Artscope

The ‘egghead’ who married the ‘hourglass’

by Carl Muller

This year, at 89, the man who was regarded as a giant of the American theatre, died. He was Arthur Miller, the US playwright who wrote Death of a Salesman and who believed that a playwright’s job was to challenge systems and change the world.

Miller was born in New York in 1915 and grew up in Harlem. The Wall Street crash forced the family to Brooklyn where the young Arthur made $4-a-week delivering bread.

“It was hard to know where my own family situation left off and where society began,” he later wrote, “it was all happening right there in the living room.” Disillusioned at the break-up of the American Dream, he embraced Socialism, read The Brothers Karamazov and realised that his only ambition was to write.

His plays were personal, moral, and his characters were based on people he had known. He drew from events in his own life: his adolescence, the Depression, his opposition to anti-Communist witch hunts and his ill-fated marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

His Socialist convictions were honed when he found work in the Brooklyn Naval Dockyard - a hotbed of Labour radicalism. He wrote all the while, married Mary Slattery and supported his wife and two children by writing radio plays. The Man who had All the Luck was produced on Broadway.

The next, All My Sons - about a businessman who allows defective parts to be fitted to aeroplanes and causes fatal crashes - won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, beating Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.

In Death of a Salesman Miller brought in the same themes - damage caused by materialistic values and family fragmentation. It featured his best-known character, Willy Loman, the American Dream proponent who realises, in late middle age, that he worth more dead than alive! It was Death of a Salesman that made Miller famous.

As the director of the play, Elia Kazan, said: “Art does an extraordinary thing here. (Miller) shows us a man who represents everything (that Miller) believes to be misguided about the system we live in; then goes on to make us feel affection and concern and even love for this man. He is ridiculous and tragic all at once.” The play was decidedly anti-capitalist and it brought Miller to the attention of Washington.

He then gave us The Crucible - a play about the witch hunts and hysteria that had swept through Salem in the 17th century. The text of this play has sold over seven million copies and has become the most performed of his plays; but he was accused of un-American activities by the government.

In the midst of all this, and after having asked his first wife for a divorce, he married Marilyn Monroe in 1956. Author Norman Mailer commented: “(The union brought together) the great American Mind (and) the great American Body,” and the magazines carolled: “Egghead weds Hourglass.” But it was a true love match.

In 1987, he wrote: “(Marilyn was) almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in her aviary, if only because her tight dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that it was the best one in the room.”

The marriage, however, proved a disaster, as Marilyn battled depression and drug addiction. They divorced after five years and Arthur married a photographer, Inge Morath, in 1962 - the same year Marilyn killed herself. But Miller began to slide.

His next play, After the Fall was ill-received because one of its characters, an over-medicated, emotionally abusive seductress who takes a fatal overdose, was seen as Marilyn, and he was accused of sensationalism and exploitation. Even the play that followed was panned by the critics who had become hostile to his moralising tone. Author Gore Vidal told him bluntly: “Stop telling us what we already know!”

But every one of his plays was enthusiastically received in England and Miller became a frequent visitor to London. After Morath died in 2002, Miller began seeing artist Agnes Bailey, 55 years younger than he was. When asked about his new affair, he said: “I like the company of women. Life is boring without them.”

Fitting words for his epitaph!

..................................