Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

I am almost finished with Barbara Leaming’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, called Marilyn Monroe. When I first began this book, I was unsure whether it would provide much useful information senior exit project wise, but it was absolutely fascinating so I was going to read it whether it was helpful or not. As it happened, not only did I find a huge amount of important information on Marilyn and Arthur’s marriage, there was also some information about Mary Slattery and Arthur, and I’m hoping there will be some about Inge Morath at the end, since Arthur seems to have been cheating on Marilyn with her. I am only about three years into their marriage right now.

I have decided that I will largely focus on Marilyn and Arthur for the senior exit, and maybe include information on BOTH of their previous and subsequent marriages, rather than just look at Arthur’s. Also, I might read The Misfits since it was the play that Arthur began writing as a testament of his love for Marilyn, but which ended up contributing to the end of their marriage. When Marilyn read the play, she thought that the character Arthur meant for her, Roslyn, was idealized and passive, that he had created her not to show his love for of Marilyn, but in order to try to retrieve the image of the girl he thought he’d fallen in love with, a girl that lacked what Marilyn called “the monster within her”. When Marilyn read The Misfits, she determined that Arthur truly did not love her, because if he did not accept her emotional fragility and outbursts, then he obviously loved a girl that did not truly exist, the same girl that America had fallen in love with, but that was only an act.

Her resentment over this perceived lack of love led her to ridicule the play; she became increasingly cruel and suspected that Arthur was staying with her only to provide for the success of his screenplay, since it was doubtful that his project would proceed without her name attached to it as lead actress. This suspicion was due to Marilyn’s paranoia and mental illness, but while she was not right about Arthur’s motivation in that sense, she may have been right about the rest. According to Leaming, by creating Roslyn Arthur was trying to recapture the Marilyn he loved, trying to come to terms with the fact that he now wanted to leave the stranger she had turned into, and trying to convince himself that leaving his life and his wife for her hadn’t been a mistake. Meanwhile, he began writing the early drafts of After the Fall, not yet including Marilyn, but writing about his former wife, his parents, and a man he worked with who was mentally unstable but whom he felt obligated to help.

In those early drafts, Quentin was actually named “Miller”, supporting the idea that the play is largely autobiographical. There were also incredibly many parallels between Marilyn and Maggie, a famous singer who attempts suicide many times. Little details were there, like the house they bought together that Marilyn/Maggie threw herself into renovating in an effort to repair issues with the marriage, the fact that soon after the wedding Marilyn/Maggie ceased trusting her old agent, lawyer, and psychoanalyst and fired them, hiring new people that were friend’s of Arthur/Quentin’s to take their place, Marilyn/Maggie’s reading of a scribbled note Arthur/Quentin wrote expressing disappointment in the marriage which in her mind proved that he did not love her, Marilyn/Maggie’s initial adoration of Arthur/Quentin, which soon turned into mood swings, possessiveness. There was also the distancing between husband and wife that occurred because of her derision of his work ( Marilyn made fun of The Misfits and felt entitled to because she knew more about screenplays than Miller, who was primarily a playwrite, and this fact allowed her to take him off his pedestal and instead she began to regard him with what Leaming called “contempt”- one of the Horsemen that Gottman said to watch out for; meanwhile, Maggie has Quentin act as her lawyer and she begins to insult his work because he can’t get the studio to comply with her demands (like Marilyn, Maggie often skipped work or called in sick, infuriating the studio) and she feels disrespected by all the people in show business, like Marilyn did, and since her husband failed to get her the respect he thought he would and did not live up to her idealization of him she began to treat him disrespectfully, in a way that Quentin called embarrassing and that one of Arthur’s friends called “degrading”, according to Leaming), and Marilyn/Maggie’s overconsumption of pills and the disturbing pattern of extreme marital problems, attempted suicide, temporary reconciliation and return to honeymoon bliss, then return of extreme marital problems all over again.

Of course, Arthur fails to give Maggie the multiple (three in three years) miscarriages that Marilyn had, and the ensuing guilt she felt because they were caused by her endometriosis, consumption of barbiturates and alcohol, and what she perceived as her fated bad luck because she had been taught at a young age that she was evil and undeserving of any happiness. Perhaps he did not include these in the play because they, of all things, were the most painful for him to write about.

Marilyn and Arthur showed signs from all three of the marriage risk indicators I previously researched and discussed on the blog, but most significant was their perfect fit with Ted Huston’s study. Although they first met in 1951 and Miller briefly decided to leave his wife for Marilyn, he soon changed his mind and tried to fix the marriage (a difficult period also experienced by Quentin with his first wife, Louise- both the real and fictional man described the wife as “cold” and “unforgiving”). The guilt and doubt that resulted from this time is part of what pushed Miller to write  The Crucible and View from the Bridge. For quite a while, Marilyn and Arthur exchanged letters, and for a few months she held out the hope that he would come back to her. He cut off communication, however, and suggested that she Abraham Lincoln would be a better role model than him. Marilyn took him seriously, and for the next few years a portrait of Abraham Lincoln hung over her bed, replacing the picture of Miller that had been there before.

When the two met again four years later in New York, Miller soon began to have an affair with Marilyn, and soon decided to leave his wife. His six week stay in Nevada was necessary for him to establish residence so the divorce could be finalized, and he sued her for divorce (fault based marriage!) saying that she had mentally and emotionally abused him, despite the fact that he was the one having an affair. A mere five months after the divorce was final, Marilyn and Miller were married, having experienced life together only in unstressful situations, and only a day or two at the time (the first point against them). They also had highly idealized visions of each other (point two). At that time, Miller was also being called to testify at HUAC (the House of Un-American Activities Committee) because he had filed for a passport to go to England, where there would be a stage play of A View From the Bridge and Marilyn would work on her next film, The Prince and the Showgirl. During his testimony, he planned to refuse to name names, but to gain sympathy with the press, he decided to announce that he wanted to marry Marilyn during the testimony, hoping that would make him more sympathetic. That was the way she found out he wanted to marry her. In order to get the passport, Arthur hoped to say that he needed to go to England in order to have a honeymoon with Marilyn. So, he needed to marry her before they left, providing an external push to rush the wedding (point three).

Within the first few months, Marilyn and Arthur faced problems: he could see immediately that she was not the girl he had imagined, and he saw a new side of her as he witnessed her paranoia, craziness, over drinking and over drugging during the process of filming her movie. This neurotic Marilyn was new and unwelcome, and this was the fourth point against them: a bad first two years, the passionate fall out of infatuated love, signaled that this was not a marriage meant to last. It is the same fall from paradise that Miller depicted in After the Fall.

More about Marriage and Divorce

So, I solved my problem of not finding scholarly articles about divorce and marriage and only finding self help articles. In case anyone else is facing the same issue, if you search your topic on googlescholar instead of normal google the results are far more credible! Also, does anyone know if we can use personal stories as examples in our papers? Because I have quite a few I could share. For example, since I would like to discuss different types of marriages in depth since 1 that is what I have mostly found in my research up until now and 2 I’m doing marriage and divorce in the US, but I’m tying it to Arthur Miller and his three marriages, and I would like to analyze which type each one of those falls under as well, and maybe compare it with a real life example. Does anyone know if that’s allowed?

Moving on, this week I read part of an article called “The Evolution of Divorce” written by University of Virginia professor W. Bradford Wilcox. The article can be found at http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Wilcox_Fall09.pdf. This article also discussed the marriage revolution in the 60’s and 70’s, mentioning that by 1980 divorce rates had doubled: 20% of couples who married in 1950 ended up divorced, while 50% of those who married in 1970 did. Of course, the divorce rate stopped growing so steeply after 1980, but the article cited several factors that contributed to the extreme growth over those two decades.

First, of course, was the law change from fault divorce to no fault divorce, which began in California with Ronald Reagan and spread outward from there. For some reason, the date of the law change didn’t quite click last time I read about it, but now it hit me: Arthur Miller had divorced his first two wives, Mary Slattery and Marilyn Monroe, in 1956 and 1961, respectively. So, he had divorced each of them with a fault divorce. I was unable to find any information about why Arthur and Mary divorced or who was found to be at fault, other than a brief mention at http://www.ibiblio.org/miller/life.html that he “lived in Nevada for six weeks in order to divorce Mary Slattery”. I’m not sure if that means that he had to be separated from her for a certain amount of time to divorce, or that since the divorce was finalized in Nevada he had to be a permanent resident there for six weeks in order to make the divorce happen, or maybe he just went to Nevada so Mary would be able to accuse him of leaving her in court in order to have the divorce go through. I’m not sure which of these it was, but I will keep looking. Meanwhile, I was able to find far more information on Marilyn and Miller (as I expected).

According to an article from 1961 on the BBC website, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/24/newsid_4588000/4588212.stm, Marilyn and Miller went to divorce finalized (maybe because they couldn’t do it in the US?) and it was granted on grounds of incompatibility. These grounds were certainly true: as I mentioned in a previous post, Marilyn was very unstable, constantly using drugs and alcohol, and she had had a miscarriage at the beginning of their marriage. They also had different expectations from each other: Marilyn wanted to pursue her career the same way Arthur was, but Arthur wanted her to reduce the time she spent on films so she could be a full time wife. The filming of The Misfits, Marilyn’s last movie, which Miller had written for her and in which she basically played herself, was tense and hectic. Marilyn wouldn’t show up, she increased her use of drugs without her psychiatrist there with her, she went to the hospital, and she and Miller barely spoke the whole time. Meanwhile, he met Inge Morath, his third wife, on the set. Since he married her a month after his divorce, it is highly probable that he was having an affair. Meanwhile, several months later Marilyn was set to remarry her second husband, Joe DiMaggio, but three days before they were to be married she was found dead from an overdose, at only 36 years old.

Marilyn had been married twice before Arthur Miller: at sixteen to Jimmy Dougherty, and later on to Joe DiMaggio. Based on the biography of Marilyn that I am currently reading, she married Jimmy partially to get out of the foster care system, and when he went to fight in the war she went to work in a factory. A photographer came to take pictures for the newspaper, and he is the one who “discovered” her. At first, she modeled, then she began to act and her newfound fame is considered to be why she divorced Jimmy. I have not yet read about Joe, but apparently their marriage was “tumultuous” (according to the BBC article) and only lasted nine months. I am curious to see why the courts granted her that one. While these easily granted divorces may just have been because Miller and Monroe were famous, I find it unlikely, and that’s part of why I find it hard to assign the change in divorce law to increasing divorce rates and loss of respect for marriage: I think it was already happening well before that, and that’s why the laws were passed.

The original article (from University of Virginia) also mentions that the sexual revolution and feminist movement increased divorce rates, as well as the rebellion of the youth against authority and religious institutions. This was a huge change in attitude in the 1960s and 1970s, especially from the conformist, family and white picket fence thinking 1950s. In fact, when Miller married Mary Slattery straight out of college, they had two kids and lived the life that was expected of them, and I think that part of what attracted him to Marilyn was the adventure that came from a relationship with her in comparison to the one he had with Slattery.

In After the Fall, part of the reason that Quentin divorces his first wife is that she begins protesting about the inattentive and uncaring way he treats her, and the thing that pushed her to finally protest was reading about women’s rights and becoming more independent. So, the marriages and events that Arthur Miller wrote about really do fit with the reality of marriage and divorce.

Courtships, Newlyweds, and Hollywood Romances

Sorry for the slight lateness of this post, but I have been sick and I was hoping I’d be better by today, but no such luck. So I decided to just medicate and tough it out for the duration of this post (: 

Anyways…I found several interesting articles this week. The first was in the online journal/magazine/whatever it is Psychology Today. I think two of my past sources were from there, too, but that’s just because it’s incredibly difficult not to just find personal stories or self help or counseling websites when googling marriage. If anyone has a suggestion on how to fix that, please let me know!

This article (http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200001/will-your-marriage-last) was once again about what makes marriage work and what doesn’t, but it was completely different from the last two I read, both of which expressed somewhat similar viewpoints. The first one discussed different types of marriage and their success rates, and the one from last week discussed indicators of marital dysfunction and the idea that the way a couple handles conflict rather than the marriage type is what affects their chances of staying married. This one presented a different take: it’s not conflict handling or type of marriage, but rather what happens in the first two years of a marriage and courtship that affects whether it will last.

Ted Huston, Ph.D., conducted a long term study on over 160 couples for about 13 years. He found that marriages take one of four courses: divorce happens early, within the first two or three years, divorce happens later, at about 7 to 10 years (sometimes later), couples stayed unhappily married, or couples stayed happily married. Now while most people read about the unhappily married couples and question their sanity, Huston mentions that it’s really not that bad: these couples may not be satisfied with their marriage, but it’s not vicious or poisonously bad so there is no spillover into the rest of their life, so they can stay married out of habit or religion or whatever it is and still be okay.

He found that the major difference between the couples that stayed together and those that didn’t was shown immediately. Most psychologists think that couples who get married are in a state of total marital bliss, then that goes away after the honeymoon period and if the couple is unable to learn how to handle conflict, that’s when divorce happens. But Huston found that many newlyweds actually don’t have this period of marital bliss, and those that do run into more trouble later because that kind of joy and intensity is impossible to keep going for an extended period of time. Also, he found that it is not inability to handle personal conflict that leads couples to divorce, but rather an erosion of love and affection, which is why couples who had a boring, comfortable (or not boring, just comfortable) newlywed period are less likely to divorce because there are no Hollywood happily ever after romanticized ideals there from the outset, so there is no disappointment later when love turns out not to be the fairytale it was expected to be. Of course there were also the couples who were very loving and affectionate from the beginning, but they were able to maintain these feelings with few negative emotions creeping in. Those were the happily married ones. So the major predictor in whether a couple will remain married or not is not the level of affection or conflict management at the beginning of the marriage, but rather the amount of change the couple faces within the first few years.

For example, if a couple has a very short courtship that is pushed alone by other factors (jealousy, parental pushing, pregnancy, etc) then they get married, it is highly likely that in the first few years the idealized versions they had of their spouse will change as they reveal their true personalities, and this can lead to issues (obviously). This loss of the rah-rah-rah we’re so happy and affectionate woohooo feeling that propelled them through their short courtship and into marriage leaves them facing the stark reality of a person whom they no longer love, but they are married to. Meanwhile, the couples that are together for a longer period (say two to three years) BEFORE getting married, and are used to handling issues together and have open lines of communication and know and accept each other’s flaws are the ones that are more likely to carry this stability throughout their marriage and stay together.

Another article I looked at, but didn’t really get through because it was more about the history of marriage and not the psychology of marriage and I find that more boring (I know history is supposed to be part of my exit project, but I was thinking of making it a veryveryveryvery small insignificant part that requires far less researching than all the rest). And actually, I am being unfair to the article (which is here: http://www.enotes.com/marriage-divorce-article) because it’s NOT all about history, that’s just all I’ve read so far.

So anyways, the article is discussing the way marital laws change in the late 1960s. Before then, the law was fault divorce, which meant that in a divorce, one party had to prove in court that the other party was guilty of doing something terrible enough to ruin the marriage (such as abuse, infidelity, etc) and only the innocent party could sue for divorce. This ensured that both parties wanted the divorce. California was the first to change the law into what it is today (no fault divorce) and all fifty states followed by 1984. Some researchers have blamed the change in divorce law for increased divorce rates between 1960 and 1970 and say that we should go back to fault divorces, because these days it’s easier to just give up on a marriage than actually try to fix it, which is why couples divorce so much. However, researchers on the other side say that correlation does not imply causation (and they are right! Yay AP Stats!) and divorce rates had been rising anyway since 1800, they peaked in 1980 and have now level off (at a terrible 50%) so the no fault divorce laws are not to blame. They also point out that although no fault divorces only require one party to want to end the marriage, fault divorces ensure that a marriage cannot end in a friendly manner, and kids are often psychologically harmed far more by a fault marriage where they have to witness the accusations and cruelty that occur in court.

I have not yet fully formed an opinion, but right now I am leaning towards no fault marriages. I will have to look into it more (and actually finish reading the article…). That’s all for this week! Bye!

The Four Horsemen of Marital Doom

This week, I read an article by marriage psychologist John Gottman called “What Makes a Marriage Work.” I looked up Gottman’s research because I remembered reading about it a few months ago when I read the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (which I strongly recommend, by the way. It’s absolutely fascinating, and it has a bunch of random topics and research so I’m sure someone else could use it for their project as well). This is the Amazon link to the book: <p><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1328585996&amp;sr=8-1&#8243; title=”Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking”>Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking</a></p>.

Gottman is a marriage psychologist who has conducted research on over 200 couples in the past 20 years, but the interesting thing about him is the way he conducts his research: he has a marriage lab, and he tapes a short conversation between a husband and his wife (about thirty minutes long) recording their physiological responses (heart rate, perspiration, etc), facial expressions, and tones of voice. He analyzes each video carefully, makes a prediction about the marriage, and sees whether it comes true in 5 or 10 years. The amazing thing is that 99 percent of the time, it does. By watching one short, 30 minute conversation between a married couple, he can predict whether the marriage will last.

Through this lab, Gottman discovered several indicators of marriage success, but since the whole explanation of what he discovered is long (I will definitely use as much of it as I can on my senior exit project because it’s fascinating, but the articles I read on him along with the Blink chapter about him are nearly 50 pages long so I can’t discuss everything) I will only focus on the article I mentioned above, from the magazine Psychology Today.

In this article, Gottman mentions that the conventional view that marriages in which a lot of fighting take place or marriages in which conflicts are ignored are at high risk for failure are wrong. This goes directly against some of what I discussed in my last blog post, but I would like to explore both of the differing views in my project. According to Gottman, any of the three major types of marriages (Validating, in which couples compromise and calmly work out issues; Volatile, in which passionate arguments are the norm; and Conflict-avoiding, in which the couples rarely discuss their problems) can work equally well. 

He went on to mention several couples, each with one of these types of marriages, and he discussed how they got along and their strongly contrasting methods of dealing with conflict. The interesting thing was that each of those couples stayed together many years after he had first interviewed them. Instead, Gottman found that the predictors of marital failure come in the same forms, no matter what type of marriage a couple has. First and foremost is the negative to positive ratio. To have a healthy marriage, the amount of negative interactions and comments must be balanced out with positive affirmation, affection, and kindness. This balance was far greater than what I expected: it must be in a five to one ratio; in other words, couples need to have five times as many positive as negative interactions AT LEAST, because anything less is a strong indicator of impending marital failure.

Gottman also identified what he calls “The Four Horsemen,” or the four signs that communication is getting progressively worse in a marriage. The first horseman is criticism. This shows up when a couple moves from complaints (which actually help the marriage, since they allow husband and wife to discuss any issues they might be having and work them out to their mutual satisfaction rather than holding them in, so nothing ever gets better) to making things personal. The example Gottman uses is that instead of saying “We never go out” a wife might begin to say “You never take me anywhere.” The accusatory use of the word “you” is critical: it indicates that the problem is the husband’s fault, instead of merely being an issue the wife is having.

The next horseman is contempt, which comes riding on the heels of criticism. As a husband and wife begin to criticize each other more and more, what began as a complaint becomes disgust in the behavior of the other person. Each time an argument and a criticism is repeated, this behavior is brought up again and again until it becomes cemented in the husband/wife’s mind that this is a negative personality trait of his/her spouse, and contempt shows up in the form of rolled eyes, curled lips, and failure to listen.

The third horseman is defensiveness. This obviously shows up as a result of criticism and contempt, as both the husband and wife begin to take a defensive attitude to protect themselves from their spouse’s accusations. The problem with defensiveness is that when people are busy protecting themselves from insult or refusing to take blame, they can fail to listen to others. Gottman cites several signs of an overly defensive mode of communication: denying responsibility, making excuses, and cross complaining (or meeting a complaint with a complaint, ignoring what the other person said) . None of these lend themselves particularly well to paying attention and trying to cooperate or compromise, and that is what makes defensiveness so destructive to a relationship.

Finally, the last horseman is stonewalling. This is when one person gets so fed up with the arguments of the other that he/she just shuts down, refusing to respond or show any sign of listening. While this is an extremely negative behavior and can hurt marriage when executed by both men and women, it seems that it is actually worse when the man stonewalls, because a woman has a far more negative, aggressive, and hurt response to being ignored. According to Gottman, stonewalling “conveys disapproval, icy distance, and smugness” and this can lead to a total failure in any attempts at communication, essentially ruining chances of fixing the marriage. 

The most fascinating thing about this for me is that Gottman could see early predictors of these four horsemen in a mere thirty minute conversation between newlyweds. His research is definitely going to have to be included in my senior exit project, and I’m thinking of using a movie or a clip of a theater production of one of Miller’s plays (maybe After the Fall, or maybe a more well known piece of his) and seeing if I can detect any of what Gottman sees in these couples in the actors of the plays. While I know it’s just acting and fiction, I would like to see if the conversations Miller invented based on his life experiences and the emotions he urged his actors to convey are accurate representations of a failing marriage, and if they show any of the traditional conversational patterns Gottman observed.