Peter S Beagle’s beloved bestseller was made into a star-studded, much-copied film 40 years ago. Then his legal troubles began
What Peter S Beagle remembers most clearly about dinner with Marilyn Monroe was how glamorous she seemed – and how lost. “Whatever it was she was wearing, she smelled wonderful,” he says. “She was there with Arthur Miller [her third husband]. She never took her eyes off him. He was like lifeboat on the ocean. And she was just struggling toward it.”
It was the mid-1950s. Beagle, best known today as author of timeless fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, was a teenager at the time. A smart working-class kid from Brooklyn, he’d been adopted “in the literary sense” by poet Louis Untermeyer. At weekends, Untermeyer would invite auspicious guests to dinner and have Beagle sit in.
“He knew everybody. One particular evening, [his guests] were Arthur Miller and his new wife, Marilyn Monroe. There was something about her – you couldn’t not like her. I was 16 and very romantic. And I didn’t know anything.”
Beagle was struck at how dismissive Miller was of Monroe. “Later, he came out with some book or other describing his own troubles during the marriage. I felt scorn for him. I just knew I felt sorry for her and I liked her.”