The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

light on a daily basis and identify herself with it. And why not exaggerate it, too? It was as if she had found the key to becoming a better person and a better actress—her pain. Therefore, she began to concentrate daily on her darkest self, her saddest self. Though she may have thought this was a treasure trove of dramatic interest—and maybe it was—the problem was that she wasn’t able to just turn off all of those emotions when she wished and go about her day. Indeed, in the months and years to come, she would become more depressed than ever as the misery of her past weighed heavily on her mind. After a day of dealing with her personal pain in such an intensified setting, how could anyone expect her to just drift off and go to sleep? No. She had to have sleeping pills. Then, the next day, she would need more medication to function. If it went particularly badly in class or in therapy, she would need something else for her anxiety—a sedative would do nicely. She was so dependent on pills by this time, it’s a wonder she could function at all. “I remember that she would ask me, ‘Do you want a pill?’ ” recalled her friend John Gilmore, “and she would reach into her purse and come out with a handful. She’d just put them all out on the table and say, ‘You can take this one to sleep and this one for anxiety and this one for…’ It was very disconcerting.” It should be noted, though, that in the 1950s, many actors and actresses depended on drugs to get through the day. Everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Marlon Brando to Montgomery Clift to Tallulah Bankhead was addicted to one drug or another. Their lives and careers were not enhanced either by such excessive self-medicating.

It now seems ironic that in Marilyn Monroe’s quest for clarity, her mind became even more clouded. Some of the notes she took during therapy at this time reveal her to be conflicted and, as always, terribly insecure—but also not necessarily cogent. “How or why I can act,” she wrote one day, “and I’m not sure I can—is the thing for me to understand. The torture, let alone the day to day happenings—the pain one cannot explain to another.” She also wrote, “What is there I’m afraid of? Hiding in case of punishment? Libido? Ask Dr. H.” And another: “My problem of desperation in my work and life—I must begin to face it continually, making my work routine more continuous and of more importance than my desperation.”

Marilyn’s half sister, Berniece, would notice troubling changes in Marilyn’s personality and blame them more on her therapy than on her acting classes—but that’s because Berniece didn’t understand Lee Strasberg’s methodology. “She couldn’t handle all of that therapy,” Berniece would say. “It made things worse, not better.”

In fact, throughout 1955, as Marilyn’s studies with her acting teacher intensified, she began to rely even more on her psychiatrist. Marilyn’s increasing reliance on Dr. Hohenberg suggests that, on some level, she may have felt she was ill-equipped to handle her own life. She may have started therapy at Strasberg’s insistence, but she could have done it by seeing the doctor once a week. However, by the end of 1955 she was going at least three times a week, and also telephoning her constantly for advice and direction.

Almost as a backdrop to Marilyn Monroe’s search for herself in both her life and career was the legal warring that was going on between her and Fox. It continued throughout 1955. However, by the end of the year, Marilyn would, at long last, be the victor. “Fox offered her a new contract—four more movies over the next seven years,” said Wesley Miller from Wright, Wright, Green & Wright. “If memory serves, she would get $100,000 per upcoming film and $500 a week for expenses. She would also have subject, director and cinematographer approval—a huge win for her. Finally, she would be able to veto a nonsensical movie if it came her way. She would also be able to work in television and onstage if she wanted to do so.”

As for “Marilyn Monroe Productions,” its first of two new projects would be the film version of William Inge’s Broadway play Bus Stop, for Fox, of course. Also on tap, a film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince. Both of these were not only worthwhile projects, they were worthy of the time and energy Marilyn had put in to reclassify herself in the minds of those with whom she and her lawyers had negotiated at Fox. What she learned was that she didn’t have to settle for just being a brainless but pretty face, even if that would have been the easier way to go. “There is persuasive evidence that Marilyn Monroe is a shrewd businessman,” a writer for Time magazine noted after the deal was announced—high praise for someone who’d been thought of as a dumb blonde.

Maybe her Aunt Grace was right, after all… about a lot of things. Indeed, no matter how complicated Norma Jeane’s life would become, Grace Goddard was someone who had been able to grab her “niece” by the collar and force her to simplify things and think in a less complex manner. Whereas Lee Strasberg would chastise Marilyn and tell her that she wasn’t thinking enough or wasn’t feeling enough, Grace would tell Marilyn that she was fine just as she was at any given time. In a sense, Strasberg kept trying to add complexity to a woman whose mind was too busy to begin with, while Grace had sought to quiet that mind by offering straightforward and effective advice. Her wisdom may have seemed pedestrian to someone like Lee Strasberg, but, it could be argued, it was far more valuable and maybe even prescient. “You already have everything in you that you need,” Grace had told Marilyn the summer before she died. “As you see yourself, so will others. It’s not so complicated, Norma Jeane. Just believe in yourself,” she concluded, “and I guarantee that others will follow.”

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