The Genius and the Goddess (14 page)

Marilyn refused the wise counsel of her own lawyers, publicists
and accountants, who advised her to stick with Fox and improve her
contract. Instead she unexpectedly formed
Marilyn Monroe Productions
with Milton
Greene, a handsome New York fashion and celebrity
photographer whom she liked and trusted. Born Greenholtz and four
years older than Marilyn, he had had a brief affair with her at the
Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in 1953. (When I asked his son
Joshua whether, as rumored, they resumed their affair during Greene's
second marriage, he did not deny it but merely said "no comment.")
Greene's contract with Marilyn stated that he would finance her for
a year in New York, and allow her to live in high style and study
acting. He would find new films and great parts for her, and she
would finally have the power to guide her own career. Her contract
with Fox was bad, but she exchanged it for an equally bad one with
Greene, who knew almost nothing about film making and wound
up owning 49 percent of the company and the most successful star
in Hollywood.

Marilyn traded a powerful studio and agent for a family who took
her in as other families had. She spent many weekends at the Greenes'
house in Connecticut, and they helped smooth the way for her new
life in New York. Greene's second wife, Amy, a thin, elegant, high-fashion
model with dark hair pulled straight back like a ballerina, had
the uncomfortable task of being the new best friend of her husband's
partner. The svelte Amy and the voluptuous Marilyn of the bountiful
bosoms represented two ideal but contrasting images of American
beauty. An indiscreet but unidentified lady-friend of both women said,
"I got the feeling that Amy looked down on Marilyn Monroe as a
stupid little bitch. Amy was better dressed, more chic, more sophisticated,
and much cleverer than Marilyn. She even looked better. In
fact, you couldn't believe that this queer little duck you saw sitting
around the Greenes' was really Marilyn Monroe."
¹⁵

The striking difference between the two women came into sharp
focus when they both appeared on a popular television show,
Person
to Person
. Hosted by the distinguished, chain-smoking newsman
Edward
R. Murrow, who had sent stirring broadcasts from wartime London,
it was filmed when Marilyn was living with the Greenes in Weston,
Connecticut, and shown in April 1955. Other actors interviewed by
Murrow, like Kirk Douglas and
Tony Curtis, seemed happily married,
confident, at ease and living in luxurious houses with swimming pools,
while Marilyn seemed an uneasy guest, taken in by the Greenes as
if she were still an orphan. Murrow's biographer noted that his "questions
were dreadful. 'I saw some pictures of you the other day at the
circus riding an elephant. Did you have fun?' 'Do you like New York?'
'Do you like Connecticut?' And to Mrs. Greene, 'Does she make her
own bed?' And puzzlingly, 'Do you play a part to impress directors
or please them?'"

Murrow's questions did not allow Marilyn, who seemed nervous,
passive and possibly stoned, a chance to respond with her usual wit.
Amy, who was much brighter, prettier and self-possessed, sometimes
answered for Marilyn and dominated the rather awkward program.
Zanuck voiced the pervasive Hollywood response when he angrily
wrote Feldman that Marilyn had thrown away a great chance for
publicity and "made an idiot of herself on Ed Murrow's show last
week with obvious repercussions."

Miller, pretending to speak for Marilyn but actually expressing his
own hostility toward the Greenes, condemned Amy's character:
"[Marilyn] thought Amy was someone whose values were superficial
and a little insubstantial; who married someone who was 'in,' who
was successful and could help her meet the
right
people, the famous,
the 'in' people. That's her whole life and interest. When Marilyn
needed somebody, as she did then, [Marilyn] would seem to be powerfully
connected with [the Greenes]." In fact, Marilyn admitted that
she was not really close to them at all.

Breaking with Fox and starting her own company was a bold move,
and Marilyn was optimistic when she left Hollywood for New York.
From then on, she alternated between the East and West coasts, and
considered the rest of America a vast, unknown hinterland. Miller,
who resumed their relationship when she reached the East coast and
replaced DiMaggio in her life, explained why her film company was
doomed from the start:

The concrete reason was that they were both in an impossible
position. [Greene] was acting as a manager, so to speak, and was
very jealous of his authority, as he would have to be in such a
situation, but their standards were different. He really was basically
trying to upset her arrangement with Fox. . . .

She had originally thought that his interest was in furthering
her career, going about the world seeking the best properties.
She had hoped that it would create a situation where she could
pick and choose among the best available. But the way it worked
out, Greene thought that he would be this big-shot producer
and she would be working for him. . . . It was [supposed to, but
didn't] work out that her salary would not be taxable, as it had
been. . . . He never did anything about all that. He wasn't capable
of that. This was all talk. You have to be a special kind of person
to pull this sort of operation together. He just didn't have it.
¹⁶

While Marilyn was making her way as an actress in Hollywood,
Miller was working as a playwright in New York and trying
to maintain his precarious marriage. In contrast to Marilyn, he was
stable, purposeful, educated and confident. He came from an uppermiddle-
class Jewish family and his life, like his art, was firmly grounded
in reality.

Though Miller never knew the poverty and abandonment that
Marilyn endured, he suffered the trauma of the Depression when his
father lost his business after the stock-market crash of 1929. He
expressed his ambivalence about his parents by simultaneously idealizing
and denigrating them. He said that his father,
Isidore, who came
to America from Poland when he was five years old, "grew up to be
six feet two inches tall with blue eyes and red hair and everybody
thought he was an Irishman." But photographs of Isidore, slightly
taller than Marilyn and only as high as Arthur's chin, reveal that he
was only of average height. Miller also said that though his father
"built one of the two or three largest coat manufacturing businesses
in the country," he was completely uneducated and could not "read
or write any language." Isidore's "Miltex Coat and Suit Company
boasted a factory, showroom, front office and more than 800 employees."
The family "lived on the top floor of a handsome six-story building
at a very respectable address, 45 West 110th Street, facing the north
end of Central Park just off Fifth Avenue." Isidore was driven to work
in a chauffeured automobile.

Despite her husband's astonishing immigrant's success,
Miller's mother
constantly humiliated his father, both before and after he'd lost his
money and his business, demeaning his social status and self-esteem:
"The children regularly overheard their mother belittling Izzy for his
grubby ladies' clothing company, his coarse associates, his educational
shortcomings and his inability to appreciate
the finer things
"
¹
– which
of course he had provided. Though Miller loved his father, he inevitably
adopted his mother's condescending and critical attitude. "I couldn't
help blushing for him," he recalled, "when she made him her target,
since I admired his warm and gentle nature as much as I despaired of
his illiterate mind." For Isidore, after the crash, "there would never be
a recovery of dignity and self-assurance, only an endless death-in-life
down to the end." Arthur, as a teenager and young man, felt pity and
contempt for his father and scarcely spoke to him. He said they were
isolated "like two searchlights on different islands. I had no animosity
toward him. I simply had no great relationship with him." But Marilyn,
always in search of a father, would develop a powerful bond with her
ignorant but warmly responsive father-in-law.

Miller described his mother Augusta (known as "Gussy") as warm
and nice, musical and a lively storyteller – as well as high strung and
subject to sudden fits of depression. After Isidore's financial collapse
and their descent from the luxurious life of Manhattan to a modest
dwelling in Brooklyn, Gussy had to sell her furs and pawn her jewelry.
The once glamorous and well-dressed woman turned into a slovenly
and lethargic Hausfrau, shuffling around in crushed-back slippers. She
only seemed to revive when condemning her husband for ruining
her family and destroying her life. Like most modern American writers,
from Hemingway and Fitzgerald to Lowell and Berryman, Miller had
a strong mother and weak father.

Miller entered manhood in the 1930s, and formed his political and
cultural views after witnessing the threatening events of that low,
dishonest decade: the rise of fascism, the economic hardships of the
Depression, the heartbreaking defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish
Civil War, the spread of Nazism throughout Europe and the plague
of anti-Semitism. After graduating from high school in 1933, Miller
took a job to earn money for college. He made fifteen dollars a week
at Chadick-Delameter, "the largest wholesale auto parts warehouse
east of the Mississippi, an old firm that sold to retail parts stores and
garages all over the eastern seaboard."
²
The huge warehouse – with
a dour, pasty-faced boss and Miller the only Jew in the firm – stood
on the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 63rd Street. Thirty years
later, Lincoln Center was built on the site and Miller's plays were
produced there.

His father wanted Arthur to attend City College in New York,
where tuition was free and he could live at home, and to follow him
into the coat business. But Arthur held out for the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied from 1934 to 1938. He
said he chose it because it was the only college in America that offered
a playwriting course and gave prize money for the best student plays.
In fact, George Pierce Baker had been teaching his famous playwriting
courses – to students like Eugene O'Neill, Philip Barry and
Sidney Howard – at both Harvard and Yale since 1908. Michigan
had twice rejected Miller because he'd repeatedly failed algebra
and had a poor academic record. But an enlightened dean of admissions
reversed his decision after Miller sent several letters arguing that he'd
been working for two years, and was now more mature and serious
about academic life.

In the 1930s the university was a radical outpost in the generally
conservative Midwest. The energetic Miller washed dishes in a cafeteria
in exchange for meals and supported himself on the fifteen
dollars a month (a quarter of his warehouse salary) he earned by
feeding mice in a cancer research laboratory. After classes he worked
as night editor at the
Michigan Daily
. His main expenses were for
room, laundry, tobacco, books and movies. At Michigan Miller met
his first wife, the Catholic, idealistic and high-principled
Mary Grace
Slattery. "The first time I saw him," she recalled, "he came toward
me, ducking overhead heating pipes. . . . When he did notice me, he
asked for a date. I proposed a movie, but he didn't have any money.
I treated to the movies, and afterwards to malted milks."

E.M. Halliday, then a graduate student and later a college professor,
described an extraordinary incident that revealed Mary's sexual innocence
and naïveté as well as her desire to appear sophisticated and
free-spirited. On a rainy spring night, Mary and her close friend
Hedda Rowinski unexpectedly knocked on the door of Halliday and
his roommate
Bhain Campbell. The women were invited in and, after
considerable awkwardness and hesitation, Hedda shocked Halliday
with a bold proposal:

This is kind of embarrassing, but we couldn't think of what else
to do. You know I've been seeing a lot of
Norman [Rosten],
and Mary has been seeing a lot of Art, and things are getting –
well, things are getting kind of serious. The thing is, I'm still a
virgin – which is probably no surprise to you – and Mary is,
too. And Norman and Art want to go to bed with us; but we
think
they
think we're women of the world, and we're afraid
they'll be disillusioned if they find out we're so innocent. So we
wondered if you and Bhain. . . .

But just as friends! No complications; just as friends! You like
me, and I know that Bhain likes Mary; and you both like Norman
and Art. We thought if you'd just – well, you know, show us
how it's
done
? We don't want to seem stupid about it when the
time comes with
them
. We wouldn't
tell
them about it, of course.

Halliday, gallantly refusing their enticing offer, told them, "I was sure
their maiden condition would not be scorned by Norman and Art,
who undoubtedly loved them." Miller's previous experience seems to
have been limited to an encounter with a prostitute when he was
sixteen. But both college girls, thinking their boyfriends and potential
lovers would be disappointed by virgins and prefer women of the
world, sweetly credited the men with more
savoir faire
than they really
had.

Miller's first visit to Mary's family in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of
Cleveland, was like the scene in
Annie Hall
when Woody Allen visits
Diane Keaton's hostile and demented Christian family in Wisconsin.
Mary's father, a retired boiler inspector for the city of Cleveland, was
both stupid and crude. He spat tobacco juice onto the front lawn
while his embarrassed wife almost groaned in despair and the dourly
humorous Miller tried to pretend nothing had happened. He found
Mary's mother absurdly pious and extremely repressed. Though he
and Mary – after surmounting the hurdle of virginity – had lived
together in Ann Arbor, he had to maintain propriety by sleeping in
a rented room.

Mary's first visit, in August 1938, to his more tolerant family was
not quite as traumatic: "For a while it did not go down well, but
pretty soon they got used to her and she to them. She, in any case,
was not a practicing Catholic by then. It was far more difficult for
her parents because they were still very devout and I was a heathen.

Actually, that is part of the ceremony. There are special ceremonies
for Mohammedans, heathens and Jews who marry Catholics. You are
not married in the church and you have to get a special dispensation
from the church in order to do that."
³

Mary, a year behind Miller, made one of her many sacrifices by
dropping out of the University of Michigan and moving to New
York with him when he graduated in 1938. Marilyn's biographer
Maurice Zolotow wrote that Mary "was political, literary, intense in
the style of the 1930s, and she was . . . the family intellectual. She had
been Miller's creative inspiration, his economic support. She had worked
as a waitress and later as an editor . . . to support him while he
established himself as a writer." But Miller's friends and family found
Mary (who remains a shadowy figure in
Timebends
) rather stern and
withdrawn. Kazan's daughter called her "a rather joyless creature . . .
a skinny, silent, disapproving figure"; and Joan Copeland described
her as "upright, a straight arrow, even if a little bit cool, not
emotional."
⁴

Mary also worked at a magazine for China specialists called
Amerasia
.
The magazine argued, during the Chinese civil war, that Mao Tsetung's
victory over Chiang Kai-shek was inevitable, even desirable,
and that America's support of Chiang was futile and foolish. In 1945
extracts of classified reports written by the OSS (the wartime intelligence
agency and forerunner of the CIA) were unaccountably
published in the magazine.
Amerasia
's prediction about Mao turned
out to be correct, but Miller was inevitably associated, through Mary,
with backing the Communists during the Cold War.

After living together for two more years in Brooklyn, Arthur and
Mary finally married on August 5, 1940. Their daughter,
Jane, was
born in 1944 and their son,
Robert, three years later. When a nursemaid
moved in with the family after Robert's birth, Miller wryly
remarked, "there are so many women in the house, I spend half my
time raising the toilet seat." A few years later, as their marriage began
to disintegrate, Mary desperately tried to stay youthful. Miller, self-absorbed
as always, told the English author
James Stern that he was
puzzled about her dance-and-exercise class, but never bothered to
question her about it: "Mary is taking some kind of lessons in body
movement or some damned thing. I always forget to ask her what
it's about. But she does it in a class every week and is convinced she
is growing younger." Despite their estrangement and eventual divorce,
Miller did his best work toward the end of their sixteen-year marriage,
and wrote very little during his tempestuous years with Marilyn.

The young Miller was inspired to become a dramatist, while a student
at the University of Michigan, after seeing a Chicago production of
Clifford Odets' play about a troubled Jewish family,
Awake and Sing!
(1935). Miller had tremendous energy, ambition and desire to learn
his craft. For a decade after graduating from college, he turned out
many failures before suddenly achieving great fame with
All My Sons
(1947) and
Death of a Salesman
(1949). His dozen or more plays, which
were never produced, included two that won prestigious Hopwood
Awards at Michigan (the first,
No Villain
, was twice revised and also
won a Theater Guild Award); a satiric comedy,
Listen My Children
, in
collaboration with Norman Rosten; and a historical play,
The Golden
Years
, about Montezuma, Cortés and the destruction of Mexico by
the Spanish
conquistadores
. When America entered World War II he
was rejected for military service because of a knee injury he'd received
in a football game, so he tried to justify his existence by writing
several radio plays on patriotic themes. His first play on Broadway,
The Man Who Had All the Luck
, portrayed a character who feels guilty
about his success and is convinced that he's heading for disaster. It
had a terrible reception and closed after only four performances in
November 1944.

Miller (like Marilyn) aided the war effort by
manual labor. From
1941 to 1943 he worked thirteen out of every fourteen nights, from
four in the afternoon to four in the morning, in the ship-fitting
department of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Like many other workers,
Miller was unskilled and was surprised when the ships they'd worked
on actually stayed afloat:

Whenever a drydock was finally flooded and a ship instead of
sinking floated safely into the harbor and sailed out into the bay,
I was not the only one who stared at it thinking it miraculous
that out of our chaos and incompetence, our bumbling and
goofing off and our thefts . . . we had managed to repair it. More
than one man would turn to another and say, "How the hell'd
it happen?" as the ship vanished into the morning mists and the
war.
⁵