The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Arthur Miller

In the spring of 1955, Marilyn began a new chapter in her story with a man who would become one of the great loves of her life, the playwright Arthur Miller, whose drama A View from the Bridge was currently playing in New York. (Marilyn saw it three times and loved it.)

Miller was tall and thin, almost Lincolnesque in bearing. His face somehow seemed full of wisdom. His large spectacles and serious expression made him appear humorless, but this was misleading. He was gregarious, thoughtful, and not as bookish as most people expected. Rather, he was a sports enthusiast and enjoyed the outdoors. He could not be considered handsome, at least not by the standards of the day, but he had an imposing presence. What was interesting about Marilyn’s choices in men was that they were almost always of the “everyman” variety, which was perhaps one of the reasons why she was so beloved by men in this country in the 1950s. The perception was that any “normal” guy in America could have a chance with the most beautiful woman in the world because, after all, look at the men with whom she had been involved: Jim Dougherty, Johnny Hyde, Joe DiMaggio… even Frank Sinatra wasn’t considered a strikingly handsome man. She went for depth, always, not appearances.

Marilyn first met Miller in August of 1951 on the Los Angeles set of her film As Young as You Feel, when he showed up there with Elia Kazan. Kazan hoped to direct Miller’s screenplay of The Hook, a politically charged story about waterfront workers and racketeers. The two men were in town to try to secure a movie deal for it. (The movie would never be made, however, because the work was viewed as anti-American during a time when the shipping of military men and weapons was vital to the Korean War.) Miller—who was ten years her senior—would later recall of his first meeting with Marilyn on the set, “The shock of her body’s motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up.” ^*

Novelist/playwright/essayist Arthur Asher Miller was born in New York City’s Harlem in November 1915. In 1944, he won the Theater Guild’s National Award for The Man Who Had All the Luck. Despite critical acclaim in New York, the play closed after only six performances. A few years later, he published his first novel, Focus, about anti-Semitism, to little acclaim. He then adapted George Abbott and John C. Holmes’s Three Men on a Horse for television. However, his first major breakthrough came in 1947 when his All My Sons was produced in New York at the Coronet Theater. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, with whom Miller would have a long-term personal and professional relationship. All My Sons won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and two Tony Awards in 1947. The work for which he is best known, though, is Death of a Salesman, which premiered on Broadway in February 1949, also directed by Kazan. Salesman won the Tony Award for Best Play as well as a Pulitzer Prize. He was married when he met Marilyn and lived on the East Coast with his wife and their two children.

At the time that Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe began secretly dating, he was having a great deal of difficulty in his life, constantly hounded by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It’s difficult to trace Miller’s problems with HUAC. Some reports say that he was being investigated as far as back at 1944 simply because he was viewed as a powerful and influential left-wing writer and public person. When he wrote All My Sons, the FBI called it “party line propaganda” just because it had to do with someone selling defective parts to the United States Air Force. In 1949, the FBI declared his Death of a Salesman “a negative delineation of American life.” It was felt that the FBI had something to do with his story The Hook meeting a dead end in Hollywood. J. Edgar Hoover had it in for Arthur Miller, that much was certain, and he turned the heat up after Miller’s play The Crucible.

The Crucible had been inspired by the experience of Miller’s friend Elia Kazan, who had appeared before HUAC in 1952. Under fear of being blacklisted from Hollywood, Kazan named eight people from the Group Theatre—a popular theater company in New York—who, he said, were just mildly interested in Russian history, particularly in the Russian Revolution. HUAC took Kazan’s naming of names to mean he was fingering members of the Communist Party, which he most certainly was not doing. In discussing the extent and effects of HUAC’s activities, Miller developed the idea for The Crucible, an allegorical play in which he compared HUAC’s activities to the witch hunts in Salem. The play opened on Broadway in January 1953. After its debut, Miller was, more than ever, viewed by HUAC as a Communist sympathizer, hellbent on overthrowing the government by his work on the stage and also because he had attended Communist writers’ meetings in the 1940s.

There was such paranoia at this time, Americans living in a constant state of fear about Communism. The panic was fueled by the media and certain government officials like Hoover. In fact, at that time all a public person had to do was suggest that he knew anyone who was Russian or appreciated anything of Russian culture and he was branded anti-American and a Communist sympathizer, his life then made a living hell. Miller went farther than that, though. As an intellectual and a liberal thinker, he did know some party members and was interested in learning more about Communism—and that was enough to brand him right there. When Miller ended, for a time, his friendship with Kazan because of Kazan’s testimony, it convinced certain members of the conservative press that he was sympathetic to those Kazan had named—which he was, but only in the sense that he thought they shouldn’t have been named, not because he thought they were Communists.

Between HUAC and the FBI’s constant surveillance of and investigations of public figures such as Arthur Miller, it’s a wonder there was time for any official business to be conducted in this country. Even Lucille Ball was investigated at one point. As pernicious as HUAC and the FBI were during the early 1950s in the pursuit of those alleged to have Communist leanings, the hunt for “pinkos” and Communist sympathizers reached its zenith with the rise of McCarthyism as practiced by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who used his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Government Operations as his personal stage to launch attacks on citizens, in places both high and low, as being “soft on Communism.” His fall from grace was as ignominious as his rise had been spectacular, with his censure by the U.S. Senate in 1957.

After The Crucible opened, Miller was denied a passport to go to its opening in London, and that was just the beginning of his trouble. When he defended his actions through the play A View from the Bridge—the plot of which has a dockworker informing on two illegal immigrants—the response from HUAC was more surveillance and harassment. Walter Winchell, who was Joe DiMaggio’s friend and the man who made it possible for Joe to see the scene in The Seven Year Itch that was the catalyst for his beating of Marilyn, couldn’t wait to weigh in when Arthur Miller announced in February 1956 that he and his wife were divorcing: “America’s best known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia.”