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.
upintheairika 
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