http://nytimes.com/2005/02/11/theater/newsandfeatures/
Arthur Miller, Moral Voice of American Stage, Dies at 89
By MARILYN BERGER
Published: February 11, 2005
Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed
the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his
home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Julia Bolus, his assistant.
The author of "Death of a Salesman," a landmark of 20th-century drama,
Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in
his plays and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and
very public elements of his own life - including a brief and rocky
marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with
the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee.
"Death of a Salesman," which opened on Broadway in 1949, established
Mr. Miller as a giant of the American theater when he was only 33. It
won the triple crown of theatrical artistry that year: the Pulitzer
Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony.
But the play's enormous success also overshadowed Mr. Miller's long
career: "The Crucible," a 1953 play about the Salem witch trials inspired
by his virulent hatred of McCarthyism, and "A View From the Bridge," a
1955 drama of obsession and betrayal, ultimately took their place as
popular classics of the international stage, but Mr. Miller's later
plays never equaled his early successes. Although he wrote a total
of 17 plays, "The Price," produced on Broadway during the 1967-68
season, was his last solid critical and commercial hit.
Mr. Miller also wrote successfully in a wide variety of other media.
Perhaps most notably, he supplied the screenplay for "The Misfits," a
1961 movie directed by John Huston and starring Monroe, to whom he was
married at the time. He also wrote essays, short stories and a 1987
autobiography, "Timebends: A Life." His writing remained politically
engaged until the end of his life.
But his reputation rests on a handful of his best-known plays, the dramas
of guilt and betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently
at theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were
drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression, the event that he
believed had a more profound impact on the nation than any other in American
history, except, possibly, the Civil War. "In play after play," the drama
critic Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times, "he holds man responsible
for his and for his neighbor's actions."
Elia Kazan, who directed "All My Sons," "Death of a Salesman" and "After
the Fall," once recalled in an interview, "In the 30's and 40's, we came
out of the Group Theater tradition that every play should teach a lesson
and make a thematic point."
The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who worked frequently with
Mr. Miller, said in reminiscing about their work together that he
found a "rabbinical righteousness" in the playwright. "In his work, there
is almost a conscious need to be a light unto the world," he said, adding,
"He spent his life seeking answers to what he saw around him as a world of
injustice."
Broadway theaters dimmed their marquee lights last night at curtain time
in his memory.
Mr. Miller, a lanky, wiry man whose dark hair turned to gray in his later
years, retained the appearance of a 1930's intellectual whether he was
wearing work boots and bluejeans while fixing his porch or seated at his
word processor - or typewriter, when the power failed at his 350-acre farm
in Litchfield County.
Writing plays was for him, he once said, like breathing. He wrote in
"Timebends" that when he was young, he "imagined that with the possible
exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most
important thing a human being could do." He also saw plays as a way to
change America and, as he put it, "that meant grabbing people and shaking
them by the back of the neck."
He had known hard work firsthand in an automobile-parts warehouse during
the Depression; in what he called a mouse house, where he earned $15 a
month feeding mice used in medical experiments; and on the night shift
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.
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But Mr. Miller called playwriting the hardest work of all. "You know," he
said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you
can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take
a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them."
'I'm a Fatalist'
What Mr. Miller could not swallow was critics. During a 1987 interview, he
dismissed them as "people who can't sing or dance." It was a reprise of a
bitter theme he had sounded throughout his working life.
"I'm a fatalist," he said. "I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is
and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result
of a misunderstanding."
He also once said, "I never had a critic in my corner in this country," and
that he never saved the reviews of his plays, even the raves: "There's an
instinct in me that I had to exist apart from them, lest I rely on them for
my esteem or despair. I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of
anything."
Mr. Miller's antipathy was understandable. At one moment he was hailed as the
greatest living playwright, in the same rarefied company as Tennessee
Williams and Eugene O'Neill, and at another as a has-been whose greatest
successes were decades behind him. Even at the height of his success, Mr.
Miller's work received harsh criticism from some prominent critics. Eric
Bentley, the drama critic for The New Republic in the 1950's, simply
dismissed "The Crucible," writing, "The world has made this author important
before he has made himself great."
Mr. Miller also despaired of the American theater, which he believed was too
profit-oriented to allow writers and actors to flourish. He noted that opera
and ballet in America were supported through contributions but that what he
called the "brutal inanity" of Broadway required that the American theater
pay for itself. "If the thing is gonna be regarded the same as the fish
business, it ain't gonna work," he said in the feisty tones of his New York
City boyhood. "In the whole entertainment enterprise, the theater has become
a fifth wheel. People only take parts hoping it will lead to the movies."
Arthur Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to
Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so
prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment
overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment
district. For a child, as Mr. Miller remembered in "Timebends," life unfolded
as "a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news."
The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that
etched its way through Arthur Miller plays, from "Death of a Salesman" and
"The Price" to "After the Fall," "The American Clock" and "A Memory of Two
Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from
the apartment overlooking the park to considerably reduced circumstances in
the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the teenage Arthur worked as a bakery
delivery boy and developed a knack for carpentry, which left him fascinated,
he said, with "the idea of creating a new shadow on the earth."
He attended James Madison High School, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High
School in 1932, and then went to work in the auto-parts warehouse, earning
$15 a week and saving $13 a week for college. Mr. Miller said he was not much
of a student, but he knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted to be a
writer. He recalled a terrific urge to tell stories, a talent that he said
made him a center of attention.
Prizes Pay Tuition
When he had put away enough money for his freshman year, Mr. Miller went to
the University of Michigan with the hope that he could write a play good
enough to win the Avery Hopwood Award, an honor administered by the
university that carried a prize of $250, enough for a second year at college.
He did not win the first year, but managed to scrape together enough money to
go back. He went on to win two Hopwood Awards, as well as a $1,250 Bureau of
New Plays Award from the Theater Guild. He earned more money by winning that
one prize than he had earned in three years at the warehouse. It became
clearer than ever that playwriting was for him.
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Within two years of graduating, Mr. Miller had written six plays, every one
of them rejected by producers except "The Man Who Had All the Luck." When it
lasted only four performances on Broadway in 1944, he added two or three more
works to the reject pile and wrote "Focus," a novel about anti-Semitism.
In 1940 he had married his college sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom
he soon had two children. To support his family he worked in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard, wrote scripts for radio and took a final shot at playwriting.
"I laid myself a wager," he wrote in his autobiography. "I would hold back
this play until I was as sure as I could be that every page was integral to
the whole and would work; then, if my judgment of it proved wrong, I would
leave the theater behind and write in other forms."
That play was "All My Sons," which Brooks Atkinson, the Times drama critic,
called "an honest, forceful drama about a group of people caught up in a
monstrous swindle that has caused the death of 21 Army pilots because of
defectively manufactured cylinder heads." It was selected as one of the 10
best plays of 1947, won two Tony Awards and took the New York Drama Critics'
Circle Award. (Eugene O'Neill's "Iceman Cometh" was the runner-up.) "All My
Sons" enjoyed a revival and new relevance when it was shown on public
television in 1987, a year after the Challenger space shuttle exploded
because of defective seals in the joints of its booster rocket.
'Attention Must Be Paid'
In 1949 Willy Loman, riding on "a smile and a shoeshine" and determined to be
not just liked but well liked, made his way into American consciousness in
"Death of a Salesman." Mr. Miller wrote the play in six weeks, and for the
first time in Broadway history, a play made a clean sweep of the top three
awards.
Acclaimed as a modern American masterpiece in its first reviews, translated
into 29 languages and performed even in Beijing, "Salesman" was no sooner a
major success of the Broadway stage than it was savaged in intellectual
journals as sentimentality, melodrama or Marxist propaganda. Sentimental or
not, "Death of a Salesman" stunned audiences. Atkinson called it "a rare
event in the theater," and "a suburban epic that may not be intended as
poetry but becomes poetry in spite of itself."
Lines from the play became hallmarks of the postwar era. "You can't eat the
orange and throw the peel away," Willy bellowed, coming to grips with the
fact that he was no longer the hotshot salesman he once was and finding
himself pleading with his young boss to keep his job, saying, "A man is not a
piece of fruit." More eloquently, Willy's careworn wife spoke for the
inherent dignity of her husband's life, providing a stirring refutation of
the cruelties of America's capitalist culture: "Attention must be paid."
In 1950, Mr. Miller wrote an adaptation of Ibsen's drama "An Enemy of the
People." This 19th-century play, whose hero resisted pressure to conform to
the ideology of the day, resonated in the McCarthyite climate of the mid-20th
century. Mr. Miller was encouraged to undertake the work by one of the
foremost acting couples of that generation, Fredric March and his wife,
Florence Eldridge, who had agreed to play the leading roles.
"An Enemy of the People," in philosophy at least, served as a forerunner of
"The Crucible," a dramatization of the Salem witch hunt of the 17th century
that implicitly articulated Mr. Miller's outrage at McCarthyism. In his
autobiography he recalled that at one performance of "The Crucible," upon the
execution of the leading character, John Proctor, people "stood up and
remained silent for a couple of minutes, with heads bowed" because "the
Rosenbergs were at that moment being electrocuted in Sing Sing."
"The Crucible" was also the occasion of Mr. Miller's explosive rift with
Kazan, the director of his greatest successes. Kazan's decision to name names
at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing incensed Mr. Miller, and
the play was seen by some as a personal rebuke. Bypassing Kazan for the
project, Mr. Miller and his producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, turned to Jed
Harris, a domineering director whose career had faltered after a string of
successes in the 1920's. But Mr. Harris's production was not well received,
with Atkinson criticizing his direction as "overwrought." Five months after
the opening, with the box office lagging, Mr. Miller restaged the play
himself, inserting a scene that had been cut. The revised version was better
received, but the run was still unsuccessful.
A Bellwether of Freedom
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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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In a biography of Monroe, Maurice Zolotow wrote that Mr. Miller had "to give
up his entire time to attend to her wants." He was once asked if he had
resented having to care for her to the detriment of his work. "Oh, yeah," he
answered.
"After the Fall," his most overtly autobiographical play, brought Mr. Miller
a storm of criticism when it was produced in 1964, shortly after Monroe's
death. The play, which had been written soon after the collapse of their
marriage, implies a search for understanding of his responsibility toward
her, of her inability to cope, and of his failure to help her. He insisted
that he was dealing with large human themes and professed surprise when
critics noted the resemblance between Monroe and Maggie, the drug-addicted,
blond-wigged protagonist in the play, and accused him of capitalizing on
Monroe's fame and defiling her image.
"The play," he said at the time, "is a work of fiction. No one is reported in
this play. The characters are created as they are in any other play in order
to develop a coherent theme, which in this case concerns the nature of human
insight, of self-destructiveness and violence toward others." And although
many of the characters were seen as thinly veiled, he said they resembled
real people "neither more nor less than in any other play I ever wrote."
Almost no one took his explanations at face value, and some of his critics
considered the play a cruel way of getting even, not only with Marilyn Monroe
but also with her teachers from the Actors Studio, Paula and Lee Strasberg,
who came in for Mr. Miller's special contempt.
Similar criticisms were voiced when Mr. Miller's last play, "Finishing the
Picture," was produced at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in the fall of 2004.
The play depicted the making of the movie "The Misfits."
But "After the Fall" did occasion Mr. Miller's reunion with Kazan, the most
insightful director of his work. It was brought about by Whitehead, one of
the architects of the ambitious plan to create an American repertory theater
company as part of the new Lincoln Center complex. In his autobiography, "A
Life," Kazan wrote, "Once brought together, Art and I got along well - even
though I was somewhat tense in his company, because we'd never discussed (and
never did discuss) the reasons for our 'break.' "
"After the Fall" was the inaugural production of the Repertory Theater of
Lincoln Center, although the new Vivian Beaumont Theater was not finished in
time and the company's first season was produced elsewhere. Mr. Miller
contributed a second play, "Incident at Vichy," to the following season, but
it, too, was poorly received. In 1965, Mr. Miller accepted the presidency of
PEN International, the association of poets, editors, essayists, novelists
and other literary figures, and he became increasingly active in defending
the rights of writers. He was fond of recalling an appeal he received in 1966
to send some sort of message to Gen. Yakubu Gowon, who was about to take over
the Nigerian government, to save the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who was
facing execution. Mr. Miller wrote that when the general saw his name he
asked "with some incredulity whether I was the writer who had been married to
Marilyn Monroe and, assured that that was so, ordered Soyinka released."
"How Marilyn would have enjoyed that one!" he added. Mr. Soyinka went on to
win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986.
In Politics
Mr. Miller, who had spoken against the Vietnam War in 1965 at the first
teach-ins on the subject at the University of Michigan, was also active in
local political affairs in Connecticut and was elected to serve as a delegate
to the Democratic National Convention in 1968.
In 1967, he published a book of short stories, "I Don't Need You Any More,"
and continued to write plays. "The Price," a drama about two brothers, one a
successful surgeon, the other a police officer who had given up the chance
for a more promising career to support his father, was a modest commercial
success and received some critical praise. Both success and praise would
become increasingly elusive in the years that followed, even as Mr. Miller's
works began to appear Off Broadway.
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"The Creation of the World and Other Business," a serio-comic treatment of
the human predicament in the Garden of Eden, closed after 20 performances on
Broadway in 1972. Two years later, Mr. Miller turned to Genesis again and
reworked "The Creation of the World" for his first musical, "Up From
Paradise." It was produced Off Broadway and it, too, flopped.
Two later plays, "The Archbishop's Ceiling" (1976) and "The American Clock"
(1980), which recalled his family's struggle during the Depression, were more
successful in London than in the United States. Mr. Miller made a
less-than-triumphal return to Lincoln Center in 1987 with two one-act plays
about the danger of remembering and the danger of forgetting, called "Danger:
Memory!" Frank Rich, who was then the chief drama critic of The New York
Times, wrote in a review, "While Arthur Miller's admirable voice of
conscience remains firm as always, 'Danger: Memory!' is an evening in which
the pontificator wins out over the playwright."
Mr. Miller enjoyed greater critical acclaim in 1980 with his dramatization
for television of "Playing for Time," a book by Fania Fenelon, who survived
Auschwitz by playing the violin to entertain Nazi officers. Mr. Miller
opposed demands to have Vanessa Redgrave removed from the lead because of her
support of Palestinian causes. "To fire her now because of her political
views would be blacklisting," he said.
In his later years, Mr. Miller seemed to get greater satisfaction from
writing books, although he continued the difficult work of writing plays.
"The story of American playwrights is awfully repetitious, the celebratory
embraces soon followed by rejection or contempt," he wrote in "Timebends."
"The quickest route to failure is success." He published a short story,
"Beavers," in this month's issue of Harper's.
After his divorce from Monroe, Mr. Miller married Inge Morath, the
Austrian-born photographer, with whom he had a daughter, Rebecca Miller, a
filmmaker. With Ms. Morath, Mr. Miller collaborated on a number of books: "In
Russia" (1969), "In the Country" (1977), "Chinese Encounters" (1979) and "
'Salesman' in Beijing" (1984).
Ms. Morath died in 2002. In addition to Rebecca, who is married to the actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, Mr. Miller is survived by the children of his first
marriage, Jane Doyle of Roxbury, and Robert, of Laguna Beach, Calif.; a
sister, Joan Copeland, an actress, of New York; and four grandchildren. He is
also survived by his companion, Agnes Barley, a young painter whom he met
shortly after Ms. Morath's death.
In the late 1980's, after his autobiography was published, he reflected in an
interview on the course he had taken in life. "It has gone through my mind
how much time I wasted in the theater, if only because when you write a book
you pack it up and send it off," he said. "In the theater, you spend months
casting actors who are busy in the movies anyway and then to get struck down
in half an hour, as has happened to me more than once."
He concluded: "You have to say to yourself: 'Why do it? It's almost
insulting.' "
But when asked how he wanted to be remembered, he did not hesitate. "I hope
as a playwright," he said. "That would be all of it."
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Charles Isherwood and Jesse McKinley contributed reporting for this article.
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