Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming

Author:Barbara Leaming [Leaming, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55777-3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 1998-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

TEN

During the early weeks of Arthur Miller’s stay in Nevada, he had noticed a curious habit of Saul Bellow’s. The novelist would head out to a spot behind a hill near his book-filled cabin and there, for some thirty minutes, he would scream into the vast mountainous silence.

That silence was shattered in the last days of Miller’s stay as reporters descended on Pyramid Lake. On one occasion, a truck with a camera crew and an interviewer pulled up in front of Miller’s remote quarters. Many other press people followed. Everybody wanted to know one thing: Did the playwright plan to marry Marilyn Monroe? Miller refused to say.

After Miller was served with the HUAC subpoena, Lloyd Garrison promptly asked for a postponement. Rather than say that Miller had not been given time to prepare—which was, of course, very much an issue—Garrison pointed out that his client needed to remain in Nevada another few days in order to be eligible to file for divorce. HUAC agreed to delay until Thursday, June 21. That gave Miller an additional week.

In later years, Miller was to argue that HUAC would never have “bothered” him if it hadn’t been for his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Since HUAC’s inception in 1938, publicity for the politician-inquisitors had been the hearings’ raison d’être. But it is also true that the committee had intended to call Miller before anyone knew about his relationship with a movie star. As Miller and his lawyers were aware, there had been plans to call him at the entertainment industry hearings in New York in the summer of 1955. In The Crucible Miller had spoken out against naming names, the very thing HUAC required people to do. Is it any wonder they went after him? Marilyn’s presence in his life provided a most welcome publicity bonus, but she wasn’t the reason he was summoned.

Miller’s divorce hearing on June 11 took five minutes. Though it was he who had embarked on a relationship with another woman, he charged his wife, the former Mary Grace Slattery, with “extreme cruelty, entirely mental in nature.” The divorce was uncontested. As he left court, the press lay in wait.

There were more journalists waiting the next morning as Miller stepped off an airplane in New York. That, apparently, was the way it was going to be from now on. How was this intensely private man, a natural loner who prized quiet and solitude, possibly going to live and work in the incessant media swirl that engulfed anything having to do with Marilyn Monroe? As in Nevada, Miller’s having been called by HUAC seemed a mere footnote to the issue of his marriage plans. When Miller snapped that he had no comment, the reporters begged him at least to reveal whether he planned to see Marilyn now that he was back in New York.

“Oh, that may happen one of these days.”

Did Miller intend to write a play for Marilyn?

“I don’t know how to write a play for somebody,” Miller insisted. “I’d be delighted if there were a part for her in one of my plays.

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