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Marilyn and Miller: Star-crossed Misfits

A new documentary takes a deep dive into the mind of playwright Arthur Miller and his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and reveals why their short-lived relationship fascinates us to this day

By Lindsay Zoladz  Mar 19, 2018, 5:50am EDT

When Arthur Miller met Marilyn Monroe, she was crying. Or at least that’s the story he always told her, the one she repeats in footage used in the new documentary Arthur Miller: Writer: “As he describes it, I was crying when he met me.” As he describes it.

They met on the set of the 1951 movie As Young As You Feel. At the time Marilyn was broken up over the recent death of her agent and paramour Johnny Hyde, and she was also casually involved with Miller’s friend Elia Kazan. When he first shook Monroe’s hand that day, Miller later wrote, “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me.” Having watched a few of her takes, he told her he thought she should act on the stage. “People around heard him say it,” Marilyn recalled, “and they laughed.” But she suddenly felt she could tune them out: Here was someone seeing a side of her she had always wanted to be seen, a woman not just with luminous beauty but a potential to become a serious artist when her other powers inevitably diminished. She wrote about their encounter in her diary: “Met a man tonight … It was, bam! It was like running into a tree. You know, like a cool drink when you’ve had a fever.”

Marilyn Monroe & Arthur Miller II

Marilyn Monroe & Arthur Miller II

Mariylin Monroe & Arthur Miller

 

Marilyn Monroe & Arthur Miller

Marilyn Monroe and the Miller Tale

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

Marilyn and the Miller tale

Christopher Bigsby

December 07 2008 04:48 AM

IT was in 1951 that Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan climbed aboard the Super Chief passenger train in New York, heading towards Los Angeles. Though the writer and his director had high hopes for their new screenplay, The Hook, it was something more than a business trip.

It was a chance to get away from New York, from the daily routine of writing and, in Miller's case, from his tense marital life with Mary, his wife of 10 years. "For a man of 35," he lamented, "I seemed to have done nothing but work... When, I wondered, does one cease to work and start to live?" The answer, it seemed, was now.

Arthur Miller / The Art of Theather / Part 2

Arthur Miller by Henri-Cartier-Bresson, 1961

Arthur Miller

 The Art of Theater 

No. 2, Part 2

Interviewed by Christopher Bigby

Fall 1999
The Paris Review No. 152

Arthur Miller’s first interview with The Paris Review appeared in issue 38 in the spring of 1966. Since then, Miller has continued to write for the stage—including such plays as The Price, After the Fall, The Last Yankee, and The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. He also has written several screenplays, stories, and nonfiction books. In 1998 A View from the Bridge received the Tony Award for best revival of a play, and in 1999, the play’s fiftieth anniversary, Death of a Salesman was awarded the same honor. This autumn, an opera based on A View from the Bridge premiered in Chicago.

The following interview was conducted last spring at the 92nd Street YMHA before a packed house.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

INTERVIEWER

The 1960s saw a certain radicalization aesthetically. That was the period of The Living Theater, The Open Theater, The Performance Group, and The Wooster Group. I have the feeling that you never found that particularly compelling as a version of theater.

ARTHUR MILLER

I found myself a lot of the time being reminded of a similar outbreak of that kind of theater in the thirties when Clifford Odets and Bertolt Brecht were starting. I just felt that this was going to pass away the way the other one did, because its emphasis was so heavily on the side of the issues rather than on the side of the characterization of people or of the human conflicts involved. They were political conflicts basically, and I felt that this was very temporary and it was not going to endure.

Arthur Miller / The Paris Review / Part 1

Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller

 The Art of Theater

 No. 2, Part 1

Interviewed by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron

Summer 1966
The Paris Review No. 38

Arthur Miller's white farmhouse is set high on the border of the roller-coaster hills of Roxbury and Woodbury, in Connecticut's Litchfield County. The author, brought up in Brooklyn and Harlem, is now a county man. His house is surrounded by the trees he has raised—native dogwood, exotic katsura, Chinese scholar, tulip, and locust. Most of them were flowering as we approached his house for our interview in spring 1966. The only sound was a rhythmic hammering echoing from the other side of the hill. We walked to its source, a stately red barn, and there found the playwright, hammer in hand, standing in dim light, amid lumber, tools, and plumbing equipment. He welcomed us, a tall, rangy, good-looking man with a weathered face and sudden smile, a scholar-farmer in horn-rimmed glasses and high work shoes. He invited us in to judge his prowess: he was turning the barn into a guesthouse (partitions here, cedar closets there, shower over there . . . ). Carpentry, he said, was his oldest hobby—he had started at the age of five.

We walked back past the banked iris, past the hammock, and entered the house by way of the terrace, which was guarded by a suspicious basset named Hugo. Mr. Miller explained as we went in that the house was silent because his wife, photographer Inge Morath, had driven to Vermont to do a portrait of Bernard Malamud, and that their three-year-old daughter Rebecca was napping. The living room, glassed-in from the terrace, was eclectic, charming: white walls patterned with a Steinberg sketch, a splashy painting by neighbor Alexander Calder, posters of early Miller plays, photographs by Ms. Morath. It held colorful modern rugs and sofas; an antique rocker; oversized black Eames chair; a glass coffee table supporting a bright mobile; small peasant figurines—souvenirs of a recent trip to Russia—unique Mexican candlesticks, and strange pottery animals atop a very old carved Spanish table, these last from their Paris apartment; and plants, plants everywhere.