Arthur Miller opens up about marriage to Marilyn Monroe in newly unearthed recordings | Arthur Miller

He was one of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century and one of the greatest actors. In newly unearthed recordings dating back nearly 30 years, Arthur Miller described his short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe, saying she wanted a husband who was “father, lover, friend and representative” and that the child she longed for would be an “additional problem.”

In recorded conversations with his friend and biographer Professor Christopher Bigsby, Miller said he felt “death was always upon him”. [Monroe’s] shoulder – always.” He believed that if he “did not pay attention to her life,” it would “end in disaster.”

“I once brought in doctors to pump him out because he had swallowed enough. [drugs] to kill him,” he said. “So I felt like he was in a very psychologically vulnerable state. Apparently it took a few years, but it happened. “It was beyond my or anyone else’s power to hold him back.”

It seemed inevitable to him that Monroe would die from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, at the age of 36. “It was impossible for him to live, let alone live with someone. A life that intense, you couldn’t go on with those drugs and survive,” he said.

The couple began a passionate extramarital affair in 1955 and married in 1956. Miller said it only took months for him to realize he had made a mistake. “I wasn’t really prepared for what I had to be prepared for, so he literally had no internal resources… He wanted a father, a lover, a friend, an agent, above all someone who wouldn’t criticize him for anything, or he would lose his self-confidence. I don’t know if such a person exists.”

Records reveal that the couple unsuccessfully sought medical help after Monroe miscarried and suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Reflecting on their loss, Miller said Monroe felt she “ideally” wanted to be a mother while working under “tremendous pressure” in Hollywood: “In a way, I’m not sure how good it would be for her to have a child. That would be an added problem… I’m not sure how that would work out in practice.”

He described Monroe as a “very smart woman” who was “a pleasure to be with” and had “a great sense of humor, irony and generosity”, but said “a kind of paranoia” came into play. “She began to suspect everyone of exploiting or harming her.”

The couple had become completely estranged in 1960, when Monroe starred in The Misfits, which Miller wrote for her. Just months after their marriage, they began arguing while Monroe was filming The Prince and the Showgirl: [the director, Laurence] Olivier was persecuting him… I found myself defending him, and that was the worst thing I could have done. But I don’t think any other course would be important either.”

He said their marriage effectively ended when he left the set. “We weren’t talking. There was no way I could approach him… He was being really hostile towards me.”

From a career standpoint, he felt that they had spent the four years of their marriage “doing basically nothing” outside of The Misfits, and that Monroe would have ended their marriage at that time even if her feelings had changed. “I couldn’t keep going. It would kill me. I couldn’t work anymore.”

The previously unpublished conversations were recorded over nearly 30 years, starting soon after Miller met Bigsby in the mid-1970s and continuing until several years before the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s death in 2005. These conversations came to light after Bigsby, now 84, transcribed them for a book. The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own WordsIt was published by Cambridge University Press on Thursday.

Miller also explained how the unprecedented success of Death of a Salesman, the first play in American theater to win a Critics Circle Award, a Tony and a Pulitzer in 1949, both empowered him and contributed to the breakdown of his first marriage to Mary Slattery. “My horizons suddenly opened up to all kinds of other ways of expressing dominance. I felt like I could do anything, and I think that’s when we drifted apart.”

Fame, he told Bigsby, was “a form of power that is sexual or implicitly sexual.” He said he was “completely immersed” in his work “all day and all night”. “Looking back now, I don’t know how anyone could live with me.”

He also admitted that he had been questioning his ability to write throughout his life. “My whole life has been a struggle with self-doubt.” He explained that only a “small percentage” of what he wrote “came to light.”

Miller also spoke of flirting with communism and Hollywood suppressing his work after he refused to name communist writers before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.

He said McCarthyism “created an irrational sense of fear that society was being infiltrated by an unseen force that was busy poking holes in society to bring it down.” “There was no logical way to confront all of this, because every time you did that you could be accused of being part of that conspiracy.”

He feared that he and other “dissident people” would end up “either in a madhouse or in some kind of quasi-fascist system,” self-censoring themselves while “the most extremely patriotic people run everything.” “That’s one of the reasons I started writing The Crucible. I had to find a way to solve the problem. [that]he said.

He staged the play during the Salem witch trials because “it was simply impossible to discuss in contemporary terms what was happening to us. There had to be a certain distance from the phenomenon. We were all going a little crazy trying to be honest, trying to be honest, trying to stay safe.”

Miller also talked on the tapes about his upbringing, his first sexual encounter in a brothel at age 16, his views on Zionism and antisemitism as an atheist Jew, the inspiration for The Misfits and many of his plays, the influence of the Holocaust on his work, and his 40-year marriage to his third wife, Inge Morath.

Bigsby, emeritus professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia, thinks the ideas and experiences that shaped Miller’s life and career ensure that his plays remain so relevant today. “He talks about his Judaism [as] “What he learned from the Depression and re-learned from the Holocaust is a sensitivity that we’re walking on very thin ice in our understanding of civilization, and a lingering concern about the fragility of society,” he said. “All of this is fundamental to Miller.” “He is a person who believes in the importance of history, the connection between the past and the present, because this is the basis of morality.”