“She was a whirling light to me then,” wrote Arthur Miller, the famous playwright and former husband of Marilyn Monroe, “all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence.” It would be hard to think of a cultural figure in America more mysterious and renowned than Monroe. The new Netflix film about her, Blonde, explores the complexities and controversies that defined her short life.
Monroe’s boundless fame also made her a target for surveillance. Like many cultural figures and academics of the 20th century, Monroe was watched by the FBI, whose agents monitored her life and kept tabs on who she associated with, documenting activity that could be vaguely construed as anti-American. During the Cold War, the US government dogmatically sorted its citizens into two groups: patriots or potential Communist traitors.
The root of the FBI’s interest in Monroe was her romantic involvement with Miller, which began as a secret affair but grew into a media spectacle. Miller was a politically involved individual, engaged with many of the Communist Party’s cultural and social front groups, a progressive American writer who staunchly opposed fascism. Suspicions were aroused that Monroe, too, might be a Communist, causing the FBI to escalate its tracking of her whereabouts and the monitoring of her political opinions. The US has always tried to brand itself as a country of freedom and individual autonomy, but the FBI was jailing Americans and censoring culture that didn’t fall in line with this branding. This is the story of how Marilyn Monroe was dragged into the world of anti-Communist hysteria.
The Communist Party USA was founded in 1919 and quickly grew into one of the country’s main progressive political forces. The party pushed for racially integrated unions, organizing Black tenant farmers in the South, and fighting for civil rights, labor rights, and women's rights. As famous Hollywood screenwriter and Communist Dalton Trumbo put it, party members were “being prosecuted everywhere for their thoughts and speech and never for their acts.” Many Americans were monitored, and Trumbo, along with other radicals, was sentenced to prison for his progressive political beliefs.
This tyrannical period of blacklists, censorship, and political purification was the context that birthed Arthur Miller’s famous 1953 play, The Crucible, a parable in which the residents of Salem, Massachusetts, turn against each other, making frenzied accusations of witchcraft. In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) aimed its sights on Miller. Chaired by anti-Communist senator Joseph McCarthy, the congressional subcommittee held hearings to interrogate people suspected of Communist allegiance. Miller characterized the HUAC as the “thought police” of Hollywood. Miller, also known for his plays Death of a Salesman and All My Sons, was forced to make his own appearance before the HUAC — his own witch trial — where he was threatened with jail time for refusing to name other suspected Communists.
It was during Miller’s interrogation by the HUAC, in 1956, that he announced his intent to marry Monroe. Monroe was at the peak of her career. She had cemented herself as a world-famous movie star, cultural figure, and sex symbol, starring in dozens of Hollywood films, including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. She’d obtained, as she put it, “clothes, fame, money, a future, all the publicity I could dream of.” But Monroe remained plagued by a sense of inadequacy and was dealing with trauma that dated back to her turbulent childhood. She came to rely on alcohol and pills.
When Monroe was a child, her mother, Gladys Baker, ended up in a mental institution. Monroe floated between foster homes and spent time in an orphanage. In her posthumously published memoir, My Story, she reflected that “there were no kisses or promises in my life. I often felt lonely and wanted to die.” One of the only family possessions to stay with her was a secondhand baby grand piano, which once sat in Gladys’s home, that had the name Fredric March, one of Hollywood’s most famous actors in the 1930s and '40s, inscribed on it. After Monroe's Hollywood career launched, she found that old piano in an auction room, painted it white, and kept it with her for the rest of her life.
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During the HUAC hearing, Monroe was supportive of Miller’s moral imperative to not name names, telling reporters that she was “really confident that, in the end, my husband will win this case.” Despite a lot of pressure, including from Hollywood bigwigs, Miller maintained his convictions. For instance, the president of 20th Century Fox, Spyros Skouras, visited Miller and Monroe in New York before Miller went to Washington to testify. According to Miller’s recollection, Skouras said that if Monroe vocally supported Miller, anti-Communist organizations might picket the studio (at the time, Fox had a contract with Monroe and her newly formed production company). Skouras, whose interests were primarily financial, implied that he could arrange a private session with the HUAC if Miller agreed to share information, but Miller stood firm on his principles. He mentioned in passing how Socrates was sentenced to death by a similar court. “You are a Socrates,” Skouras reportedly muttered on his way out, per Miller.
Miller maintained that the committee, which was declining in clout and in the court of public opinion, was mainly concerned with him because of his marriage to Monroe. He claimed in his memoir that a lawyer had told him about an offer from a chairman of the committee, Representative Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, who had proposed canceling the whole hearing if Walter could just get a photograph shaking hands with Monroe. “I burst out laughing,” Miller remembered. “Why I was not even tempted, I don’t know. It certainly would have saved a lot of grief.” Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress, denied a passport, and sentenced to a month in jail or a $500 fine; he successfully appealed the decision and avoided jail time.
In 2012, the FBI updated previously heavily redacted files on Monroe, exposing how closely the bureau had monitored her life. The documents are filled with names and testimony that tie Monroe to alleged Communist Party members and fellow travelers, or people who were very involved with and supportive of the party. There was particular concern over Monroe’s relationship with Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a disinherited member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family who lived in exile in Mexico and was considered a “[Communist Party] member at large.” There was also mention of an unnamed Life photographer and Communist Party member who took Monroe on a tour of Brooklyn; an anonymous call to a reporter at the New York Daily News that Marilyn Monroe Productions was filled with Communists and the company’s money was going to the party; informants described her views, which she voiced at a group dinner that included President Kennedy, as “positively and concisely leftist”; and so it goes on, for 85 pages, the detailed surveillance of America’s biggest star.
The truth is, Communists were hard to avoid as a progressive in the 1930s and '40s. During the Popular Front period, with the rise of fascism in the mid-1930s, the Communist Party strategically sought to unite all progressive forces against fascism, reaching out a hand to any force that was fighting against the ideology that would lead to the slaughter of millions throughout Europe. In the years after World War II, it wasn’t uncommon for a celebrity like Monroe to find herself socializing with a photographer, a writer, a musician, or a front group that happened to be part of the Communist Party USA. Field quoted her as voicing “her strong feelings for civil rights, for Black equality, as well as her admiration for what was being done in China, her anger at red-baiting and McCarthyism, and her hatred of J. Edgar Hoover." In a period of authoritarianism and reactionary politics in America, it appeared that holding these personal views was enough to warrant being tracked by the FBI and potential sentencing to jail as a Communist.
As it happens, the presence of Communist cultural figures started early in Monroe’s life. For example, March, to whom Monroe's beloved baby grand had belonged, was also passionate about social causes. March, who won best actor for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) and was nominated for his role in the film adaptation of Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1951), also cofounded, in 1936, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League with other cultural figureheads, such as the famous writer Dorothy Parker. March and Parker were both investigated by the HUAC for their progressive beliefs and suspected Communist affiliations.
According to Monroe biographer Keith Badman, that famous Fredric March piano symbolized for her “the permanency of a home and the family security she never had.” Through the ups and downs of Monroe’s short life, that white piano was one of the few constants with her until her death. The modest instrument, with its hasty inscription, symbolized not just Monroe’s troubled family history, but the reactionary political landscape of anti-Communism in mid-century America.
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