{"id":654981,"date":"2026-05-07T06:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654981\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T06:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T06:50:08","slug":"arthur-miller-opens-up-about-marriage-to-marilyn-monroe-in-newly-unearthed-recordings-arthur-miller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654981\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur Miller opens up about marriage to Marilyn Monroe in newly unearthed recordings | Arthur Miller"},"content":{"rendered":"

He was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century and she was one of the greatest actors. In newly unearthed recordings made over a period of nearly three decades, Arthur Miller opened up about his short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe<\/a>, saying she wanted a husband who was a \u201cfather, lover, friend and agent,\u201d and the child she longed for would have been an \u201cadditional problem\u201d.<\/p>\n

In taped conversations with his friend and biographer Prof Christopher Bigsby, Miller said he had felt \u201cdeath was always on her [Monroe\u2019s] shoulder \u2013 always\u201d. He had believed that if he did not \u201ctake care of her life\u201d she would come to a \u201ccatastrophic end\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne time I brought doctors to pump her out because she had swallowed enough stuff [drugs] to kill her,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I felt she was in a very delicate psychological position. As it turned out, it took some years, but it happened. It was beyond my powers or anybody else\u2019s to hold her back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Monroe\u2019s death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, at the age of 36, had seemed inevitable to him. \u201cIt was impossible for her to live, let alone with anybody. You couldn\u2019t go on with that intensity of life, and those drugs, and manage to survive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The couple began a passionate extramarital affair in 1955 and married in 1956. Miller said it took him just months to realise he had made a mistake. \u201cI was not really prepared for what I should have been prepared for, which was that she had literally no inner resources \u2026 She wanted a father, a lover, friend, agent, above all someone who would never criticise her for anything, or else she would lose confidence in herself. I don\u2019t know if that human being exists.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Miller\u2019s house in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1956, a few hours before their wedding. Photograph: Bettmann Archive<\/p>\n

After Monroe had a miscarriage and an ectopic pregnancy, the couple sought medical help without success, the recordings reveal. Reflecting on their loss, Miller said he felt Monroe wanted to be a mother \u201cin an ideal sort of way\u201d, while working under \u201cterrific pressure\u201d in Hollywood: \u201cIn a way, I am not sure how good it would have been for her to have a child. It would have been an additional problem \u2026 I am not sure how it would have worked out in practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

He described Monroe as \u201cdelightful to be with\u201d and \u201ca very smart woman\u201d who had \u201ca terrific sense of humour, irony and generosity\u201d, but said \u201ca kind of paranoia\u201d took over. \u201cShe began to suspect everybody of exploiting or damaging her.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple became completely estranged while Monroe was starring in The Misfits, the film Miller wrote for her, in 1960. They started quarelling just months after their marriage, when Monroe was filming the Prince and the Showgirl: \u201cWe got into an argument about whether [the director, Laurence] Olivier was persecuting her \u2026 I found myself defending him, and that was the worst possible thing I could have done. But I don\u2019t think any other course would have mattered either.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time he left the set, their marriage was in effect over, he said. \u201cWe weren\u2019t speaking. There was no way to approach her \u2026 She was genuinely hostile to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller and Monroe arriving at what was then called London airport in 1955. Photograph: AP<\/p>\n

From a career perspective, he felt he had spent the four years of their marriage \u201cdoing nothing basically\u201d, apart from The Misfits, and that even if Monroe\u2019s feelings had changed, he would have ended the marriage then. \u201cI couldn\u2019t have gone on. It would have killed me. I couldn\u2019t work anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

The previously unpublished conversations were recorded over nearly 30 years, beginning soon after Miller met Bigsby in the mid-1970s and continuing until a few years before the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright\u2019s death in 2005. They have come to light after Bigsby, now 84, transcribed them for a book, The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Words<\/a>, published on Thursday by Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Miller also revealed how the unprecedented success of Death of a Salesman in 1949 \u2013 the first play in American theatre to win a Critics\u2019 Circle award, a Tony and a Pulitzer \u2013 simultaneously empowered him and contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage to Mary Slattery. \u201cMy horizon suddenly opened up into all kinds of other ways of expressing my dominance. I felt I could do anything, and we kind of broke apart then, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

He told Bigsby that fame \u201cis a form of power which is sexual, or implicitly sexual\u201d. He said he became \u201ctotally immersed\u201d in his work, \u201call day and all night\u201d. \u201cNow that I look back at it, I don\u2019t know how anybody could live with me at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, throughout his life, he questioned his ability to write, he confessed. \u201cMy whole life has been a struggle with self-doubt.\u201d Only a \u201cminor percentage\u201d of what he wrote had \u201cever seen the light of day,\u201d he revealed.<\/p>\n

The couple, centre, at the first night of Miller\u2019s play A View from the Bridge, in London, 1956. Photograph: Express Newspapers\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Miller also talked about his flirtation with communism and Hollywood\u2019s suppression of his work after he refused to name communist writers before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.<\/p>\n

He said McCarthyism created \u201ca kind of irrational sensation of overhanging fear that some unseen force had infiltrated society, that was busy boring holes in it, to bring it down. There was no rational way to confront all of this, because every time you did so you could be accused of being part of that conspiracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had feared he and other \u201cdissident people\u201d would end up \u201ceither in a lunatic asylum or in some kind of quasi-fascist system\u201d, self-censoring themselves while \u201cthe most outrageously patriotic people would be running everything\u201d. \u201cThat was one of the reasons I started to write The Crucible. I had to find a means to address [that],\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He set the play during the Salem witch trials because \u201cit was simply impossible to discuss what was happening to us in contemporary terms. There had to be some distance given to the phenomenon. We were all going slightly crazy trying to be honest, trying to see straight and trying to stay safe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller also talked in the tapes about his upbringing, his first sexual encounter in a brothel at the age of 16, his views on Zionism and antisemitism as an atheist Jew, his inspiration for The Misfits and many of his plays, the impact of the Holocaust on his work, and his 40-year marriage to his third wife, Inge Morath.<\/p>\n

Bigsby, who is an emeritus professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia, thinks the ideas and experiences that shaped Miller\u2019s life and career ensured his plays remain highly relevant today. \u201cHe talks about his Jewishness [as] a sensibility, a continuing concern with the fragility of society, which he learned from the Depression and learned again from the Holocaust, that we walk on very thin ice in our sense of civilisation,\u201d he said. \u201cAll of this is fundamental to Miller. He\u2019s a person who believes in the importance of history, in the connection between the past and the present, because that\u2019s the basis of morality.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century and she was one of the greatest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-654981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}