As far as famous old-Hollywood marriages go, it was a doozy – celebrated playwright Arthur Miller and silver screen siren Marilyn Monroe wed in 1956 and managed five years together.
He’d left his first wife, and she’d already been married twice, once at 16 to local lad James Dougherty, and again in an ill-fated union with baseballer Joe DiMaggio.
They were chalk and cheese – Variety described the union as “Egghead marries Hourglass”. The couple had met several years earlier on the set of the 1951 film As Young as You Feel, and had started regularly meeting in 1955 after Monroe relocated to New York after the filming of The Seven Year Itch.
The home that hosted one of their wedding ceremonies is now for sale – a four-bedroom, French Country-style house in Waccabuc, Westchester County, in New York state, built in 1948 and priced at $US1,699,000 ($2,215,000).
It’s been maintained in style with its parquet floors and French doors, as well as a pool, pool house and landscape gardens, as well as lake access.
Monroe and Miller were formally married at the Westchester County Courthouse on June 29. They later retired to the home of Monroe’s manager Kay Brown – the Waccabuc house on the market – for a second, Jewish ceremony to confirm the nuptials on July 1st.
There were about 25 guests at the event, one of which reportedly gave a speech making the joke that their future children should have have Miller’s looks, and Monroe’s brains.
And while the house has lasted, the celebrity union was far more fleeting – it was stymied by, among other events, Monroe discovering a diary entry by Miller detailing his regrets about entering the marriage.
Miller wrote The Misfits for her and – later, post-1961 divorce – the play After the Fall, reportedly to be based on the experiences of his own failed marriage. It premiered in January 1964, two year’s after Monroe’s death.