Every Christmas, I give my son next year’s Marilyn Monroe calendar. She was a great actress, beautiful, radiating a sensuous attraction we find hard to resist; no wonder the yearly calendar is always much appreciated.

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I vividly remember the moment when her death was reported on the radio, way back in  August 1962.  We were having dinner but the shocking news of her death abruptly ended my appetite.  Was there no one who could  have prevented the tragedy, I wondered?  No there wasn’t. She had been married before; the last time to playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller. But this marriage  had also ended in divorce. Monroe and Miller had tried to make it work but fairly early in the marriage Miller realized that  their relationship was doomed.

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How had they met? In his memoir Timebends, Miller described their first encounter. When we shook hands, he remembered, the shock of her body’s motion sped through me. A few days later, they danced during a party and all of a sudden he realized what a perfect woman should look like. This romantic idea may also have been inspired by the fact that Miller was contemplating to divorce his first wife. After he had overheard a woman saying ‘men would eat Marilyn alive’, he felt even more attracted but also oddly protective towards her. Marilyn also fell in love with Arthur; he was tall, goodlooking, famous, courteous and - like her former husbands  – much older than Marilyn.

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Since her mother was on and off in mental hospitals, Marilyn’s youth was spent in orphanages and foster families not overflowing from affection. Initially, Miller had not realized that Marilyn was an insecure young actress in need of reassurance and love, which she hoped Miller could give.

From the start there was also a strong sexual attraction between them. But it took four years before they would meet again. In the meantime, Miller tried to rescue his marriage, staying  away from Marilyn. During that time Miller had written  a play in which the female character, Lorraine, was inspired on Marilyn. This is how he characterized Lorraine: With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and expectations in a life she half sensed it was doomed, she moves instinctively to break the hold of respectability on the men.  This was one side of Marilyn’s character. He was to learn her ‘ugly side’ (as she called it) when he accompanied her to England where Marilyn would act in The Prince and the Showgirl, co-starred and directed by Laurence Olivier.

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When  Miller’s marriage was at last about to end, Marilyn flew to New York hoping to meet him. She yearned for a family, which she hoped Miller could give her. However, he did not yet  bite.  But in the end he did, and  the couple got married.

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During the shooting  of The Prince and the Showgirl, Olivier became more and more frustrated about Marilyn’s behaviour: always late at the set; forgetting her lines, even very brief ones; ever demanding praise; her personal coach cum psychotherapist meddling in Olivier’s directorship. Although Miller sympathized with Olivier’s feelings, he defended his wife. Their trip to England was a disaster. Miller wrote in his diary that he was disappointed in her. He added that he then realized he had made the mistake of marrying Marilyn. As if in a Freudian set-up,  she found the notes, after which she told a friend that people only saw the glamour and fell in love with her. And she added: When they saw my ugly side they then run away, and this is what Arthur has done.  But Marilyn was jumping to a conclusion too soon.

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In Timebends, Miller wrote that Marilyn needed incessant reassurance and ever stronger doses of tranquilizers to get through a working day. She required unquestioning and absolute support and when this was not forthcoming, she was on the lookout for evidence of betrayals. This resulted in  a life that was full of suspicion and addiction. Miller also realized that Marilyn’s mental problems were going to take a lot of  time which he could not devote to his own work.

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After their return from England, Miller started wring the script of The Misfits. He hoped  to make Marilyn feel good in playing the part of a serious actress, rather than the character she typically had played. Meanwhile, Marilyn was contracted to play such a part in Some Like it Hot, one of her best films, by the way. Like Olivier, Billy Wilder, the film’s director, became fed up with her behaviour on the set. He sent Miller a long telegram in response to Miller’s defence of Marilyn’s behaviour on account of a miscarriage immediately after the shooting. Wilder responded by admitting that he understood Marilyn’s medical problems, but she didn’t understand anybody else’s problems.  

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Before the shooting of The Misfits, Marilyn began doubting whether her marriage with Miller  could last. She had become bored with Miller, who preferred  a quiet private life rather than  one in the spotlights.

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In The Misfits, a film of lost freedoms and of desperate hopes, Miller portrayed Marilyn stripped of vindictiveness, egotism and cruelty towards colleagues. He wished that by living through this role she might have gained some confidence. But the opposite happened. She had hoped  that she could get away from ‘Marilyn Monroe’, but in the film she was playing exactly the same role. Miller admitted that, after all, there was indeed no space between herself and the movie star - she was Marilyn Monroe, and that, he added, was killing her. The Misfits was the final prelude to their divorce. Marilyn would never make another film. On 5 August 1962, she died of an overdose of Nembutal tablets. Could she have been rescued? When so asked by  reporters Miller  said that her self-destruction was terrifying and beyond him to master it. He admitted that he could never have rescued her, and  doubted that anybody could have.

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I look at the pictures of the 2026 Marilyn Monroe calendar which I will give my son on Christmas Eve. Looking at them, I realize that I see the Marilyn Monroe she wanted to be rid of. Her tragedy was that her admirers loved this  Marilyn Monroe and not another.

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Peter de Haan                                                                                                                                                                                                      December 2025