Arthur Miller

• 1. Introduction

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  Arthur Miller died on the evening of the 10th of February 2005 - the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman. The symmetry was almost too neat for a man who wrote plays about men crushed by the weight of their own illusions. He was 89, and he died of bladder cancer and heart failure at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, the same town where he had built a small studio decades earlier and written one of the most celebrated plays in the English language in less than six weeks.

  Miller's life contained multitudes that seem almost fictional in their drama: the son of a prosperous clothing manufacturer who lost nearly everything in the Wall Street crash of 1929; a college student who delivered bread every morning before school to save money for tuition; a playwright who refused to name names before a congressional committee and went to jail for it; the husband of Marilyn Monroe; the man who spent years silent about a son he had institutionalized. Each of these threads runs through a life that lasted nine decades and a writing career that spanned more than seven of them. What made him one of the 20th century's greatest dramatists - and what made him so deeply controversial - is what this documentary will explore.

• 2. A Brooklyn Education

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  Isidore Miller ran a women's clothing manufacturing business that employed 400 people. In that fact lies the origin of Arthur Miller's most persistent subject: the American man who believes the dream is within reach, then watches it slip. The family lived well on West 110th Street in Manhattan, owned a summer house in Far Rockaway, Queens, and employed a chauffeur. Then the Wall Street crash of 1929 erased nearly all of it, and the Millers moved to Gravesend, Brooklyn.

  Arthur, the second of three children, was a teenager when the crash came. He began delivering bread each morning before school to help with the family finances. He would later publish an account of those years under the title "A Boy Grew in Brooklyn". He graduated in 1932 from Abraham Lincoln High School and worked at several menial jobs to pay for his tuition at the University of Michigan.

  At Michigan, Miller first majored in journalism and wrote for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. His first play, No Villain, earned him the Avery Hopwood Award, and that prize changed the direction of his life. He switched his major to English, and enrolled in a playwriting seminar with Professor Kenneth Rowe, who taught his students what Miller described as "the dynamics of play construction" - how a play was built to achieve its intended effect. Rowe gave Miller what he needed most: realistic feedback and encouragement. The two became lifelong friends.

  In 1937, Miller wrote Honors at Dawn, which also received the Avery Hopwood Award. After graduating in 1938, he joined the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal agency that provided jobs in the theater, turning down a more lucrative offer from 20th Century Fox to write film scripts. Congress shut the project down in 1939 over fears of Communist infiltration. Miller moved to the Brooklyn Navy Yard and kept writing - radio plays, some of which aired on CBS, while the stage waited.

• 3. Death of a Salesman

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  In 1948, Miller built a small studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. There, in less than a day, he completed the first act of Death of a Salesman. Within six weeks, the entire play existed. That speed was not a sign of carelessness - it was a sign that the play had been forming in him for years.

  Death of a Salesman premiered on Broadway on the 10th of February 1949, at the Morosco Theatre. Elia Kazan directed. Lee J. Cobb played Willy Loman, with Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. The play ran 742 times and swept the major awards: a Tony Award for Best Author, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play in history to win all three.

  Before Salesman opened, Miller had already learned something about the cost of critical disapproval. His very first Broadway production, The Man Who Had All the Luck, had closed after four performances in 1944 following disastrous reviews. The play did win the Theatre Guild's National Award, but that could not save it. Then in 1947, All My Sons - a play he had begun writing in 1941 - became a success, earning Miller his first Tony Award for Best Author. In a 1994 interview with Ron Rifkin, Miller recalled that most critics at the time found All My Sons "a very depressing play in a time of great optimism". Positive reviews from Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times had, Miller believed, saved it.

  In 1949, Miller exchanged letters with Eugene O'Neill after O'Neill sent a congratulatory telegram following the All My Sons production. Miller wrote back expressing gratitude and inviting O'Neill to the opening of Salesman. O'Neill accepted the apology for the delay but declined the invitation, explaining that his Parkinson's disease made travel difficult. He suggested a trip to Boston instead. That trip never happened.

• 4. The Crucible and HUAC

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  In 1952, Elia Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and named eight members of the Group Theatre as fellow travelers of the Communist Party. Arthur Miller was among them. The friendship between Miller and Kazan, which had been close throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, ended that day. After speaking with Kazan about the testimony, Miller traveled to Salem, Massachusetts, to research the witch trials of 1692. He and Kazan did not speak to each other for the next ten years.

  The Crucible, which Miller wrote in direct response to those events, first played at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on the 22nd of January 1953. The parallel Miller drew between the Salem witch trials and the HUAC investigations was unmistakable. Though the play was regarded as only moderately successful at the time, it has since become his most frequently produced work in the world. Robert Ward adapted it into an opera in 1961.

  The relationship between Miller and Kazan went beyond grievance. Kazan defended his own decision to cooperate with HUAC through his 1954 film On the Waterfront, in which a dockworker heroically testifies against a corrupt union boss. Miller answered with A View from the Bridge, a play about a longshoreman who informs on his co-workers out of jealousy and greed. He sent Kazan a copy of the script. When Kazan jokingly asked to direct the film version, Miller replied: "I only sent you the script to let you know what I think of stool-pigeons."

  The HUAC took a direct interest in Miller himself after The Crucible opened. The committee engineered the State Department's denial of his passport to attend the play's London opening in 1954. When Miller applied in 1956 for a passport renewal, the committee subpoenaed him. Before appearing, Miller asked the chairman, Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania, not to demand that he name names. Walter agreed. Monroe accompanied Miller to the hearing, risking her own career to be there. Miller gave the committee a detailed account of his political activities and admitted his involvement with Communist-front organizations had been a mistake. "I think it would be a disaster and a calamity if the Communist Party ever took over this country," he said. "That is an opinion that has come to me not out of the blue sky but out of long thought." When the committee reneged on Walter's promise and demanded names, Miller refused: "I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him." A judge found him guilty of contempt of Congress in May 1957. He was fined, sentenced to a prison term, blacklisted from Hollywood, and denied a passport. In August 1958, a court of appeals overturned the conviction, ruling that Miller had been misled by the committee chairman.

• 5. Marilyn Monroe

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  Miller and Monroe had met in 1951, had a brief affair, and stayed in contact. In June 1956, Miller left his first wife, Mary Grace Slattery - who had given him two children, Jane and Robert - and married Monroe. She had just turned 30. She converted to Judaism, biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes, to "express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents." Shortly after the conversion, Egypt banned all of her movies.

  Away from Hollywood, Monroe's life briefly became more ordinary. She cooked, kept house, and, according to Miller, gave him more attention and affection than he had been used to. She confided to him: "I hate Hollywood. I don't want it any more. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself any more." In her private notes, she wrote about her fear during the HUAC ordeal: "I am so concerned about protecting Arthur. I love him - and he is the only person - human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses - but he is the only person - as another human being that I trust as much as myself."

  Miller began writing the screenplay for The Misfits in 1960. The film was directed by John Huston and starred Monroe. During production, the marriage collapsed. Monroe was taking drugs to sleep and others to wake up, arriving late and forgetting lines. Huston later recalled confronting Miller about it: "I was impertinent enough to say to Arthur that to allow her to take drugs of any kind was criminal and utterly irresponsible. Shortly after that I realized that she wouldn't listen to Arthur at all; he had no say over her actions." Monroe obtained a Mexican divorce from Miller in January 1961, shortly before the film's premiere. Nineteen months later, on the 5th of August 1962, Monroe died of a likely drug overdose. Huston, who had also directed her in her first major role in The Asphalt Jungle in 1950, placed the blame on her doctors: "The girl was an addict of sleeping pills and she was made so by the God-damn doctors. It had nothing to do with the Hollywood set-up."

• 6. Private Silence, Public Roles

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  In February 1962, Miller married Inge Morath, a photographer who had documented the production of The Misfits. Their first child, Rebecca, was born on the 15th of September 1962. Their son Daniel was born with Down syndrome in November 1966. Against Morath's wishes, Miller had Daniel institutionalized, first at a home for infants in New York City and then at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut. Morath visited often. Miller never did. Daniel left Southbury at 17 and moved gradually from a group home to an apartment with occasional visits from a social worker.

  When his son-in-law, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, visited Daniel frequently and persuaded Miller to meet him, Miller was asked about the relationship. He answered: "Well, he knows I'm a person, and he knows my name, but he doesn't understand what it means to be a son." When Morath died in 2002, Miller told people they had only one child together. Daniel did not attend her funeral. When Miller died, Daniel was named as an heir alongside his three other children.

  Miller's public roles ran in a different direction from his silences at home. In 1965, he was elected the first American president of PEN International, a position he held for four years. He organized the 1966 PEN congress in New York. In 1969, after he campaigned for dissident writers in the Soviet Union, that government banned his works entirely. In the late 1970s, he joined a group of celebrities, including William Styron and Mike Nichols, who worked to raise bail for Peter Reilly, a young man convicted of his mother's murder on what many considered a coerced confession. Miller firmly believed Reilly had been railroaded by the Connecticut State Police. The A&E series City Confidential later suggested that Miller's experience with the HUAC had deepened his sympathy for anyone he believed persecuted by the state.

  In 1983, Miller traveled to Beijing to direct Death of a Salesman at the People's Art Theatre. The production was a success. The following year, his book Salesman in Beijing described what it had meant to guide a Chinese cast through an American play about a man the system had failed.

• 7. Later Work and Final Years

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  After the Fall, which opened on the 23rd of January 1964, at the ANTA Theatre in Washington Square Park, reunited Miller with Kazan for the first time in a decade. The play was understood to draw on Miller's marriage to Monroe; a character named Maggie was widely read as a Monroe figure. Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, called it "a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness" and "a shameless piece of tabloid gossip". Miller insisted the characters were composite shadows of history rather than portraits. The play arrived alongside Incident at Vichy in the same year.

  The 1968 play The Price became his most successful work since Death of a Salesman. That same year, Miller attended the Democratic National Convention as a pledged delegate for Eugene McCarthy from Connecticut. He remained active as a public intellectual: his 1978 collection of Theater Essays, edited by Robert A. Martin, included his reflections on tragedy, the McCarthy era, and the case for a publicly supported theater. Reviewing the collection, Studs Terkel wrote in the Chicago Tribune: "In reading the Theater Essays... you are exhilaratingly aware of a social critic, as well as a playwright, who knows what he's talking about."

  In 1987, his autobiography Timebends was published. Before it appeared, Miller had refused to discuss Monroe in interviews; the book broke that silence at length. He spent much of the 1990s writing new work: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan in 1991, The Last Yankee in 1992, and Broken Glass in 1994. The 1999 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, celebrating its 50th anniversary with Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman, ran 274 performances at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre and won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

  In December 2004, Miller announced that he had been living at his Connecticut farm with Agnes Barley, a minimalist painter then aged 34, since 2002, and that they intended to marry. His final play, Finishing the Picture, had already opened at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago that fall, with a character said to be based on Barley. He insisted the work was fiction. Within hours of his death on the 10th of February 2005, his daughter Rebecca ordered Barley to vacate the home she had shared with him. The Arthur Miller Theatre at the University of Michigan opened in March 2007 - per Miller's express wish, the only theater in the world to bear his name.