Elia Kazan's Affair With Marilyn Monroe....From the Publication of his Letters

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Director Elia Kazan remains one of Hollywood's most polarizing figures. He directed such classics as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), East of Eden (1955) and Splendor in the Grass (1961). The native New Yorker's career began on the stage and, as such, Kazan was an actor's director; he discovered Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty. He also loved writers and proved a nimble collaborator for such icons as Tennessee Williams and John Steinbeck.
But when he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee about being a member of the Communist Party in the '30s, he "named names" -- an act that drew scorn from some of his contemporaries and colored his career and his 1999 honorary Oscar (some of the attendees, like Kirk Douglas, steadfastly refused to applaud).
While a look at the correspondence he left when he died in 2003 at 94 -- collected in The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, out April 22 -- can't form a complete portrait of the man, it offers invaluable insight into the mind of one of the 20th century's great cinematic artists.
He was a man who admitted to various marital infidelities, including one with Marilyn Monroe, recognized the appeal of Paul Newman ("plenty of power, insides and sex"), scolded Beatty for being a diva and fought tooth-and-nail with censors and studio heads to preserve his directorial vision. He was a man who loathed much about Hollywood -- writing his wife, Molly Day Thacher, that he hated it "in a shrieking insane way. … It's like the grave, the tomb, the charnel pit -- except it's all very fancy … full of really very fine people, all in various stages of decomposition, without knowing" -- but came to Tinseltown anyway because that's where movies are made.

"I'm not sorry about it," Kazan wrote in a 1955 letter to his wife ( about Marilyn Monroe) which offers an intimate view of not only their relationship but also the actress' marriage to Joe DiMaggio

In 1955, a defiant Kazan, 46, confessed to his wife an affair with Monroe, 29, a few years earlier -- not the first or last time he would stray. His letter offers an intimate view of not only their relationship but Monroe's marriage to Joe DiMaggio. It shows how Kazan was both tender and tough to the women he loved.

Nov. 29, 1955

To Molly Day Thacher
The reason I can't write you about what I'm ashamed of is because I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed I hurt you ever. On the other hand I resent being made to feel guilty and low and less. This harks back to the worst times I ever had when I felt low and less and all that. I don't feel that way any more ostensibly. I just want you to know that it's not a philosophy of mine, or a callous piece of habitual aggression. And it's not like the earlier episode because I don't feel vengeful, hardly at all, if at all. I guess it's accurate to say: not at all.
In one sense it's true to say that it meant nothing. On the other hand it was a human experience, and it started, if that is of any significance, in a most human way. Her boy friend, or "keeper" (if you want to be mean) had just died. His family had not allowed her to see the body, or allowed her into the house, where she had been living. She had sneaked in one night and been thrown out.
I met her on Harmon Jones' set. Harmon thought her a ridiculous person and was fashionably scornful of her. I found her, when I was introduced, in tears. I took her to dinner because she seemed like such a touching pathetic waif. She sobbed all thru dinner. I wasn't "interested in her"; that came later. I got to know her in time and introduced her to Arthur Miller, who also was very taken by her. You couldn't help being touched. She was talented, funny, vulnerable, helpless in awful pain, with no hope, and some worth and not a liar, not vicious, not catty, and with a history of orphanism that was killing to hear. She was like all Charlie Chaplin's heroines in one.

I'm not ashamed at all, not a damn bit, of having been attracted to her. She is nothing like what she appears to be now, or even appears to have turned into now. She was a little stray cat when I knew her. I got a lot out of her just as you do from any human experience where anyone is revealed to you and you affect anyone in any way. I guess I gave her a lot of hope. She is not a big sex pot as advertised. At least not in my experience. I don't know if there are such as "advertised" big sex pots. She told me a lot about [Joe DiMaggio] and her, his Catholicism, and his viciousness (he struck her often, and beat her up several times). I was touched and fascinated. It was the type of experience that I do not understand and I enjoyed (not the right word) hearing about it. I certainly recommended her to Tennessee's attention. And he was very taken by her.

I'm not sorry about it. I love you and only want to help you. I'm awful sorry I hurt you. I am human though. It might happen again. I hope not, and I have resisted quite some other opportunities. No loss. I got a lot out of this one; can't say I didn't. I think I helped her. If you don't like what I say and feel it necessary for your own sense of honor to divorce me, divorce me. I don't think I should not be married or anything like that. If you divorce me, I'll tell you plainly I will in time get married again and have more children. I feel I'm a family man and a damned good one. I don't care what your judgment is on that.

Elia was quite an eccentric character, as creative geniuses often are. And in the Hollywood environment of old, creative geniuses were often amoral or immoral. That's not a judgement, it just is. Times and attitudes have changed, but not completely, I think.