The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

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.”

Why Marilyn Was Investigated by the FBI

Many have wondered over the years how Marilyn Monroe ever ended up being the subject of so many years of FBI investigations. It seems preposterous, especially given her dumb-blonde persona, that she was viewed as a serious threat to this country’s security. So how did it start?

Actually, there are reams of documents filed with the FBI concerning Marilyn. In October 2006, ninety-seven more were released under the Freedom of Information Act, most of which are marked “Internal Security.” As research for this book, all of these voluminous documents were carefully reviewed, and, based on them, it’s clear that surveillance of Marilyn by the FBI began in 1955 because of her growing relationship with Arthur Miller.

Judging from his files, it seems clear that J. Edgar Hoover had pretty much lost his mind by the 1950s, at least when it came to his obsession with celebrities and what they may have had to do with Communism. Of course, it wasn’t just Marilyn whom Hoover was interested in—it was just about all of Hollywood, including Abbott and Costello (who knew that Bud Abbott had fifteen hundred porn movies in his possession?). And of Marilyn, consider this, from file marked 100–422103 and dated June 1, 1956: “Miss Monroe is expected to move to New York sometime during the later part of 1956.… Marilyn Monroe will according to present plans complete her present assignment in the motion picture entitled Bus Stop on or about May 25, 1956. Further, that on or about July 6, 1956, she will proceed to England where she tentatively plans to make a motion picture starring Laurence Olivier.” Hedda Hopper couldn’t have done a better job!

Later, when she would begin her association with John F. Kennedy, her files would increase tenfold, not only in pointless paperwork but also in foolishness. Most of the files have names and places redacted, as if the country would surely be taken over by Commies should it be revealed that she had dinner with Mr. X and Mr. Y.

Here’s the truth: None of it means a thing. Much of the FBI activities back then had more to do with rumormongering than truth-gathering. Any wacky “informant” could say anything about a celebrity and it would end up in the FBI’s files as fact. This is one of the reasons why these files are so tantalizing to some historians. They are rife with seeming scandal, if one can read beyond the redacted segments. However, how much of it was just J. Edgar Hoover’s paranoia being passed down to his agents, all of them out there in their trench coats with flashlights following Marilyn Monroe to the set of “Bus Stop on or about May 25, 1956.” The less one relies on the FBI’s accounts of anything having to do with Marilyn Monroe, the better.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller—both hounded by government agencies—became very close quickly. So close, in fact, that in Marilyn’s will, which she signed on February 18, she bequeathed to him $100,000. That was a lot of money for someone she was just dating, so it at least suggests that she felt she had some kind of a future with him. ^*

Bus Stop

In February 1956, Marilyn Monroe returned to Los Angeles to begin work on her next film, Bus Stop. This would be the first co-production of her newly formed Marilyn Monroe Productions in partnership with 20th Century-Fox. Marilyn and MMP vice president Milton Greene and his wife, Amy, and their baby son, Joshua, rented a house in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. The next month, in March (the twelfth), she made it legal—her name, that is. Norma Jeane Mortensen officially became Marilyn Monroe. “I am an actress and I found my name a handicap,” she said in the hearing to finalize the name change. “I have been using the name I wish to assume, Marilyn Monroe, for many years and I am now known professionally by that name.”

In April, Bus Stop would begin shooting in Phoenix. Marilyn felt it would be her most important role—a big stretch for her as an actress—and she sought to do her best to make sure the powers that be at Fox were not sorry they had acquiesced to her contractual wishes. After scoring big with The Seven Year Itch, the studio honchos had wisely acquired the Tony Award–winning comedy of 1955, William Inge’s Bus Stop, for their new box-office queen. The Harold Clurman–directed play opened at the Music Box on March 2, 1956, and starred the redoubtable Kim Stanley as Cherie, the haunting, vocally challenged saloon singer. It ran for 478 performances and closed at the Winter Garden on April 21, 1957.