Marilyn Monroe: The Death of Arthur Miller

Whenever I contemplate who America’s dramatic masters are, my answer is always Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee. The reason for this is both fought their way out of critical deep-freezes or personal issues and wrote some of their best work later in life. In addition, a dramatic master, in my opinion, must be fully skilled in the traditions of playwriting (and must show that), but also experiment and push the form further. Some may wonder why I don’t include Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams on that list. I’ve addressed Williams on the blog before. Now to Miller.

Both were born at a time when their first great works saw the last age when a play could have a real cultural impact. Both Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire have been in print ever since, are widely produced and translated, and are among the most purchased scripts to be read both in schools and by the general public. But their careers also share striking similarities. For example, they both had a virtually unblemished record of work between the mid-1940s until early 1960s. Williams’ best work begins with The Glass Menagerie and ends with Night of the Iguana. Miller’s best work begins with All My Sons and ends with After the Fall. They both continued to write voluminously, but personal issues and the critical press which, by that time, had moved onto celebrating the works of Sam Shepard and David Mamet, prevented them from ever giving us what they could have. For Williams, it was drinking and drugging. For Miller, it was politics and, of course, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

Miller, as all of America, was fascinated by her. Whether it was love or pure physical attraction, I can’t say. He once remarked to her, as is echoed in a line from their only collaboration, the film The Misfits, that she was the saddest girl he ever knew. He meant this as a cheeky compliment, but I think he became both entranced by her beauty and frustrated by the fact that she needed to be sent back to the factory and fixed. He wanted to fix her and couldn’t.

Both disregarded and abused in her early life, Monroe rose to stardom with limited acting ability, but personal charm and, of course, great beauty. The dumb blonde routine was an act. Deep inside, she was tortured and Miller’s life with her became tortured as well. Being a man of great moral character, he thought he could save her from what was a certainty: that she would kill herself. They divorced before her death, but he never let his pain go as is exemplified by his last great play, After the Fall, and his final play, Finishing the Picture. Both are thinly veiled accounts of his time with her.

After the Fall was part of a failed attempt at creating a repertory company in New York City. This financial blunder and his portrayal of Marilyn in the character of Maggie set it up for failure. While it did have a respectable run and no shortage of talent in the cast (Jason Robards, Faye Dunaway in a minor role), friends of Marilyn were horrified that at her portrayal on such display.

All of Miller’s work is a kind of autobiography. I think this is true of most playwrights’ work even when they disagree, but Miller’s, if you know his life, is obvious even in his greater works where the personal connections were less on-the-nose. Both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman drew inspiration from Miller’s relationships with his father and uncle, the former of which lost everything in the Great Depression and the latter of which, for all intents and purposes, was Willy Loman in real life. Miller’s obsession with trying to understand his family continued in works like The Price, his last commercial success on Broadway.

But, even The Crucible, a parable about the McCarthy hearings which would eventually find Miller in contempt of court, has many veiled references to his own adultery (in the guise of John and Elizabeth Proctor & Abigail Williams), although at that point, the romance was all in his mind. His first marriage fell apart because he fell in love with Monroe, who was being fed nonsense by Strasberg acting-teachers in New York, trying to improve her craft (and being fed barbiturates by doctors). A View from the Bridge is also a story about his sexual obsession with Marilyn.

The likelihood of such a union as Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe seems absurd on the face of it. Miller, in the mid ‘50s, was not only a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright, but a kind of public intellectual. He believed (foolishly) that plays had some sort of social responsibility. His progressive sentiments are scattered throughout his plays, including 1980’s The American Clock, a solid effort that received a poor production in New York. His belief in the ultimate evil of capitalism, of course, never left his work and led to a successful second career as an advocate for oppressed writers in fascist countries. Monroe, on the other hand, was known as a sex symbol, but few people knew she was a deeply haunted soul who fame swallowed up, just as it did other luminaries such as Elvis Presley. Looking at pictures of them together, one can see she was obviously attracted to intelligence and not just to a pretty face (Sorry, Art).

But with the demise of their marriage and Monroe’s untimely death, Miller also lost his craft. The 1970s were a particularly cruel time to him critically speaking. His The Creation of the World and Other Business and the resulting musical adaptation Up from Paradise were almost completely ignored. With each passing play, the critics sneered at him and, quite frankly, they were mostly right. There are flourishes of his early talent in The Last Yankee (and, some would say, Broken Glass), but none of the early weight was there—the depth of characterization, the real exploration of a particular moment of stagecraft. He was, as the title of his last great play suggests, working After the Fall.

Re-reading that play this last weekend, I was amazed at how he made absolutely no effort to allegorize Monroe and his relationship to her. The play is about a lawyer, Quentin, who is seeking understanding about his life, putting himself on trial for his crimes, real or imaginary. The first act deals a lot with his family, but the second act is almost squarely focused on his relationship with a budding singer, Maggie. Perhaps if the director Elia Kazan (he and Miller had resumed their friendship even after Kazan named names to HUAC and Miller would/could not) had not put Tony-winner Barbara Loden in a platinum blonde wig, things would have turned out differently. But, even then, the text might as well be docudrama. I still call it his last great work because it is, at the very least, a fully rendered idea, though tough for most audiences to follow (and a challenge for any actor playing Quentin, whose monologues are short story length). But you could already see the change. The man who had created the perfect allegory and parable in The Crucible stood naked and alone onstage in After the Fall and he suffered for it for the rest of his life.

With Monroe’s death came Miller’s artistic death. Again, he continued to write. Some of his later plays have garnered some attention, particularly The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Mr. Peter’s Connections, but the ill-fated, under written Resurrection Blues is a veritable mess and Finishing the Picture, though produced shortly before his death, was only published a few years ago. The saddest thing about these later plays, and the same is true with Tennessee Williams, is they only have flashes of the early brilliance. While I find some faults in Death of a Salesman, it has spoken to virtually every country which has produced it and, as I’ve mentioned multiple times on the blog, The Crucible deserves to be called one of the greatest plays, if not the greatest, by an American playwright. It was a terrific fall from grace.

As to the autobiographical nature of his work, Miller was an interesting figure. He watched his family losing everything in the Depression and temporarily sought solace in early socialist ideals, but he was not as interesting as some might believe. He was a quiet man who, when not writing, did carpentry and puttered around his Connecticut farm. His life simply did not have the flavor of most of his contemporaries to sustain a tome of autobiographical plays. As you go down the list, the plays get increasingly less interesting. And the fact that Marilyn was still haunting him in the mid-aughts proves she was something he could never get over.

Of course he couldn’t save her. When you’re that depressed, and taking pills to excess, there’s not much to do for a person. He later had a very successful marriage to photographer Inge Morath (and even declared love for another lady after her death), but if we look at the plays alone, Marilyn overshadows everything he did afterwards.

It is not uncommon for American theatre critics to revel in lifting someone up and then spend the rest of their careers tearing them down (this was the case with Shepard, Mamet, Lanford Wilson, even August Wilson). But it is rare that such vitriol is deserved. In Miller’s case, it may not be deserved, but it was certainly inevitable. A person may only have two great plays in them. For the “famous playwrights,” they are usually acknowledged in their obituaries as the writer of one or two great plays. No matter whether he continued writing, his obit would have read, “Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman.” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I would have been proud to written it. But I would’ve been much prouder of him if he had worked through the pain, as O’Neill and Albee did, and came out with greater works than he left us.

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH: 20th Century Masterpiece

In the mid-1970s, when the country was in a deep malaise over Watergate, Vietnam, the failure of most of the late-60s protests, artists for theatre and film were producing some of the most outstanding works of art of the century. Somehow, in the midst of political upheaval, artists are a little more electrified. Hence, we have fewer great plays and films from the ‘80s than we do the ‘70s. In that latter decade, if you could find gas to get to a theater, there was a new film almost each week by Scorcese, Bogdanovich, George Roy Hill, etc. In the theatre, there were the musicals by Sondheim and Prince and plays by fresh, engaging playwrights in a time when a play still had a following. Today, a play makes almost no large cultural impact.

The world of opera, however, was stagnant and staid with largely middle-aged and elderly crowds attending the standard repertory of Puccini, Verdi, and Wagner. Films were drawing a new generation; opera, however, was strictly for the uptown and wealthy. That is, until an experimental stage director from Waco, Texas, Robert Wilson, and an experimental composer, Philip Glass, collaborated on the monumental music-theatre work Einstein on the Beach.

Though a stage director, Wilson had come out of the world of painting and dance. Language was not his strongest suit as he was a stutterer from a very young age. So, many of his early “operas” (he was already using the term since it simply translates as “a work”) were largely silent, sometimes using abstract language often provided by an autistic poet named Christopher Knowles and using canned music for scant scenes. His operas moved at a glacial pace and lasted hours. One of his early works, KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE, lasted for a full seven-day period. He was mostly well-known in Europe, where his magnificent Deafman Glance, a silent opera, caused a sensation and he was crowned the new torch-bearer of the surrealists.

Glass virtually had no early audience except for friends in SoHo and young people, who were more receptive to his work due to their interest in hallucinogenic drugs, rock and roll, and Eastern-oriented music. Glass used amplified instruments for his self-named ensemble and had studied both traditional Western music at Julliard and with Nadia Boulanger, but also Eastern music with Ravi Shankar. The result was an extended period of additive, minimalist music which was shunned by critics as one work could be performed based on two simple notes or an additive piece of repeating notes. Glass cut his teeth theatrically with Mabou Mines, an Off-Off Broadway troupe who largely created pieces based on the works of Samuel Beckett. Glass and Wilson would inevitably work together because of the small pool of experimental theatre artists in New York.

As Wilson typically named his theatrical pieces after historical figures (even if they only had to do with the work incidentally), their piece became centered upon Albert Einstein, the central figure of science during the 2nd World War. Their work would not be autobiographical, but a series of stage pictures, dance, and music that were tangentially connected to Einstein: his clothing, the swift change of technology in the 20th century, the atomic bomb age, etc.

Einstein on the Beach is possibly the first opera where the libretto consisted almost exclusively of Wilson’s sketchbook where he planned what his stage pictures would look like. Glass wrote the score to these drawings rather than to a traditional libretto. Eventually, text would be included in the opera, though all spoken. Knowles contributed pieces in addition to two of the actors, choreographer/dancer Lucinda Childs and Samuel M. Johnson, who contributed two of the best moments of the opera—a monologue in one of the Trial scenes and the exquisite, tear-inducing finale. The only sung lyrics were numbers and solfege syllables.

The work would eventually be four- and three-quarter hours long with no intermission. The piece would already be in progress when the audience entered the opera house and people were free to come and go as they pleased. After all, a single stage action in a Wilson piece could take a half an hour to perform.

I once saw Wilson speak in New York. He is as interested in the movement of a single finger as he is the entire stage picture. Actors may be asked to take fifteen minutes to walk from one side of the stage to the other both in auditions and the final product. It takes complete control of the body and tremendous stamina. That should give you a sense of the suspended time in which his works exist. 

I suppose I first encountered Einstein when studying the work of my mentor, Tony Award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang. Hwang and Glass had met after Glass had seen the former’s Sound and Beauty in New York (which he eventually adapted into the chamber opera The Sound of a Voice). Glass felt Hwang’s spare writing would lend itself well to the operatic stage and he has enlisted him in writing several libretti for him, including the innovative 1000 Airplanes on the Roof and, a rare commission from the Met, The Voyage in 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World.

From there, I found a book in the library, Music by Philip Glass (by Philip Glass) which is my favorite book about the theatre. It is the telling of the creation of his trilogy of portrait operas, which includes Einstein as well as a work on M. K. Ghandi, Satyagraha, and the world’s first monotheist, Akhnaten. The Trilogy concerns itself with men who changed the world in the realms of science, politics, and religion. That led me to borrow from the library the initial recording of Einstein—the music was originally difficult for the untrained ear, but now has become so much a part of our musical culture that nearly every documentary score sounds like a plagiarism of Glass’ repertoire: the repetition, the tone, the timbre, the ambience. His musical vocabulary is now ingrained in the American arts. And he has become the most prolific composers of opera in the world.

While I could marvel over pictures from productions of Einstein and listen to the music (I once held the actual score in my hand and wept), the opera was rarely performed due to its immense performance costs, length, and general difficulty. Finally, in 2014, the opera’s second revival was forever preserved on DVD. That production, filmed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. What a gift! Scenes I had only read about in narrative reports came alive through stunning videography.

When I think about a work of art that stands out as the singular achievement of a decade or a century, I mostly can only do this with theatrical works. It is all subjective, of course, but such works typically emulate that century—both its horrors and its glories. The 20th century saw the greatest failure of human civilization (the Shoah), but also saw spectacular industrial and technological growth. I call Einstein the greatest 20th century work of art not only because it accomplishes that feat (in showing, in its final scene, the horrors of the atomic age, but also the hope in our continuing to dream up new ideas), but it also encompasses all the arts: visual, dance, music, writing, and drama.

But, perhaps its best asset, is that it is also open to as many different interpretations as there are people in the audience. The work was created with the intent that the audience completes the meaning. That was a dictum of Wilson and Glass’ early work and one that I wish more artists would take on. It elevates the opera and theatre itself: the audience as collaborator.

Immerse yourself in Einstein on the Beach and more of Glass’ operas. Reach out and try harder works, works that make you work more for it.

Jefferson & Hemings

I was perhaps in my junior year of high school when the news broke that, after many years of speculation and debate, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States, did father children with one his slaves, Sally Hemings. Jefferson had always been my favorite Founding Father. John F. Kennedy once remarked at a dinner honoring a group of Nobel Prize winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent—of human knowledge—that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” I always thought of Jefferson as a true genius—literarily, architecturally—but perhaps not politically in the sense that his presidency was so-so, and it seemed to me he was dragged kicking and screaming into most of the events that led to the founding of this nation. He was, in essence, a quiet man who wanted to be left alone.

Early in life, he lost his wife Martha and he never recovered. Reading Jefferson’s letters (and they are voluminous), you have a sense of how he changed. One of the most interesting of his correspondences is referred to as “My Head and My Heart,” written in dialogue form to the Anglo-Italian artist, Lady Maria Cosway. It is certain he loved her—he even broke his wrist permanently during one of their outings, attempting to impress her by trying to jump a fence. But that relationship was never to be as Cosway was married and, in at least that regard, Jefferson was staunchly opposed to dalliances with a married woman.

But, for nearly forty years, he fathered many children with Sally Hemings, his wife’s half-sister (Sally’s mother Betty belonged once to his in-law John Wayles). The cognitive dissonance of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence which intoned that all men were created equal owning slaves and bedding one (and, coincidentally never freeing Sally, although he freed their children) is one many students of history can’t reconcile. The fact that most geniuses are flawed in deeper ways than us yokels understands reveals itself more and more as time goes on. Yet people, in this activist age, have become rather tired of trying to reconcile these facts. Things are, to coin an unfortunate phrase, only black and white. No grey area allowed.

The obvious question becomes was love involved or was it what it was in many plantations of the South (sexual contact without consent). We will, of course, never know as an entire year of Jefferson’s letters was destroyed and, for years, historians denied the reports of James T. Callender, a muckraker who sold the story of Hemings to the papers in an effort to prevent Jefferson’s reelection because Tom would not give him a governmental post. Callender made the news of Sally a national scandal and, only by orchestrating the Louisiana Purchase, did Jefferson leave Washington unscathed.

The only historian for many years to even tell the tale was Dr. Fawn M. Brodie, a psychobiographer whose early work (No Man Knows My History, etc.) was inspiring, but later work (Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character) was perhaps blinded by hate and ill health. Her volume on Jefferson though, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, was finally vindicated by DNA results proving lineage through the descendants of Eston Hemings in addition to the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, who’s massive The Hemingses of Monticello is a must read for anyone interested in the story. And indeed, I was.

I remember visiting Bennington College before I was accepted and being asked by the playwriting professor if I had any projects I was working on. I said I wanted to write something about Jefferson and Hemings (my idea being vacillating monologues back and forth from one character to the other). He said, “Yeah, you have that idea and about a hundred other people.” Deflated, I abandoned my sketches.

Yet, certain dramatists and writers have tried to tell Hemmings’ story even though there is not much to tell. It is all left to conjecture. There are those who think it was rape and Stockholm Syndrome and those who believed it was love and those who believed it was somewhere in between. There is so much room for dramatic license that you could write anything, but the potency of the idea propagates more and more as our country sees itself further divided on racial lines and, especially interracial relationships, than ever before. One only needs to look at how such connections are mistreated in the media, whether by Spike Lee in Jungle Fever (though that mess of a film has its moments) or something more measured, like Jeff Nichols’ Loving (2016).

The first writer to try to tell the story from Sally’s point of view was novelist/poet/sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose 1979 novel Sally Hemings was a bestseller, so much so that CBS was interested into adapting it as a telefilm until staunch Hemings-deniers shut the project down. A historically minded playwright, Granville Burgess, who achieved some regional success, offered the story as a play onstage for the first time (and Dusky Sally was even published for licensing—I own one of the few copies in circulation), but a landmark court case deemed the play to be a plagiarism of Chase-Riboud’s novel and it was withdrawn.

The next time Sally was onscreen was for the 1993 Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris. The work of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was praised for many years for elegant, prestige pictures like A Room with a View, Howards End, and The Remains of the Day. Though never money-making crowd-pleasers, they were well-respected and critically beloved. Their efforts on Jefferson in Paris (1995) were almost uniformly ignored—mainly because the film itself never makes up its mind as to what it wants to be. Cosway is there in the first half, played by Greta Scacchi, and Hemings is there in the second, played by Thandiwe Newton. An inspired (no, really!) casting choice was Nick Nolte as the lonely widower. But it was clearly Merchant-Ivory at their least strong—the film equivalent of lukewarm tap water.

It would take many years, but the heroic efforts of dramatist Tina Andrews to bring Sally’s story to the screen finally were realized in the early 2000s. Andrews had been the actress who played Valerie Grant on Days of Our Lives when it became the first soap opera to show an interracial kiss on national television. Shortly after angry, racist fan reactions, she was fired and scrimped by for many years until some took note of her plays and she had some success with her screenplay for Why Do Fools Fall in Love?, a biopic of Frankie Lymon.

Andrews necessarily believed the story of Sally should be told from an African American woman’s point of view and her view was that it was a love story—a deeply ironic and painful one, but definitely love. After all, 38 years? Due to life expectancy, that’s longer than most marriages lasted in that period. Andrews first wrote a theatrical version, The Mistress of Monticello, which was produced in the mid-80s in Chicago. This caught the attention of talent agents who shepherded her through early drafts of a screenplay version, which was never made. Many people, like her mentor Alex Haley (author of Roots), encouraged her to proceed. Her research, detailed in a book about the making of Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, was exhaustive—she visited Monticello many times and interviewed the black descendants of Jefferson.

It wasn’t until the DNA proved the relationship conconclusively that her screenplay became a four-hour miniseries starring Sam Neill and Carmen Ejogo, which premiered on CBS in 2000. I can remember my attempt to catch it on television because, by that point, I was obsessed. But bad weather in Birmingham, Alabama prevented it from being seen as the first night was wall-to-wall tornado coverage. Alas, it would be a few years until I found a VHS copy of it at a Blockbuster and finally saw it.

When comparing it with her final revised draft (printed in her book subtitled The Struggle to Tell the Controversial True Story), it is most certainly a compromised effort. The director, Charles Haid, apparently rewrote some of the scenes and, in the editing, rearranged many of the scenes for more ease of flow, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. Some elements, just being a TV miniseries from over twenty years ago, are “cringeworthy” as the kids say. Mario Van Peebles’ suicide scene (and, in fact, his entire trajectory as the freed brother of Sally) was mishandled to say the least. But Neill has great screen presence as Jefferson and Ejogo was probably seen for the first time to many American audiences (the British actress has gone on to a laudable career).

Still, when the series was screened for a crowd of 800 descendants of the Monticello scandal (black and white), tears were flowing. Many of them lived their entire lifetimes being derided for knowing the truth and they felt like they saw a respectable portrayal of their family’s story for the first time. Andrews’ memoir of the production is more engaging than her teleplay in many respects (though terribly copy-edited by the folks at The Malibu Press). The story behind the story was a little stronger, but the miniseries did lead Andrews to win the 2001 Writers Guild of America Award for Original Long Form dramatic writing (as well as an NAACP Image Award)—quite a feat for the actress who shouldn’t have been fired from a TV show over twenty years before.

There have also been at least three operas of the story, two musicals, and a more recent play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks, Sally and Tom, which is a play-within-a-play about the writing of a play of the story (Say that three times fast). But none come close to at least asking the hard questions than Andrews’ miniseries. While she flatly denied the relationship was not coercive, she depicts many such instances in the film and makes room for a complicated story of a complicated family, told in a no-holds-barred kind of way. Bravo for that.

As for Mr. Jefferson, my feelings on him have not changed. I accept him as a complicated man I’ll never understand. I feel for Sally and her descendants and for the scourge of slavery upon our nation. And yet, I’d like to think if Jefferson had put his money where his mouth was, he might not have had to live a secret life. But we all know, given how such stories play out even today, that would have never been possible.