On June 29, 1956, Hollywood film actress Marilyn Monroe marries playwright Arthur Miller in a four-minute civil ceremony at the Westchester County Courthouse in New York state. Writer Norman Mailer famously calls the union a meeting of “The Great American Body” and “The Great American Brain.”
On July 1, 1956, the couple wed again in a Jewish ceremony at the home of Miller’s agent, Kay Brown, near Katonah, New York. Eager to fit in with Miller’s family, Monroe had studied Judaic texts with the family rabbi and converted to Judaism.
Monroe and Miller were first introduced in 1951 by film and theater director Elia Kazan on the Hollywood set of As Young as You Feel. Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” had premiered on Broadway in 1949 and garnered the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and Tony Award for Best Play. Monroe had begun to attract attention for her minor appearances in The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and All About Eve (1950). Upon meeting Miller, Monroe confided to a friend, “It was like running into a tree! You know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.”
The relationship, however, only really took off years later—after Monroe’s starring sex-symbol roles in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955)—and her tumultuous 274-day marriage to baseball great Joe DiMaggio.
It was Miller’s second marriage and Monroe’s third. On the back of a wedding photograph, Monroe had scrawled: “Hope, Hope, Hope.” But just like with her marriage to DiMaggio, the strains began to emerge as early as their honeymoon in London. Monroe discovered notes by Miller expressing doubts about their marriage, an emotional wound from which she would never fully recover.
Monroe’s pill-taking, increasingly erratic behavior and affair with French actor Yves Montand—along with Miller’s emotional withdrawal and bond with Austrian photographer Inge Morath—strained the marriage further. The relationship reached its nadir with the couple barely speaking to one another during the filming of The Misfits, whose screenplay Miller wrote for Monroe. They divorced on January 24, 1961, just one week before the film’s opening.
On August 5, 1962, Monroe was found dead at the age of 36 in her Los Angeles bungalow, an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. Miller did not attend her funeral.
