Page 58 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn’s reply is always the same: a shrug and a dismissive “Who’s happy?”

Director Josh Logan agrees, saying of his leading lady, “I doubt if she had two consecutive days’ happiness in her entire life.”

“Broadway’s biggest becomes Marilyn’s best,” teases 20th Century-Fox in its trailer forBus Stop.

Ahead of the film’s premiere, the cast gathers for a preview.Cast members Bill Murray, Hope Lange, Arthur O’Connell, and Eileen Heckart aren’t sure what to expect. As Broadway veterans, they’re all used to running their lines straight through, but that wasn’t what happened on the set ofBus Stop.

“We would see all these little pieces, and we thought the film was going to be a disaster,” Murray says.

Daily rushes never captured a complete scene with Marilyn.

As the preview rolls, they’re amazed and astonished. “All of a sudden we realized what the magic of films was, with the editing and cutting it all together; she was magnificent!”

Critics agree. TheNew York Timespraises Murray as “a wondrous new actor” who “sets up a mighty force to be curbed by Miss Monroe. And the fact that she fitfully but firmly summons the will and the strength to humble him—to make him say ‘please,’ which is the point of the whole thing—attests to her new acting skill.”

Miller writes Marilyn a letter as one creative force acknowledging another. “The wholeBus Stopreception is a personal triumph for you of a magnitude which I don’t think you yet realize. You have done what you set out to do. You are an actress and an artist.”

CHAPTER 42

KETCHUM, IDAHO, IS 538 MILES from Reno, Nevada. That’s where Arthur Miller spends six weeks at the Pyramid Lake Ranch, awaiting the finalization of his divorce.

On weekdays, Miller observes “misfit” cowboys wrangle wild horses. These authentic scenes from Western life spark the idea for a story. Miller makes notes—until the phone rings at the ranch house with a daily call from a “Mrs. Leslie” for a “Mr. Leslie.” Then he rushes from his isolated desert cabin to talk to her for hours.

“I don’t want this anymore, Papa, I can’t fight them alone, I want to live with you in the country and be a good wife,” “Mrs. Leslie” tells him.

On weekends, Miller crosses the state border to Idaho or California for clandestine meetings with Marilyn in Reno. His FBI surveillance detail is never far behind.

Though questions about the couple’s future are unavoidable, Miller agrees to sit with Goodman forTime’s cover story on Marilyn, with a cover portrait from illustrator BorisChaliapin, Marilyn’s name drawn on a piece of motion picture film.

“I can’t afford to get married for a long time,” Miller tells the magazine’s reporter. “Where will I get the money to support two families? My playA View from the Bridgejust closed on Broadway. I got thirty-five thousand dollars, and that will have to last me for two years until I can write another one.”

June 2. Miller writes to Marilyn from the Pyramid Ranch, asBus Stopis wrapping: “It is ten to eight here … the radio is playing ‘Let’s Fall in Love,’ in a corny Dorsey brothers arrangement, and I have just walked over to my wall and kissed your lips that kiss the glass. How in love I am! … I adore you … I love your every lunacy. Only love me. I will make you so happy you will not really believe it is possible. I want to be your lover and your husband and the papa of your new family and our home.”

“We’re so congenial,” Marilyn tells herGentlemen Prefer Blondesco-star Jane Russell. “This is the first time I’ve been really in love. Arthur is a serious man, but he has a wonderful sense of humor. We laugh and joke a lot. I’m mad about him.”

June 11. Reunited in New York, the newly divorced Miller and Marilyn make plans for their life together. First, they’ll travel to London, whereThe Prince and the Showgirlbegins filming in August and whereA View from the Bridgewill have its West End opening in October.

Before then, Miller is subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, on June 21.

It’s not his first run-in with them.

In 1952, celebrated director Elia Kazan had been called to testify before HUAC. Kazan, himself once a member of the Communist Party, named seventeen others, reasoning that he was doing no harm by calling out those who’d already been blacklisted.

Miller is one of many on Broadway and in Hollywood who vehemently disagree with Kazan’s choice, to the point that when Miller sees his former friend and collaborator on the street, he turns away, refusing to acknowledge him.

Miller writesThe Crucible,in which the Salem witch trials of 1692 act as an allegory for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dangerous and circumstantial anti-Communist crusades. The drama opens on Broadway in January 1953 and wins four Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Author of a Play. But in March 1954, Miller is blocked from attending a premiere ofThe Cruciblein Brussels, Belgium, when the US State Department denies his passport renewal due to suspicions that he supports Communism.

The issue returns when Miller applies again for a renewal, now amplified by Marilyn’s celebrity aura, and he is hauled into court.

“The next stop is trouble,” Walter Winchell writes in his column. “The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena will check into his entire inner circle, which also happens to be the inner circle of Marilyn Monroe—and all of them are former Communist sympathizers.”

Months earlier, Winchell—a stalwart friend to Joe DiMaggio—had likewise stoked these rumors, declaringon his radio show, “America’s best known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia, several of whom are listed as red fronters.”

Fellow columnist Vincent X. Flaherty speculates that Marilyn’s fame risks making Communism appealing to young Americans. Since “teenage boys and girls worship Marilyn,” Flaherty argues, if “Marilyn marries a man who was connected with communism, they can’t help but start thinking that communism can’t be so bad after all!”

June 21. Representative Francis Eugene Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, presides as Richard Arens, HUAC counsel and former aide to Senator McCarthy, questions Arthur Miller in Washington, DC.

The committee lays out a lengthy timeline dating back sixteen years, specifying Miller’s attendance at a Marxist study group in 1940 and a gathering of Communist Party writers in 1947, fewer than a dozen meetings in total.

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