American actress Marilyn Monroe wanted a husband who was “father, lover, friend and agent,” in the words of one of her husbands, playwright Arthur Miller, in a recently discovered recordings, reports The Guardian on Thursday.
Miller considers on the other hand that the son she so eagerly sought would have been “an additional problem” to her complicated personality.
The dialogue was recorded by Christopher Bigsby, friend and biographer of the American playwright, screenwriter and essayist, considered one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. The recordings were made over nearly three decades, and address not only the marital relationship, but also Miller’s insecurities about his career and his stance on anti-communist persecution in the 1950s period known as ‘McCarthyism’.
Miller admitted that she felt that “death was always stalking her (Monroe), always.” She believed that if she didn’t “take care of her life,” she would meet a “catastrophic end” and revealed that she once had to ask doctors to help her because “she had ingested enough drugs to kill herself,” she said.
“I felt he was in a very delicate psychological situation. In the end, it took a few years, but it happened,” he says, referring to her suicide. It was out of my hands, and anyone else’s, to stop it.”
To Miller, Monroe’s death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962 when she was 36 years old seemed inevitable.
“She found it impossible to live, let alone with anyone. He couldn’t go on with that intensity of life, with those drugs,” recounted Miller, who married Monroe in 1956, in a marriage that lasted five years.
In conversation, the playwright admits that it took him only a few months to realize that it had been a mistake to marry her: “She literally lacked inner resources. She wanted a father, a lover, a friend, an agent, above all someone who would never criticize her for anything, or else she would lose her self-confidence. I don’t know if there is such a human being,” she said.
On the miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy the actress suffered, Miller commented that she felt she wanted to be a mother “in an ideal way,” while working under “enormous pressure.”
“In a way, I’m not sure how good it would have been for her to have a child. It would have been an additional problem…. I don’t know how it would have worked in practice,” he admitted.
Arthur Miller was one of Marilyn Monroe’s lovers.
In conversation, Miller described Monroe as a “charming” person and “a very intelligent woman” with “a great sense of humor, irony and generosity,” but “paranoia” took hold of her as she suspected everyone of exploiting or harming her.
The couple became completely estranged while Monroe starred in ‘The Misfits’ (‘Vidas rebeldes’ or ‘Los inadaptados’ in Spanish America), the film Miller wrote for her in 1960, but by the time filming ended, the relationship was all but over.
Likewise, the playwright told Bigsby that fame “is a form of sexual, or implicitly sexual, power” and that, throughout his life, he questioned his own ability to write. “My whole life has been a constant struggle with insecurity,” he said.
Miller also discussed his rapprochement with Communism and Hollywood’s censorship of his work after he refused to name Communist writers before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.
He said McCarthyism created a kind of “irrational sense of constant fear, the idea that an invisible force had infiltrated society, that it was out to destroy it. There was no rational way to deal with all this, because every time you did you could be accused of being part of that conspiracy.”
The recordings came to light after Bigsby, 84, transcribed them for a book – The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Words – published by Cambridge University Press, reported Agencia EFE.
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