The Genius and the Goddess (24 page)

In August Miller also wrote Rauh that the workers renovating his
Connecticut house had followed his case, and celebrated his victory
with a bottle of whiskey and several cartons of beer. He couldn't resist
quoting a hypocritical letter he'd just received from Spyros Skouras
– the "spiral staircase" himself: "Let me be the first to congratulate
you on your acquittal by the U.S. Court. I am delighted with this
outcome to your long ordeal and I certainly admire the courage and
perseverance with which you met it. I cheerfully must concede that
I was wrong in my advice to you. Seriously, it is wonderful to know
that you have won out in the contempt proceedings." Miller, punning
on the title of Ibsen's play and calling Skouras a pillow of society, was
amused by this groveling if insincere apology and said the son of a
bitch must feel proud of his magnanimity.

Miller continued to correspond with Rauh for the next few years.
In November 1957, between his conviction and his successful appeal,
he agreed to introduce Rauh's speech to the American Civil Liberties
Union meeting in New Haven, Connecticut. He invited Rauh to
stay with him in his country house in Roxbury, and mentioned that
if Rauh flew up from Washington in a small plane, he could land on
a private airfield about a mile away. Miller said he'd gone back to his
writing and that Marilyn, who was also eager to see Rauh, sent her
extreme best regards.

In 1959, Miller finally sent a check for half his legal bill. He
mentioned how difficult it was to estimate his taxes because NBC
had tentatively offered to pay a small fortune for television rights
to
Death of a Salesman
and he didn't know if the deal would actually
come through. He said that after their successful appeal, other
witnesses had been convicted for
contempt of Congress and that
the committee was once again looking for blood. He urged Rauh,
if John Kennedy were elected president in November, to accept a
high judicial appointment and use his liberal influence in the courts.
In a letter of 1960, sent from Reno, Nevada, Miller apologized for
the late payment of Rauh's fee and promised to send it in the next
few days. He thought the Democratic presidential convention had
been a bit of a disaster, that Adlai Stevenson had seemed too
intellectual and other-worldly, but felt that Kennedy had been a
good choice. Both he and Marilyn were working hard on the
filming of
The Misfits
and hoped all their efforts would turn out
to be worthwhile.
¹⁶

Caught up in one of the most bizarre and disgraceful episodes of
American political history, Miller said his battle with the committee
was "a fraud and a farce, except it cost me a fortune [$40,000] for
lawyers and a year's time lost in the bargain, worrying about it and
figuring out how to react to it." When he was invited to Kennedy's
inauguration in January 1960, he joked that "it seemed strange to be
going [to Washington] without a lawyer."
¹⁷

Though it seems unlikely, Marilyn's two famous husbands had
quite a lot in common. DiMaggio was born in 1914, Miller a
year later, and both were more than a decade older than her. They
were tall and handsome, capable and conventional men, who felt sorry
for Marilyn and wanted to help and protect her. Both were powerful
authority figures who seemed able to provide the security she needed
as well as absolution for her illegitimate birth and sexual history.
Miller's theatrical triumphs from
All My Sons
to
The Crucible
were
the equivalent on Broadway of DiMaggio's spectacular hitting streak
in Yankee Stadium. But Marilyn's fame was greater than theirs. Her
marriage to DiMaggio had been good for
her
career; her marriage
to Miller would help
his
.

Both men took an active interest in her professional affairs. Though
they often had to hang around, with very little to do, while Marilyn
worked, she criticized them for ignoring her. She complained that
DiMaggio constantly watched television and that Miller was
completely immersed in his work – even when he was writing a
screenplay for
her
. DiMaggio thought Marilyn had no talent and
resented her absorption in acting. Miller admired her ability, encouraged
her and even participated in her career – though he hated
Strasberg as much as DiMaggio hated Lytess. Marilyn failed to interest
DiMaggio in serious books, but eagerly learned a lot about books
from Miller. She found DiMaggio too boring, Miller too intellectual;
she was too serious for DiMaggio, too ignorant for Miller.

DiMaggio loathed Marilyn's sexy outfits and wanted to keep her
entirely to himself. Miller liked her to reveal her sensual body and
was proud to share her with the public."Why shouldn't she show off
her God-given attributes?" he asked. "Why should she have to dress
like her maiden aunt?" Marilyn seemed to want with Miller the kind
of life that DiMaggio had wanted with her. "I hate [Hollywood], "
she told Miller. "I don't want it anymore. I want to live quietly in
the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for
myself anymore." She became close to her husbands' families, and after
her divorce from Joe traded spaghetti and pizza with the DiMaggios
for matzo balls and gefilte fish with the Millers.

DiMaggio was intensely jealous and even worried about imaginary
lovers; Miller ignored and tolerated her infidelities. DiMaggio
sometimes lost his temper and slapped her around; Miller always
contained his anger under the most extreme provocations. Like the
glamorous but essentially unhappy contemporary marriages of Jack
and Jackie Kennedy, Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, and (later on)
Prince Charles and Diana Spencer, the Miller-Marilyn marriage would
have one spouse who was notoriously unfaithful.

At the time of their wedding the thirty-year-old Marilyn was no
longer the unknown starlet whom Miller first met in January 1951.
Since then she'd become a world-famous superstar, been married to
a wealthy baseball hero, formed her own production company – and
was used to getting her own way with everyone. Except for brief
periods with Lytess, Karger, Shelley Winters, Greene and DiMaggio,
Marilyn had always lived alone. Her radical adjustment from a solitary
to a married life, and Miller's from a private to a very exposed
existence, was difficult for both of them.

After Miller announced their impending marriage, rumors quickly
spread about where and when it would take place, and the press
pursued them to rural Connecticut. In late June, Mara
Scherbatoff –
a forty-eight-year-old Russian princess and New York bureau chief
of the French weekly magazine
Paris-Match
– was killed in a car accident
on a winding country road close to Miller's house. He wrote
that Scherbatoff 's teenaged driver, chasing them at high speed, lost
control of his car: "Inquiring for my house from a neighbor, he had
mistaken a passing car for mine, roared off in pursuit, failed to make
this turn and collided with the tree. . . . Returning home later in the
afternoon, we came on a Chevrolet askew in the road a quarter of
a mile from the house, its front end mangled around this tree. We
stopped, and I got out and looked and saw a woman, stretched out
on the front seat, her neck obviously broken."

Miller ran back to help and Marilyn – hypersensitive to pain and
suffering – followed before he could stop her from witnessing the
grisly scene. They saw "the boy crumpled beneath the steering wheel.
Scherbatoff, in the passenger's seat, had been hurled partway through
the windshield. Her face was sliced open from the middle of her
lip to her forehead. Teeth were missing. Her chest was crushed, her
legs broken. Blood gushed from a severed artery in her throat. She
was crying softly." Marilyn helped pull the mangled reporter from
the car and got bloodstains on her clothes. A photo of the crash,
taken before the ambulance arrived, showed the smashed-in car, the
dazed and bloodied driver sitting on the ground near the tree and
the dying Scherbatoff stretched out under a blanket.
¹
Marilyn, hysterical
and horrified, had to be reassured that the accident was not her
fault.

Miller was furious at the press for hounding them so recklessly.
He told Bellow that photographers with telescopic lenses were perched
in (and nearly falling out of) the trees across the road from his house.
To put an end to the circus they decided to get married right away.
Their marriage, announced with the headline: "Egghead Weds
Hourglass," began with this fatal omen. Six hours after the car crash,
on June 29, 1956, the civil ceremony took place in the courthouse
in White Plains, New York. Two days later, they were married again in
a Jewish ceremony in the home of his longtime agent, Kay Brown,
in Katonah, New York.

By marrying Miller, Marilyn embraced a new Jewish identity that
was already familiar to her. Many of Marilyn's closest associates were
Jewish: not only Natasha Lytess, Joseph Schenck and Johnny Hyde,
but also Sidney Skolsky, Lee and Paula Strasberg, Milton Greene,
Norman Rosten, her agent Charles Feldman, her publicist
Arthur
Jacobs, her three analysts and most of her doctors. The actresses Carroll
Baker and Elizabeth Taylor had (or soon would) set a fashionable
precedent by changing their religion when they married Jewish
husbands, and Amy had converted when she married Milton Greene.
Marilyn told Susan Strasberg, "I can identify with the Jews. Everybody's
always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me." Acutely
aware that she did not have a family of her own and eager to join
the families of her husbands and friends, she converted to Judaism to
express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents.

Miller recalled that Marilyn's tuition in the mysteries of the Jewish
faith by Rabbi
Robert Goldberg (who also married them) was brief,
superficial, even surreal:

The rabbi was a reformed or liberal rabbi and he sat with Marilyn
for a couple of hours and that was it. I'm not religious, but she
wanted to be one of us and that was why she took some instruction.
I don't think you could say she became a Jewess, but still
she took it all very seriously. I would say she wanted to join me
and become part of my life. But her interest in talking to the
rabbi had about it an unreality to me.

Marilyn's perfunctory conversion resembled Rex Mottram's pro forma
conversion in
Evelyn Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited
(1945). In a great
hurry and not particularly concerned with the finer points of doctrine,
Rex tells the priest: " 'I'll become a Catholic. What does one have
to do? . . . I don't pretend to be a very devout man, nor much of a
theologian, but . . . a man needs a religion. If your Church is good
enough for [my fiancée] Julia, it's good enough for me.' . . . So Rex
was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for
his triumphs with obdurate catechumens."

Marilyn took the sacred vow from the Book of Ruth (1:16), one
of the most moving passages in the Old Testament, and swore fidelity
to the faith of her husband: "whither thou goest, I will go; and where
thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy
God my God." Her Certificate of Conversion stated that "Marilyn
Monroe, having sought to join the household of Israel by accepting
the religion of Israel and promising to live by its principles and practices,
was received into the Jewish faith on July 1, 1956."
²
While
married to Miller she'd sometimes sprinkle her talk with Yiddish
expressions – Hi
bubeleh
,
oy veh
, what
tsures
(rhymes with Skouras)
– to confirm her conversion and sense of belonging. When describing
her nude calendar, she said "there I am with my bare
tuchas
out."

None of Marilyn's family or Hollywood friends attended the Jewish
ceremony, as she stood under the bridal canopy and Miller crushed
the symbolic glass with his foot, nor appeared at the wedding reception
– at which, though strictly prohibited by Jewish law, lobster was
served. Lee Strasberg, a surrogate father, gave the bride away. Norman
Rosten, originally asked to be best man, was awkwardly replaced at
the last minute by Miller's brother, Kermit. The guests included Miller's
parents, his two children, Jane and Robert; Kermit and his wife, Miller's
sister Joan Copeland and her husband; his cousin Morton and his wife;
the Rostens, Greenes and Strasbergs, the agent Kay Brown and designer
John Moore. The "exclusive photos" were, as always, by Milton Greene.

Marilyn called herself a "Jewish atheist." After her divorce from
Miller, her Judaism was pretty much confined to a
mezuzah
on the
door frame and a rather kitschy "brass-plated musical menorah for
Hanukkah whose base played 'Hatikvah,' the Israeli national anthem."
When Marilyn converted to Judaism, Egypt retaliated by banning all
her movies. But in April 1961, right after her divorce, the United
Arab Republic – hoping to catch the biggest act since Verdi's
Aida
celebrated the opening of the Suez Canal – sent an urgent telegram
to Skouras requesting her presence "for inauguration light and sound
of pyramids and sphinx. All expenses to be borne by government."

On July 8 Miller wrote Bellow that Marilyn, trying hard to lead
a normal life, had turned into a real Hausfrau – cooking, waxing
floors and (for an all-too-brief moment) treating him like an oriental
pasha. He added that his children, aged twelve and nine, were both
in love with the exciting movie star and reluctant to go back to their
mother when the weekend was over. Miller's father and children (his
possessive mother was more distant) loved Marilyn till her death.
Marilyn, who adored old people and children, fully returned their
affection.

Despite the fatal car accident, the beginning of their marriage
seemed propitious. Marilyn had gone from Hollywood to New York
to prepare for a career on stage; Miller in turn would go from New
York to Hollywood to work on her film script. She had a brilliant,
famous and supportive husband; loved Miller's family; belonged to
the Jewish community; soon became pregnant with a child of her
own; was decorating their apartment in New York and country house
in Connecticut; and was planning to collaborate with him in
The
Misfits
.

Interviewed during her first year with Miller and emphasizing her
emotions, Marilyn said that marriage had assuaged her vulnerability
and relieved her sense of solitude: "I love being married to Arthur
Miller. All my life I've been alone. Now for the first time, the really
first time, I feel I'm not alone any more. For the first time I have a
feeling of being sheltered. It's as if I have come out of the cold. . . .
There's a feeling of being together – a warmth and tenderness. I don't
mean a display of affection or anything like that. I mean just being
together."
³
Their marriage also had a powerful impact on Miller. Her
intense emotions released many of his inhibitions, made him less stiff
and self-conscious, and enhanced his poise and self-confidence.

At the outset,
The Prince and the Showgirl
(1957), like
Bus Stop
, seemed
to be a prestigious project. It would be the screen version of a successful
play by an important dramatist and would have a distinguished director.
It was therefore highly ironic – even absurd – that when Marilyn
formed her own production company she chose mediocre plays that
had exactly the kind of part she'd always been trying to avoid. She'd
been playing a poor chorus girl who captures a wealthy upper-class
man ever since her dreadful early movie,
Ladies of the Chorus
(1948).

In March 1955 the English playwright
Terence Rattigan, author of
The Sleeping Prince
(1953), was flying from London to Hollywood to
discuss the screen adaptation of his play with the director William
Wyler. When Rattigan stopped in New York, Marilyn and Greene
summoned him to a conference and offered to pay a much higher
price for the rights. When Wyler failed to make a definite offer,
Rattigan accepted her bid of $175,000 and agreed to write the screenplay.
They considered various titles – "A Night in Love," "The Purple
Pillow" – before settling on
The Prince and the Showgirl
, which named
both leading roles.

Richard Burton, then a hot property, was originally considered for
the leading role. In April Marilyn told Charles Feldman that "she would
love to sleep with the Prince if his name were Richard Burton." She
also considered appearing with
Noël Coward and having costumes
created by Cecil Beaton. She finally pulled off a coup by convincing
Sir
Laurence Olivier, the leading Shakespearean actor of his time, to
appear in and direct the Ruritanian fantasy. Marilyn became, rather
awkwardly, both his co-star and (as head of Marilyn Monroe Productions)
his employer. They were an odd couple, but there seemed to be
some advantages for both of them. Olivier wanted money, glamor and
international recognition; Marilyn wanted respectability, prestige and
recognition as a serious actress.