The Genius and the Goddess (2 page)

This book is based on a substantial amount of new information.
Between 1981 and 1998 I had nine long talks with Arthur Miller and
took thorough notes immediately afterwards. He also sent me many
letters. I've studied his papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center in the University of Texas at Austin; his letters to
Saul Bellow in the University of Chicago Library; his unpublished
screenplay,
The Hook
, in the Lilly Library, Indiana University; his unpublished
last play,
Finishing the Picture
, in the Goodman Theatre in Chicago
(courtesy of Julie Massey); and a copy of his will in the Roxbury,
Connecticut, Probate Court.

I've read the papers of Charles Feldman in the American Film
Institute in Los Angeles; of John Huston and George Cukor in the
Margaret Herrick Library, American Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; of Ben Hecht in the Newberry
Library, Chicago; of Spyros Skouras, the president of Twentieth
Century-Fox, in Stanford University (courtesy of Polly Armstrong);
and the unpublished memoir of Natasha Lytess in Texas. I've studied
the papers of Joseph Rauh, and the letters of Dr. Ralph Greenson to
Anna Freud, in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the extensive
FBI files on both Miller and Monroe; material from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in New York (courtesy of Kathy Kienholz);
and the files about Marilyn's tour in Korea in the National Archives,
College Park, Maryland (courtesy of Paul Brown). The library of the
University of California, Berkeley, a major source for all my work
since the 1960s, has been enormously helpful.

These unpublished papers illuminate Marilyn's relations with her
acting teacher, her agent and her psychiatrist; her roles in
The Asphalt
Jungle
,
The Misfits
and
Something's Got to Give
; her quarrels with the
studio; her ghostwritten autobiography; her trip to Korea; and her
appearance when Miller received a Gold Medal for Drama in 1959.
There's also new material in this book about Miller's testimony before
the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI's reports
on his political engagement.

I interviewed Angela Allen, John Huston's script supervisor on
The
Misfits
;Walter Bernstein, one of the screenwriters of
Something's Got
to Give
; the actress Joan Copeland, Miller's sister; Brian Dennehy, who
starred in
Death of a Salesman
; Patricia Rosten Filan, the daughter
of Miller's close friends; Lydia Kaim and the poet William Jay Smith, of
the American Academy in New York;Walter Mirisch, the producer
of
Some Like It Hot
; Don Murray, the co-star of
Bus Stop
; and Curtice
Taylor, son of the producer of
The Misfits
, who gave me a vivid
account of Marilyn in Connecticut. I had conversations about Miller
and Monroe, before I began work on this book, with their old friends,
most of them now gone: Jack Cardiff, Dorris Johnson, Gloria Mosolino
Jones, Evelyn Keyes, Joseph Mankiewicz, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Budd
Schulberg, Robert Stack, Richard Widmark and Billy Wilder. Other
actors and friends refused to be interviewed: Lauren Bacall, Jeanne
Carmen, Cyd Charisse, Tony Curtis, Faye Dunaway, Celeste Holm,
Kevin McCarthy, Patricia Newcomb, Mickey Rooney, Jane Russell,
Stefanie Skolsky and Audrey Wilder.

I had phone talks with Severio DiMaggio, Joshua Greene, Daniel
Greenson and Mary Slattery Miller; and letters from Michael Adler
(for Anna Strasberg), Edward Albee, Agnes Barley, Adam Bellow, Sondra
Bellow (who described Miller's residence in Nevada while waiting
for his divorce), Martin Cribbs, Jane Miller Doyle, Tony Huston, Gail
Levin, Richard Meryman, Robert Miller, Edward Parone, Elizabeth
Paterson, Lawrence Schiller, Eli Wallach and Gareth Wigan; as well as
from the John F. Kennedy Library, Mills College, UCLA Library and
Wesleyan University Library. Stacy Kit was helpful during my visit to
Hollygrove, formerly the Los Angeles Orphans Home Society.

Dr. Ellen Alkon, Dr. Michael Aminoff, Dr. Joel Fort, Dr. Henry
Lee, Dr. Mario Papagni and Dr. Alan Skolnikoff advised me about
Marilyn's medical problems. I'm grateful to other friends who provided
addresses, books, photographs, information and unpublished material:
Rudy Behlmer, Mary Berg, Enoch Brater, Leo Braudy, Barnaby
Conrad, Frederick Crews, LeAnn Fields, Laurence Goldstein, Ronald
Hayman, Valerie Hemingway, Charlene Hess, Sylvia Howe, Francis
King, Michael Korda, Neal Kozodoy, Ellen Nims, Susan Rabens, Carl
Rollyson, Michael Scammell, Philip and Ellen Siegelman, James
Spohrer, Gail Steinbeck, Stephen Tabachnick and Victoria Wilson.

As always, my wife, Valerie Meyers, assisted with the archival research,
read and improved each chapter, and compiled the index.

For
Paul and Ellen Alkon

For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright.

W.B. Yeats,
"Never Give All the Heart"

In January 1951 Arthur Miller and his close friend, the director Elia
Kazan, took a train from New York to Los Angeles. They wanted
to sell his first screenplay,
The Hook
, to
Harry Cohn at
Columbia Pictures.
The tall, handsome, thirty-five-year old
Miller was a serious
young man, married with two young children, and the author of two
enormously successful plays. In Hollywood he would face two moral
crises: negotiating with Cohn over the content of his screenplay and
falling in love with
Marilyn Monroe. When they met she was an insecure
and little-known model and actress; by the time they married
five years later she had become a glamorous star whose image was
known all over the world. They wrote to each other during those
years, as she pursued her career in Hollywood and he struggled to
maintain his marriage in New York. She was briefly married to
Joe
DiMaggio in 1954, yet told a friend, just as she was marrying DiMaggio,
that one day she would marry Miller. They were a most unlikely
couple, yet on their first meeting they formed an emotional bond
that survived their long separation.

Kazan played a key role in Miller's relations with both Cohn and
Marilyn. The two friends, both passionate about politics and the
theater, were temperamentally very different. Miller was a shy intellectual
from a solid Jewish family in New York. Kazan, a few years
older – short, energetic and intense, with dark curly hair, roughhewn
features and a Levantine look – had been born into a poor
Greek family in Constantinople. Brought to America when he was
four years old, he had made his way in the world through his talent
and ambition. He'd graduated from Williams College, and in the
1930s had been an actor and director in the left-wing Group Theater,
joined the Communist Party and helped found the influential Actors
Studio. In 1951 Kazan was the coming man in Hollywood and New
York. He'd directed the films
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
,
Gentleman's
Agreement
and
Boomerang
(in which Miller appeared in a line-up of
criminal suspects). He'd also achieved spectacular success on Broadway,
directing Tennessee Williams'
A Streetcar Named Desire
as well as the
plays that established Miller's reputation:
All My Sons
(1947) and
Death of a Salesman
(1949).

The FBI took a keen interest in Miller and Kazan, as they had in
many leading writers and intellectuals since the 1930s. They particularly
monitored the political content of Hollywood films, which
exerted tremendous influence on public opinion. According to Miller's
typically pedantic and inaccurate
FBI file, compiled because of his
left-wing political views, "In early 1951, according to — [name blanked
out], Harry Cohn, President of Columbia Pictures, Inc. Hollywood,
California, obtained a story entitled, 'The Hook,' from Arthur Miller,
for $50,000." Miller and Kazan knew that the script, about a doomed
attempt by New York longshoremen to overthrow the gangsters who
controlled their union, would be controversial. But Kazan, who had
many contacts in Hollywood, also knew that Cohn had grown up
on the waterfront and had the reputation of a maverick. Kazan thought
that if Miller went with him to Hollywood to pitch the idea, they
might convince him to make the film.

But Cohn, after consulting
Roy Brewer, the leader of the Hollywood
unions and personal friend of the head of the longshoremen's union,
demanded radical changes. He said that Miller's script was anti-
American, even treasonable, and that the gangsters had to be portrayed
as communists. Kazan, who'd left the Party and become a staunch
anti-communist, saw nothing wrong with this response. But Miller
flatly refused to falsify his script and turn it into propaganda. After
Miller had finally left Hollywood in disgust, he received an insulting
telegram from Cohn: "IT'S INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE
WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU
PULL OUT." This was the first (but not the last) time that he would
get into trouble about the political content of his work. It was also
the first crisis in his
friendship with Kazan.

The studios had turned out anti-Axis propaganda during World War
II and during the Cold War felt obliged to make anti-communist
movies. Paranoid about the Russian threat, the United States government
pressured the studio heads to make films that expressed the
prevailing political views, and eventually supported Senator
Joseph
McCarthy's persecution and purges of left-wing writers and actors. In
turn the movie industry exerted pressure on writers and directors.
Miller and Kazan were prominent players in the 1950s conflict between
artists and the government forces that tried to control them.

Marilyn Monroe had recently advanced her career with small but
significant roles in two first-rate films:
The
Asphalt Jungle
and
All About
Eve
(both 1950), but she was still playing bit parts in trivial movies.
Miller first saw her on the Twentieth Century-Fox set of a fatuous
comedy,
As Young as You Feel
. She had a small stereotyped part as a
sexy but inept secretary, with pencil poised above her pad. (Anyone
could type, but no one looked liked Marilyn.) Miller recalled that
she was talking to Kazan (always on the lookout for a pretty and
obliging girl) and weeping about the recent death of her lover, agent
and protector
Johnny Hyde. She was "telling Kazan that
Hyde had
died while calling her name in a hospital room she had been forbidden
by his family to enter." In fact, Marilyn was shopping in Tijuana when
Hyde passed away in Palm Springs on December 18, 1950. Though
excluded from the funeral, not the hospital, she managed to bluff her
way into the service at Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Marilyn's clichéd account of the dying Hyde calling for her in the
forbidden hospital, like a scene in a B-movie, suggests that she was still
publicly grieving about Hyde a month after his death. It's more likely
that she was crying about her own career, now more uncertain than
ever without Hyde's crucial help, or about her poor performance in
her current film. She complained that the director had ignored and
insulted her. She may also have been weeping to attract the attention
and arouse the sympathy of Kazan and Miller, and to make herself even
more appealing to them. If so, she was more convincing in this role
than the one in the movie. Miller poignantly recalled that "she was
so striking and so terribly sad that the combination struck me"
¹
– as
it was meant to.

Miller and Kazan had been invited to stay in the lavish home of
the attractive, suave
Charles Feldman, who'd produced the film version
of
A Streetcar Named Desire
. Feldman told them, following Hyde's
demise, that Marilyn was up for grabs and both men were keenly
interested. Miller invited her to a party at Feldman's house and,
behaving like a real gentleman, insisted on picking her up instead of
letting her come on her own by taxi. He was a good dancer and she
was clearly delighted as he whirled her around the room. When they
sat down to talk, he gently squeezed her toe – a kind of seductive
acupressure – and she took his timid approach as a sign of respect.
He told her that his marriage was collapsing, that he'd been terribly
unhappy for several years and that he was now completely alienated
from his wife. But a man on the make always claims his marriage is
unhappy, and he'd gallantly picked her up so he could also take her
home. An uninhibited hedonist, always willing, even eager, to sleep
with men she liked or she thought could help her, Marilyn probably
tried to seduce him that night.

In his self-serving autobiography, Kazan was more frank and perceptive
than Miller himself about his friend's relations with Marilyn.
Though Kazan didn't mention that he too was eager to seduce her,
he called her "a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood had brought
down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for
acceptance by people she might look up to." Marilyn's sexual humiliations
made her especially responsive to Miller's dignified restraint.
She confided to Kazan that "Art was
shy and this pleased her after
all the mauling she'd taken. She said that Art was terribly unhappy
in his home life. She'd certainly opened him up." Deeply moved by
their first meeting, she gushed poetically to her acting teacher, Natasha
Lytess: "It was like running into a tree! You know – like a cool drink
when you've got a fever. You see my toe – this toe? Well, he sat and
held my toe and we just looked into each other's eyes almost all
evening."
²
Their gestures and expressions were more meaningful than
words.

Miller was a leading playwright – intelligent, moral and respected;
Marilyn (no doubt, unfairly) was considered just another stupid, vulgar
and sluttish starlet. Though his father had lost everything in the
Depression, Miller grew up in a secure family. Marilyn's broken family
had almost nothing to lose, and during the thirties she'd led a miserable
life in an orphanage and with a series of harsh foster families.
Miller's mother had been forced to sell her lamps, tables and carpets,
but had refused to part with her piano – her last connection to the
middle class. Marilyn's mother had lost her precious white piano,
which her daughter later managed to recover, and placed in the luxurious
white décor of a flashy New York apartment. But, like Marilyn,
Miller had worked in a humble factory job during the war. He
instinctively sympathized with her impoverished
background and her
desire to escape to a better life.

Miller's feelings for Marilyn – romantic infatuation compounded
with adulterous guilt – were conflicted from the start. He believed
that with no place to go and no one to go to she needed his
protection. He noted her childish voracity (which would one day
destroy him) and desperately wanted to help and possess her, but felt
he had to leave Hollywood immediately or "lose himself" and his
old life for ever. Thus began a long inner struggle between his fierce
attraction to Marilyn, made up of lust and pity, and his need to maintain
his moral stature and role as a faithful husband. Like the dignified
Emil Jannings, bewitched by Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel
, he
eventually found her sexuality irresistible.

Miller later described Marilyn's traumatic background, which would
make her difficult, and finally impossible, to live with:"she had a crazy
mother. That is not a good start; her mother was quite mad. She was
a paranoid schizophrenic who ended up spending half her life in an
institution. The mother tried to kill her three times and [Marilyn]
was convinced that she was a worthless creature because she was illegitimate."
Marilyn constantly sought sympathy by exaggerating her
miserable childhood. In fact, her grandmother (not her mother) may
have tried to kill her once (not three times). But Miller was moved
by her sad account. As the cowboy Bo tells Cherie (played by Marilyn)
in
Bus Stop
: "I like ya like ya are, Cherie, so I don't care how you
got that way."

Kazan – himself blissfully free of bourgeois scruples – carefully
observed Miller struggling between Marilyn's liberating sexuality and
his own intolerable remorse. He was subject, Kazan wrote, to that
"domestic peril which results when certain ties of restraint that a
middle-class man has always lived with are snapped. . . . He respected
the moral law, but he must also have found it constricting to a suddenly
reawakened side of his nature: the life of the senses." Miller had sought
relief from his problems in psychoanalysis, but his sessions with the
analyst intensified rather than relieved his repression, and made him
distraught and ill. His life, he told
Kazan, "seemed to be all conflict
and tension, thwarted desires, stymied impulses, bewildering but
unexpressed conflicts. 'What a waste!' he cried. . . . He had sex on his
mind, constantly. He was starved for sexual release." After ten years
of marriage, "Art was on the verge of something disruptive, and [his
wife]
Mary could only wait and prepare to apply moral sanctions
when the inevitable happened."
³

Though married and with children himself, Kazan – a charismatic
seducer – was consistently unfaithful to his wife. While Miller gently
held Marilyn's toe, the lusty Greek boldly took her to bed and grabbed
all the rest. At Feldman's house she spent her nights with Kazan while
Miller, tortured by jealousy, writhed alone in a nearby room and faced
the contented couple over breakfast the next morning. Kazan later
revealed that during their liaison, early in 1951, Marilyn became
pregnant by him and had a miscarriage. Toward the end of her life,
Marilyn had fond memories of her old lover and recalled, "Kazan
said I was the gayest girl he ever knew and believe me, he has known
many. But he
loved
me for one year and once rocked me to sleep one
night when I was in great anguish. He also suggested that I go into
analysis and later wanted me to work with Lee Strasberg." Ironically,
Marilyn's sexual relations with Kazan intensified Miller's bond with
his friend, made her seem more desirable than ever, and stimulated
Miller to take her from him.

In the midst of all this sexual rivalry, Marilyn took a cameo part
in the protracted but futile negotiations with Cohn over
The Hook
.
Kazan thought it would be amusing for her to reprise her movie role
as secretary, equipped with heavy spectacles and stenographer's pad,
and accompany Kazan and Miller to Cohn's office. In 1948, as a young
starlet under contract to Columbia, she had to have sex with Cohn.
As all three men lusted after her, with Miller the odd man out, the
sexual tension was palpable.

A few of the love letters that Miller wrote to Marilyn, after he
returned to New York and she remained in Hollywood, have survived.
Sensing her vulnerability and her essential innocence (despite her
sordid past), he sent paternal advice about how to protect herself
while advancing her career: "Bewitch them (the public) with this
image they ask for, and I hope and almost pray you won't be hurt
in this game, nor ever change." Kazan recalled a rapturous letter of
1951 in which Miller confessed that before he left Hollywood Marilyn
had given him his long-sought sexual fulfillment: