It was the spring of 1957 when Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, "the Great American Mind and the Great American Body," as Norman Mailer famously titled them, drove into Amagansett in a black Thunderbird convertible. "I suppose we all need a place to escape," mused a wind-tousled Marilyn upon arrival in the sleepy hamlet.

With a basset hound named Hugo, the newlywed couple moved into a rented weather-worn cottage on Stony Hill Farm, a 100-acre estate nestled between riding stables and potato fields. It was here among the rustic cedar shake and clapboard houses of Amagansett that the couple sought refuge and played out the next two years of their lives. Their "escape" turned out to be the most intimate chapter of a very public love story, and the images captured by photographer and friend Sam Shaw-those of Arthur and Marilyn at play on an Amagansett beach-remain as the most unguarded moments documented during their five-year marriage.

"I just want to show this fascinating woman with her guard down-at work, at ease off-stage-the joyous moments in her life," said the late photographer some years after those photos were taken. "People always talk about the tragic Marilyn, but they forget to talk about how much fun she was."

Amagansett Beach, 1957 These playful impromptu photos were taken when the couple picnicked surfside for the day with their close friend and trusty chronicler Sam Shaw. This is how the late photographer liked to remember the couple.

The couple, however, didn't share such a natural ease with all photographers. On the morning of their Manhattan departure, dozens of preying paparazzi were camped out in front of their apartment building. The next day, pictures of "the Egghead and the Hourglass" were strewn across newspapers nationwide. Reporters accosted them at every corner, snooped through their trash, and even their most private conversations and affairs became tabloid fodder. At the time, never had a couple suffered so public a private life.

That the masses were pawing over them with such curiosity is perhaps no wonder. Here was Ms. Monroe, recently divorced from baseball star Joe DiMaggio, hanging on the arm of bespectacled and nebbish Mr. Miller. They were the odd couple of Post-war America: Hollywood's screen goddess and the new voice of American Theater. She oozed unabashed sex appeal and was Playboy's first-ever playmate; he smoked pipes and was author of the great American play. She was a broken child of California foster homes; he was an "emotionally constipated" Jewish playwright from Brooklyn.

Simultaneously, during the anticommunist era of McCarthyism, the moralist playwright of Death of a Salesman was under investigation for subversive activity and charged with Contempt of Congress when he staunchly refused to name some 20 fellow writers. "The life of a writer is tough enough already," quipped the shrewd Miller on trial, "I will not help you place restrictions on the freedom of literature."

Despite warnings it would end her career, Monroe publicly aligned with Miller: "My career is acting but Arthur is my life," said a resolute Monroe. Now, not only were "Sex-kitten and the Brain" sharing a bed, they were politically aligned. It was in one of the hearings that he announced he was engaged to Monroe, and they wed two weeks later in a private Jewish ceremony in White Plains. Marilyn was asked at the ceremony why she would marry this skinny man with crooked teeth. Besotted and beaming at the lanky playwright, she replied: "I simply love him to death!"

The couple soon traveled to London while Monroe filmed The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. Upon arrival at Heathrow Airport, the pair found themselves engulfed in a suffocating press mob-at the time Miller lamented "the suffocation of living in the Monroe fishbowl." Soon after returning to the States, Monroe called her husband in a fit of desperation one day: "I want to live quietly in the country, Papa! I just want to be there when you need me. I just can't fight for myself any more," she cried.

It was at this moment, according to his memoirs, that Miller realized how fragile his new wife truly was. Madly infatuated with the child-like siren, however, he acknowledged it all with devotion and an almost inflated sense of duty:

"I saw suddenly that I was all she had...We would start a new and real life together. We were two parts of the same-sensuous, life-loving but with a center of tragedy. The best of her was in my eyes, and now I know all her hope was there with me," Miller reminisced.

Home Body Shaw captures Marilyn on the phone at their rental cottage on Hammill Lane, Amagansett, in 1957.

After her pleas, the pair decided to take "an extended honeymoon" and rented the Amagansett farmhouse from friend Joe Potter. During the ensuing months, Marilyn was almost merry, serene, and very much in love. The couple was unashamedly physical, according to friends, always touching and caressing each other. In a letter, she recalled fond memories of surf-casting and listening to Sinatra records with Miller on gray afternoons, motoring around with Hugo, the Basset Hound, and cooking pasta from scratch, which she dried with a hairdryer. When he "talked theater" with the boys, she curled up and listened quietly.

Nowhere does this sun-drenched domestic bliss come to life more than in the photographs of Shaw, who caught them smitten and light at heart.

"My father didn't publish these images until 20 years after her death," says Edie Shaw, speaking of her late father's respect and relationship with the actress. "To us she was someone with a real sense of joy and gentleness. Sure she had her problems, too...and there was pain there, but that's not the woman we knew and loved." (Edie and her sister Meta are currently looking for the right gallery in the Hamptons to host an exhibition of their father's work, focusing on those shots taken on the East End.)

Far From the Madding Crowd Miller and Monroe outside their rental house at Stony Hill Farm, Amagansett. They were described as unabashedly physical and very much in love during this time.

A few surviving locals recall the couple during those summers, like a former lifeguard who dug her jeep out of the beach on occasion and the owner of White's Pharmacy who witnessed her frequent trips to the make-up counter, how the star sat in that chair applying products like a girl in dress-up. Another woman recalls knocking on their door at the age of 12 to find an eager Marilyn in her dark sunglasses and a bathrobe. Monroe came outside and chatted gregariously, happily absorbing the attention, until Arthur ordered her inside with a stern voice. "Okay, Papa," she replied with childlike resignation.

Monroe's well-being soon shifted, however, when the weather changed, as Arthur retreated into a creative drought and seclusion, forcing the desperately needy wife "to learn the art of solitude." She suffered bouts of insomnia and her mood fluctuated from hyper-kinetic exuberance to wretched despair in a single afternoon.

Monroe's bedeviling sexuality came bundled with a child-like innocence, and there was an inherent vulnerability at the core of all her relationships. Her early abandonment left a void for an all-nurturing, ever-watchful father figure that she carried into adulthood. "I didn't have a father so I wanted someone to admire," she once said.

In the following months one could see her meandering by the water's edge in flip-flops and floppy hats, reciting Yeats with a far-off look. Unsettled and tiring of domestic life in the sticks, she took downers and wandered around in ripped clothing and Arthur's rumpled shirts. During this time, Miller cared for her like "a self-destroying babe in the woods," counting her pills and tending to her breakdowns like a nursemaid. He would later blame the creative dry-spell on her, but as feminists exclaim, "he was paying the price for being the product of a culture that teaches men to find extreme dependency appealing."

To study her depths, it was said you had to see Monroe with children. Her whole approach to life had their brand of simplicity and directness. She found herself at her calmest and truest self in their guileless company. Having kids became a preoccupation in her later years. Despite the addictions, the breakdowns and health problems, Monroe desperately wanted to start a family of her own with Arthur. In July of 1957, Marilyn announced that she was pregnant to her somewhat estranged husband, and a new hope for happy endings filled the cottage. "In her was a new confidence and quietness of spirit never seen before," said Miller.

On August 1, exactly five years before her death, she collapsed from abdominal pain, was rushed to a Manhattan hospital, and suffered the painful and shattering miscarriage that sunk her into severe depression. In short, she saw herself as a failure as a woman. She was an ineffective muse, infertile womb and unreliable partner.

Marilyn's "devastating sensitivity to life force" extended beyond her own pregnancies. In her dark moments she seemed hypersensitive to the simple occurrences of nature. "It could make her cry as if she were wounded to see flowers dying," wrote Truman Capote in Music for Chameleons. After the miscarriage, people reported that she wept at the sight of wounded seagulls and stopped her car to pick up stray dogs. She even paid some boys trapping pigeons to release them. Some have called this sort of behavior signals of mental anguish. Miller, during their earlier days, saw great beauty in the acute empathy she had.

On the beach in Amagansett where Shaw shot the couple, Arthur found inspiration for a short story called "Please Don't Kill Anything," one of the few pieces completed during their marriage. It's a story for, and about, Marilyn, and "her fierce tenderness toward all that lived." He says it all with such reverence-a testament to how deeply he loved her despite the eccentricity. But he sensed a pending unraveling... "While part of his heart worshipped her fierce tenderness toward all that lived, another part knew that she must come to understand that she did not die with the moths and the spiders and the fledging birds," Miller wrote. The world is unbearable if you feel too much he seemed to know.

Arthur Miller was surely not always so adoring as a husband. Tormented by the fact that he wrote very little during their years together, Miller blamed this on his new profession of caretaker for "my third sick child, Marilyn." After the miscarriage of 1957, however, Miller felt a revived urgency to save and protect her, which their landlord and friend Jeffrey Potter noted when he took them to the Devon Yacht Club one day in August. He noticed her degrading physicality-a bloated look and morbid spirits: "There was a great sadness in there. And Arthur hung on her every word. He would have physically merged with her and taken her sadness on if he could," Potter recalled.

In one final attempt to revive her spirit, Miller wrote the story The Misfits, the ultimate gift for his wife and a sort of final love offering. The idea to adapt it as a script was the suggestion of Sam Shaw, who knew the story-an eerie Western about displaced modern-day cowboys chasing wild horses for chump change-and saw a great opportunity for a creative renewal in Marilyn. Both thought Roslyn and her "woman dignity" would return the deflated actress to a threshold of faith and confidence. In August 1960 she suffered a breakdown, was wrapped in wet sheets and evacuated to Los Angles for two weeks. Ironically, on the Nevada set of the film that Miller hoped would be her way back to him, they were pulled apart forever. When they left eventually Reno, they did so on separate planes. "If there was a key to Marilyn's despair, I did not possess it," Miller later commented.

The Misfits was the last film Monroe completed before her death, and it was also the last for the lead actor, Clark Gable. Yet another father figure for the doe-eyed, approval-seeking Marilyn, the actress had grown up adoring the screen legend, and plunged into depression when Gable dropped dead two weeks after walking offset. Monroe checked into a mental institution soon after.

In his own way, Miller, too, surrendered, as expressed in the highly autobiographical play, After the Fall, a fictional account of Marilyn and the filming of The Misfits: "The question is no longer whether you'll survive, but also whether I will. I had to save myself."

Sammy Davis Jr. once said, "Marilyn Monroe hangs like a bat in the heads of all the men who met her. None of us will ever forget her." Torn between a desire to protect her and a cloying inability to understand her, it's no wonder she haunts her men. Joe DiMaggio proposed a second marriage at the end of her life, devoting himself like an adoring retriever. Keeping to his role as silent protector, he delivered flowers to her grave once a week for the rest of his life. Arthur Miller's adoration was not so tender. He didn't attend her funeral and spent years trying to ravenously misdirect the public from his private life with Marilyn. Despite his efforts to extinguish the memories, the entire body of his work exhumes her ghost in prismatic, emotionally wrought renderings. If Norman Mailer was writing for money, Miller was writing for absolution. His work left an encoded network of conflicted feelings the writer seems never to have resolved. Even in his final years, it seems, he had been unable to forget the beautiful and broken siren.

Their Amagansett farmhouse is now three times its original size, and Monroe's bathroom remains exactly as it was when the couple rented it. The clawfoot bathtub and vanity table are just as she left them, although the "icehouse" has been converted into a sauna. (Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger spent their happier domestic days right next door, at a house on the same estate. They too couldn't brave their very public marriage and have since split.) In the dining room there are three framed photographs on the wall-also Sam Shaw originals-that were taken during their Amagansett chapter. In the photographs, Marilyn is playful and sun-kissed, smiling at Arthur here, phone in hand there, and frolicking in the frothy waters of Asparagus Beach.

Despite the acrimonious split, their time together in Amagansett stayed with Miller-the house, a relic of a happy, albeit short-lived, domestic life, appeared as a backdrop in his plays. Right before his death in 2005, he requested his son drive him back to Amagansett and down the oak-lined Hammill Lane, to the site of the weather-worn cottage to which he escaped with Marilyn some 50 years earlier. "Whenever there was a mild moment of despair in my life, all I needed was to get in my car and drive to Amagansett," wrote Miller at the end of his life. "...Drive past the Potter Farm and then home. Then I am new and whole."

But Arthur didn't go inside the house when he returned; he didn't knock on the door. Rumor has it he just perched outside by the old Oaks, staring at the property where the couple found happiness for the last time. One can't help think of the words he wrote about Marilyn:

"The iron logic of her death didn't help. I could still see her coming across the lawn, or touching something, or laughing, at the same time that I confronted the end of her as one might stand watching the sinking sun."

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