Between You and Me (33 page)

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judgments he had set down in the last chapter. I must say, that surprised me. After all, Norman Mailer was hardly one of those reclusive, academic writers who had spent most of his life in the pristine confines of some ivory tower. He was known to be an astute and savvy media warrior who had long been accustomed to mixing it up on television shows; even more to the point, this was not the first time he had been interviewed by me. Hence, he should have been much better prepared to deal with my line of questioning.

When the piece ran on 60 Minutes and Mailer saw how defensive and unconvincingly he came across in our interview, he was hop-ping mad. A few days after it aired, he was quoted as saying that the next time he saw me, he was going to beat me up. Ever the macho man, Mailer specified that he would confine his assault to body blows, because “Wallace’s face is already so ugly that there’s no point in doing any damage to it.” That lively remark was passed on to me by a reporter who called to get my reaction to Mailer’s threat. I just laughed and said, “Ah yes, that sounds like Norman. What would we do without him? The man’s a national treasure.”

It was no laughing matter to Mailer. He nursed his grievance against me for many years thereafter, and invariably, when I ran into him, as I did from time to time, he would look at me like I was a hair in his soup.

Marilyn Monroe was also a prime topic of conversation when I interviewed another famous author in 1987. Except on that occasion, the writer also happened to have been her last husband—the esteemed playwright Arthur Miller.

The three men who married Monroe had almost nothing else in common. She was only sixteen and was still known by her real name—Norma Jeane Baker—when she tied the knot with her starter husband in 1942. His name was Jim Dougherty, and his sole claim to

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distinction was that he was the first mate of the woman who went on to become Marilyn Monroe. Their marriage lasted four years, but during most of that time, Dougherty was away at sea, serving in the Merchant Marines.

In 1954, not long after her big burst to stardom, Monroe married Joe DiMaggio, who was, if anything, even more of a living legend than she was. To their millions of fans, the bond between the Yankee Clipper and the Blond Bombshell was the great storybook romance of the age. Alas, what began as a starry-eyed liaison soon turned into a star-crossed mismatch: Their marriage lasted only nine months.

Brief though it was, it produced a terse comment that must be regarded as one of the most telling rejoinders in the history of American pop culture.

While Mr. and Mrs. DiMaggio were on their honeymoon in Tokyo, Marilyn was persuaded to make a brief visit to South Korea to entertain U.S. troops stationed in that grim, battle-scarred country.

(The Korean War had come to an end just a few months earlier.) Although DiMaggio did not go with her, the trip was a howling success.

To no one’s surprise, the GIs greeted the appearance of this stunning glamour queen in their midst with thunderous applause and frenzied screams of rapture. When Monroe returned to Tokyo and her new husband, one of the first things she said to him was “Oh, Joe, you’ve never heard such cheering.”

To which he replied: “Oh, yes I have.”

After her divorce from DiMaggio, Monroe was more determined than ever to prove her worth as an actress, and toward that end, she moved to New York and began taking lessons at the Actors Studio.

Her mentor was the longtime guru of that famous workshop, Lee Strasberg, and guided by his influence, she began to hobnob with the intelligentsia of the Broadway theater, a social path that led her into the arms of Arthur Miller.

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Miller had his own considerable reputation as one of America’s finest dramatists, a man who wrote plays that were relentlessly serious. His masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, was nothing less than an audacious attempt to create a drama that would be viewed as a modern counterpart of the classical tragedies that dominated the theater of ancient Greece and the Shakespearean tragedies that were the glory of the Elizabethan Age. Salesman and some of Miller’s other plays were built around his concept that the common man could be as much of a tragic hero as the kings and princes of yore. Moreover, his personality reflected the gravity of his work. In almost every respect, Miller projected the image of an earnest intellectual who brooded over the fate of mankind. As such, he didn’t seem at all like the sort of fellow who would wind up with Marilyn Monroe.

At the time of my 60 Minutes interview with Miller, whom I had known when both of us were students at the University of Michigan, thirty-one years had passed since the day in June 1956 when he and Monroe were married. I recalled how the two of them were portrayed in the tabloids as “the odd couple” long before Neil Simon chose that phrase for the title of one of his comedies. And not only in the tabloids, for even in those days, Norman Mailer couldn’t resist commenting on Monroe’s love life. He described her marriage to Miller as a union between “the Great American Brain and the Great American Body.” That was among the reactions I had in mind when I interviewed Miller three decades later.

W A L L A C E : You know that people said at the time that you were together, what in the world is Arthur doing this for?

Arthur is an innocent. What in the world—Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe?

M I L L E R : That is exactly the point. She also in a way was moving in a world she knew nothing about, a world of getting up

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in the morning, making breakfast, and living in a— That was an innocence there.

W A L L A C E : Did she want that, do you think?

M I L L E R : With part of herself. She wanted it with part of herself, yes.

W A L L A C E : And with the rest?

M I L L E R : She wanted to be a great star.

When we broadcast our profile of Miller in the fall of 1987, he had just published an autobiography called Time Bends: A Life, in which he set down some observations about the Marilyn Monroe he knew. I quoted some of them in our 60 Minutes story.

“I never saw her unhappy in a crowd,” Miller wrote. “Her stardom was her triumph, nothing less. It was her life’s achievement. The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that no space existed between herself and this star. She was Marilyn Monroe, and that was what was killing her.” That led to the following exchange in our interview.

W A L L A C E : You knew that it was doomed?

M I L L E R : I didn’t know it was doomed, but I certainly felt it had a good chance to be.

W A L L A C E : You said to her, “I keep trying to teach myself how to lose you, but I can’t learn yet.” And she says, “Why must you lose me?”

M I L L E R : Well, it just shows you the power of instinct over what’s left of your brains at such moments when you’re being drawn to someone, and you sense that it may not work, and you can’t stop it anyway. . . .

W A L L A C E : Those were tough years. Wonderful years, and terrible years.

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M I L L E R : Sure. They were. Oh, there was a lot of pain, certainly for her, and certainly for me.

W A L L A C E : Why? What did it do to you?

M I L L E R : Well, it’s a defeat. It always is.

Miller devoted so much time and energy to the uphill struggle of trying to make a success of his marriage to Monroe that he all but abandoned his work. During the five years or so that they were together, his only creative achievement was a screenplay for The Misfits, a film he wrote primarily as a vehicle for his wife. In the movie, Monroe played an ex-stripper and recent divorcée who falls in love with an aging, washed-up cowboy and accompanies him and his bud-dies on a roundup to corral wild horses. As the story unfolds, she is appalled to learn that the captured horses are to be slaughtered and sold to a dog-food company. Miller created the character to give Marilyn the opportunity to play the kind of sensitive and vulnerable woman he knew her to be. But the project turned out to be the couple’s melancholy swan song. By the time The Misfits went into production in 1960, the Miller-Monroe marriage was falling apart, and they were divorced the following year.

I reminded Miller that from the time he hooked up with Monroe until their divorce, he neglected his life’s vocation to such an extent that he did not write one stage play. And I asked him if, in light of that fact, he agreed with friends and admirers who viewed his marriage to Monroe as a terrible waste of his time and talent.

“Well, you could say that, I guess,” he replied. “At the same time, she was a great person to be with a lot of the time. She was full of the most astonishing terms and revelations about people. She was a super-sensitive instrument, and that’s exciting to be around until it starts to self-destruct.”

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Marilyn Monroe was Arthur Miller’s second wife, and by the time they broke up, he was moving toward his third marriage. While The Misfits was being shot on location in Nevada, a group of photographers from the Magnum agency was on hand to take pictures of the production. One member of the Magnum team was a thirty-sevenyear-old Austrian woman named Inge Morath. She caught Miller’s eye, one thing led to another, and they were married in February 1962, six months before Monroe’s death.

When it came to marriage, the third time was the charm for Miller. With Inge Morath, he found the happiness and stability that had eluded him in his previous matrimonial ventures. (One longtime friend sardonically observed that what distinguished Morath from his two other wives was that “she was a grown-up.”) In 1987, the year we did our profile of Miller, he and Inge celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

What was more, it was surely no accident that after his marriage to Morath, he resumed writing plays. In 1964—nearly a decade after his last work had appeared on Broadway—a new Miller play called After the Fall opened in New York. It was a transparently autobio-graphical drama, with the character of Maggie, a deeply neurotic and destructive woman, obviously based on Marilyn Monroe.

Miller went on to write more plays, and although none of them measured up to the tragic heights of Death of a Salesman, some were worthy additions to his growing oeuvre. When I interviewed him in the fall of ’87, he was still turning out plays with impressive regularity. Yet Miller was, by then, seventy-two years old, and since he had exceeded his biblical allotment of threescore and ten, I raised a question I almost never asked an interviewee.

W A L L A C E : You ever think about an epitaph?

M I L L E R : Epitaph? Never gave it a moment’s thought.

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W A L L A C E : Give it a moment.

M I L L E R : The first thought that occurs to me is “He worked awful hard.” But that’s hardly a recommendation. Everybody does, or a lot of people do.

W A L L A C E : And what did he work for?

M I L L E R : Oh, some little moment of truth up on that stage that people could feel made them a little more human.

And that’s what virtually all his obituaries said when he died at the age of eighty-nine.

J o h n n y C a r s o n

I S U S P E C T T H E R E A S O N I asked Miller about his epitaph was because it was around this time—the mid-1980s—that the question was being put to me with some regularity. My customary answer on such occasions consisted of three simple words: “Tough—but fair.” A bit laconic, perhaps, but that pretty much captures how I would like my life’s work to be remembered. A couple of decades have come and gone since I first came up with that response, for, like Miller, I have been blessed with longevity, and like him, I have been one of those obstinate octogenarians who refuse to stop working. In my case, I’ve kept at it simply because the challenge of doing stories for 60 Minutes continues to give me a profound satisfaction that I’m sure I never could have found in retirement.

When Miller died in February 2005, it was just a few weeks after the passing of Johnny Carson, whose death brought to mind the adroit answer he once gave to the question about one’s own epitaph.

At the time he addressed the subject, Carson was a mere boy of fifty-

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two who still had twenty-seven years of life ahead of him. (I mention this to make the point that we geezers aren’t the only ones who have to deal with that intrusive query.) The year was 1977 and the place was Harvard University, where he was being honored as the Hasty Pudding Club’s “Man of the Year.” During a news conference at that event, a young reporter asked him, “What would you like your epitaph to be?”

“Well,” Carson replied, “I’d prefer not to have one at all, where it never got to that point.” Then, after a perfectly timed pause, he said,

“I think something like ‘I’ll be right back.’ ”

That was exactly the kind of response we would want from a man who, even before he began his long association with The Tonight Show, had made his living as a host on television programs, a job that by definition entailed frequent breaks for commercials and other interruptions. Carson was then in his fifteenth year as the host of Tonight and was at the height of his reign as the king of late-night television. As it happened, a 60 Minutes camera crew was on hand to record his reply to the epitaph question, because we were planning to include his acceptance of the Hasty Pudding Club award in a piece I was doing on him.