The Genius and the Goddess (16 page)

14. Marilyn, signed studio photo, 1956

15. Marilyn in
The Seven Year Itch
, 1955

16. Marilyn and DiMaggio
at premiere of
The Seven
Year Itch
, June 1955

Toward the end of 1954, after her failed marriage to DiMaggio,
Marilyn went to New York to study with Lee Strasberg at the
Actors Studio, and to resume her liaison with Miller. She moved from
her native city and the fake glamor of the unintellectual movie industry,
into a completely different culture – literary, theatrical and highbrow.
She understood Hollywood and had made her career there; now,
financially and emotionally dependent on Milton and Amy Greene,
she was starting again. As she tried to enter this unfamiliar society,
she made daily visits to a psychoanalyst and took classes with a famous
teacher to improve her acting skills. She was lonely until she met
Miller, who belonged to this world and helped – as companion, guide
and teacher – to bring her into it. He, in turn, was fascinated by
Marilyn's extraordinary power to attract and interest eminent writers.

It was difficult for her to contact him, since he worked at home.
The photographer Sam Shaw introduced her to Miller's college friend,
Norman Rosten, who told Miller she was in town, and they finally
met at one of Strasberg's theatrical parties in June 1955. Miller, meanwhile,
still trying to stay out of the emotional vortex and sustain a
marriage destroyed by "mutual intolerance," was torn between desire
and guilt: "I no longer knew what I wanted – certainly not the end
of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life
was unbearable." So he renewed his secret courtship in a series of
romantic settings: the Greenes' country house in Weston, Connecticut;
the Rostens' summer cottage in Port Jefferson, Long Island; the
Strasbergs' summer place on Fire Island; and Marilyn's posh suite high
up in the Waldorf Tower.

Mary Miller's reaction to her husband's relationship with Marilyn
helped propel him into his eventual marriage to Monroe. Mary had
renounced her Catholic faith, shared Miller's left-wing politics, and
tried psychoanalysis in an attempt to understand and perhaps solve
their problems. In October 1955 she discovered that Miller was
having an affair. Their son Robert, then eight years old, later remembered
that there was a lot of anger and tension in the air and that
he tried in vain to play the peacemaker. Mary, who'd made many
sacrifices in the early years of their marriage while her husband
struggled for success, was both wounded by his infidelity and furious
about his betrayal. She threw him out of the house; and he moved
into the Chelsea Hotel, a refuge for bohemians and artists, on West
23rd Street.

Kazan, sympathizing with Miller, described the tense situation that
followed: "Month after month he'd begged Mary to take him back,
but she couldn't bring herself to forgive her husband. . . . He'd been
doing his best to hold their marriage together, but according to him,
his wife was behaving in a bitterly vengeful manner." Miller's sister,
Joan Copeland, said the break-up of his marriage came as a big
surprise:

I would hear snippets of rumors but I'd just pooh-pooh it because
when you're in that position of celebrity, people are going to
say and write all sorts of terrible things about you. So I was
guarded against any kind of malicious rumor. I just didn't believe
it and I didn't ask Mary or Arthur about it. But Marilyn would
search me out at the [Actors] Studio and we'd have lunch, talk
about scenes. I guess she was trying to curry my favor, or maybe
she just liked me.
¹

Miller finally decided to get a divorce in Nevada, which was much
easier to obtain than in New York. In order to qualify, he had to
reside in the state for six weeks.
Saul Bellow was already living out
there, divorcing his first wife in order to marry his second. On March
15, 1956, at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Pascal Covici, Miller
wrote to Bellow. He asked for advice and, in a bit of one-upmanship,
expressed pride in possessing the woman whom millions of other
men longed for:

Congratulations. Pat Covici tells me you are to be married. That
is quite often a good idea.

I am going out there around the end of the month to spend
the fated six weeks and have no idea where to live. I have a
problem, however, of slightly unusual proportions. From time to
time there will be a visitor who is very dear to me, but who is
unfortunately recognizable by approximately a hundred million
people, give or take three or four. She has all sorts of wigs, can
affect a limp, sunglasses, bulky coats, etc., but if it is possible I
want to find a place, perhaps a bungalow or something like,
where there are not likely to be crowds looking in through the
windows. Do you know of any such place?

Bellow was then living in one of two isolated cabins on Sutcliffe
Star Route, on the western shore of Pyramid Lake, and in due course
Miller rented the one next door. Both the cabins and the lake, about
forty miles north of Reno, were on the Paiute Indian reservation. In
those days there was almost no one else around, and the lunar landscape
seemed just the way it was when the world was first created.
Ten years earlier,
Edmund Wilson had stayed in Minden, south of
Reno, while waiting for his divorce. He'd amused himself in that
debauched and dehydrated part of the world by exploring the desert,
lakes and wildflowers, walking around the pleasant town square and
doing a bit of gambling. In a letter to Vladimir Nabokov, he described
it as "a queer and desolate country – less romantic than prehistoric
and spooky."

A motel near the cabins had once put up people waiting for a
divorce, but now housed only the owners, who had the only pay
phone between the cabins and Reno. When a call came, they'd drive
over to summon one of the self-absorbed writers to the outside world.
The companionable highlight of the week was the drive to Reno in
Bellow's Chevy to do their laundry and buy groceries for their spartan
meals. Bellow stayed longer than the required six weeks, with his new
bride
Sondra Tschacbasov, in order to continue work on his novel
Henderson the Rain King
. (His second marriage lasted only three years,
and he would satirize his ex-wife as Madeleine in
Herzog
.)

In a letter of May 12, 1956 to his college teacher Kenneth Rowe,
Miller emphasized his strange isolation: "There is no living soul nor
tree nor shrub above the height of the sagebrush. I am not counting
my neighbors, Saul Bellow, the novelist, and his wife, because they
are on my side against the lunar emptiness around us." Miller recalled
that Bellow, in a Reichian catharsis, liked to scream into the landscape:
"Saul would sometimes spend half an hour up behind a hill a
half-mile from the cottages emptying his lungs roaring at the stillness,
an exercise in self-contact."

Sondra Bellow – who rode horses from the dude ranch into the
hills behind the house – recalled that the two writers did not, as one
might expect, have intense and stimulating conversations:

Miller came out perhaps in mid- or late May for his six-week
residency. We overlapped maybe three weeks at most, since we left
Nevada the beginning of June. The conversations with Miller at
that time were less than fascinating, at least from a literary point
of view. He talked a bit about his marriage and how difficult it
was to make the decision to get a divorce. But his attention was
almost totally focused on Marilyn Monroe. He talked non-stop
about her – her career, her beauty, her talent, even her perfect feet.
He showed us the now famous photos by Milton Greene – all
quite enlightening since neither Mr. Bellow nor I had ever even
heard of her before this. To my disappointment, Monroe was filming
Bus Stop
at the time, and never did get to visit Miller in Nevada.

I actually spent more time with Miller than did Bellow, who
dedicated much of his day to writing, and believe me, conversation
was not at all literary, as you can surmise from the above.
Miller occupied himself mornings in his cabin, and also spent a
huge amount of time talking (presumably to Monroe) on the
only available telephone in the area. This was a pay telephone
booth a half mile away on a dirt road used primarily – and
rarely – by hunters traveling north. He and I would spend some
afternoons together – sightseeing, or going into Reno, or hiking
around Pyramid Lake. He generally had dinner with us, during
which he repeated all the Marilyn stories he had already told
me during the day.

I believe the "bond" between [Bellow and Miller] at this time
had much less to do with their being writers, and more to do
with their being in somewhat the same place in terms of ending
a long-term marriage and starting anew with a much younger
woman. I never heard a single literary exchange between them.

They sort of metaphorically circled each other, and pawed
the ground. You just knew it from their body language. They
told jokes – especially shaggy dog stories with a Yiddish flavor
– and gossiped rather than have significant conversation.

Miller had all those Hollywood connections that Bellow would
have felt was "selling out." But it was fun to hear his stories. He
also thought Miller was not a real intellectual (like the
Partisan
Review
crowd). Bellow came from a rabbinical intellectual tradition
and Miller's father didn't read or write but had his wife
help him.

Miller also was soon to be testifying in Washington before
the House Un-American Activities Committee, but there was
little substantive discussion about this as well, mostly because
Miller was caught up in the Monroe romance, and also, in part,
because Bellow and Miller had very different political philosophies.
[Bellow was a Trotskyite at the time and Miller was not.]
²

Miller and Bellow were both born in 1915 to Jewish immigrant
parents. Bellow had reviewed Miller's novel,
Focus
(1945), in the
New
Republic
and thought the sudden transformation of the main character
from Jew-hater to a man who accepts his enforced identity as
a Jew was unconvincing: "The whole thing is thrust on him. . . . Mr.
Newman's heroism has been clipped to his lapel. . . . If only he had
had more substance to begin with." Miller accepted the criticism and
didn't hold it against him. He published his short story, "Please Don't
Kill Anything," in Bellow's little magazine, the
Noble Savage
, and later
commended Bellow's work: "I like everything he writes. He still has
a joy in writing. . . . He is a genius. . . . He's kind of a psychic journalist
– which is invaluable. He's just simply interesting. . . . His work
seems necessary, which is high praise. It seems to mark the moment."
Bellow won the Nobel Prize, Miller did not, which may account for
his rather patronizing tone.

Miller didn't spend all his time with his companions at Pyramid
Lake. Marilyn, working on
Bus Stop
, never visited him in Nevada. But
Miller, risking the loss of continuous residence that was required for
his divorce, secretly slipped into Los Angeles for a series of romantic
encounters on Sunset Boulevard. (The FBI, tracking Miller's movements,
knew he was leaving Nevada to see Marilyn.) Amy Greene
recalled that "Arthur would come out on weekends . . . they'd lock
themselves up at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. He would arrive on
Friday, she would go to the Marmont that night, come back to us
Sunday night and she would be a mess on Monday. He was still
married and she would be upset because she couldn't show this man
off to everyone because he still had a wife and two children in
Brooklyn."

On June 2, after Bellow's departure, Miller told him that conditions
had radically changed at Pyramid Lake and described the
intrusive publicity that would both excite and plague them throughout
their marriage. Marilyn was protected by the studio, which controlled
access by the press. But Miller, though a famous playwright, had never
experienced such aggressive attention: "The front page of the [
New
York Daily
]
News
has us about to be married, and me 'readying' my
divorce here. All hell breaks loose. The [imported] phones all around
never stop ringing. Television trucks – (as I live!) – drive up, cameras
grinding, screams, yells – I say nothing, give them some pictures, retire
into the cabin. They finally go away."
³

Miller, not Mary, was granted a divorce on the grounds of her
extreme mental cruelty, but she exacted harsh terms and made him
pay dearly for his betrayal. She "was awarded custody of their two
children, Jane (b. 1944) and Robert (b. 1947), child support payments
(including rises in the cost of living), the house they had recently
bought on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights, plus a percentage of
all his future earnings until she remarried (she never did)."He managed
to keep their weekend house in Connecticut, but was responsible for
all her legal costs as well as his own. He felt guilty and was willing
to pay for his mistakes in order to marry Marilyn. Most of his friends
never saw Mary again. She just disappeared and seemed to be wiped
out of existence. During our conversation, Mary refused to discuss
her contribution to Miller's early success. I told her that she'd been
repeatedly characterized as a dull, boring, sexless wife who'd been
cast off when someone better turned up. Instead of defending herself,
she self-effacingly said: "Maybe I was."
⁴

Many men had slept with Marilyn, both before and after she'd become
a famous sex symbol, and thought nothing of abandoning her the
following day, but Miller was devoted to her and always treated her
with respect. He perceived her innocence beneath the sexy image,
found her waif-like quality appealing and instinctively felt sorry for
her. He thought she was opaque and mysterious – not at all the happy,
dizzy blonde – and wanted to rescue her from her profound misery.
At the same time, he saw her talent and realized he could write material
for her and about her. She was a personal and artistic challenge,
a tragic muse. She was also fascinating because she was so extraordinarily
desirable in the eyes of the world. Miller was famous, but
Marilyn was a phenomenon.