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The Times’ then-art critic, Arthur Millier, was a staunch advocate for the murals and wrote about them many times, including a particularly poignant plea for them to be spared a week before they were slated for destruction.

“There is in Los Angeles, in a semi-public place, a work of art which gives to a vast gray wall a freshness like the breath of spring, a lightsome beauty like the dawn of the Renaissance in Tuscany,” Millier wrote.

“Every great work of art was once new and strange,” Millier noted.

Marshall heard the gossip during her Harvard years; Millier’s biography, published in 1993, makes the outlines of the relationship clear.

Bishop’s previous biographer, Brett C. Millier, more convincingly links these lines to thoughts that Bishop confided to her notebook a few months earlier, while suffering over Margaret Miller: “Name it friendship if you want to—like names of cities printed on maps, the word is much too big, it spreads all over the place, and tells nothing of the actual place it means to name.”