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Nevertheless, the play won Mr. Miller another Tony Award in 1953 and went on
to become his most frequently produced work. "I can almost tell what the
political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there,"
he wrote in "Timebends." "It is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a
reminder of tyranny just past."
Mr. Miller recalled that when he wrote "The Crucible," he hoped it would be
seen as an affirmation of the struggle for liberty, for keeping one's own
conscience. "That's what it's become," he said with considerable satisfaction
in a 1987 interview. "I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal
Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England.
Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too.
The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless
after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the
kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything
I ever did in my life. The mission of the theater, after all, is to change,
to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities."
In 1956, Mr. Miller was himself called to appear before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. By this time, his relationship with Monroe had made him
a far more public figure than any of the awards he had won, and therefore a
prime target who could attract attention to the committee in its waning days.
Mr. Miller wrote in his autobiography that his lawyer said there had even
been an offer to cancel the hearing "provided Marilyn agrees to be
photographed shaking hands" with the chairman of the committee.
Mr. Miller was applauded in Hollywood and in New York theater circles when he
refused to name names, a courageous act in an atmosphere of fear. He was
cited for contempt of Congress, although he said he had never joined the
Communist Party.
Of Mr. Miller's performance before the committee, Atkinson wrote in 1957: "He
refused to be an informer. He refused to turn his private conscience over to
administration by the state. He has accordingly been found in contempt of
Congress. That is the measure of the man who has written these high-minded
plays." The year he appeared before the committee was the year the University
of Michigan gave him an honorary degree. Two years later, the courts
dismissed his contempt of Congress citation.
In 1956, even as Mr. Miller's testimony was continuing, he and Monroe were
married, a union that Norman Mailer sourly remarked brought together "the
Great American Brain" and "the Great American Body." The marriage - less than
a month after his divorce from his wife and two years after her divorce from
Joe DiMaggio - was the fulfillment of a lengthy obsession that Miller the
moralist had agonized over and had even guiltily confessed to his wife. (John
Proctor, the flawed hero of "The Crucible" (1953), confesses a similar
affair.)
He and Monroe had met in 1951 at a Hollywood party. Monroe was going out with
Kazan at the time, but the director asked Mr. Miller, the newly minted
Pulitzer winner, to cover for him while he went on a date with another
actress. It was a decision that Kazan would later regret as Monroe, the
struggling, richly ambitious young actress, and Miller, the bold young voice
of American theater, seemed to bond immediately.
"I watched them dance," Kazan recalled years later in his autobiography. "Art
was a good dancer. And how happy she was in his arms!" Whether both men's
attraction - and sexual involvement - with Monroe played a part in their
professional alienation is unclear. But in the end Miller captured Monroe's
heart and she his mind.
A Troubled Marriage
For most of the four years of that marriage, Mr. Miller wrote almost nothing
except "The Misfits," composed as a gift to his wife, who found herself
increasingly tormented by personal demons and drug abuse. The film had its
premiere early in 1961, shortly after the couple's marriage ended in divorce.
A year later, Mr. Miller remarried, and six months after that, Monroe was
found dead of a drug overdose.
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