“Fortunately, I wasn’t famous,” wrote Norman Rosten, who also escorted Marilyn to concerts and premieres. “I was a safe, nonrecognizable, non-gossip companion. It sounds glamorous; it also was hard work. There we were one night, seated in Carnegie Hall, she in her devastating dress, I in my assembly-line suit, waiting for the great pianist Emil Gilels to enter on stage and be seated at the piano. ‘Relax,’ she whispered with that little laugh of hers. ‘They don’t know who you are.’ I don’t know if word of her presence got backstage, but Gilels played like a man inspired. At intermission, a Carnegie official approached and informed us that Mrs. Gilels was seated in a box across from our part of the dress circle and asked to meet her. Marilyn took my hand (she was worried I’d back out) and with half the hall watching, we crossed over to the box where Mrs. Gilels was chatting with a short, intense man. It was Gilels himself. Marilyn introduced me as ‘my poet friend’ and I tried my best to look poetic. He said to her ‘You must visit Russia one day. Everyone would like to see you.’ She answered, ‘I would love to, and someday I will. Right now I’m reading Dostoevsky.’ Then she turned to Mrs. Gilels, who didn’t seem to know more than a dozen words of English. ‘He’s a great man, your husband, you must be so proud of him.’ Mrs. G. smiled sweetly. It was a high moment in international relations.”
The next day’s gossip column: MARILYN MONROE COOING POETRY WITH NORMAN ROSTEN. Norman groaned. Hedda laughed: “It’s certainly better than ‘wooing.’”
Far from a devious femme fatale, Marilyn befriended entire families. She was a regular guest at the Wallachs’ home—eating bagels and gefilte fish, chatting with Anne over coffee in the kitchen, or babysitting their son Peter. She shared a birthday with Sam Shaw’s preteen daughter, Edie, and surprised her one year with tickets to the circus. “Marilyn was so excited,” Sam recalled years later. “She wore a skirt, a loose blouse, no make-up, a wig wrapped in a babushka like a scarf around her head. Edie I remember with lace trimmed bobby-socks, her hair tied in a bun and white dainty gloves. Both girls, a big sister and a kid sister.”
“Three Gemini children fated to meet and play,” wrote Norman Rosten of Marilyn, Edie Shaw, and his daughter, Patricia, whose birthday was right before theirs. “Edie and Patricia barely teenage, and Marilyn in her mid-twenties and ageless.” Marilyn was always giving Patty little gifts and trinkets, including an adorable dog named Cindy. Marilyn had found the dog roaming the streets, half starved, barely able to walk. With the help of a vet, she nursed Cindy back to health and presented her as a birthday gift to Patty. “The playful spirit of the child lurked in her eyes, her walk, her psyche, particularly her laugh,” wrote Norman Rosten. “That inner child stayed with her to the end.”
Marilyn doted on her own pets with childlike intensity. That fall she adopted a russet striped cat who mysteriously got pregnant under her care. Marilyn obsessed over prenatal cat care, fed it caviar, and lined a box with a blanket. She called Norman and Hedda with daily updates: “Cat looked fine, cat seemed to be breathing hard, cat didn’t eat much, cat looked listless, cat looked crazy.” Norman threatened to get an unlisted number if the kittens didn’t arrive soon. Marilyn coached her pet through labor alone and rang Norman at midnight: “They’re coming, the kittens! Hurry, take a cab!”
Marilyn always treated animals with empathy and care, just as she treated people. Years later she adopted a basset hound named Hugo and fretted over his moods. When Marilyn convinced herself that Hugo was depressed, it was Norman who helped feed the dog teaspoons of whiskey. “In those years people, friends were closer,” mused Norman. “There was more meaning to friendship.”
Throughout her life, Marilyn would refer to Norman Rosten as her “closest friend.” They discussed dreams, poetry, and art. “I had mentioned the Rodin section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” wrote Norman, “knowing it would delight her and for months she promised to see it. One day the phone rang: ‘I’m ready, Claude, if you are!’ It was the perfect Monroe sentence—directionless, timeless.”
The Rodin wing was empty that afternoon, and there was something hushed and holy in the rooms. She wandered around the airy vault, the cool marble matching her own skimmed-milk pallor. She paused by Pygmalion but it was The Hand of God that stopped her cold: a vision of obsessive love coaxed out of stone. She tiptoed round it, slipping off her sunglasses, eyes as solemn and rapt as a child’s. “This was a different dream, of love and happiness and culmination—a dream denied her,” Norman wrote. “She stood before this vision transfixed, finger at her lips.”
Ever the paradox, Marilyn was equally captivated by Francisco Goya. Back in May she’d rushed to the Met for its monthlong exhibit of his etchings and drawings—this time with Sam Shaw. She roamed, unrecognized, pausing to gape at his witches and ghouls, then suddenly turned to Sam: “I know this man well. We have the same dreams. I’ve had these dreams since I was a child.”
Eager to learn more, Marilyn immediately bought Goya’s biography. But she was bitterly disappointed—the book had none of the psychological insight she’d hoped for. Norman and Sam understood her frustration. They knew how personally she responded to art, instantly considering Goya a kindred spirit. They marveled at her complexity. Rodin’s eros and Goya’s demons coexisting in one angelic being.
“It isn’t simple with Marilyn,” mused Sam years after Marilyn’s death. “Nothing ever is.”
* * *
“She chose us because we were family men,” said Sam Shaw, referring to Norman, Eli, and himself. “She felt safe with us—there was no threat or sexual tension.” But Marilyn simply couldn’t turn off the flirt, telling Norman she loved him, sitting in Eli Wallach’s lap, making Sam girlish scrapbooks with crayon-drawn hearts (“I’d rather be dancing with you, Sam,” she scrawled on one page). She pushed boundaries—she couldn’t help herself. One weekend Marilyn ran into Eli at Idlewild Airport before a weekend flight to LA. He was waiting for a plane to San Francisco. She asked if he was flying alone and said, “If you had asked me I would have gone with you.”
“That was one of the few times I thought she was cruel,” claimed a mutual friend, who thought Marilyn was toying with Eli for sport. “She would never have gone to San Francisco with him.”
But it’s just as likely that Marilyn was compelled by her desire for closeness and warmth, her hatred of boredom, and the fact that she’d always been attracted to Eli. After all, he’d been on that list of “desirable men” she’d made years ago with Shelley Winters. Marilyn’s interactions with men were always light and whimsical, infused with her sense of fun and play. Studio classmate Jack Garfein remembered one afternoon in particular:
“She called me and said that Strasberg said that I was very good at choosing women’s clothes, and would I go shopping with her? And I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ So I met her, and we started to walk and talk, and I sensed that she liked me. At one point she said to me, ‘Take my hand, Jack.’ I said, ‘Marilyn, if I take your hand tomorrow we’re on the front pages of all the newspapers.’ She said, ‘Jack, don’t be silly—you think people are occupied with me, with my life? Come on, they have their own lives they’re living.… You want me to get their attention? Watch—I’ll walk up on these steps here at Carnegie Hall; I’ll stand a certain way and people will stop and say, “Oh, hi, Marilyn Monroe!”’ I said, ‘Well, Marilyn, you’re very modest and you’re very nice, but I’m sorry, I don’t think that that’s what will happen if I take your hand.’ She said ‘Ok, let’s go into a coffee shop. We’ll sit at the counter; we’ll order coffee—Jack, if nobody recognizes me at the coffee shop, will you stop being stupid and take my hand?’ So we walked into the coffee shop, we sit right there, and the guy gives us coffee. Nobody recognized her—even the guy opposite her serving the coffee. So then we went and I took her hand, we went shopping, and of course, she had a great sense of humor. I said to her, ‘Marilyn, it’s just a year I’ve been married; I’m not looking for trouble, you know,’ and she laughed. So we went into the store, and every time she was trying on a dress she would say to me ‘Jack, I need to be zipped up’ or ‘Jack, I need to be buttoned’ but laughing, knowing what it did to me. In no way was it directly seductive—it was enjoying life, like, ‘Have some fun, Jack; see what joy or pleasure you could have.’ I was trembling much of the time, but the irony of that is that she walked me home after that.… And I had a sense that if I wanted to invite her upstairs she probably would have come. I don’t know what would have happened—you never know—that’s the wonderful thing about women, women who are honest, who aren’t racked by guilt: ‘Oh, I misled this man; oh, how terrible, I made him feel that he could have me’ instead of knowing there’s fun in life, it’s fun to have that feeling and that sense. So I sensed that she would have but I stopped and said, ‘OK, Marilyn, I live here, I’ve got to go upstairs.’ She laughed, because she knew that there was a conflict, and she was enjoying it. So she said, ‘Get me a taxi,’ and I said okay and got her a taxi, and she kissed me very lightly and she left.… She loved that mystery between a man and a woman.”
Perhaps the constant flirtation was Marilyn’s way of protecting herself, of scattering her heart in pieces instead of trusting it to one person alone. “One evening at our house with friends,” remembered Norman Rosten, “someone suggested an impromptu poetry reading. The idea was to pass around a copy of Whitman and Yeats, each to open a page at random and read. At Marilyn’s turn, she opened the Yeats and the poem could only have been presented to her, again, by fate. It was ‘Never Give All the Heart.’ She read the title, paused, and began the poem. She read it slowly, discovering it, letting the lines strike her, surprised, hanging on, winning by absolute simplicity and truth.”
For everything that’s lovely is/ But a brief, dreamy, kind delight/ O never give the heart outright …
“When she finished,” Norman noted, “there was a hush. She stared into space.”
* * *
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.”
