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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/58457/full/58457/book-hones-in-on-marilyn-monroes-jewish-marriage/ <br /><br /> <b>Book hones in on Marilyn Monroe’s Jewish marriage</b> <br /> Thursday, June 17, 2010 | by liat collins <br /><br /><p>It was a surprising marriage, summed up in one headline as “Egghead weds Hourglass.”</p> <p>Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood superstar who elevated playing the dumb blonde into an art form, and Arthur Miller, probably the most respected American playwright of the 20th century, wed in 1956. The marriage was to last a mere five (mostly miserable) years.</p> <p>In “The Genius and the Goddess,” Jeffrey Meyers traces the relationship between Monroe and Miller from their first meeting at a party in Los Angeles in 1951 — when Miller was already established as an intellectual and Monroe was still “couch casting” in her attempt to break into the big-time movies — through their marriage, divorce and the way Monroe lived on as Miller’s tragic muse.</p> <p><img alt="Amarriage" class="left" height="322" src="/images/uploads/y_photos_2010/za06_18_10/Amarriage.jpg" title="Amarriage" width="216" />During their initial encounter, Miller won her over by squeezing her toe (not, indeed, her most famous body part). By the end, Miller, according to Meyers, bailed out of the relationship to save himself, claiming: “She was beyond help. There was simply nothing but destruction that could have come. My own destruction as well as hers.”</p> <p>Of particular interest to Jewish readers, perhaps, is Meyers’ description of Monroe’s conversion to Judaism.</p> <p>“Marilyn told Susan Strasberg: ‘I can identify with the Jews. Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me,’ “ Meyers writes. “Acutely aware that she did not have a family of her own and eager to join the families of her husbands and friends, she converted to Judaism to express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents.”</p> <p>Miller is quoted in the book as saying: “I’m not religious, but she wanted to be one of us and that was why she took some instruction. I don’t think you could say she became a Jewess, but still she took it all very seriously.”</p> <p>During their marriage, according to Meyers, she would occasionally pepper her speech with Yiddish: “When describing her nude calendar, she said, ‘There I am with my bare tuchas out.’ ”</p> <p>Meyers, a well-established biographer and writer, has clearly researched his subject, and has the added benefit of a 25-year friendship with Miller. But sometimes there is so much detail that it goes off at a tangent and detracts, for instance when he quotes Raymond Chandler to describe the type of childhood home in which Monroe lived.</p> <p>Meyers provides a great deal of sometimes sordid information about Monroe’s life, loves and affairs, and her craving for attention (or security). An appendix of “Illnesses and Hospitalizations” coldly lists harrowing information: Before she married Miller, she had 13 abortions (the last from a pregnancy with Miller’s close friend, film and stage director Elia Kazan) and attempted suicide three times. The years after that are marked by a desperate desire for children ending in an ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage after miscarriage, following two of which she again attempted suicide.</p> <p>Famous names wander in and out of the book, including Billy Wilder, who directed Monroe in “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like It Hot,” Norman Rosten, Yves Montand, Tony Curtis, Laurence Olivier, Clark Gable, John Huston and, of course, the Kennedys and Frank Sinatra.</p> <p>Monroe’s observations of the boring conversations between Pulitzer Prize winners Miller and Saul Bellow, both living in Nevada awaiting their divorces to marry younger women, are as eye-opening to readers as they were to her.</p> <p>The sections on Miller are, well, less sexy. But the chapters on Miller’s experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee are illuminating. Miller’s refusal to name names, unlike Kazan, was to freeze their friendship for a decade, while Monroe risked her own career by accompanying Miller when he was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC.</p> <p><br /><strong>“The Genius and the Goddess”</strong> by Jeffrey Meyers (384 pages, University of Illinois Press, $29.95)</p>

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