Bret L
June 15th 09, 07:18 AM
(( Of course the core truth is left for others to figure out: Miller
married MM to go over on Elia Kazan, his great enemy-friend. Kazan was
hardly "gone over on": Miller's life would become a trainwreck with
the voluble and delicate Monroe, and the marriage and its aftereffects
soiled and tainted him for the rest of his life. Kazan, for all his
foibles, was more of an adult, more of a man really, than Miller ever
could be and Miller knew it. Bret.))
Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Literary: A Playwright’s Life, With
Marilyn
By DWIGHT GARNER
>> "Arthur Miller was 35 and at the top of his career when, in 1951, he first set eyes on Marilyn Monroe. He was the author of “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman,” the first play to win all three major drama prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award). He would soon begin work on “The Crucible.” She was 24 and, with minor film roles behind her, virtually unknown.
ARTHUR MILLER
1915-1962
By Christopher Bigsby
Illustrated. 739 pages. Harvard University Press. $35.
Related
Times Topics: Arthur Miller
Documents First Chapter: ‘Arthur Miller’
Christopher Bigsby
The occasion was a Hollywood party in Miller’s honor. A married father
of two, he was dazzled by the erotic scenery. Women were clearly on
offer to him. He had, he would write, “never before seen sex treated
so casually as a reward of success.”
When Monroe arrived, she was “almost ludicrously provocative,” he
wrote, squeezed into a dress that was “blatantly tight, declaring
rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that
it was the best one in the room.” The director Elia Kazan caught “the
lovely light of lechery” in Miller’s eyes.
Miller and Monroe would not meet properly until a short time later, on
the lot at 20th Century Fox. Each was jolted awake by the other. For
Monroe, meeting him “was like running into a tree!” she recalled. “You
know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.” But Miller — tall,
Lincolnesque, a beacon of now troubled moral probity — returned to his
life and family in New York. Monroe would soon marry Joe DiMaggio. She
wouldn’t see Miller again for several years, and they would not marry
until 1956.
The long, strange, elegiac ballad of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
— one that would end for her in miscarriages, bottles of pills and
increasingly erratic behavior, and for him in a long gap in his
theater career — takes up only a few chapters of “Arthur Miller:
1915-1962,” Christopher Bigsby’s sober and meteor-size new biography.
But they are crucial chapters. The book moves inexorably toward
Monroe’s appearance; her magnetism sucks everything rapidly toward it.
Miller’s long life (1915-2005) can be cleaved neatly into B.M. and
A.M. — before Marilyn and after.
Miller’s story has already been told in his own very readable
autobiography, “Timebends,” and most recently in Martin Gottfried’s
punchy and quarrelsome 2003 biography. Mr. Bigsby, a British academic
— the back flap refers to him as “professor of American Studies and
the director of the Arthur Miller Center at the University of East
Anglia” — arrives with new material, notably boxes of papers,
including unfinished manuscripts, made available to him before
Miller’s death. He is a more sympathetic witness to Miller’s life than
Mr. Gottfried, if more prone to pedantic literary and cultural
analysis. But the basic outlines of Miller’s story are unchanged and
as fascinating as ever.
The second of three children, Arthur Miller was born into wealth. His
father, a Jewish émigré from Poland, was illiterate but a powerful
businessman whose women’s clothing company employed some 400 people
and sent salesmen across the country. The Miller family lived on East
110th Street in Manhattan; they owned a summer house in Far Rockaway,
Queens; they employed a chauffeur.
It all came apart. Miller’s father had invested heavily in the stock
market and during the Depression lost nearly everything. The family
was exiled to Brooklyn, into what Miller later referred to as Willy
Loman territory. The teenage Miller delivered bread each morning at 4
a.m., before school, to help the family get by.
More interested in sports than in studying, Miller got into the
University of Michigan, where he began writing plays and sharpened his
interest in radical politics — an interest that would lead to his
testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.
(Miller had attended Communist Party meetings but said he had not been
a member; he was convicted of contempt of Congress, a charge later
dismissed, for not naming others who had attended.)
He graduated from Michigan in 1938 and moved back to New York, where
he wrote radio plays until he could get his more ambitious work
staged. In 1940 he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery. His
first play to be performed on Broadway, “The Man Who Had All the
Luck,” was clubbed by critics and closed after four performances in
1944. Three years later “All My Sons” hit Broadway — it defeated
Eugene O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh” to win the New York Drama Critics’
Circle Award — and Miller was off and running.
Mr. Bigsby’s book is crammed with piquant details. Miller briefly
lived in the same Brooklyn brownstone as the young Norman Mailer.
(Mailer would later say: “I know he was thinking what I was, which
was, ‘That other guy is never going to amount to anything.’ ”) Miller
drafted parts of “Death of a Salesman” and “The Crucible” in verse. He
wrote the first half of “Death of a Salesman” in a single grueling day
and night. He nearly gave “The Crucible” the title “Spirits.” He
viewed Dustin Hoffman, the star of a 1984 revival, as a “slightly
dictatorial” Willy Loman.
Mr. Bigsby, the sympathetic biographer, does give a strong taste of
Miller’s critics. More than a few saw his work as programmatic. Mary
McCarthy, for one, wrote that “Death of a Salesman” was “enfeebled” by
Miller’s “insistence on universality.” (Mr. Bigsby has his fun with
McCarthy, writing about her dislike of Eugene O’Neill: “She was
fascinated enough with him to circle around his work like a bat
sending out high-pitched shrieks in the hope that some kind of echo
would come back.”)
Suddenly, there is the U.S.S. Monroe on the horizon, and it’s all
narrative hands on deck. She capsizes this book the way she capsized,
for a while, Miller’s life. We are, like him, happily pulled under.
It’s good theater.
Monroe was rebounding from her unhappy nine-month marriage to
DiMaggio. Miller was preparing to testify before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and his own marriage had long been troubled. As
the demonically quotable Kazan had earlier put it: “He was starved for
sexual relief.”
The public didn’t exactly applaud this match. Gossip columnists
fixated on, as Mr. Bigsby puts it, “a red in bed with America’s snow
queen.” Mailer famously snarked that “the Great American Brain” had
met “the Great American Body.”
Miller would give up his career to help guide hers, and he spent years
working on “The Misfits,” directed by John Huston, for which he wrote
the screenplay and she would star. On the set she’d be hospitalized
and, around this time, have an affair with Yves Montand. The couple
got a Mexican divorce in 1961; Miller would marry the Magnum
photographer Inge Morath, whom he met during the filming.
With Monroe out of the picture — she died in 1962 — Mr. Bigsby pretty
much folds up this big, busy tent. Miller went on to write important
plays, notably “After the Fall” (1964), but his best work was in the
distant rearview mirror." <<
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/books/03garn.html?bl&ex=1244174400&en=b5c37ec88313a338&ei=5087%0A
married MM to go over on Elia Kazan, his great enemy-friend. Kazan was
hardly "gone over on": Miller's life would become a trainwreck with
the voluble and delicate Monroe, and the marriage and its aftereffects
soiled and tainted him for the rest of his life. Kazan, for all his
foibles, was more of an adult, more of a man really, than Miller ever
could be and Miller knew it. Bret.))
Some Like It Hot, Some Like It Literary: A Playwright’s Life, With
Marilyn
By DWIGHT GARNER
>> "Arthur Miller was 35 and at the top of his career when, in 1951, he first set eyes on Marilyn Monroe. He was the author of “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman,” the first play to win all three major drama prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award). He would soon begin work on “The Crucible.” She was 24 and, with minor film roles behind her, virtually unknown.
ARTHUR MILLER
1915-1962
By Christopher Bigsby
Illustrated. 739 pages. Harvard University Press. $35.
Related
Times Topics: Arthur Miller
Documents First Chapter: ‘Arthur Miller’
Christopher Bigsby
The occasion was a Hollywood party in Miller’s honor. A married father
of two, he was dazzled by the erotic scenery. Women were clearly on
offer to him. He had, he would write, “never before seen sex treated
so casually as a reward of success.”
When Monroe arrived, she was “almost ludicrously provocative,” he
wrote, squeezed into a dress that was “blatantly tight, declaring
rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that
it was the best one in the room.” The director Elia Kazan caught “the
lovely light of lechery” in Miller’s eyes.
Miller and Monroe would not meet properly until a short time later, on
the lot at 20th Century Fox. Each was jolted awake by the other. For
Monroe, meeting him “was like running into a tree!” she recalled. “You
know, like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever.” But Miller — tall,
Lincolnesque, a beacon of now troubled moral probity — returned to his
life and family in New York. Monroe would soon marry Joe DiMaggio. She
wouldn’t see Miller again for several years, and they would not marry
until 1956.
The long, strange, elegiac ballad of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
— one that would end for her in miscarriages, bottles of pills and
increasingly erratic behavior, and for him in a long gap in his
theater career — takes up only a few chapters of “Arthur Miller:
1915-1962,” Christopher Bigsby’s sober and meteor-size new biography.
But they are crucial chapters. The book moves inexorably toward
Monroe’s appearance; her magnetism sucks everything rapidly toward it.
Miller’s long life (1915-2005) can be cleaved neatly into B.M. and
A.M. — before Marilyn and after.
Miller’s story has already been told in his own very readable
autobiography, “Timebends,” and most recently in Martin Gottfried’s
punchy and quarrelsome 2003 biography. Mr. Bigsby, a British academic
— the back flap refers to him as “professor of American Studies and
the director of the Arthur Miller Center at the University of East
Anglia” — arrives with new material, notably boxes of papers,
including unfinished manuscripts, made available to him before
Miller’s death. He is a more sympathetic witness to Miller’s life than
Mr. Gottfried, if more prone to pedantic literary and cultural
analysis. But the basic outlines of Miller’s story are unchanged and
as fascinating as ever.
The second of three children, Arthur Miller was born into wealth. His
father, a Jewish émigré from Poland, was illiterate but a powerful
businessman whose women’s clothing company employed some 400 people
and sent salesmen across the country. The Miller family lived on East
110th Street in Manhattan; they owned a summer house in Far Rockaway,
Queens; they employed a chauffeur.
It all came apart. Miller’s father had invested heavily in the stock
market and during the Depression lost nearly everything. The family
was exiled to Brooklyn, into what Miller later referred to as Willy
Loman territory. The teenage Miller delivered bread each morning at 4
a.m., before school, to help the family get by.
More interested in sports than in studying, Miller got into the
University of Michigan, where he began writing plays and sharpened his
interest in radical politics — an interest that would lead to his
testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.
(Miller had attended Communist Party meetings but said he had not been
a member; he was convicted of contempt of Congress, a charge later
dismissed, for not naming others who had attended.)
He graduated from Michigan in 1938 and moved back to New York, where
he wrote radio plays until he could get his more ambitious work
staged. In 1940 he married his college sweetheart, Mary Slattery. His
first play to be performed on Broadway, “The Man Who Had All the
Luck,” was clubbed by critics and closed after four performances in
1944. Three years later “All My Sons” hit Broadway — it defeated
Eugene O’Neill’s “Iceman Cometh” to win the New York Drama Critics’
Circle Award — and Miller was off and running.
Mr. Bigsby’s book is crammed with piquant details. Miller briefly
lived in the same Brooklyn brownstone as the young Norman Mailer.
(Mailer would later say: “I know he was thinking what I was, which
was, ‘That other guy is never going to amount to anything.’ ”) Miller
drafted parts of “Death of a Salesman” and “The Crucible” in verse. He
wrote the first half of “Death of a Salesman” in a single grueling day
and night. He nearly gave “The Crucible” the title “Spirits.” He
viewed Dustin Hoffman, the star of a 1984 revival, as a “slightly
dictatorial” Willy Loman.
Mr. Bigsby, the sympathetic biographer, does give a strong taste of
Miller’s critics. More than a few saw his work as programmatic. Mary
McCarthy, for one, wrote that “Death of a Salesman” was “enfeebled” by
Miller’s “insistence on universality.” (Mr. Bigsby has his fun with
McCarthy, writing about her dislike of Eugene O’Neill: “She was
fascinated enough with him to circle around his work like a bat
sending out high-pitched shrieks in the hope that some kind of echo
would come back.”)
Suddenly, there is the U.S.S. Monroe on the horizon, and it’s all
narrative hands on deck. She capsizes this book the way she capsized,
for a while, Miller’s life. We are, like him, happily pulled under.
It’s good theater.
Monroe was rebounding from her unhappy nine-month marriage to
DiMaggio. Miller was preparing to testify before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, and his own marriage had long been troubled. As
the demonically quotable Kazan had earlier put it: “He was starved for
sexual relief.”
The public didn’t exactly applaud this match. Gossip columnists
fixated on, as Mr. Bigsby puts it, “a red in bed with America’s snow
queen.” Mailer famously snarked that “the Great American Brain” had
met “the Great American Body.”
Miller would give up his career to help guide hers, and he spent years
working on “The Misfits,” directed by John Huston, for which he wrote
the screenplay and she would star. On the set she’d be hospitalized
and, around this time, have an affair with Yves Montand. The couple
got a Mexican divorce in 1961; Miller would marry the Magnum
photographer Inge Morath, whom he met during the filming.
With Monroe out of the picture — she died in 1962 — Mr. Bigsby pretty
much folds up this big, busy tent. Miller went on to write important
plays, notably “After the Fall” (1964), but his best work was in the
distant rearview mirror." <<
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/books/03garn.html?bl&ex=1244174400&en=b5c37ec88313a338&ei=5087%0A