The Genius and the Goddess Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One First Encounter (1951) I

  II

  Chapter Two Marilyn's Traumatic Childhood (1926–1946) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Three A Star Is Born (1947–1954) I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Four Image and Identity (1950s) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Five Joe DiMaggio (1952–1954) I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Chapter Six Miller's Path to Fame (1915–1949) I

  II

  III

  Picture Section 1

  Chapter Seven Secret Courtship (1954–1955) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Eight New York and the Actors Studio (1954–1956) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Nine Betrayal and Guilt (1950–1956) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Ten Witch Hunt (1956–1958) I

  II

  Chapter Eleven Marriage and England (1956–1957) I

  II

  Chapter Twelve Heading for Disaster (1957–1960) I

  II

  III

  IV

  Picture Section 2

  Chapter Thirteen Billy Wilder and Yves Montand (1958–1960) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Fourteen Making The Misfits (1960) I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Fifteen The Misfits: Life into Art (1960) I

  II

  III

  Chapter Sixteen Something's Got to Give (1961–1962) I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  Chapter Seventeen Suicide (1962) I

  II

  III

  IV

  Chapter Eighteen Miller's Tragic Muse (1964–2004) I

  II

  III

  IV

  Appendix: Marilyn's Illnesses and Hospitalizations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  The Genius and the Goddess

  Books by Jeffrey Meyers

  BIOGRAPHY

  A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics

  Married to Genius

  Katherine Mansfield

  The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis

  Hemingway

  Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle

  D.H. Lawrence

  Joseph Conrad

  Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy

  Scott Fitzgerald

  Edmund Wilson

  Robert Frost

  Bogart: A Life in Hollywood

  Gary Cooper: American Hero

  Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers

  Wintry Conscience: A Biography of George Orwell

  Inherited Risk: Errol and Sean Flynn in Hollywood and Vietnam

  Somerset Maugham

  Impressionist Quartet: The Intimate Genius of Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt

  Modigliani

  Samuel Johnson: The Struggle

  CRITICISM

  Fiction and the Colonial Experience

  The Wounded Spirit:T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  A Reader's Guide to George Orwell

  Painting and the Novel

  Homosexuality and Literature

  D.H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy

  Disease and the Novel

  The Spirit of Biography

  Hemingway: Life into Art

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  T.E. Lawrence: A Bibliography

  Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon

  George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

  EDITED COLLECTIONS

  George Orwell: The Critical Heritage

  Hemingway: The Critical Heritage

  Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs

  The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Reader

  The W. Somerset Maugham Reader

  EDITED ORIGINAL ESSAYS

  Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation

  Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell

  D.H. Lawrence and Tradition

  The Legacy of D.H. Lawrence

  The Craft of Literary Biography

  The Biographer's Art

  T.E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend

  Graham Greene: A Revaluation

  The Genius and

  the Goddess

  ARTHUR MILLER AND

  MARILYN MONROE

  Jeffrey Meyers

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781409061441

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Hutchinson 2009

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Jeffrey Meyers 2009

  Jeffrey Meyers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Hutchinson

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781409061441

  Version 1.0

  Illustrations

  1. Norma Jeane and her mother, Gladys Baker, Los Angeles beach, 1928

  2. Norma Jeane and her first husband, Jim Dougherty, 1943

  3. Arthur Miller, Norman Rosten, Hedda Rosten and Mary Slattery Miller, 1940 (Patricia Rosten Filan)

  4. Miller with Mary and his children, Jane and Robert, 1953

  5. Marilyn and Johnny Hyde, late 1949

  6. Marilyn and Natasha Lytess, c.1952 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  7. Marilyn and Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950 (© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)

  8. Marilyn with Anne Baxter, Bette Davis and George Sanders in All About Eve, 1950 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  9. Marilyn and Joe DiMaggio, 1953

  10. Marilyn entertaining troops in Korea, February 1954 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  11. Marilyn with Milton and Amy Greene, 1955

  12. Lee, Paula and Susan Strasberg, 1963 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  13. Marilyn in airport bathroom, April 1955 (Eve Arnold: Magnum)

  14. Marilyn, signed studio photo, 1956 (Charlene Hess)

  15. Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch, 1955 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  16. Marilyn and DiMaggio at premiere
of The Seven Year Itch, June 1955 (© Sunset Boulevard/Sygma/Corbis)

  17. Miller and Marilyn on their wedding day, with his parents, June 1956 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  18. Miller and Marilyn, July 1956 (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)

  19. Miller and Marilyn in English garden, July 1956 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  20. Marilyn and Billy Wilder making Some Like It Hot, 1958 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  21. Marilyn with Isak Dinesen and Carson McCullers, February 1959 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  22. Miller and Marilyn with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, January 1960 (© John Bryson/Sygma/Corbis)

  23. Marilyn with President Sukarno, 1956

  24. Dr. Ralph Greenson, c.1960

  25. John Huston, Marilyn and Miller on the set of The Misfits, 1960 (Frank Taylor Archive)

  26. Frank Taylor, Miller, Eli Wallach, Huston, Montgomery Clift, Marilyn and Clark Gable on the set of The Misfits, 1960 (© Underwood & Underwood/Corbis)

  27. Gable and Marilyn in The Misfits, 1960 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  28. Miller and Marilyn estranged in Reno hotel room, 1960 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  29. Marilyn's crypt, Westwood Memorial Park, 1962 (Valerie Meyers)

  30. Miller and Elia Kazan, c.1963 (© Bettmann/Corbis)

  31. Barbara Loden and Jason Robards in After the Fall, 1964 (Inge Morath © The Inge Morath Foundation/Magnum)

  Acknowledgements

  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"

  One

  First Encounter

  (1951)

  I

  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 De
sire 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.