24 January

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are divorced in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

1961 ‘Egghead weds Hourglass’, ran the 1956 headline in Variety. The American papers couldn’t get over the unlikely marriage of sex and the intellect (in those days the playwright was commonly called an ‘intellectual’ in the popular prints). But Miller himself acknowledged the link between his feelings for Monroe and if not his mental powers, then at least his creativity. As he wrote in his autobiography, Timebends (1987):

Flying homeward, her scent still on my hands … I could, after all, lose myself in sensuality. This novel secret entered me like a radiating force, and I welcomed it as a sort of proof that I would write again.

They had met when Miller went to Hollywood to make a film about crooked labour leaders on the Brooklyn waterfront, only to drop out of the project when told by the studio chief of Columbia Pictures to change the villains from the mob to wicked communists. The project was later re-aligned as On the Waterfront (1954).

His resistance to the anti-communist film script, the production of The Crucible (1953 – see 1 March) and his enlarged public profile brought Miller to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). While the HUAC investigations were proceeding, studio executives urged Monroe to dump Miller, but she refused. Subpoenaed in 1956, he was convicted of contempt when he refused to ‘name names’.

It was all about publicity. In Timebends Miller recalls the HUAC chairman, Francis E. Walter, offering to cancel Miller’s subpoena provided he could be photographed shaking hands with Miller’s new wife.

What went wrong? We’ll never have her side of the story now. His is set out in Timebends, which can be exciting about the power of their early love, honest and harrowing about their break-up, but keeps coming adrift in group-therapy phrases like ‘I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing’.

Why or how it happened, most film people agree that the marriage was in a pretty rough state by the time they came to make The Misfits (John Huston, 1961), a script (ironically) that Miller had written as a Valentine gift to his wife. It was not only the marriage that perished. The Nevada sun and the stress of production combined to fray the nerves of actors and crew alike. Huston drank a lot and sometimes fell asleep on set. Monroe was drinking too, and taking sleeping pills. Two days after filming finished Clark Gable suffered a heart attack, dying ten days after that. A year and a half later Marilyn Monroe herself would die of an overdose; whether it was intentional or not has never been established.

For Miller one of the few good things to come out of the Misfits experience (apart from the film itself, which isn’t half bad) was Inge Morath, a Magnum photographer covering the movie. She and Miller married in 1962, remaining happily together until her death in 2002.