By the time Marilyn returned to New York in late May, Arthur was back from Reno with his divorce, but he was involved in his own difficulties. The House Un-American Activities Committee had subpoened him to appear for questioning. He had been named as a Communist years earlier, but the committee knew the charge was inaccurate. He had never belonged to the Communist Party, although he had signed leftist petitions. The committees interest was aroused when he applied for a passport to go to London for the opening of A View from the Bridge. By 1954 the power of the congressional committees investigating internal Communism was declining. Concluding they needed to prosecute someone important to shore up their power, the committee decided to go after Arthur. They hoped to frighten him into naming names of friends who had been members of the Communist Party, thus acknowledging their power. The tactic had worked many times before. Marilyns name became tangled in the matter. At his hearing on June 21, the committee asked Miller why he wanted to go to England. He mentioned A View from the Bridge and also stated he wanted to go there with his wife. At a recess in the hearings, reporters asked him who he meant by his wife. He answer was bold: he told them that at some point before Marilyn left for England to begin production on The Prince and the Showgirl, he and she would marry. Marilyn was watching the news on television when she heard Arthurs statement, and she was surprised, since he hadnt proposed to her. Ralph Roberts and Rupert Allan thought Arthur had used her, hoping that the committee wouldnt jail someone married to the worlds preeminent film star. In one fell swoop he had turned himself from a dangerous subversive into a man in love. When he refused to name names to the committee, he became the darling of the left, even though he was firm in his statement to the committee that he considered communism to be dangerous and subversive. Arthurs refusal to name names may have moved Marilyn to admire him even more; she wasnt angry at him for announcing their engagement without asking her. There was also her sense of justice; she felt the attack on him was unmerited. She was like Saint Joan urging the dauphin to fight, wrote Susan Strasberg. She was a warrior goddess, awakened and full of piss and vinegar. In news footage of them together after his announcement, they look very much in love. Throughout Arthurs difficulties, Marilyn stayed true to her sense of right and wrong. When a committee member offered to have the charges dropped if Marilyn would pose with him in a photo for his next election campaign, she refused. When Spyros Skouras put pressure on her to persuade Arthur to name some names and get off the hook, she refused, even though Skouras threatened to destroy her film career. She told him if he did that she and Arthur would move to Denmark: That was the country where the king had worn a yellow star in protest against Hitlers discriminatory policies against the Jews. Checking the studio grosses, Skouras backed down. He couldnt stop the hearing, but he arranged for a passport for Arthur to go to England. With the marriage proposal - perhaps even sooner - Marilyn decided to convert to Judaism. She studied with Rabbi Robert Goldburg, a leftist involved with the civil rights movement. It wasnt important to Arthur that she convert, but Arthurs mother had been estranged from his first wife because she hadnt converted. Marilyn wanted to make the Millers into a real family. This family, unlike others she had joined, would be her own. Gussie told the Jewish Daily Forward they hadnt attended their sons first wedding because it wasnt Jewish and they had never been able to be real in-laws to their sons first wife. But Marilyn was more loving to them than their own children. She told Gussie stories of her terrible childhood, and Gussie became a staunch ally. Goldburgs papers, recently opened, show that Marilyn was sincere, not calculating, in converting. In an unpublished memoir about the conversion, Goldburg wrote that Marilyn had rejected the Protestant fundamentalism of her childhood years earlier. She was impressed by the many Jewish people she knew, and one of her heroes was Albert Einstein, whom she thought of as the great scientist-humanist-Jew-Socialist dissenter. She liked the ethical and prophetic sides of Judaism and its devotion to close family life. Marilyn often met with Rabbi Goldburg to discuss the books he assigned her to read. They became friends; he went to the Millers Hanukkah and Passover celebrations. She liked his civil rights credentials. He supported the movement, and he led marches and demonstrations. Lois Banner Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (2012)
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 17:39:12 +0000
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