Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (65 page)

The stakes were clear. Because of her expectation of a new life and new career with Arthur Miller, Marilyn had been persuaded that her need for Milton Greene no longer existed. The result was that he was suddenly badly treated by the woman to whom he had devoted his considerable talents. It was true that he had shared and perhaps even encouraged some of her most perilous weaknesses. But he had also enabled her to free herself from studio servitude and form a company in which she had succeeded magnificently by selecting and delivering arguably the best roles of her career. They had discussed plans for the future—among them a film with Charles Chaplin, who was indeed interested. Now everything was sabotaged.

“The truth is,” said Jay Kanter, “that suddenly Milton was left out in the cold.” And Amy, who was not blind to Milton’s mistakes and weaknesses, recalled that Marilyn admitted to her that “Arthur was taking away the only person I ever trusted, Milton,” but that she felt powerless to withstand him. At the root of it all was the frustration and sadness Marilyn felt over her marriage to Arthur, and much of that feeling she directed against Milton. It was ironic that Marilyn now found herself in the same situation as previously. Just as she had once allowed Milton to appoint his friends as corporate officers of MMP, so
now she was allowing Arthur to do the same, but with men far less qualified. Despite her anger and protests, she was exerting no more professional control over her destiny in 1957 than she had in 1954.

That anger was fierce in April. At a social gathering, the Millers met Arthur Jacobs, and Marilyn (thus Jacobs) “screamed about me and Jay [Kanter], calling us ‘shitty friends of that shitty Mr. Greene, who got me a psychiatrist who tried to work against me and for Mr. Greene!’ ”

Marilyn Monroe and Milton Greene never met again. Lawyers battled for a year until she finally bought out his stock for $100,000—his entire remuneration for over two years of work. He returned to work as a photographer, but a bitter disillusionment afflicted him, and in ensuing years he became increasingly addicted to alcohol and drugs. But Milton was forever courteous in his public statements about Marilyn:

She was ultrasensitive, and very dedicated to her work, whether people realize this or not. She came through magnificently in
Prince
and she was great in
Bus Stop
. All I did was believe in her. She was a marvelous, loving, wonderful person I don’t think many people understood.

As for Irving Stein and Joe Carr, they had no more to do with film production companies. Carr worked for years before his death as a private accountant, and Irving Stein became chairman of the Elgin Watch Company. Approaching home in his car one evening in 1966, he suffered a heart attack, crashed into a tree and was killed instantly; he was fifty-two.

As usual, Marilyn’s few public appearances showed her as ever cheerful. Among the charity events she supported was an all-star soccer game at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, where on May 12 she opened the America-Israel match; wearing open-toed shoes, however, she kicked with such gleeful force that two toes were sprained. She remained for the game without complaining so that she could award the trophy to the victors.

But emotional rather than physical discomfort attended her later that month, when she went with Arthur to Washington for his court appearance on the contempt of Congress citation from the previous
year. The formal indictment and the trial date had been handed down in February, and at last Arthur’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, was prepared to contest the issue; were they to lose, a possible two-year imprisonment and two-thousand-dollar fine could be imposed. The trial was held from May 13 to 24, during which the Millers were houseguests of Joe and Olie Rauh.

“She had no desire to do anything except support her husband,” recalled Olie, “and she asked questions about the case every day and every evening. She had no movie commitments and seemed not a bit conflicted about it.” Then, when Arthur and Joe left for the hearings, Marilyn “picked books off our shelves—and every one she chose had something to do with psychiatry.”

On the last day of the trial, as Joe Rauh rested his defense on the grounds that a refusal to answer irrelevant questions was not a punishable offense, Marilyn handled a crowd of reporters brilliantly. She asked Olie Rauh for a glass of sherry, donned white gloves (“because I haven’t done my fingernails and one of those women will notice they’re unpolished”), saw that her panty-line showed through her white dress, promptly removed the undergarment and stepped out to meet the press, telling them she was in Washington to see her husband vindicated. But on May 31, after the Millers had returned to New York, Arthur was found guilty on two counts of failing to answer HUAC in 1956. The preparation of an appeal and the final disposition of the case would last another year.

The Millers spent much of the summer in quiet indolence at a rented cottage in Amagansett, far out on Long Island. He tried to work on several projects, while Marilyn walked along the beach, read poetry, visited the Rostens in nearby Springs and made only rare appearances in New York—when, for example, she accepted an invitation to attend the ceremonial ground-breaking for the Time-Life Building.

Marilyn’s moods that season were alternately effervescent and depressed; this Miller and Rosten took as a sign of mental instability. It was considered hypersensitive and unrealistic when a wounded sea gull reduced her to weeping, or if she stopped her car at the sight of a stray dog wandering a country road. A discussion of the deer-hunting season roused her angry denunciation of killer sports. On the other hand, she enjoyed nothing so much as time spent playing lawn tennis or parlor
games with young Patty Rosten, just as she regularly welcomed Jane and Robert, Arthur’s children, when they visited their father.

In fact few celebrities donated so much public time as Marilyn to charities benefiting youngsters: that year she sold tickets for and attended, among others, the Milk Fund for Babies and the March of Dimes. She was always relaxed and sympathetic with children, always listened, asked about their needs, wrote down their names and later sent toys and gifts. They were, after all, unaware of her fame, asked nothing of her and allowed her to be, if only for a few moments, a mother. With those she knew better, like Patricia Rosten and the Millers, no demand on her time or attention was excessive. “She loved children so much,” according to Allan Snyder. “My daughter, other people’s children—she went for them all. If she’d had one of her own to care for, to grow up with, I’m sure it would have helped her immensely.”

Yet Marilyn often suddenly withdrew from everyone to be alone for hours that summer. She had been grievously offended over the verdict handed down in Washington and was anxious about another protracted time of examination, interrogations, meetings with lawyers—and the fees, which fell entirely to her. She then quietly announced to Arthur one day in July that a doctor had confirmed her pregnancy—news that made her happier than anyone could recall. With this, Arthur noticed “a new kind of confidence, a quietness of spirit [he] had never seen before.”

But there was to be no term of the pregnancy. On August 1, she collapsed in extreme pain and was briefly unconscious. An ambulance and physician were summoned, and Marilyn was rushed to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, where it was determined that she had an ectopic pregnancy: the fetus was being formed in a Fallopian tube. The loss of her child that August wounded Marilyn’s confidence and sense of maturity, and to Susan Strasberg, among others, she confided feelings of incompetence and worthlessness. Even her body seemed to indict her as unfit for adulthood.

Returning home after ten days, she was determined to prove herself in the role of Arthur’s good wife, as if every emotional and physical obstacle presented her with the challenge not merely to survive but to triumph. Concluding negotiations for their new home in Roxbury, Arthur and Marilyn devised elaborate plans for an unlikely replacement
for the simple house. While working on the final stages of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright was living at the Plaza Hotel, and there he met with Marilyn, who had fantasized something grand: she envisioned a vast home, complete with swimming pool, projection booth and auditorium, children’s nurseries, a costume vault and a lavish study for Arthur. Wright drew plans, but the cost was enormous and the project was never realized. The Millers settled for the tasks of repairing and updating the existing house.

Something else would be realized, however. Sam Shaw had read Arthur’s short story “The Misfits,” published in
Esquire
magazine that year, and he suggested it as the basis for a screenplay. The story concerned three wandering men in the wilds of Nevada who capture wild horses to be butchered for canned dog food; in the story was a woman as rootless and unsettled as they but with an innate sense that life is sacred. This, Shaw argued, could become a serious film with a role for Marilyn that could confirm her as a major dramatic actress. But Arthur had another idea: why not a rewrite of
The Blue Angel
, the 1930 film that had made Marlene Dietrich an international star? “Look, Arthur,” Sam countered, “you wrote a wonderful story—why not do that as a film? It’s something original, it’s strong, and it’s something for you both.”

That autumn, Arthur began working on the scenario for a movie based on his story. As he proceeded, Marilyn read portions, laughing at the humorous moments and reflecting silently on the characters and motifs. She was not sure how the role of Roslyn Tabor, the Reno divorcée who alters men’s destinies, would finally suit her, but this hesitation she kept to herself and simply encouraged Arthur to keep writing.

At Christmas 1957, Marilyn was as usual generous to a fault, spending a good portion of her savings on others. Arthur received a new set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Susan Strasberg unwrapped a Chagall sketch. There were books and records for Lee, and to Paula she gave a pearl necklace with a diamond clasp, a gift from the Emperor of Japan in 1954 during her honeymoon with Joe. “She knows how much I love those pearls,” said Paula, moved to tears. “Look, she gave them to me!” Most extravagant of all was her gift to John Strasberg, then eighteen and, Marilyn felt, an unhappy, often ignored outsider to his own family. To him she calmly signed over the ownership of her Thunderbird, knowing he longed for but could not afford a car.

With her mentor and mythmaker, Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky (1954).

With Tom Ewell in
The Seven Year Itch
(1954). (From the collection of Greg Schreiner)

At the premiere of
The Seven Year Itch
on Marilyn’s twenty-ninth birthday (1955).