that didn’t stimulate her—but something in him winced at it, too. Arthur noticed and remembered each intellectual “flaw”—her refusal to read a book the “proper” linear way, her inability to “suspend her disbelief towards fiction.” It rattled him when Marilyn slammed a book shut, angered by a plot twist or sentence. He was even unnerved by Marilyn’s outrage toward a blasé, almost campy depiction of rape in a novel. Inexplicably, her inability to “accept literary irony about a humiliation she had once experienced” baffled Arthur. Marilyn began to see the cracks in her Abraham Lincoln, and it chilled her to the bone.
On October 27, Marilyn’s divorce from Joe DiMaggio became final. It had been exactly one year since she’d been crying on the steps of a courthouse in Santa Monica, and now she had a totally new life in New York. It was irrevocably over now. All of it: That Christmas he surprised her at the Beverly Hills Hotel, stocking her fridge with champagne and stringing her suite with twinkling lights. Joe was gone—his sweet Vermouth and Bay Rum cologne, his love of ice cream and quiet warmth with children. “He loved her beyond anyone’s comprehension,” remembered Sam Shaw. “He felt, but he didn’t tell.”
* * *
Another source of stress was the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been investigating Arthur since January. In October, they started a file on Marilyn herself. Actress Diana Herbert recalls spotting her swathed in scarves and sunglasses by a subway entrance on 58th Street. They ducked into a dim little Greek bistro for coffee and cakes. Marilyn was taut-nerved and tense. She kept peering twitchily out the window, and eventually admitted she was scanning for federal agents. Diana was alarmed. Was her friend unraveling? (In fact, Marilyn was correct—the FBI had been tracking her.) Hoping to distract Marilyn, Diana changed the subject to her new diet—she was eight months pregnant and sticking to baby-nourishing food. This triggered more tears from Marilyn, who’d also spent the summer with Park Avenue gynecologists—for flare-ups of agonizing endometriosis. Racked with pain, she agonized over medical texts, imagining uterine tissue ransacking her body until her organs fused together like some gruesome horror film. What’s more, she doubted her ability to sustain a pregnancy—another blight on her precarious relationship with Arthur. Even if he divorced his wife, even if he wasn’t imprisoned or deported, even if he chose to marry Marilyn (there were so many ifs), what if he wanted more children?
Marilyn lit up around children like she did around cameras, melting into an even softer, prettier version of herself. “She metamorphosed,” remembers one friend. “The head tilted easily back, the eyelids closed down, she licked her lips, became that myth and smiled full into the child’s face and sighed, ‘Hi-iiiiiiiiii.’” That Christmas she told Kitty Owens of her dream to adopt orphans—as many as possible, from around the world.
But Marilyn was ambivalent about childbirth. She feared the loss of bodily control—sagging breasts and bulging waistlines. Endometriosis complicated pregnancies, and she’d had more than her share of harrowing surgeries. Above all, she lived under the shadow of her mother’s mental illness, an illness that she knew had genetic roots.
Physical pain and shaky relationships weren’t new to Marilyn. Vulnerability and sangfroid often coexist, and she had plenty of both in spades. She could handle anything if she felt secure in the thing that mattered most to her: her acting career. Tennessee Williams had been eyeing her for his new screenplay, Baby Doll—the story of a nineteen-year-old virgin bride who sucks her thumb, sleeps in a crib, and wields an intoxicating hold on the men around her. Marilyn was counting on the lead. She was the perfect child-woman, Persephone meets Playmate meets shantytown shepherdess.
But there were other factors at play. Director Elia Kazan had final choice, and he was still feuding with Arthur Miller. Even worse, Elia’s wife had just discovered the fling he’d had with Marilyn back in 1951. Now he was dashing off mea culpa letters nightly, frantically downplaying the affair. He couldn’t turn around and cast his former mistress in the film. Despite Marilyn’s hopes and Tennessee’s pleas, the role went to Carroll Baker.
