Exclusive: Taped conversations also cover playwright’s relationship with fame, self-doubt and communism
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, saying she wanted a husband who was a “father, lover, friend and agent,” and the child she longed for would have been an “additional problem”.
In taped conversations with his friend and biographer Prof Christopher Bigsby, Miller said he had felt “death was always on her [Monroe’s] shoulder – always”. He had believed that if he did not “take care of her life” she would come to a “catastrophic end”.
“One time I brought doctors to pump her out because she had swallowed enough stuff [drugs] to kill her,” he said. “So 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’s to hold her back.”
Monroe’s death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, at the age of 36, had seemed inevitable to him. “It was impossible for her to live, let alone with anybody. You couldn’t go on with that intensity of life, and those drugs, and manage to survive,” he said.
