00:00Timebends is the title of Arthur Miller's just-published autobiography, and Timebends
00:05is a strangely appropriate way to characterize the course of the life of this preeminent
00:10American playwright, because over his 72 years, his life and times have bent in and out of
00:15the bitter Depression years, in and out of immense professional acclaim, in and out of
00:20two failed marriages and into a long, fine one, in and out of political controversy,
00:26and in and out of fashion in the fickle world of American letters.
00:31You wrote Death of a Salesman when you were 33 years old. How long did it take you?
00:35Well, the first act, more or less, was a matter of one day and a night. I then rested and
00:49worked about six weeks on the second act, and put the whole thing together. But, of
00:55course, there's a lifetime in that play.
00:57Death of a Salesman was a triumph for Arthur Miller. It won him both the Pulitzer Prize
01:01and the New York Drama Critics Award. The critics were comparing him to Henrik Ibsen
01:05and Eugene O'Neill.
01:07You inevitably begin to feel a kind of impact of power, which is sexual, it is financial,
01:16it is everything. You begin to shift and change, if you're not careful, which I wasn't. People
01:22now were talking to me differently. Women, men, they were looking at me like an icon
01:28of some kind.
01:29Arthur Miller came a long way for a Jewish boy born in Harlem and raised in Brooklyn.
01:34He was the son of an immigrant coat manufacturer, a man who couldn't read English. His father
01:40lost everything in the crash of 1929, and so Miller grew up a child of the Depression,
01:46and that was to show in his writing and his politics. He had to work and save for two
01:50years before he could afford to go to the University of Michigan in the 1930s. And at
01:55school in the Midwest, he seemed to be trying to reach beyond the New York he knew to touch
02:00the American heartland he knew so much less about. He even looked for this in his first
02:05wife, Mary Slattery, an Irish Catholic from the Midwest.
02:09Yeah, we wanted something, each one from the other. She wanted the experience of the intellectual,
02:17the Jew, the artist, and I wanted America, something beyond New York. That's part of
02:30what attracted both of us. We were mysteries to each other.
02:34During the middle 40s, Miller wrote what he called trunk plays. That's where they wound
02:38up, in the trunk. And he had one flop on Broadway. Discouraged, he gave himself one last chance
02:44at playwriting, and wrote All My Sons in 1947. It was a breakthrough for him, a success.
02:52But nothing prepared him for the success of Death of a Salesman, and the impact it would
02:56have on his personal life and his marriage.
03:00The night that it opened...
03:00Well, then I felt with my wife then...
03:04Mary Slattery.
03:05Yes, that we were... It wasn't enough for me, suddenly. I thought I had a feeling that
03:15we were not close, that we were not one.
03:18That you had outgrown her?
03:19I had outgrown her.
03:20It's hard for you to say.
03:21Yeah.
03:22I hadn't realized until I read the book that you were in psychoanalysis for some time.
03:27Yeah.
03:29What drove you to do it?
03:30My marriage. The fact that I was unhappy.
03:34Your first marriage?
03:34Yes.
03:35To Mary Slattery.
03:35And I thought that that would teach me something that I didn't know about how to live. Well,
03:42it really didn't. It just illuminated the fact that I didn't know how to live. And that
03:48I could have told you in the first place.
03:51The Millers kept their marriage together through the early fifties, a period in which he produced
03:55The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials. That play opened during the hearings
04:00of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the parallels were striking. A few years
04:06later he heard from the committee himself. They wanted to ask him about some left-wing
04:10meetings he had gone to.
04:12They wanted you to name names?
04:14Yeah.
04:14And what did you say to them?
04:15I said, look, I'll tell you about me, but I'm not going to tell you about anybody else.
04:19Had I thought, put it this way, that somebody I knew was a spy or working against the United
04:26States, that'd be a different story. What are we talking about? We're talking about
04:30actors, a few playwrights. Most of them were actors, directors. What earthly effect could
04:37these people have on security in the United States, or anything else?
04:43And they held you in contempt?
04:45They voted me in contempt, and we appealed it to the Court of Appeals, and they threw
04:49it all out.
04:51Your friend, Elia Kazan, named names.
04:52Right.
04:53You couldn't accept that?
04:54No, it seemed to me to be a wrong thing to do.
04:59Elia Kazan had been the director of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
05:04Kazan had been your good friend.
05:06Oh, yeah.
05:07Collaborated.
05:08I loved him. Very close friends.
05:09And that simply split it?
05:11Yes, it did.
05:12How long didn't you speak?
05:16I don't know. It was a number of years.
05:19It was during this time that Miller divorced his first wife, Mary, and his impending marriage
05:24to Marilyn Monroe became headlines in the tabloids. Miller maintains that his appearance
05:29before that committee, in a strange way, had more to do with Marilyn than with the committee's
05:34search for communists.
05:35Chairman Walter proposed to my lawyer just before the hearing began that if it could
05:41be arranged for him to take a photograph with Marilyn, he'd call off the whole thing.
05:46The congressman wanted a photograph with Marilyn Monroe?
05:49With himself.
05:50Yes.
05:51In the picture. We could have aborted the whole thing in five minutes.
05:55And declined to do it?
05:57Yeah. And I didn't do it.
06:00Their marriage caused a sensation. Arthur Miller moved from the theater pages to the gossip columns.
06:05You know that people said at the time that you were together,
06:08what in the world is Arthur doing this for?
06:11Arthur is an innocent.
06:14What in the world? Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe?
06:17That innocence is exactly the point.
06:20She also, in a way, was moving into a world she knew nothing about.
06:27A world of getting up in the morning, making breakfast, and living in it.
06:31That was an innocence there.
06:33Did she want that, do you think?
06:35With part of herself. She wanted it with part of herself, yes.
06:39And with the rest?
06:40She wanted to be a great star.
06:43He wrote about her,
06:44I never saw her unhappy in a crowd.
06:47Her stardom was her triumph, nothing less. It was her life's achievement.
06:51The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that
06:54no space existed between herself and this star.
06:57She was Marilyn Monroe, and that was what was killing her.
07:01You knew that it was doomed.
07:03I didn't know it was doomed, but I certainly felt it had a good chance to be.
07:09You said to her, I keep trying to teach myself how to lose you,
07:13but I can't learn yet.
07:15And she says, why must you lose me?
07:19Well, it just shows you the power of instinct over what's left of your brains
07:26at such moments when you're being drawn to someone,
07:30and you sense that it may not work,
07:35and you can't stop it anyway.
07:37Your face changes when you talk about her.
07:39Excuse me?
07:40Your face changes when you talk about her.
07:43In what way?
07:44Well, I think you're still...
07:48Those were tough years.
07:50Wonderful years and terrible years.
07:51Sure.
07:53They were.
07:55Although it was a lot of pain, certainly for her and certainly for me.
07:59Why? What did it do to you?
08:00Well, it's a defeat.
08:02It always is.
08:03And she was for you quicksand.
08:05In a way.
08:06Yeah, but you could have lost your way.
08:08As a matter of fact, there are those who feel that you did lose your way for five years because of it.
08:13Well, you could say that, I guess.
08:16At the same time,
08:20she was a great person to be with a lot of the time.
08:25She was full of the most astonishing turns and revelations about people.
08:32She was a super-sensitive instrument,
08:35and that's exciting to be around until it starts to self-destruct.
08:40And you and Marilyn were divorced when?
08:43About 61.
08:46And you married Inga a year later.
08:48Yeah.
08:50Today, at the age of 72,
08:52Arthur Miller spends most of the time at his house in the Connecticut countryside.
08:56He has been married for 25 years now to Inga Moran,
09:00a world-class photographer.
09:02They have a daughter, Rebecca, who is a promising young actress.
09:07He has a small cabin on the property where he still writes every day.
09:11Writing every day, right up in that building.
09:13Plays?
09:14Yeah, I'm writing a play now.
09:16Don't ask me why, but I love doing it.
09:36♪♪♪
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