Two ceremonies, two days apart. Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller married in a civil ceremony in Westchester County, New York, on June 29, 1956. The Jewish ceremony came on July 1. In the wedding image here, the two of them have their hands at the cake. There’s a second picture worth setting beside it, from the film they made together in 1960. The Misfits starts in Reno, where the woman played by Monroe is getting a divorce.
There’s also a gap of several years between their first meeting and the first photograph in this gallery. Elia Kazan brought them together in Los Angeles in the early 1950s. By then Miller had the 1949 Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman. If you go looking for Monroe in two of her 1950 films, The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve, you’ll see her in supporting parts. Take another look at the two of them at the April in Paris Ball in 1957. By that night at the Waldorf-Astoria, she’d played the lead in Niagara and sung about diamonds in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Decades later, Mike Wallace asked Miller to look back. The 60 Minutes interview went out on November 15, 1987. Miller knew what people made of the difference between the two of them. The way he remembered it, the apparent mismatch was part of the reason the relationship made sense to him. He was speaking more than thirty years after the wedding, long after people had gotten used to hearing their names together.
There’s a practical part of Monroe’s story that gets less room in the wedding pictures. She moved to New York, worked with Lee and Paula Strasberg and set up a production company with the photographer Milton Greene. Her new deal with Twentieth Century Fox gave her a say in who directed her films. Bus Stop was the first picture under that deal. She played Cherie, a singer on her way to Hollywood until a rodeo cowboy made up his mind that she was going home with him.
How The Misfits Took Shape
Earlier in June 1956, Miller had sat before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He spoke about his own activities. When the committee asked him to identify people who had been with him at a meeting of Communist writers, he refused. A contempt conviction followed in 1957. The federal appeals court reversed it the next year. That part of Miller’s life played out in Washington and in court, far from the Hollywood sign in the gallery. It also overlapped with the work he was doing on the story that would become The Misfits.
Miller had spent six weeks in Nevada in 1956 to get a divorce from Mary Slattery, his first wife. While he was there he picked up material about men who rounded up wild horses and sold them for pet food. In October 1957, Esquire ran his short story about it. The men had a buyer, and the buyer wanted the horses for meat. That arrangement stayed in the screenplay. Miller enlarged the part of Roslyn, the woman who sees what the roundup will cost.
In his Michigan Quarterly Review interview, Miller said he wrote the part for Monroe. He believed she had a good eye for how people behaved and could do serious dramatic work. The pink dress in the gallery belongs to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where she and Jane Russell play two friends. In The Misfits she had to do something quite different. The role takes her out of the musical’s crowded rooms and puts her on the Nevada salt flats, where the men have a truck, a plane and a job they expect to finish.
Huston started shooting in July 1960. Monroe plays Roslyn Taber, who stays with Isabelle, played by Thelma Ritter. Clark Gable is Gay Langland, Eli Wallach is Guido, and Montgomery Clift plays Perce, a rodeo rider. Roslyn begs the men to stop when she learns they intend to sell the mustangs to a pet-food company. She goes along to the salt flats anyway. In the middle of all that open country, it’s her reaction that makes you see what the men are doing.
The Film Opened After the Divorce
The airport photograph shows the two of them traveling together while they were married. The American Film Institute’s production history puts dates on the end of their last project together and the end of the marriage. Filming ended on November 4, 1960. Monroe announced the separation a week later, on November 11. She finalized the divorce in Mexico on January 20, 1961. The Misfits opened in New York on February 1, twelve days later. The audience got to see the work after the couple had gone their separate ways.
Gable had died on November 16, 1960, at 59. Monroe died in August 1962 at 36. You’ll often see The Misfits called her last film. It was the last feature she finished. She was back on a set in 1962 for Something’s Got to Give, with Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse. The film remained unfinished. Some of the pages she worked with survive, including script sides from the production. It’s one way to see that the work carried on after Roslyn, even if another completed feature never reached theaters.
There’s another way to get back to the years when they were making the film. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has typescripts of The Misfits, including a copy with Miller’s edits and an explanatory note. Look at those alongside the magazine short story from 1957 and you get a sense of the years the script spent changing shape. It was being written and revised well before a camera crew turned up in Reno.
There’s a reason to watch the roundup again once you know that. Perce takes Roslyn seriously enough to undo the work the men have done. Gay catches the stallion a second time, and by then it matters what he does with the rope in his hands. The couple’s wedding photograph has a place in the history of the film. The way Monroe watches the men in that last stretch gives you something the wedding picture can’t.
