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Its sixty years since Marilyn Monroe’s death. Aubrey Malone plots the last extravagant, turbulent years of a Hollywood legend who continues to fascinate
: n y l i Mar
the final years
Marilyn Monroe will be sixty years dead this August. What more can be said about her other than the fact that she continues to intrigue us even from the grave? Her last completed film was The Misfits. The screenplay was written by her husband, Arthur Miller, but by the time it was in the can their marriage was on the rocks. She tortured him with cruelty on the set. Who was to blame? Both of them and neither. Monroe expected too much from him. She knew she was no angel and confessed as much. ‘A lot of people like to think of me as innocent,’ she said, ‘so that’s the way I behave to them but if they saw the real me they’d hate me.’
Marilyn with her co star in The Misfits, Clarke Cable. Photograph courtesy of Steve Cox
Miller checked in to the Chelsea Hotel in New York. She went back to their 57th Street apartment. She rang him one night. ‘Are you coming home?’ she asked. It was as if they were still a couple. She was needy for him but he refused to see her. The past was wiped out, he said, ‘like a colour photo of violence that had been left too long in the sun.’ He couldn’t share her amnesia. Returning to the old life would have been ‘like trying to die backwards.’
Miller now started dating Inge Morath, a photographer on The Misfits. Monroe wasn’t pleased at her being in his life. She didn’t appreciate the speed with which the relationship progressed. Had his marriage meant that little that he was able to move on to another woman so quickly? Morath made her feel like ‘a negated sex symbol.’
He’d stayed with her until she began to threaten his hold on sanity. She was like a drowning woman who was trying to bring him down with her. The intensity with which she’d loved him at the beginning had turned inside out.
She started to see Joe DiMaggio again. She’d been married to him once. They were still friends but that was all. Billy Wilder said her marriage to DiMaggio failed when he realised he’d married Marilyn Monroe, that the Miller one failed when he Senior Times | May - June 2022 | www.seniortimes.ie 5
