‘The Misfits’, 1960 – producer Frank Taylor at far left

Nan Taylor Abell, formerly married to Frank E. Taylor, producer of The Misfits, has died in Greenwich, Connecticut, aged 94.

Born in Minnesota, Nan was the daughter of a mine engineer. After graduating, she moved to New York and became a children’s radio host. She gave up her career on marrying Frank Taylor, who was then a publisher and editor to the playwright Arthur Miller.

In the late 1940s, the Taylors moved to Hollywood with hopes of bringing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, Tender is the Night, to the big screen. However, this project failed to get off the ground, and by 1952 they had returned east with their four sons.

After Taylor’s client, Arthur Miller, married Marilyn Monroe in 1956, he bought a farm in Roxbury, Connecticut, close to the Taylors’ home at Belle Haven, Old Greenwich. In his 1969 biography, Norma Jean: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe, author Fred Lawrence Guiles remarked that ‘to Marilyn, the Taylors were by far the liveliest and most convivial of Miller’s married friends. She came in time to confide in both Frank and Nan Taylor…’ Continue reading →