Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller met on the set of the1951 movie As Young as You Feel. As the story goes, Monroe was crying when she met Miller. At the time, Monroe was upset about the recent death of her agent and paramour Johnny Hyde, and she was casually involved with Miller’s friend Elia Kazan. Monroe and Miller shook hands, and Miller later wrote, “the shock of her body’s motion sped through me.” Monroe wrote of meeting Arthur, “Met a man tonight … It was, bam! It was like running into a tree. You know, like a cool drink when you’ve had a fever.” When they met, Miller had just won a Pulitzer Prize for Death of A Salesman and Monroe was still a star on the rise. They eventually started an affair while Miller was still married and in 1956, after Miller got divorced, Monroe and Miller got married. In retrospect, it is one of the strangest celebrity marriages in 20th-century American history. A new documentary, called Arthur Miller: Writer, which was directed by Rebecca Miller, Miller’s daughter from his third and final marriage to the Austrian photographer Inge Morath, explores her father’s relationship with Monroe. It is comprised of home movies and interviews Rebecca shot of her father in his later years. During a recent New York Times interview, Rebecca said that she felt like she shouldn’t be in the room when her father was talking about Monroe, that she shouldn’t know the things he was telling her. She also said it was “very tricky” to create a portrait of her father that included intimate details of his first two marriages, and also that wasn’t diminished by Monroe’s presence. “I was constantly trying to cut it down again because she has so much light coming out of her,” Rebecca said, according to The Ringer. “So much charisma. I just said, ‘OK, how can we penetrate the mystery a little bit of this woman and this man and in the end find some clarity?”
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