ARTHUR MILLER (1915-2005)
Some Memories by Warren Allen Smith
11 February 2005
When I lived for three decades on 45th Street in Manhattan's Hell's
Kitchen, just off Broadway and near my Variety Recording Studio in
Times Square, I met U. S. Senator
Patrick Moynihan by chance. Told that I lived in his old Hell's
Kitchen neighborhood for three decades, he asked if I knew that Arthur Miller got his first job in
my and his part of the city. Miller's job, he told me, was at an auto
parts warehouse near the Landmark Tavern at 46th Street and 11th
Avenue, a tavern the senator knew well, the only building left standing
in the area around 42nd Street near the Hudson River, where he'd lived
for a time.
It was the kind of trivia I would include later when, wearing the hat
of a Connecticut English teacher, I taught Death of a Salesman (about Willy
Loman, the "ordinary" person who is destroyed by hollow materialistic
values, an indictment of America's capitalist culture); The Crucible (a powerful depiction
of religious paranoia and its resulting mayhem – it vented his outrage
at everything that Senator Joseph
McCarthy stood for); All My
Sons (in which a manufacturer of defective airplane parts causes
needless deaths of Army pilots, including the death of his own son – an
example of the failure of the American dream); and After the Fall (a thinly disguised
story of Miller's marriage to Marilyn
Monroe, a work that appears to say that we are all, indeed,
fumbling around in a godless world, so our major responsibility is to
our fellow man).
In 1958, now wearing the hat of a journalist, I watched as Miller was
elected at the annual ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His peers were honoring the playwright who had never joined the
Communist Party, had tragically refused to name names of those who
might be Communists, and had weathered the attacks by Senator McCarthy,
eventually finding that the courts would dismiss his contempt of
Congress citation.
In 1959, I watched as he received the Academy's Gold Medal for Drama.
He and Monroe apparently had just arrived from a long plane ride, and
as cocktails flowed I noticed that one of her stockings was not
straight and, gasp, there appeared to be a very small mole in the space
betwixt her boobs. Elderly, bearded scholars were hovering over her
rather than over Donald Keene,
the distinguished scholar of Japanese literature who gave that year's
Blashfield Address. Perhaps because I had finished my second cocktail,
I approached Monroe and asked if I could refresh her drink – she gladly
accepted and, after supplying her with a new one, I kept the
lipstick-covered glass. Years later, some student swiped the glass -
for all I know, it's today's bargain on eBay.
In 1963, a time when I was spending half the year teaching English in
Connecticut and the other half managing a Times Square recording studio
with my companion, Fernando Vargas,
we had a session booked by famed directors Robert Whitehead and Elia Kazan but arranged for by our
friend, composer David Amram.
The first to arrive, quite early, was a small-town-looking Barbara Loden, whose talent and
beauty I overlooked completely – she seemed like just another innocent
country gal hoping to get a job as a backup singer. Asked where she
originally was from, she replied North Carolina, and we talked a bit as
if we both had come to the big "wonderful town" depicted in the 1953
play by Fields and Chodorov. I had no idea whatsoever that she had been
cast as the sexy Monroe-like character in Miller's After the Fall, nor that one day
she would marry Kazan. Whitehead arrived by bicycle, placing it in my
office. He then greeted Loden, Kazan, Amram, and several musicians.
Miller was last to arrive, and he went right to work. Starting a
conference while sitting in well-worn clothes on the floor's rug, his
gangly legs making him look somewhat uncomfortable, he asked Amram to
come up with a musical cue of a band member's playing something that
Maggie, a character he had devised for his work about guilt and
innocence, would complain about. She would then impulsively ask that
one of the musicians be fired, whereupon the same cue would be played
and she would rave to him about how much better the new musician was –
the audience would be unable to detect any difference, and this would
show how difficult it was to live with a person who could not cope with
her problems.
Miller always denied that the self-destructive character of Maggie was
based upon Monroe, but those in the cognoscenti thought otherwise. What
impressed me was how friendly and down-to-earth Miller was to everyone,
how he chatted easily with the guys who adjusted microphones or made
technical demands. During a break when Miller asked to use my
telephone, I told him I'd heard that the first job he'd ever had was in
nearby Hell's Kitchen, where I lived. He confirmed having worked during
the Depression in a menial job that he really detested, then asked what
street I lived on, smiling that he'd walked on 45th between 9th and
10th avenues many times.
Because Amram made a last-minute change in one of the musical cues,
Vargas hurriedly prepared a new tape, and on opening night in 1964 just
minutes before curtain time I took a taxi and rushed the cue to the
sound booth of the temporary ANTA Washington Square Theatre downtown
near the New York University campus. As I was leaving, Ladybird, President Lyndon Johnson's wife,
was just arriving. A week or so later, Vargas and I saw the play,
pleased that Miller had told Amram he was completely satisfied with all
the cues made at our studio.
Miller's marriage to Monroe had been from 1956 until 1961, during which
time their unborn child died because of medical complications. A
previous marriage to Mary Slattery
had resulted in divorce, but they had two children. After the divorce
from Monroe, Miller in 1962, the year Monroe died, married the
photographer Ingeborg Morath
(1923 – 2002), and they have a son and a daughter.
When researching the word "humanism," I wrote to Miller in 1989 and
again in 1992 to see how he used the word, then included his responses
in my Who's Who in Hell (Barricade Books, 2000). When thirteen, he had
been bar mitzvahed, but I knew that he had chosen a Unitarian minister
when he married Monroe in upstate Connecticut.
Miller in 1989 wrote to me: "Humanism? I don't know, I guess it has to
be the opposite of inhumanism, and we all know what that is."
In 1992, still unwilling to be labeled, he wrote concerning which kind
of humanist – secular, naturalistic, agnostic, atheistic, rationalistic
- he might be: "Depends on the day. I'd call myself a secular humanist,
excepting when the mystery of life is overwhelming and some semi-insane
directing force seems undeniable."
In 2004 I had a plaque placed on the face of the Hotel Chelsea, one
stating that Sir Arthur C. Clarke
had written 2001 there. Clarke told me that he hoped that Miller might
be present and say something when the plaque was dedicated, so I asked
P.E.N. to relay the request. On August 23rd, 2004, Miller e-mailed me
as follows, mis-spelled word and all:
Dear Warren Smith,
Your August 2nd email was only forwarded to me a couple of days
ago and I’ve been traveling, hence the delay. I’m afraid I’m so
preoccupied with two new plays coming into production that for me to
spend an hour in front of the Chelsea Hotel is more than I can
comfortably visiualize. I was acquainted with Arthur Clarke way back in
the sixties for a brief period and much appreciated his work. I’m sorry
to hear he’s fading somewhat. If you are in touch with him I wish you
would give him my regards.
Sincerely yours,
Arthur Miller
The two letters reproduced above, requested by and donated to
Harvard's Houghton Library, are from our age's major playwright who
died yesterday, February 10th, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Critics, for whom he had little regard, will now continue debating as
to whether Arthur Miller will join Eugene
O'Neill and Tennessee Williams
as the third of the Big Three. As for describing his outlook with one
of the standard labels, I choose instead to classify this playwright of
conscience as a humanities humanist.
