Miller marriage to Monroe was 'cover for communist activity'

Published on Thursday 22 June 2006 02:21

IN THE summer of 1956, the playwright Arthur Miller married screen idol Marilyn Monroe in a Jewish ceremony, an event that fascinated much of the world - including the FBI.

"An anonymous telephone call" has been placed to the New York Daily News, an FBI report noted at the time. The caller said the "religious" wedding - Miller was Jewish and Monroe had converted - was an obvious "cover-up" for Miller, who "had been and still was a member of the CP [Communist Party] and was their cultural front man".

Monroe was also said to have "had drifted into the Communist Party orbit". The memo is one of many included in Miller's FBI files, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in the United States.

Miller, who died last year aged 89, was a long-time liberal who opposed the Vietnam War, supported civil rights and, in his play The Crucible, linked the Cold War pursuit of communists to the Salem witch trials of the 17th century.

In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee asked him to give names of alleged communist writers with whom he had attended some meetings in the 1940s.

Miller refused and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a decision eventually overturned by the Supreme Court.

For a decade before his congressional testimony, the FBI kept track of the writer, but made a more convincing case that Miller was a dissenter from the Communist Party rather than a sympathiser.

One informant told the FBI: "Miller became disillusioned with the party because the party did not stimulate in him the ability and inspiration to do creative writing as he had expected when he joined the party."

A 34-page FBI report compiled in 1951 says that Miller was identified by an informant as being "under Communist Party discipline" in the 1930s and a member as of the mid-1940s.

But in an essay published in 1999, Miller recalled "practically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist Party members ... and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organisations".

He added: "I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be."

Miller's professional and personal life were closely watched through newspaper clippings, public documents and via informants, whose names have been blacked out in the records.

The FBI not only kept records of Miller's political statements, but also of his affiliation with such organisations as the American Labour Party (said to be "a communist front").

His files end in 1956, except for a brief reprise in 1993, when a background check was submitted to Bernard Nussbaum, the White House counsel to president Bill Clinton. The occasion was not subversive activity, but the imminent presentation of a National Medal of the Arts.