Miller was never easy with Hollywood the place or its procedures. Partly this was his easterner’s shock at its bizarre confusion of cultural codes. Partly it was the New York dramatist’s sense of competitiveness, the attitude that prompted theatrical people to say that Odets had “sold out” when he went west to write dialogue for the movies. And the experience of making The Misfits (finally released in 1961) with his marriage to Monroe already foundering, was far from happy. Here he discovered that it was not just politicians and pressure groups who could interfere with the author’s text, but actors and producers as well. But he also learned that film-makers had a craft of their own, very different from his. “I asked Gable if he had shown sufficient expression in the final shot,” Miller remembered “He was surprised ‘You have to watch the eyes.
Movie acting is all up here’ he drew a rectangle around his eyes with his finger. ‘You can’t overdo it because it’s being magnified hundreds of times on the theatre screen.’ “In America, movies reach people in their millions, while stage plays can count on audiences of thousands at most, and those mainly around metropolitan New York. That is why the unions and the FBI began to interfere with Miller’s work only when he began to write for Hollywood. That’s also why the HUAC took such an interest in him only after his literary fame had been established and he had begun to court Monroe The committee thrived on publicity.
According to Miller, the chairman of the HUAC was prepared to cancel the hearing provided he could be photographed shaking hands with Monroe.Miller’s attempts to represent his relationship with Monroe prompted some of his best and worst writing. Timebends is exciting about the power of their early love, honest and harrowing about their break-up, but it keeps coming adrift in phrases like, “I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing.” The same is true of After the Fall, where Maggie’s mercurial temperament comes alive only to be smothered by Quentin’s commentary, which begins in encounter-group, confessional mode and ends in portentous sermon-like rhetoric.Not long before After the Fall opened at (and opened) Lincoln Center in New York in January 1964, Marilyn Monroe died, probably by suicide, on the other side of the United States. The critics took the play seriously, but complained of bad taste, as though Miller had planned it as her epitaph and his own exoneration. From then until the late 1990s his reception in New York could be described, at best, as “mixed”. One reviewer thought Incident at Vichy (1964) lacked “dramatic flair” Time called The Price a “museum piece”.
The New York Daily News said The Creation of the World was “devoid of wonder, mystery or even the satisfying caress of fancy”.Instead of languishing, Miller reinvented himself, in his life as in his writing. He was married again, very happily, to the Austrian-born photographer Inge Morath, and after her death in 2002 began a new relationship the painter Agnes Barley, 55 years his junior “I like the company of women,” he said “Life is very boring without them Women are livelier than men and more interested in people. Men get abstract with their ideas.” He was made President of PEN International. He travelled to Eastern Europe for PEN, to China for the production of Death of a Salesman, to Russia, where he met Mikhail Gorbachev. The Archbishop’s Ceiling, based on meetings with Vaclav Havel, Pavel Kohout and others in Prague, was a serious inquiry into the ethics of using other peoples’ political predicaments as a basis for one’s own imaginative constructs, and also (since the dissident writers on stage talk in a large room that may be bugged), a subtle study of how public speech gestures can infiltrate the most private conversations. The American Clock was a brilliant, free-form mosaic of the Depression.
