The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Miller entered manhood in the 1930s, and formed his political and cultural views after witnessing the threatening events of that low, dishonest decade: the rise of fascism, the economic hardships of the Depression, the heartbreaking defeat of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, the spread of Nazism throughout Europe and the plague of anti-Semitism. After graduating from high school in 1933, Miller took a job to earn money for college. He made fifteen dollars a week at Chadick-Delameter, "the largest wholesale auto parts warehouse east of the Mississippi, an old firm that sold to retail parts stores and garages all over the eastern seaboard."2 The huge warehouse – with a dour, pasty-faced boss and Miller the only Jew in the firm – stood on the corner of Tenth Avenue and West 63rd Street. Thirty years later, Lincoln Center was built on the site and Miller's plays were produced there.

  His father wanted Arthur to attend City College in New York, where tuition was free and he could live at home, and to follow him into the coat business. But Arthur held out for the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied from 1934 to 1938. He said he chose it because it was the only college in America that offered a playwriting course and gave prize money for the best student plays. In fact, George Pierce Baker had been teaching his famous playwriting courses – to students like Eugene O'Neill, Philip Barry and Sidney Howard – at both Harvard and Yale since 1908. Michigan had twice rejected Miller because he'd repeatedly failed algebra and had a poor academic record. But an enlightened dean of admissions reversed his decision after Miller sent several letters arguing that he'd been working for two years, and was now more mature and serious about academic life.

  In the 1930s the university was a radical outpost in the generally conservative Midwest. The energetic Miller washed dishes in a cafeteria in exchange for meals and supported himself on the fifteen dollars a month (a quarter of his warehouse salary) he earned by feeding mice in a cancer research laboratory. After classes he worked as night editor at the Michigan Daily. His main expenses were for room, laundry, tobacco, books and movies. At Michigan Miller met his first wife, the Catholic, idealistic and high-principled Mary Grace Slattery. "The first time I saw him," she recalled, "he came toward me, ducking overhead heating pipes. . . . When he did notice me, he asked for a date. I proposed a movie, but he didn't have any money. I treated to the movies, and afterwards to malted milks."

  E.M. Halliday, then a graduate student and later a college professor, described an extraordinary incident that revealed Mary's sexual innocence and naïveté as well as her desire to appear sophisticated and free-spirited. On a rainy spring night, Mary and her close friend Hedda Rowinski unexpectedly knocked on the door of Halliday and his roommate Bhain Campbell. The women were invited in and, after considerable awkwardness and hesitation, Hedda shocked Halliday with a bold proposal:

  This is kind of embarrassing, but we couldn't think of what else to do. You know I've been seeing a lot of Norman [Rosten], and Mary has been seeing a lot of Art, and things are getting – well, things are getting kind of serious. The thing is, I'm still a virgin – which is probably no surprise to you – and Mary is, too. And Norman and Art want to go to bed with us; but we think they think we're women of the world, and we're afraid they'll be disillusioned if they find out we're so innocent. So we wondered if you and Bhain. . . .

  But just as friends! No complications; just as friends! You like me, and I know that Bhain likes Mary; and you both like Norman and Art. We thought if you'd just – well, you know, show us how it's done? We don't want to seem stupid about it when the time comes with them. We wouldn't tell them about it, of course.

  Halliday, gallantly refusing their enticing offer, told them, "I was sure their maiden condition would not be scorned by Norman and Art, who undoubtedly loved them." Miller's previous experience seems to have been limited to an encounter with a prostitute when he was sixteen. But both college girls, thinking their boyfriends and potential lovers would be disappointed by virgins and prefer women of the world, sweetly credited the men with more savoir faire than they really had.

  Miller's first visit to Mary's family in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, was like the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen visits Diane Keaton's hostile and demented Christian family in Wisconsin. Mary's father, a retired boiler inspector for the city of Cleveland, was both stupid and crude. He spat tobacco juice onto the front lawn while his embarrassed wife almost groaned in despair and the dourly humorous Miller tried to pretend nothing had happened. He found Mary's mother absurdly pious and extremely repressed. Though he and Mary – after surmounting the hurdle of virginity – had lived together in Ann Arbor, he had to maintain propriety by sleeping in a rented room.

  Mary's first visit, in August 1938, to his more tolerant family was not quite as traumatic: "For a while it did not go down well, but pretty soon they got used to her and she to them. She, in any case, was not a practicing Catholic by then. It was far more difficult for her parents because they were still very devout and I was a heathen.

  Actually, that is part of the ceremony. There are special ceremonies for Mohammedans, heathens and Jews who marry Catholics. You are not married in the church and you have to get a special dispensation from the church in order to do that."3

  Mary, a year behind Miller, made one of her many sacrifices by dropping out of the University of Michigan and moving to New York with him when he graduated in 1938. Marilyn's biographer Maurice Zolotow wrote that Mary "was political, literary, intense in the style of the 1930s, and she was . . . the family intellectual. She had been Miller's creative inspiration, his economic support. She had worked as a waitress and later as an editor . . . to support him while he established himself as a writer." But Miller's friends and family found Mary (who remains a shadowy figure in Timebends) rather stern and withdrawn. Kazan's daughter called her "a rather joyless creature . . . a skinny, silent, disapproving figure"; and Joan Copeland described her as "upright, a straight arrow, even if a little bit cool, not emotional."4

  Mary also worked at a magazine for China specialists called Amerasia. The magazine argued, during the Chinese civil war, that Mao Tsetung's victory over Chiang Kai-shek was inevitable, even desirable, and that America's support of Chiang was futile and foolish. In 1945 extracts of classified reports written by the OSS (the wartime intelligence agency and forerunner of the CIA) were unaccountably published in the magazine. Amerasia's prediction about Mao turned out to be correct, but Miller was inevitably associated, through Mary, with backing the Communists during the Cold War.

  After living together for two more years in Brooklyn, Arthur and Mary finally married on August 5, 1940. Their daughter, Jane, was born in 1944 and their son, Robert, three years later. When a nursemaid moved in with the family after Robert's birth, Miller wryly remarked, "there are so many women in the house, I spend half my time raising the toilet seat." A few years later, as their marriage began to disintegrate, Mary desperately tried to stay youthful. Miller, self-absorbed as always, told the English author James Stern that he was puzzled about her dance-and-exercise class, but never bothered to question her about it: "Mary is taking some kind of lessons in body movement or some damned thing. I always forget to ask her what it's about. But she does it in a class every week and is convinced she is growing younger." Despite their estrangement and eventual divorce, Miller did his best work toward the end of their sixteen-year marriage, and wrote very little during his tempestuous years with Marilyn.

  II

  The young Miller was inspired to become a dramatist, while a student at the University of Michigan, after seeing a Chicago production of Clifford Odets' play about a troubled Jewish family, Awake and Sing! (1935). Miller had tremendous energy, ambition and desire to learn his craft. For a decade after graduating from college, he turned out many failures before suddenly achieving great fame with All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). His dozen or more plays, which were never produced, included two that won prestigious Hopwood Awards at Michigan (the first, No Villain, was tw
ice revised and also won a Theater Guild Award); a satiric comedy, Listen My Children, in collaboration with Norman Rosten; and a historical play, The Golden Years, about Montezuma, Cortés and the destruction of Mexico by the Spanish conquistadores. When America entered World War II he was rejected for military service because of a knee injury he'd received in a football game, so he tried to justify his existence by writing several radio plays on patriotic themes. His first play on Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck, portrayed a character who feels guilty about his success and is convinced that he's heading for disaster. It had a terrible reception and closed after only four performances in November 1944.

  Miller (like Marilyn) aided the war effort by manual labor. From 1941 to 1943 he worked thirteen out of every fourteen nights, from four in the afternoon to four in the morning, in the ship-fitting department of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Like many other workers, Miller was unskilled and was surprised when the ships they'd worked on actually stayed afloat:

  Whenever a drydock was finally flooded and a ship instead of sinking floated safely into the harbor and sailed out into the bay, I was not the only one who stared at it thinking it miraculous that out of our chaos and incompetence, our bumbling and goofing off and our thefts . . . we had managed to repair it. More than one man would turn to another and say, "How the hell'd it happen?" as the ship vanished into the morning mists and the war.5

  Toward the end of 1943 Miller was offered $750 a week to write a screenplay based on Ernie Pyle's frontline war dispatches during the Italian campaign. His film script was rewritten and made into the successful Story of GI Joe (1945) with Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum. Miller got no screen credit; but his first book, Situation Normal (1944), about the problems that soldiers had when they returned from combat and tried to adjust to civilian life, grew out of his research for the Ernie Pyle film. This book was dedicated to his older brother, Kermit, who was serving as a lieutenant in the American army.

  Miller's editor, Frank Taylor, at the highbrow publishers Reynal & Hitchcock, was a tall, handsome, stylish man. He had serious left-wing views and socialized with politically committed artists at his home in Greenwich Village. Taylor became a close friend and, later on, the producer of The Misfits. He also published Focus (1945), Miller's only novel, with the fashionable postwar theme of alienation. The central character is a gentile whose new glasses make him look Jewish. His appearance provokes anti-Semitic hostility, and he at first tries to maintain his non-Jewish status. Eventually he accepts his new identity and fights against the prejudice he's encountered. The subject of anti-Semitism was especially relevant between the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps in 1945 and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Readers were eager for serious fiction after the war and Focus (according to Miller) sold a surprising 90,000 copies.

  Miller disliked his mother-in-law's flat, unemphatic Ohio speech and her Catholic belief that earthly life was a disaster. But she told him the story that inspired All My Sons, his first triumphant success in the theater. A local newspaper reported that during the war the Wright Aeronautics Corporation of Ohio had bribed army inspectors to approve defective airplane engines. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy pointed out that Miller used Henrik Ibsen's device of the fatal secret, in which crime and guilt enter an ordinary domestic scene and build up to a tragic climax. She observed that "All My Sons was a social indictment taken, almost directly, from Ibsen's Pillars of Society [1877]. The coffin ships, rotten, unseaworthy vessels caulked over to give the appearance of soundness, become defective airplanes sold to the government by a corner-cutting manufacturer during the Second World War." Other critics noted the influence of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882), which Miller adapted for the American stage in 1950. In this play, "an idealistic doctor discovers that the spring waters from which his spa town draws its wealth are dangerously contaminated. As Stockmann's fellow citizens realize the financial implications of his research, he comes under increasing pressure to keep silent."

  In Miller's realistic tragedy – brilliantly directed for the stage by Elia Kazan and starring Ed Begley and Arthur Kennedy – Joe Keller sells cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force, which cause a number of fatal plane crashes. He also allows his employee and neighbor to take the blame and go to jail. When Keller's son, a pilot, dies in the war, his younger son tells Keller that his brother had discovered the fatal secret and committed suicide out of shame. Appalled by his own greed, and faced with the ruin of his name, business and family, Keller finally accepts his guilt and kills himself. After Miller won the Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best new American play of the season, and several reviewers suggested that the director and actors were more responsible for its success than the author, he ironically remarked, "Everyone's son but mine!" His sudden fame attracted attention in Hollywood and in 1947 he was offered, but turned down, $2,500 to write the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, made the following year with James Stewart and Farley Granger.

  In a frenzy of inspiration Miller wrote the first act of his best-known play, Death of a Salesman, in less than twenty-four hours. The play, again directed by Kazan, starred Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock as Willy and Linda Loman, Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchell as their sons. Like All My Sons, it was a domestic tragedy that portrayed the rivalry of two brothers, a loyal wife and a father who kills himself. Willy's brother Ben, a ruthlessly successful figure who thrives in a cutthroat world, makes a dream-like appearance. No one has noticed that the exotic, authoritarian Ben was inspired by Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). Marlow, who's been sent upriver and into the jungle to rescue the pitiless and fanatical Kurtz, says with a mixture of awe and condemnation that Kurtz "had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together." Ben boasts to Willy, a weak failure: "When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich."6 Ben, a modern-day Kurtz, is more interested in accumulating fabulous wealth than exerting absolute power. He feels a sense of pure triumph rather than horrified remorse about exploiting the natives and tearing the riches out of the African earth.

  Miller earned a fabulous $160,000 a year from the New York production of Salesman and an equal amount from several touring companies. Always careful with money, he now lashed out by buying a house in Brooklyn Heights, a farm in Connecticut and a new car. When Frank Taylor sent Miller's script to Dore Schary at MGM and suggested he buy the film rights, Schary called it "the most depressing fucking thing I ever read. Nobody would ever want to see this kind of film." The play won the Pulitzer Prize, and became a film in 1951, with Fredric March playing Willy, Kevin McCarthy his son Biff, and Dunnock and Mitchell reprising their Broadway roles. It is widely taught in schools and colleges, and by 2005 had sold more than eleven million copies.

  III

  Miller was a reserved, guarded and withdrawn man who rarely showed his deepest feelings. He was a cool and distant father, had few close friends and eventually broke with his most intimate companions: with Elia Kazan for political reasons and with Norman Rosten for siding with Marilyn after their divorce. Miller also pulled Marilyn away from her own friends. He persuaded her to sever relations with Milton and Amy Greene, and tried to diminish the pernicious influence of Lee and Paula Strasberg.

  Miller's dedications shed some light on his limited friendships. Many of his books had no dedications; and sixteen of his twenty-one dedications were given to his family: to his brother, three wives, three children and his third wife's parents (but not to his own father and mother). Of the remaining five dedications, Theater Essays was dedicated to his college playwriting teacher Kenneth Rowe; All My Sons to Kazan; and A View from the Bridge to the writer and translator James Stern "for his encouragement." Two other books were dedicated to people who had recently died: I Don't Need You Any More to the memory of his editor at Viking, Pascal Covici, and The Misfits "to Clark Gable, who did not know how to hate."

  Several colle
agues were irritated by Miller's characteristic pompous and self-righteous rectitude. Harold Clurman, a founder of the Group Theater and director of Miller's Incident at Vichy, observed that "Miller, earnest and upright, is sustained by a sense of mission. . . . For all his unbending seriousness and a certain coldness of manner, there is more humor in him than is generally supposed. He is much less rigid now than he is said to have been in his younger days, when he put people off." Robert Lewis directed Miller's adaptation of An Enemy of the People, which starred the married couple, Florence Eldridge and Fredric March. Lewis recalled that on one occasion Miller, who took an active part in the production of his plays and was usually self-controlled, unexpectedly exploded:

  Arthur sensed this wish of Florence's to be loved by the audience. Blowing his top in the middle of a scene one day at a run-through, Arthur yelled up to Mrs. March, "Why must you be so fucking noble?" . . . Florence flew off the stage and into her dressing room, followed by her equally anguished husband. The Marches insisted neither of them would return to the production until Arthur apologized in front of the company. The playwright compromised by offering a private apology, and the Marches finally accepted that.7

  Kazan shrewdly remarked that after the tremendous success, wealth and fame of Salesman, Miller's "eyes acquired a new flash and his carriage and movement a hint of something swashbuckling." Frank Taylor's wife, Nan, added that "Mary, never an extrovert, began to fade into his background, 'meek . . . beside him.'" Lacking insight into Mary's character and their marriage, Miller confessed that "it never occurred to me that she might have felt anxious at being swamped by this rush of my fame." For years Mary had loyally believed in his talent, and helped support him both intellectually and financially. But now that his career had taken off and he had plenty of money, he was less dependent on her. As he developed artistically and socially, and saw sexual possibilities that never existed before, she rather desperately clung to their old way of life.