HOLLYWOOD: Popsie & Poopsie

Once, she liked to call him “Popsie-Wopsie.” Once, he liked to call her “Poop-sie-Woopsie.” Last week the terms were somewhat more formal, as Arthur Miller, 44, and Marilyn Monroe, 34, prepared for divorce. After four years of one of the most celebrated show-business marriages since Tom Thumb’s, it was all but over between the panduriform actress and the handsome, horn-rimmed playwright.

So Congenial. “The sad fact is she’s calculated wrong every time she’s made a decision,” said Arthur Miller in 1956. But he also saw in Marilyn Monroe “tremendous native feeling. She has more guts than a slaughterhouse. Being with her, people want not to die. She’s all woman’ the most womanly woman in the world.” Did her miscellaneous loves, her hopeless marriages to the California cop and Joe DiMaggio, trouble him? “I’ve known social workers who have had a more checkered history than she has,” said Miller gallantly. For her part, Monroe murmured dreamily, “We’re so congenial. This is the first time I think I’ve been really in love.”

As if to double the indemnity, the marriage was performed twice, first in civil ceremony, two days later by a rabbi. Marilyn ate matzo balls with her new in-laws, studied Judaism and became a convert to Miller’s religion. Both sailed enthusiastically into the task of complementing their differences. As a British journalist wrote, parodying Longfellow in something called Highbrowarthur’s Honeymoon:

And he murmured soft endearments,

And she talked of Dostoevsky . . .

So Unsophisticated. A retiring man, Miller complained a bit about “living in a fish bowl,” but beyond that the Millers managed to keep their marriage to themselves, out of the public eye and prints, except for three ill-fated pregnancies, all of which ended in miscarriage.

For two years, Monroe did not make a film and Miller wrote almost nothing noteworthy. Then, after Some Like It Hot, she made Let’s Make Love early this year, and gossip columns began to pant with rumors of a Monroe affair with Co-Star Yves Montand. Purring that he was “amazed and flattered,” and full of assurance that he would never toss his eleven-year marriage to Actress Simone Signoret “overboard for one performance,” Montand did make one Gallically candid revelation: “Marilyn is a simple girl, without any guile,” he said. “I once thought she was sophisticated, like some of the other ladies I have known. Had Marilyn been sophisticated, none of this ever would have happened.”

Last month, on the set of The Misfits, a screenplay written for Poopsie by Popsie, the Millers were cooler toward each other than the two halves of a popsicle. They returned last week to Manhattan on separate planes. With word of the coming divorce, there was no mention of other people or other plans. The man who wrote Death of a Salesman seemed simply to have had all he could take of the world of the cinema. Said the re-educated Miller: “I’ve had Hollywood.”