Speaker Pop culture, is this a guy who is known by the average American in 1951?
Speaker Arthur Miller was really flying high. He came out of University Michigan in 1938 and labored away and failed to get plays on that. His first success was a novel, 1945, called Focus. Then came All My Sons in 1947, tremendously successful. Followed it two years later with Death of a Salesman, won a Pulitzer Prize. The world was really at his feet in one sense. And I say that because at the same time, there was a reaction from the right to what he was saying and doing. All my sons was banned by the U.S. Army in Europe when there was a film version going to be made. There there’s a secret FBI report which suggests that this is an anti family film. It’s a film against capitalism. It’s in favor of a collectivist society. None of this mattered terribly much. In 1950, 51 to him, because the plays were doing good business at the box office, very good business at the box office.
Speaker So give me a sense, though. Death of a Salesman is an ordinary kind of success. No one would hit Broadway show.
Speaker Did it have an ordinary effect on mind or already been transformed in some ways with all my sons? But, you know, it’s it’s easy to have the one off hit play and then never have another one. The minor miracle was that he followed it so quickly with Death of a Salesman and that that, in a way, was a play written in his own voice. All my son’s was his attempt to write a kind of Ibsen esque play. But Death of a Salesman had a unique form. It used time differently. You were in and out of the sensibility of the central character, had a kind of lyricism to it. This was kind of play that he’d always wanted to write. And the impact on him was, I think, to begin that transformation of life, which was going to have positive and negative effects. I’m not sure that it had terribly good effect in terms of his relationship with his own wife. The more successful he became, the more in a sense she was relegated to a support role and it wasn’t a role that she was too happy with. But it also, of course, made it possible in his own mind to go on to new ventures.
Speaker Great. So there’s a success drive him from his friendship from Kazam. I mean, does his success.
Speaker Do they only then share the theater because he’s Arthur Miller, the big playwright, and.
Speaker Milera was a Mara of Kazam before he directed Death of a Salesman. Cosan, of course, directed A Streetcar Named Desire, which Miller went to see with Kazan, and he was a great admirer of the language of that play, seemed to have released the American theater in some way. Interestingly, Tennessee Williams felt the same way. Thing about all my sons, which he gone to say so there’s a kind of mutual support between the two of them. So he was delighted when the death of a salesman fell into the hands of Kazan and when he began working with him, it was as though they were brothers. Know the same thoughts were in both of their minds. He was so, as Miller was concerned, the best possible director for that play.
Speaker But I mean, it was the relationship strictly, you know, going to the theater and only then of a working friendship.
Speaker I mean, what if what did they share?
Speaker Oh, that’s what I’m trying to get at the sort of. Why would they like Rose?
Speaker I think that Miller and Kazan shared more than a fascination with the theater. They both had a radical background. They both thought that the theater could be a transforming force. And eventually, around 1950, turn of the year, 1950, 51. Miller wrote a screenplay called The Hook, and he and Kazan both thought it was possible to do the same thing out there in Hollywood. Now, Miller had always been suspicious of Hollywood. Just after he came out of Michigan, he had an offer to go straight to Hollywood for, I think, 250 dollars a week. This is somebody who’s just graduated. But he was so suspicious of Hollywood and so much an enthusiast for the theater. Having lived through the 1930s where the theater was a kind of transforming force, that he reacted against it. He didn’t have a bad experience during the war. When he wrote screenplay for a film, it was called The Story of G.I. Joe in 50 50. In 1950, 51. He thought that it was possible to take a socially conscious screenplay about the corruption of the unions on the waterfront to Hollywood, get it made, and that it would have an impact on Hollywood, which would be similar to the impact the death of a salesman or all my sons had had on Broadway.
Speaker So because they were going to change the world, they were going to change the world.
Speaker And Kazan already had an inn on Hollywood because he had directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the movie version, not yet quite finished. He still had to go to Hollywood to finish some details. So they carried the screenplay with them with some confidence that they were actually going to get it made for we go to Hollywood.
Speaker I guess what I want to ask you is shift gears and talk about his childhood before we recognize all of this. So was Miller thinking, you guys, that his family destined for greatness? Was he just an American?
Speaker I think when he was growing up, they everyone in the family assumed that Miller was going to be an auto mechanic. He loved fixing things. Or Carpenter, his brother, they thought might be a writer and showed some sort of talent for poetry of a kind of romantic kind. But Miller was determined that he certainly was not going to stick around with the family and the family business. Of course, it collapsed in 1928, leading into nineteen twenty nine. They lost everything. His was a rich family. It was one of the largest women’s garment manufacturers in America. They lived in a ritzy apartment that all got lost in nineteen twenty eight just before the Depression. His father had realized that you could make a great deal more money by investing in the stock market than you could by putting all your energy into manufacturing. He wasn’t alone in that. Almost everybody in the 1920s, cab drivers, whatever, had stock. Why would you not? It was going up and up. The sky’s the limit. There was a sense of unreality. Scott Fitzgerald said the snow of 1929 wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be paid, some money went away. Money was what mattered. And he put everything into the stock market and lost the lot. And they then had to start selling off, literally selling off the family jewels. Kermit Arthur Miller’s brother will be put on a bicycle to go to the pawnshop. And they moved from their expensive apartment on Central Park out to Brooklyn and ending up a small house there where they could barely pay a mortgage. So for a family that come from a small town in Poland, originally it made it big in America. Suddenly, the American dream had come to an abrupt halt. Everything had gone and nobody in America seemed to have an explanation as to why it was that capitalism simply run out. Let it come to an end.
Speaker How does that impact Miller, that he’s an adolescent?
Speaker Miller thought that he was immune because all adolescents believe that they’re immune, they’ll live forever and that nothing matters terribly much. He actually had withdrawn such money as he had in the bank the day before it crashed and he bought a bicycle, a Porsche. It was then stolen and he joined the rest of humanity. One thing you did realize pretty quickly is that the easy pathway from school to what he had originally thought would be an Ivy League university simply wasn’t going to happen, wouldn’t be an Ivy League university. It might not be a university at all. And he had to set himself to earning money in order to get there.
Speaker But does it radicalize deprivations of the 30s? Changed his politics, changed the way he sees human nature.
Speaker There was a time in the nineteen thirties when he was about 17 years old, where he briefly thought he would turn to the Jewish faith again, which largely lost, although he did to his bar mitzvah. But he found that was nothing there for him. Then the same age, he met a young student who introduced him to Marxism, and it was as though someone had come along and given him the book of life. Here were people who did understand why the collapse had taken place as capitalists in America and politicians in America seemed not to understand. They had a reason, a historical reason. They had a vision of the future. They had a vision of human solidarity. And he swallowed it whole and entire. And eventually became a member of the Miller, never became a member of the Communist Party, the House un-American Activities Committee tried to pin it on him. They could never find any evidence for it. All they eventually came up with was a typed application form, unsigned. Now, he never became a member of the party, but a lot of people in the 1930s who were convinced Martz’s never took the step of John joining the Communist Party. Some people who did join the party stayed in for brief while popped out again. It was no big deal. Indeed, after a certain time in 1935, when the Communist Party itself changed its policy to have what it called the Popular Front, all progressive forces were much like one another. They played down the fact of membership of the party didn’t matter. What mattered was the tenets of Marxism, which Miller did embrace.
Speaker But he embraces them. I mean, it’s not just polemics. I mean, I think that he was I mean, what I want to get at. Yeah. Empathy. And he sense that this is the side of the angels. I mean. Yeah. So talk to me a bit about that. It’s not known as.
Speaker Arthur Miller may have been the son of a rich family. He may be a rich kid. But he did go down and see the conditions that existed in the workshop where the women’s coats were being produced that his father’s company manufactured. And there was not a very easy or good life. And on the other side of Marxism, he saw not political theory at all. Anything had any interest in political theory. He saw a vision of human solidarity. He had a kind of firm empathy with the working class. In a sense, he was nostalgic for other people’s lives. He saw himself as a as a worker and not a boss. This was the great revolution in in his thinking, been brought up to be a boss’s son. Suddenly, the boss was the enemy and the workers were the people who were going to transform America and the world. So it was a major transformation in Miller’s thinking. There is an element in Marxism for a whole generation of patricide because they’re largely often immigrant families had come to the country with a vision of improving themselves, of becoming materially well-off. To react against that was to react against your father, to deny your father in some sense. So I think Miller accepts that there is an element of patricide in that whole process. He went through.
Speaker One of the things I do, though, is a chance that he was defeated by the Soviet system was a repressive system, a stand for all that was totalitarian, that they oppress purges of the 30s. I mean, how could you. Well, how do you ignore that?
Speaker Well, I am one of the most difficult things, I think is to understand the passions of another age, to understand how it was in the 1930s that people in America could have embraced communism. I think from Miller’s point of view, there were a number of reasons. One is that the collapse of capitalism, Marxism seemed to have an answer to that when nobody else did. The second thing was that the Marxist and Soviet Union were very clear that the enemy was fascism. When Spain was taken over by Franco, America, Britain and other countries just turned their backs and weren’t interested. They declared themselves neutral. Well, these were the first sparks that were going to lead to the Second World War. Soviet Union seemed to understand that it knew the enemy was fascism. Then there’s the whole question of anti-Semitism, which was powerful in America. Miller experienced it when he was trying to get a job, you know, to open a newspaper in those days who were actually specify Christian. If you wanted a particular job, you could drive out in the countryside in New Jersey and there would be hotels which boasted restricted clientele, which meant no Jews. Now, the Soviet Union had a constitution which was opposed to anti-Semitism. America didn’t, but the Soviet Union did. Now we all know how bogus that was. But people in the 1930s really didn’t know how bogus that was.
Speaker So the question I have is, if I can get back to Miller, there is all that they share the fear.
Speaker Miller and Kazan were joined by their commitment to theater. They were joined by their commitment to the notion that theater could transform society. But fundamentally, they were also drawn together by the fact that they believed the same things. They were both Marxists. Kazan had been in the party. Miller had not. But that difference didn’t fundamentally matter. They believed the same things.
Speaker Interestingly enough, they seem to also come from a similar place. And be sharing similar marriages. I mean, it’s very shocking how. Much they were able to find in common with each other. I mean, Cusanus father fails and he was a salesman.
Speaker There were similarities in their family background. Both fathers. Cassagnes and Mila’s were salesmen in the case of Kisan. It was a family business to do with carpets and rugs. In Miller’s case, it was to do with women’s women’s clothing. They had both. They both lost out at different times during depression, but they did lose out. They were both the sons of immigrants. This was an experience that they had in many ways shared. They were both involved in marriages that they were beginning to feel equivocal about. Miller was very puritanical. I think if you can be puritanical and therefore felt in some way, I think constrained, repressed in some way, no one could ever accused Elia Kazan of being repressed. He saw no difficulty in having affairs all over the place.
Speaker Well, let’s let’s talk about Mary. Mary Miller. Mary Slattery, is she a warm person? She does so.
Speaker I mean, Miller and Mary Slattery came together at Michigan partly because they shared the same values. They believed in the same things. They were both radical. I don’t think Miller was quite as keen on getting married as Mary was. He didn’t see his future as settling down. And the marriage over the years became a somewhat cold and estranged one, partly because he was a workaholic. All the hours that there were he spent at a typewriter working on the place, festival radio plays and then plays for the for the theater 1951.
Speaker They were going off the highways. His relationship with Mary Solid, did salesman bring them together that finally the marriage as a success was enough money relief. And then there’s some bond again that they can share in some ways.
Speaker Miller and his wife Mary were much closer together when he was a failure than they were when he was a success. Success does put a barrier between you and other people. It does raise you onto a different plane. She was quite content to go out to work as a secretary while he was away at his work. Once he had become successful, she gave up work, looked after the children, and her job was to sort of walk along to the premieres of his plays. You know, not exactly half a pace behind, but feeling that in some way this man was growing away from her. He was entering a new world and he was entering a new world. It was a world of the theater of actors, actresses, directors, all the things she didn’t share. So the strain was going to be there, I think. And the estrangement began to build. Not that Miller meant to do anything about it. He was a family man. He was determined to try to make it work as up to a point, was she? But I think by the time that Miller took off to Hollywood with Kazan, the strain was more than evident.
Speaker OK. Where are we to take? OK. Someone ask you one last question. You start the tape for just a second, because I want to then just. We’re going to change the world. Which is fine.
Speaker I’m not sure there is too much more than that, but let me thanks very idealistic. Yeah, I think it is. But you mean there’s also the other side to that? Yeah, I suppose that’s that’s true. Yeah.
Speaker Cage in a theater is theater, but films. I mean Americans. Yes. You know, is there not not no element of that. Greater success that you know, that you don’t make it until you make it here. I don’t think the territory was actually, but there we go. That’s fine. Yeah. What is that hook about that? Help me understand what that. About. That’s great. Very good. Okay.
Speaker The hook is about the corruption of the waterfront unions by the mob. And that’s the play that he took out there. He’d researched it. He lived in Brooklyn. He went down. He knew the waterfront. He met many of the people who there. He went into the houses. He learned how they talked. He learned the politics of the waterfront, which were less to do with the Communist Party, hardly at all to do with the Communist Party than it was to do with making money on the side and with with the sheer corruption that existed down there. Now, that’s the story that he was carrying out to Hollywood and believe that they would make. And of course, they made one remarkably like that and called On the Waterfront. It just wasn’t the play, the screenplay that Miller took out there.
Speaker What we can do here.
Speaker OK, so Kisan once directed Arthur Miller, if he wants a prize winning playwright, has written it sounds like a surefire greenlight. The studio is falling all over themselves to make the hook.
Speaker They took the Hook Festival to 20th Century Fox, who had no interest whatsoever. Then then they moved on it because it partly didn’t seem to be a commercial product. This was not the time for doing it anyway. We’re at the beginning of the Korean War. There was a feeling out there that this was not the time perhaps to be suggesting things were wrong on the American waterfront. Then they went to Columbia and Columbia, were prepared to make it because they wanted Kazan. Kazan was the marketable product rather than Miller. Miller existed on Broadway, wasn’t particularly what they were concerned with engaging themselves with. And I don’t think they wanted to make the film either. But they did want Kazan. So they appeared to green lighted. Except then it was casually remarked that it first had to be cleared by trade unionists and then by the FBI. And that came as a total shock to Miller and indeed to Kazan.
Speaker So, Chris, help me understand the political climate in Hollywood. And in America that the hook is birthed into. Was it was it? We have quiet place. So the whole kind of stuff, so. So, again, help me understand that political. Is it Elizabeth? No, it’s not. Yes, it’s a. Because of what’s going on, America going to be receptive to a film about a corrupt union broke the Brooklyn Redbook dogs.
Speaker You have to remember that Hollywood had been on the defensive since 1947 when so many of its stars have been brought into a paper for the House un-American Activities Committee. And therefore, it was a politicized world that wasn’t just showbiz. It was showbiz constantly looking over its shoulder and in some curious way. I didn’t think Kazan and Miller quite realized the bomb that they were carrying with them when they went out to Hollywood. After all, here was he was a script that appeared to show that the the waterfront vital to American industry, especially during the Korean War, was corrupt. Nonetheless, Harry Cohn was quite prepared at Columbia Pictures to put the show on or appeared to be. He greenlighted it then rather through them by saying that, first of all, the script had to be run past some other people. It had to be past run past the FBI for a start. It had to be fast run past the union.
Speaker We keep get very limited. Sorry, I. I know. Do I say that. Yes, you’re right. I mean it has to go to war. Yeah. Right. Okay.
Speaker There was a there was a curious meeting in hurricanes office actually attended not only by Miller, Kazan and Cohn, but also by Marilyn Monroe, who they had just met. Hold off on.
Speaker Okay. I want to work out a Meet Monroe set. Oh, okay. Right. But they go there. Okay. I guess the question I have is, is it normal for Hollywood to take a script from a New York playwright and say, well, let’s send it to the FBI in? Right.
Speaker Right. Is that normal? Maybe it isn’t. Kazan and Miller went to see Harry Cohn and presented the screenplay of The Hook. He really didn’t like it. And he made quite clear that he didn’t like it, but he was prepared to make it because he really wanted to hold onto Kazan, who we thought was going to be very useful to the company as a director. But he did explain that before he could do anything with that screenplay.
Speaker He had to show it to Roy Brewer, who was now in a position in a union called Yahtzee, which is about theatrical employees to clear scripts. Not only do you have to go to Roy Brewer, it had to go to the FBI. Now, this astonished Miller and I think equally well Kazan. After all, he was the head of a Hollywood studio, apparently unable on his own to approve a film until it had been vetted politically. And when it was vetted politically, it began to collapse.
Speaker What did it say about Hollywood that a mogul. A guy who owns the company has to go to the FBI? What are they saying about that moment in American history?
Speaker Hollywood was on the defensive. It had been in the sights of Hugh ACX since nineteen forty seven. It looked over its shoulder. It watched it step. It really didn’t want to get in trouble. After all, it is in an industry that appealed to the public. If it was felt to be rubbing shoulders with communists, with pinkos, with fellow travellers. It was potentially going to destroy its own. The reception of its own movies. Now, Miller was a fellow traveler. Kazan had been in the party. These were actually potentially dangerous people. They weren’t just highly successful. They were dangerous. But Hollywood being Hollywood and the bottom line being what mattered. They were prepared to go along with it if the screenplay could be brought into line with their sense of what was an appropriate film to be made at that time. And what did they ask? What they asked Miller to do was to change the union leaders into communists. In other words, to make it into an anti-communist film. They were asking this of a former communist and a man who was a Marxist and actually believed in the Soviet Union. So not only just I have to say, by 1950, 1951, really the high point of Miller’s conviction was probably in 1949 and by 1950, 51, he too had begun drifting away from it. But they both had secrets. They both had things to hide. Neither of them actually wanted to be the subject of investigation. And as soon as Roy Brewer and the FBI were brought on the case, then they were potentially in trouble. They were afraid. Miller retreated from Hollywood partly because he only ever intended to go there for a few days, partly because he had encountered someone who had disturbed his sense of reality. Marilyn Monroe and I kept talking.
Speaker Okay, but I guess before we go there.
Speaker Ask you one other question. So they come here and they say to him, make them communists. Is it that Miller won’t do it only because he’s sympathetic to Marxism? Or is there something about what he’s trying to say about Red that makes making them communists? Not faithful to the people who have to bear in mind.
Speaker The Miller was a playwright on Broadway. The playwright’s name appears right up there under the title of the play. In Hollywood, the writer appears somewhere below the assistant to the assistant cameraman. He’d discover that himself when he was making a film or writing the screenplay for a film during the war and found himself written out. Somebody else took over the script. There is no credit to Arthur Miller went on that film. He suddenly realized that he had indeed got himself into a position in which he didn’t have autonomy. The mere fact that he’d written the screenplay didn’t mean it had any chance of being made.
Speaker As he wrote it. So when he retreated to the East Coast, it was partly the politics of the situation. He was reacting against a partly a sense of disgust that obviously his status as a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright meant nothing. But why make. Why on earth, why on earth would Miller wish to make the corrupt trade union officials communist when that was not what he had written about the actual corruption that was going on on the East Coast had to do effectively with the mob? That was the world. He knew he’d seen it. He knew the people. Why would he write a dishonest screenplay? Why would he falsify? To what purpose? He was morally affronted by what he was being asked to do.
Speaker Yeah, he’s great. Why was he knew that they were.
Speaker I think he was lying.
Speaker And so one of the Hollywood in the hook is important for all the things that we’ve got. Because it sets the stage for Hugh back and all the other. To come. But it is also significant because. Well, you know, he. Meets Marilyn Monroe. And how does that come? How does he mean? I mean, is it. Is he me, Marilyn Monroe, of his own accord while he’s out there?
Speaker Miller found the trip to Hollywood transforming. He found himself at parties where there were women simply available. It seemed to be part of the deal. This completely astonished him. He met Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker When you say available, you. For somebody like Miller, yes.
Speaker When he arrived in Hollywood, he found himself introduced to a number of people and going to parties and these odd parties because were attractive young women would be starlets there. And it slowly became apparent to him that, in effect, these women were available to those who had the power and the influence to get them parts in movies, whether it was directors, writers, whatever. Now rather changed the sense of reality. Then on the set of a film that was being made, he met Marilyn Monroe. He and Kazan both met her.
Speaker I mean, it’s really because they’re going to meet her, right?
Speaker No, it isn’t. No, it isn’t. I mean, there are two. There are two parts to the story. One is that they’re strolling through the back lot and they meet Marilyn there. The other is that they actually met on the on the set of a movie, which they were just watching. She had a relatively minor role in this and was very upset at the time because her agent and lover had just died. Johnny Hyde and therefore Kazan offered consolation, which in Kazan’s case only meant one thing. Miller was immediately struck by this woman electrified, he said, to, you know, to shake a hand was to feel the electricity just buzz through you. The next day, they went to make the pitch to Harry Cohn over the hook. And for reasons which are not too apparent, Marilyn Monroe went with them and sat in the office as they made this pitch, which was a thoroughly destabilising thing because they were arguing about the movie in which Miller had persuaded himself that he believed and here was this woman who had so thrown him only the day before. Then they met again at a party. Kazan was supposed to have taken her, but Kazan had found somebody else to go off and sleep with. So Miller went and fetched her, and Monroe was completely thrown by him because he was an old willed courtesy. He was someone who was not trying to make her. He was someone who talked to her about her career and acting. And suddenly she was being taken seriously as a person and as an actress. He wasn’t a watch. Miller appeared not to be romantically interested in her. For his part, I think Miller was thrown by coming up against someone who seemed to respond spontaneously from my heart. That seemed to be, as we say in Britain, no side on her, no pretense that she was open. Everything she thought and felt was on her face. She expressed it.
Speaker Well, if I can back up for just a second. I mean, before the party, she is she’s sleeping with Kizzire right. I mean, she her started romance.
Speaker Now that don’t start a romance then it was after. So now that they had not until that such weird triangle of interest.
Speaker Completely out of it.
Speaker When when Miller and Kazan went to Hollywood, Miller’s wife Mary was deeply suspicious because she knew what Kazan was like because I had dozens of affairs. I think he even kept separate bank account to deal with the affairs that he had. And Mary really didn’t want Miller associating with Kazan, especially out in Hollywood, which at least had the image of Sin City if it was or wasn’t. Therefore, when he went there and discovered precisely that and came back visibly shaken by that this further. That had a further impact on their marriage. It chilled things down still further because although Miller had in a sense retreated from Marilyn, I suppose in a way, I suppose he’d run away from her and from an aspect of himself he hadn’t even. I mean, why what does he mean? Melanie only Miller went to Hollywood, meaning only to stay for a few days. They thought they only had business that would require a few days visit. So he didn’t exactly run away. But psychologically, there is a sense in which he ran away. He ran away from Marilyn Monroe. She had destabilised him. Something about her had got to Miller. Yet he was married. He had children. And he retreated from that. He couldn’t face it. Then he didn’t want to confront it. Then he went back to the East Coast. But he had not forgotten her. She had not forgotten him. She continued to write to him.
Speaker Is he afraid of something he might do?
Speaker I think there’s a sense in which success had released something repressed in Arthur Miller. That that kind of puritanical work ethic that had driven him in the years since leaving Michigan had suddenly been broken by the success that he’d had. He been introduced to a new world and still more so when he went to Hollywood, which had used sexuality is partly what Hollywood was about. Hollywood sells sex, whatever the movies it’s making. That’s what lies underneath them. And that got him as soon as he arrived.
Speaker So he’s back in New York, Brooklyn Heights, on ungrazed court. You know, he was. She she wasn’t out there.
Speaker Mary did not know anything for sure about what had happened in Hollywood, and in one sense, nothing had happened in Hollywood. He’d met a woman. He’d been impressed, disturbed by her and had retreated from it.
Speaker But I would be very surprised if there wasn’t something about his manner that portrayed something. She also wrote to him from time to time. And there was a kind of clandestine correspondence. Marilyn wrote to Arthur he felt very dubious about this because it was luring him in to a side of himself that he’d not yet come to terms with.
Speaker The question I forgot to ask you was, when we hear Marilyn Monroe and we think seven year itch.
Speaker Yeah.
Speaker I mean, 50 one when Arthur met Marilyn Monroe. She was, if not unknown, certainly a marginal figure in Hollywood. She did very rapidly become extremely successful. But at the time, she was almost a bit player so that he wasn’t responding to the public image that we now have of Marilyn Monroe. It was the person herself that actually disturbed him.
Speaker And you say that they’re going to it with Harry. It’s not like, oh, a Rita Hayworth or Marilyn Monroe. We think of it as walking, you know.
Speaker I think, you know, people are the story.
Speaker Yeah. When when they went to make the pitch about the hook to Harry Cohn, they were accompanied by Marilyn Monroe, who was almost unknown, except Harry Cohn thought he recognized her and then said, I know who’s goil you is. And they realized that there was something being said here about the nature of Marilyn Monroe and the kind of paternalism, the kind of sexual possessiveness that movie moguls had towards their starlets.
Speaker I want to jump forward. Michael. OK. I want to jump a year ahead to 1952 because I have been subpoenaed to testify. I know we’re skipping a lot. Yeah, yeah. Television. How frantic are the times in 52 week? Is areas subpoenaed before?
Speaker When Kazam was called before heroic things were at their height, the dragnet was out. All kinds of people were being pulled in. Not just Kisan, who caused a direct death of a salesman, but Lee Jay Cobb, who played the part of Willy Loman in that Clifford Odets, the great radical playwright of the 1930s. It was, in a sense, the height of McCarthyism in 1952.
Speaker But is it about fear that they’re going after Hollywood? Right.
Speaker In 1950, about Broadman. When they went after people from the theater in 1952, I think it wasn’t the theater that interested them. It was Hollywood. And Kazan was not only a theater person. He was also a Hollywood person. That was true also of of Lee Jay Cobb. So they were in the market for publicity. The interesting thing is why did they not go after Arthur Miller in that year? He was the natural third person. If you’ve got the director of some if you’ve got the director of Death of a Salesman, you’ve got the principal actor of Death of a Salesman. Why not the author? And I think the answer is the other two had been members of the party and they had the evidence Miller had not been a member of a party. They suspected he had, but they hadn’t yet got the evidence. But the FBI was accumulating a file that was quite a large file on Arthur Miller. He was just never called in. But as a playwright, when he said, who in Indianapolis could give a damn? You know, if if there was a communist playwright whose play was on on Broadway didn’t mean anything. He was not yet known as a Hollywood writer and therefore not worth actually pulling in. Where was the publicity value? Right.
Speaker Well, I think it’s also a question of what Hollywood films submitted all over the country. They actually yeah, they play everywhere. Broadway. You’ve got to go to State City, New York.
Speaker Do you think he’s understood personally what the cost of naming names was going to mean his life?
Speaker Because I made two appearances before him, like one in January and one a few months later in January, he managed to name No one. Then the pressure was put on by Hollywood. That is scarce of 20th Century Fox told him that if he didn’t name names, there would be no more films. And he had a decision to make and he decided to name names. Originally, he intended to consult the people whose names he was going to give them and get their permission. It’s like a Catholic asking for absolution before committing the sin. He got through two or three of them and then stopped because there were others who would certainly not have gone along with this. He liked to say that if any of them had said they didn’t want him to do it, he would have stopped. But he didn’t ask them or it was a very convenient omission. It was a dividing line in his life. He knew what it potentially meant. But the price was too great. And his own wife, Molly Kazan, was urging him to go ahead and do it. They had become also fairly anti-communist by the stage. The question was, did he name names because he now genuinely thought it was the civic duty of any Americans to go in and give all the information that you’ve got, which is what he said when he went to the hearings. And in an advertisement, which bizarrely it took in the newspapers to explain his actions. Or was it? Bottom line, was it career that mattered? One suspects it was a career that mattered. If he really thought it was necessary for a citizen to name names. He could have knocked on the door of the FBI at any time. And given these names, then he didn’t do it.
Speaker Marry me a minute. Twenty seven. OK. You know, we stopped for just a second. Not a thing to do. If you know you’re going to lose your your life’s going to be sundered in such a way.
Speaker The tradeoff Kazaam was making was losing friends and getting a career. The other way round was unacceptable to him. He always believed that you can possibly get friends back or you’ve got other friends, but you can’t get a career back. He couldn’t then because the blacklisting was vicious and he opted for career over friends about Miller as a friend.
Speaker Do you think that gives you a sense that it was going to cost him?
Speaker I’m not sure whether he realized that Miller would split with him because there had been such a close personal relationship. And just before he appeared before Hirak, he called Miller up and Miller went over to his Connecticut house and they had a walk in the woods.
Speaker I want to go back. Okay. No, actually. Right. That he’s going to get a call from Miller.
Speaker New fruit kermesse go. OK.
Speaker Miller knew or thought that he knew that he was going to name names because he had a call from Kermit Bloomgarden, who was his producer, who had himself talked to because I had an Bloomgarden called Miller and said, I think you’re going to get a call from Kazam. And the phone rang a number of times and Miller did not pick it up because he didn’t want to hear Kazan say what he was going to do. Eventually, he did pick the phone up and went to see him.
Speaker Why do you think you want to hear it to him or her?
Speaker I think he could not. He did not want to believe that Kazan was capable of doing what he believed he was on the point of doing. And he didn’t want confirmation from Kazan’s own mouth. It was too dreadful to contemplate. It was an ultimate act of betrayal. And Miller knew that if he had been in the party, Kazan might well have named him.
Speaker Potentially, he was afraid. OK, let’s roll towards the Communist Party.
Speaker I mean, is he being untruthful to himself?
Speaker By 1952, Kazan had been out of the party for a long time. And indeed, like a lot of other people, felt that he’d been duped, that he had given his idealistic commitment to a false idea, a Miller minute. By that stage was aware of that. And this was the dilemma that people had. They were called before the House un-American Activities Committee, and they couldn’t defend what they had believed in in the past because they no longer believed in it themselves. So it was perfectly all right, however, to a base yourself and explain that you got it wrong. How how many of us have not read the politics of our rage wrongly? The problem was the price of getting absolution was to name other people.
Speaker And in Kazan’s case, he went on on not only to name other people, but to insist it was the duty of people, to name others, you know, get to this idea.
Speaker I mean, why is it essential to name names? Because it begins to hurt. Yeah. We’ll get to that in the Miller’s play.
Speaker But if it’s not wrong to say what it effectively what they’re asking to do it, we defend this version of themselves that no longer exists. Yeah, right. So what’s wrong then with saying, OK? Well, who else?
Speaker Was there? There’s a fundamental plausibility to what they were being asked to do. They were being asked. Were you a member of a party? Do you any longer believe in the party? Do you not accept that there was a conspiracy? If there was, who were the fellow conspirators? Give us the names. It’s a logical step by step progress. But somewhere along that line, you cross a moral divide because it’s one thing to explain about yourself to make a confessional. It’s another thing to put other people’s names on the table. Whose careers are almost certainly going to be ruined as a result. These are not people you’ve sought permission from. To betray them. You have just decided that it’s your moral duty or your pragmatic response to betray them. Well, that’s the problem. Let me ask you this.
Speaker Is it practical to see that these questions are valid in the first place?
Speaker I mean, is communism a threat to the very integrity of the American culture?
Speaker I mean, do you take the position in the 1950s was there were a number of communist spies. In other words, there were people out there who were engaged in a conspiracy against the United States who were agents of the Comintern. They didn’t include actors and directors and schoolteachers. And those were the people whose careers were systematically being ruined. That wasn’t what Hubach was about. You have to bear in mind the people who were running that the committee members, what their motives were. There was an enormous element of careerism at stake here. People were making their reputation by destroying other people’s lives, by trampling over the Constitution of the United States apart from anything else.
Speaker And part of Miller’s ambivalent response to Kazam comes from the fact that he doesn’t think Kazan is the primary villain. It’s the House un-American Activities Committee that’s the primary villain. They should never have been put in this position. And if there is another villain, it’s communism. He realizes that individuals in the 19th thought thirties were being crushed between two forces between the American system with its lies and self-deceit and the communist system with its lies and self-deceit. And where were you to go? Well, maybe into a private world, kind of private world of integrity. And those two things always interact in Miller’s work, private world and the public.
Speaker Well, before I get there. You know, you talk about Miller not answering the phone. Yeah. Not wanting to hear from. Yes. Why do I want to talk to Miller? What’s going on?
Speaker Kazan needs to get absolution for the step that he’s about to take. Not just from the people whose names he’s kind of put on the table, but from someone like Miller with whom he wants to go on working apart from anything else. This was perfect working relationship. So he wants to hear someone like Arthur Miller say, it’s all right, you can go ahead. Maybe not what you want to do, but it’s legitimate.
Speaker OK. So Arthur is hearing and kicking around this notion of writing about the Salem witch trials. Right? He’s read this book and. He then meets Kazan at a coffee shop in the Upper West Side and they talk politics.
Speaker Men are known about the events in Salem in 60, 92 since university, but didn’t know what to do with the idea. Then he read a book by Marianne Starky, which laid out not only those events, but what she thought were might might be regarded as contemporary parallels. Suddenly, the light went on in Miller’s mind and when he went to see Cezanne, because then when he went to when he went to see Cezanne about his naming of names, he also laid out the idea for The Crucible and the parallel, which seemed to him undeniable between the events of 60 92 in Salem and what was going on in the United States of his own age. Needless to say, Cezanne and still more, his wife, Molly, rejected the analogy because if it were true, where was Cezanne in that analogy?
Speaker Similarly, I understand his answers to Miller. I think I’m going to name names and Miller, as I think in The Crucible.
Speaker Yeah, effectively. So tell me what’s going on. All right. Miller Miller had suddenly got a historical parallel to the events that were going on in the 1940s. Miller suddenly got a parallel in his own mind between the events of 60 92 in Salem, Massachusetts, and what he saw going on around him in America of the 1950s. Where should he turn back to his director to say, I have this great idea because this is a director who shared the same kind of political commitments as him, who reacted against his work when it first summoned him. After all, he refused to name names at first and took great pride in this use to tell people wherever he could find them that he didn’t have to name names. Could he got money in the bank? So Miller went round to Cezannes on a kind of double errand. One is to hear the terrible news, as it turned out, from his point of view, that cause I’m going to name names. And the other was to explain that he was on his way to Salem to do the research for The Crucible.
Speaker So what happens in that walk in the woods? Can we ever really know what was said? They both give us the right.
Speaker Miller and Kosan went for a walk in the Connecticut woods in that walk. They talked about Cezannes forthcoming hearing and his decision to name names. We’ve got two accounts of that. We got Miller’s account in Cezannes. They diverge not enormously, but they do. Cezannes account says that Miller was basically understanding and said, anything you do. I know you’ll do out of the right spirit. So on Miller’s account is that if you do this thing, it will never be forgotten. Nonetheless, he was still responding to him as though almost it was a brother who was faced with a fundamental dilemma. But he did warn against naming names and actually Rose Miller hugging him. I’m sure there was a great camaraderie between the two of them. This was a dilemma forced on Kosan, and he’d been forced to leave J. Corbett had been forced on so many Americans. So there was a human understanding and Miller what Kazam was going through. He knew that Cezannes future really lay in the movies. That’s the world in which he wished to to move. And he knew that if he really dug his heels in, he was putting at risk that whole future movie career.
Speaker Was Arthur devastated? We’re getting at this point. So. How does Arthur respond to cause in naming names? How do I mean, when does he first hear about it? And is it OK? Because there’s Kazantsev in his memoir, but his heart was in the right place with Arthur.
Speaker Miller’s response to Kisan, in the words, was to warn him against the step he was about to take. He didn’t break himself off from Kisan at that moment because it hadn’t yet happened and he hoped it might not. Thereafter, he heard the account he’s driving that he heard the actual details of his evidence before Hirak as he was driving back from Salem, where he had actually read in the accounts those people who had named the names of other people in Salem and 16, 92 and brought trouble down on their head.
Speaker In that case, they were executed. The two situations seemed immediately parallel to him in both historical eras. There was a political hysteria around it in New England in the end of the 17th century. Their hold on the continent was insecure. They felt threatened from without and threatened from within. The same thing was true in the 1950s with the Soviet Union and the Cold War and the demand for conformity for everyone to come into line. Whatever the Constitution says about freedom of thought, freedom of speech and and so on. And then as he drove back from Salem, he turned on the car radio and heard the names that had been offered up by Cosan names of actors from the group theater. The group theater was what made Arthur Miller a playwright. That was the model of what theater should be and could be used to go to their shows when he was in a New York City. So it’s as though his own past was being dismantled in front of his eyes. All those people that he believed in, we’re now put at risk by Kazan and it seem to Miller urgent to write The Crucible. Having heard those names offered up by Cezanne and read the advertisement that Cezanne put in the newspapers immediately following this to justify his action and to urge other people to name names, suddenly the writing The Crucible wasn’t just the next dramatic venture. It was an urgent piece of political and social commitment to him.
Speaker Do you think on a personal level, he’s hurt by Cezanne’s actions, do you think that there’s a sense of.
Speaker When I was to death, I think when Kisan name names, it was like losing a brother. Some terrible thing had happened and he went back and wrote in his diary. The sense almost of. Of loss that occurred. It’s as though he died. He turned his back on so many people. He’d he’d offered up other people’s careers, apparently in order to sustain his own career.
Speaker OK. Let’s talk about The Crucible then, so you give me a sense of what he’s trying to do and why he’s placing it in Sablon. But what precipitates in the drama if we can just be in the play for just a moment. What precipitates the hysteria? I mean, what is making people lock up and go blind? And why are all the girls as as Miller’s first act on false?
Speaker In Salem, in 60, 92, nothing was very assured. Strange things were happening back in in England, the civil war, meanwhile. Sorry. Let’s get back on that. Give us as to what you want to. Within the play. In the play.
Speaker Yeah, within the primary audience. And you’re right. I think what’s happened in the first act. Right. So that I can get to the moment where they’re all screaming. Right. I saw. I saw. I saw.
Speaker The Crucible opens with a group of pubescent girls in a hysterical condition. Indeed, they’ve been trying to summon up through Tituba the slave woman. Details of potential lovers. They were being what adolescent girls are, but they were discovered doing this in the woods. And one of them went into a kind of catatonic trance. And suddenly witchcraft was suspected because witchcraft was the first answer to such conditions in New England.
Speaker So the girls are actually afraid of being found out.
Speaker Yeah. The girls then are forced into a position in which they have got to deflect the guilt from themselves onto somebody else. And therefore, the natural person to deflect it onto is Teichberg for summoning up spirits. And then the question becomes, who has Teichberg done this with in the past? And she is asked to name names. The girls are asked to name names. And the whole process begins. Out of that, hysteria is born betrayal.
Speaker And that is Millar’s parallel to what you see. Yeah. OK. So is the main focus then of the play? I mean, the drama, as it gets carried through these girls accusing and being judged and accusing.
Speaker I got his phone. I mean, it is about the girls. That’s why we enter the play where we enter the play. Let’s it really I mean, what’s going on?
Speaker Who’s the vehicle that Miller’s decided to use and why has he chosen this man as our vehicle?
Speaker If you look at the notes for the play while he was working on the early drafts of The Crucible, you find that Miller writes, This has got to be propter story. And after that, it says he is feeling guilt for what at that stage is no way he’s guilty. But he knows the reason for his failure to act for the first part of the play is that he is guilty about something. And it turns out that the guilt is a sexual guilt because of a relationship he’s had with Abigail. And this is one of the historical transformations that he makes. He makes Abigail older and he makes John Proctor younger and therefore a sexual spark can fly between them, which did not do historically.
Speaker But what is proper? I mean, you know who he is. I mean, is he drunk? Is he certainly difficult?
Speaker John Proctor. Is an ordinary. Sorry. John Proctor is locked in a marriage which is cold. He has had an affair with Abigail and that has made his relationship colder still because his wife knows this. He’s guilty. Therefore, he doesn’t want to become involved in the affairs of the town that are going on. He hopes that he can stand aside from it, but slowly he is pulled into it by the girls.
Speaker Why is in the play in the context of the play? Only Procter’s affair. His infidelity. The fact that he’s probably one of the Ten Commandments that Ethan can you know that. Why does that paralyze him? You should still be able to go into the public space and. And act, yes, right. Why is it the character cannot.
Speaker I think propter.
Speaker Protoje lives a private life and a public life. Like all of us in his private life, he feels guilty and feels in some way socially paralyzed. For that, he doesn’t want to get out into the into the public world where the events are going on. He wants to withdraw into himself, but slowly he is lured into it. And the public life and private life begin to interact. And betrayal on a private level becomes betrayal on a public level as far as Miller is concerned.
Speaker Miller.
Speaker As Miller, actually. Yeah.
Speaker How much do you think is Propter after Miller? I mean, without, you know, me, obviously. I mean, how much is Procter’s voice? Miller’s voice. Miller being pulled into the public.
Speaker I don’t think that that John Proctor is essentially Arthur Miller. I mean, Arthur Miller had been involved in the social and political world from the 1930s onward. Spent his life signing petitions as UAC actually reminded him when he appeared before me in 1956. This is not the John Propter, the dour man living outside the town with his wife. There is an aspect perhaps that reflects Miller’s own life at that time. After all, he was in a marriage which was itself quite cold and was coming to an end. He had had an encounter with a woman younger than himself. Marilyn Monroe was eleven. Young Marilyn Monroe was 11 years younger than him. So it’s it’s tempting to feel that there is a kind of shadow of that world cast over this. But that isn’t what grabbed his attention. It was the electricity that art between 60 and 92 and the 1950s that really made him sit down and write that play.
Speaker Let me be an advocate, the devil’s advocate. Guess. Yeah. Yeah, I know you don’t want I don’t know what we’re going to be able to do. Yeah. OK.
Speaker You know, let me push you a little bit, because there were communists in the right. And they were not witches in Salem. And so, you know, Miller may be on the wrong decided about this great parallel, but they don’t work.
Speaker Well, a lot of people in the 1950s, beginning with Mary McCarthy and then Eric Bentley pointedly and Molly Kazan pointed out that in the 60s, 90s, there were no such things as witches, whereas in the 1950s the plainly were communists. Except if you’ve been there in 60, 92 and chosen to stand up and say there were no such things as witches, you would have found yourself in court because that was a faith that was held not only in the United States, but across Western Europe. They were real.
Speaker The state said they were real religion, so they were real. And religion and the state were the same things. Now, in the United in the 1950s, of course, there were communists. But the people who are being called before the House un-American Activities Committee were not people who were overthrowing the United States. They were actors. They were directors. Kazan himself was not threatening the United States, whereas actually they did believe in 60 ninety-two that witches were threatening the whole establishment of Salem and the American experiment.
Speaker Well, yeah. I mean, certainly people thought that the communists were also doing the same thing. I guess what The Crucible says to me, because I am sympathetic, Miller, really is that there are parallels in the hysteria, even if there are parallels also between the two periods in sense of the procedures that were going on and the hysteria that generated those procedures.
Speaker The hysteria over witchcraft did have its parallel over the hysteria over communism. In both cases, both societies believed there to be a rational basis for that hysteria. You can’t say now there were no witches in the 17th century because everybody believed that there were witches. That was the predicate on which they operated.
Speaker But also what was essential was the only way you could prove. Yes. Is that right?
Speaker I mean, that that’s the only way in the 17th century you could actually purge yourself of suspicion was to say that you had supped with the devil, that you actually were a witch or had been associated with witches. But then you named the names.
Speaker And this was the ultimate proof that you could purge yourself if you refused to name names. You were clinging on to witchcraft. The same procedures applied before the House un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. The ultimate proof was that you were willing to offer up the names of other people and their direct parallels. The list of names that are read out in the trials in 16 92, paralleled by the names that are read out before Hubach in the 1950s.
Speaker Okay, so over the course of the play propter actually first, Elizabeth, but improper gift to. Right. How is it that he finds himself.
Speaker Proctor ends up in jail, of course, because he tries to defend his wife and finds himself in court, caught out in what appears to be a lie. And caught out by his failure to be able to recite all 10 of the Ten Commandments because he’s not an overly religious man, though, living in a religious community with the law.
Speaker A pregnant moment. What is the line that he gets caught? Well, the.
Speaker So what’s he saying? You know, he just says nothing spoiled by giving them this line that we’re not rotten belong. What’s he going to do? Why is he justifying in his own mind?
Speaker The irony for John Proctor is that the only way that he can effectively save his own life is to lie, is to say that he did consort with witches. If he tells the truth, he’ll be hanged. And that’s the paradox of his position. And he believes it’s worth offering up the lie in order to survive, or at least he does until he’s asked to name other people.
Speaker I want to get that right. I want to do it. And he defers to his wife. Nothing spoiled by giving them this lie. But effectively, I have an already spoiled. What’s he said? Why? What is his own private justification for why? I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. Well, he effectively he said to Elizabeth, I’ve already committed adultery already.
Speaker Really? A single man. Oh, I see. Mm hmm. We are different. Possibly.
Speaker But I give them this lie. I’ve already.
Speaker That’s interesting. I’m not quite sure that’s what I think he’s saying. But there we go. Yeah. Because then, Elizabeth, I think it’s more I think it’s more elemental than that. Literally, he’s going to be killed if she doesn’t lie. And that’s does he cling on to his integrity and die or does he surrender his integrity and live? And he’s asking Elizabeth, which should I do? And she’s saying only you can decide that.
Speaker Yes. But he says. And yet you’ve not confessed till now that speak goodness in you spy keeps me silent. I see what you’re saying, right. And yada, yada, yada. But she says to him, John, I counted myself so late, so poorly made. No honest love could come to you. Was asked the following question, I stopped. My own count. It needs a cold wife to prompt luxury. Yes. So she blames herself. He seems, in fact, use up with our. It’s my fault. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it’s very it’s the connection.
Speaker The key thing is the connection between that and the decision to say what he does before the court. Well, I know that what you’ve just said is perfectly explicable. She says, alright, it’s partly my fault. You know, I drove you where you went to this young woman. But then I kept cold house. It’s the connection. The problematic bit is the connection between that and the decision that he is now going to take, which is to dissemble again, only this time not over a sexual relationship, but over the issue of whether he did or did not consult with witches. Now he’s seeking her approval for telling a lie. Having told her a lie initially about something else, why did he not tell a lie in the end?
Speaker What keeps him from it doesn’t tell a lie because he’s not allowed to keep that condemnation to himself. A, it has to be put on the church door. It has to be publicly proclaimed. And this is a dilemma of those people in the 1950s who were prepared sometimes to go before private hearing, which were called executive hearings, which is what Kazan did the second time around, and actually having public events in which everyone knew what was happening. It was a false distinction because usually the executive hearings were quickly leaked anyway. So it didn’t really make any difference. But in in Proctor’s case, he doesn’t want it publicly known. And then he is asked to give evidence that other people were witches. And that becomes a step too far. He can’t do that. He’s fighting to maintain his integrity. The price of saving his life is to destroy his integrity. And in the end, his good name matters more to him than his life.
Speaker That’s so interesting to me. What is it with Miller? Because he is what his testimony will be.
Speaker I asked him once why? What is the thing with the name? It was about any, if almost it’s almost all. Miller plays a large number of Miller plays.
Speaker There’s always a moment in which the character shouts out his name. I’m Willy Loman. I’m not a dime a dozen. I’m Eddie Cow Bone. Curious moment in the play. And it’s usually we’re in the process of destroying the integrity of that name. And I think it’s because if there’s a common theme in his work, it is an individual’s need to respect him or her self. The integrity of the name is everything is there from the very earliest place that he he ever wrote when he comes to give his own evidence before you ask. It is virtually a paraphrase of John Propter speech. And I asked him once why?
Speaker And he said, What else could you say? There is nothing else from his point of view that you can say the most important thing is your integrity. Without that, what is a life? It’s Shakespearean.
Speaker So he says, you know, don’t ask me to give up my name because it is all I get is this effectively saying, oh, prompter is astonished that actually he can bring himself to this point that there is indeed an integrity in him.
Speaker He’d felt guilty throughout the play. He felt guilty because he turned aside from his wife and gone with Abigail. He’s now necessarily confronted that because he’s had to give evidence for that in court in an effort to save his wife. Now he knows that he is a sinner, but can nonetheless have integrity. But the price of the integrity is the loss of his life. And in the end, it’s a price worth paying.
Speaker We got that. No, not really. Right. Creeps right at the end. If you want to. You know, I think one of the good things to do is to sort of not sidestep it, but to go for. Yeah. Not say, oh, it could be reductive. Right. Rather, let’s. I mean. Do you think Miller’s playing out in some ways his own private drama and relationship with his heir, with Monroe and with Mary? Is it all in the mix here? Also, there’s something it’s all that it’s about, but is it in the mix as well?
Speaker The Crucible does touch on Miller’s personal life. The relationship between John Proctor and Abigail. John Proctor and his wife does have its parallels in Miller’s relationship with his wife and putatively with Marilyn Monroe. Except that there was no affair. There was just this strong attraction between them. I think it’s somewhat reductive version of the play, however, to interpret it in those terms. But if he’s engaging the public world of his own time, I think in some ways he’s perhaps engaging the private world of his own time as well. And betrayal operates on all levels. It is, in a way, Miller’s fundamental theme. He points out that the Bible begins with betrayal. For him, the key figure recurs in his diaries, in his notebooks is Kane the betrayer? The question is, how do you live with betrayal? How do you live with the guilt and transform it into responsibility?
Speaker OK, let’s move on, because I think we’re going to start running into drama in this apartment. Is the crucibles success? In the theater in America when it was hit, that everybody expected it to fail because The Crucible is now his most produced play because it studied in school and university.
Speaker I think people believe that it was immensely successful when it was first staged. It wasn’t it wasn’t either artistically successful or publicly successful. In fact, every one of his plays ran for shorter and shorter time.
Speaker But let’s talk about just 53. All right. We’ll leave it there.
Speaker The crystal ball was not a hit in 1953. It did have enthusiastic audiences. It had very dubious reviews. Miller militant like the first production talk. He thought the production was cold and static. But very quickly after that festival, he redirected it for the road version. And then within two years, there was another version of it for Off Broadway, which was immensely successful, ran for two years. Fifty three and fifty three. It was not a successful play.
Speaker Boy, there’s a lot of noise going on right now is the worst.
Speaker Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker You know, when we back Israel right now, the little that vacuum quietly, if you hear 20 seconds. OK, go ahead.
Speaker 20 seconds of room tone with the vacuum in background.
Speaker Stop. Well, we had a little bit of it there. Show us the vacuum and not the lift. The elephant could be the lift. There you go. Could be the elevator. All right. How would you think it had to do with losing kids and as a partner? You talk about.
Speaker I think he had not Cosan this time, but Jed Harris and Jed Harris is the cross. The number of American playwright had to bear. This was not a good production. It wasn’t put together well. It wasn’t well produced. It wasn’t well directed. And I think that’s a good reason for failing. He had lost his best director when he broke with Kazan. Does he know he lost his nose? Oh, he’s fully aware of the fact that that relationship has been has been broken. He would later re-establish it.
Speaker I know. But does he have a sense that losing his path to a successful Broadway production?
Speaker I don’t know if you don’t know, you don’t know. No, I don’t. Well, I’d never said I’ve never heard him say that. I’ve heard him say things about Jett Harris. Yes, but I don’t want to method here. OK. I have a question for you. It’s 1953.
Speaker Now, it’s not that far off from 1952. The Crucible is, if nothing else. A very bold play about its time. People must surely read it that way. Why is Arthur Miller not subpoenaed?
Speaker I think Miller is not subpoenaed in 1953 when you would think he would be after writing the Crispell for two reasons. One is they didn’t have the goods on him. They have the evidence he been a member of the Communist Party. And the other is there would have been rather too obvious in some sense if that’s not giving to greater subtlety to the House un-American Activities Committee here. Here was a play that seemed to be directly about what they were doing to then arrest the guy or bring him in. Someone came forward, would have been a little too crude. But I think the real reason is they really didn’t have the goods on him at that stage.
Speaker Right. OK. A view from the bridge. It seems on the surface, really. I want to talk about it not as personal story as a salesman was because of his own father’s experience or his family’s experience in the way or the crucible in the way that we probably talk. It doesn’t seem to be quite as informed by Miller’s like just on the surface. What is the thing that’s driving him to tell this story?
Speaker What is the story that he is telling interview from The View from the Bridge is about a man who has a passionate attraction to his niece that he cannot accept, articulate or believe. And in order to protect himself in some sense from the knowledge of that to stop losing her, he betrays two illegal immigrants who is putting up in his house two cousins of his wife, because she falls, because she falls in love with one of them. In one way, of course, it’s a natural parental response because he’s acting as a parent here, as an illegal immigrant, comes into the country within weeks, is declaring love for your niece and is going to marry you. Wouldn’t you be suspicious of just after the green card? And of course, when he drops a dime and informs to the Immigration Bureau he’s actually doing his civic responsibility. It’s not doing anything illegal, nothing unjust in that sense. It’s just against all the principles of human trust that he’s operating. So what we were saying about you here. Well, the odd thing I think about a view from the bridge is that the protagonist is an informer. A miller turns him in some way into a tragic hero. It feels enormous sympathy for this man, not for the act, but for the situation in which he finds himself. And he also has respect for the passion that this man. Lives his life with. I mean, most people, he says, settle for half the thing about Will. Most people, he says, live settle for half in their life. Eddie Colburn won’t stop.
Speaker We’re going to go out. Why do you need to get more, like Change or Europe? So much you can do right now. OK, to me was, you know. It’s OK. We’re not going to be mixing these two up anyway.
Speaker You know, I guess what I want to also get at is. When we get some quiet, we OK? Let’s start before we get it. Where is he getting the idea from it? Is it just something that he’s reading a book, he’s pulling something from his past? Right.
Speaker The idea for a view from the bridge dates back many years. It was a story he’d heard on the waterfront. And indeed, while he was writing Death of a Salesman, he he writes, the thing about the Italian play in his notebook has always been on his mind long before Kazan was ever called before the House un-American Activities Committee. So he’s not a play written in response to that, though it has its relevance to that. It’s been in his mind before. Well, it’s a waterfront. It’s a written the book. Yes. It’s a waterfront play. It’s it’s set in Red Hook, as the narrator Alfieri says, Red Hook, not Sicily. But in some ways, the Sicilian values are in their Sicilian values to do with family and community and responsibility.
Speaker But as you say, Mueller seems to have sympathy for the informal sympathy for what the informer does.
Speaker It’s sympathy, I think, is not for the informant’s action, not in dropping the dime and turning the illegal immigrants ever to the authorities. No, not at all. But for the dilemma in which the man is placed and for his desperate desire to maintain respect for himself in some way. And as in the Crucible, he’s willing to lay down his life to do that.
Speaker But he’s also driven by lust, too, right?
Speaker I mean, there he is, the man is driven by love for his niece. But he can’t accept that. He can’t articulate that. He can’t allow it to come into his consciousness or into his language. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t exist. He wants, above all, to keep her innocent. He would like to stop her growing up because if she grows up, he has to accept that she’s a sexual being. And that reflects back on his own feelings for her. So his desperate desire is to keep her as a child in some way. Don’t let her go out to work. Certainly don’t let her fall in love with somebody.
Speaker What happens when he drops the dime? And in ridolfo, Marco are arrested in. How does the neighborhood respond to Eddie’s actions?
Speaker Eddie knows that the moment he drops the dime, he steps out of society. He will be condemned by everyone. He will be on his own. Nonetheless, such as the compulsion that he feels that he has to drop the dime and there is just him then and his own integrity as he sees it on the line. But now he’s cut off from everybody telling you everything.
Speaker I actually don’t find a particularly sympathetic character for character in the way that I say, really, because what he wants is so repugnant. Certainly not moral. It’s not right. I mean, this is capturing his justification for informing is not a.
Speaker I don’t think the question of morality really comes into it. What he’s trying to do is write almost classic Greek play, which just happens to be set in Red Hook in New York City in the 20th century. If you think of classic Greek plays, this is he was sleeping with your mother. And so and it’s not a question of morality. It is a question of actually being drawn fatally to the thing that will destroy you. And in the process of being destroyed, nonetheless, trying to find the source of some integrity to cling on to, that’s what he does. He’s wrong. Everything he believes is wrong, just as it was for Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. He was wrong. But somehow, nonetheless, he compels our attention because this man lives to the extreme.
Speaker OK. In between the crucible and a view from the British, which are similarly themed plays.
Speaker You have on the front. Which was.
Speaker Some version of the hook right on the waterfront is extremely similar to the hook, although it was separately research by Budd Schulberg in a different part of New York City. Nonetheless, some of the key events in both screenplay’s reflect one another. And Miller has always been suspicious since they both been through Cezanne’s hands that some part of the original screenplay for The Hook found its way into On the Waterfront also proved, incidentally, that that work could have succeeded in the cinema because one very close to it did became a classic of American cinema.
Speaker One interesting thing, though, that you say that Miller is suspicious. Do you think that he was maybe more suspicious, maybe resentful? I mean, the waterfront was his. Territory, he was the one that had gone down. Did he feel robbed of it?
Speaker I think there’s a sense in which there is some resentment there. I think there was even a move by Miller’s lawyer to stop on the waterfront. But he doesn’t it hasn’t become a hang up his it’s not the center of his relationship with that. But at that time, there must have been a sense of loss. I’m sure there is. This is this is a work that he’d spent some time writing. He’s researched it. Sure. There is one. I’m sure there is some element or was some element of resentment on Miller’s part about on the waterfront. There are plainly just elements in the screenplay of On the Waterfront, which were there originally in the hook. This is not to say that Budd Schulberg had not done his own research. He did. But here was a project that had been snatched away from him, from Miller. And and yet two years later, here it was to be made.
Speaker Do you think then that a view from the bridge is some measure of reclaiming that space? The waterfront drama for himself.
Speaker I don’t think that this is his attempt. I don’t think on. I don’t think.
Speaker Did it strike you as just, shall we say, happenchance or just lucky coincidence that the next Arthur Miller play after On the Waterfront is a view from the strangely.
Speaker I don’t think has anything to do with the fact that On the Waterfront came out before because he had been working on this play before, on the waterfront, before the hook. This had been in his notebook earlier on the story had already heard even thinking about him at work. No, I know you haven’t been working on it, but that play existed in his mind as an idea. I don’t think it was in any way written in response to. I certainly don’t think it was a deliberate attempt to get back at Kazan by showing an informer in his next play. I don’t think that for a second, though. There are those who believe it to be true.
Speaker Yeah, well, you know what I mean, a. We’ll go back and do the same thing again. You didn’t feel like you did the job.
Speaker So I don’t think a view from the bridge is the same themes as the crucible in the Crispell. It’s about a man who refuses to inform. A view from the bridge is about a man who does inform. But I don’t think either play is about informing. I think both plays about betrayal. And I think that is fundamental to Miller’s work. The fact that people are flawed, that indeed they do betray one another. The question is the basis on which they can live their lives thereafter. Now, in the case of a view from the bridge, there’s no way that Eddie Cambone can live. He has to make a decision either. Catherine grows up, leaves a marries somebody else, in which case he’s destroyed or he tries to cling onto her, in which case he is destroyed. He is a classic tragic hero. He has no room for maneuver. The value of his life is how he chooses to leave it.
Speaker You say that because it seems to me that somewhere there is no room for maneuver, which I think can and did have room for maneuver.
Speaker There are plenty of people who went through that system. Either you were blacklisted and you went the long route, which quite a lot of people did, or you confessed to all the details of yourself without having to advocate that other people betrayed other people as well. I mean, it’s not just his testimony. It is the terms of the advertisement that he published, which was enormously self-righteous, that demanded that other people had a civic duty to turn in people to name names. And that’s what I think got up so many people’s noses. It wasn’t at the same time a Miller. Miller never fundamentally blames him because he was put in that position by a system. And it’s the system that Miller blames.
Speaker Miller is really unique where he isn’t. Miller is always somebody who sees a bigger picture.
Speaker Well, think that. Who did he want to play? Eddie Carbon. He wanted Lee Jay Cobb. Lee Jay Cobb had name names before the House un-American Activities Committee. So and I asked him why that and why did he later work with Kazan again? And he said it’s because how could I possibly maintain my own blacklist? He would be doing the same thing that the U.S. had done. And so he turned to Lee Jay Cobb and he turned to Kazan again.
Speaker We didn’t get to. Yeah. So does that play success?
Speaker I mean, is it a view from the bridge is less successful in terms of the number of weeks that it ran even than the Crucible event? And by nineteen fifty five, there was a sense of crisis. I think in Miller’s life he saw America going one way and ingoing another. He was losing his audience. He was also increasingly aware of the right wing backlash against him himself that would eventually lead to him being called before new act. But his plays had been condemned and picketed by the American Legion, Catholic War Veterans, or all the right wing groups in the country, and attacked by many of the sort of liberal right in America in terms of reviews of those plays. So he’s seen as very much faster. I think he felt himself increasingly out of step by 1955. And quite apart from the marriage to Marilyn Monroe, that was just about to happen. I don’t know that he knew where he was going to go next. I think it was a real sense that he and the public for which he had written had gone into separate directions.
Speaker So the premier is in 1955 and has Miller and Marilyn lost there, no infatuation. Have they stopped doing their dance? Has Miller sort of settled into a happy family life with Mary?
Speaker By 1955? Of course, his his own marriage had gone further downhill. And Marilyn was back in the picture again. She had written.
Speaker They had met up again when Marilyn moved east, which she did for a while. She found her own production company and worked out of the East Coast for a while. They met again, began an affair. And that was conducted while a view from the bridge was going on. Indeed, in order to get to rehearsals for a view from the bridge. He had to walk past that famous photograph of Marilyn with a skirt blur blowing up around her her waist. And he walked past that every time in order to explain to the actors what it must be like to feel sexually frustrated by loving a younger woman. So the irony is that that were becoming too overwhelming. Yes, the affair was now fully blown and divorce was the next step.
Speaker Yeah, it’s interesting that there’s that thing that holds him back just a few years earlier. He is in some way, I think, true to himself. By having the affair with her.
Speaker There was a side of of Miller that I think was repressed for a long time. And Marilyn released that repression. The relationship between Arthur Miller and his wife, Mary, had really just become frigid. The icicles had formed and Marilyn plainly melted.
Speaker It’s funny you think of any with Beatrice, and there is that.
Speaker Sort of. Well, there’s an interesting difference between the two versions, a view from the bridge when it opened in America was a one at play, a large inversed.
Speaker Like what was done? Well, we.
Speaker There’s an interesting difference to me between the two versions of a view from the bridge, the one in America is a one act version, first verse drama, The American War that opens on Broadway. It is actually not the play that we have today. Now, the version that opened on Broadway is one act play because it opened with another one act play. It’s a play that ends with Beatrice’s name on his lips. He dies, you know, with her name is what? His wife’s name. What the next verse. And the two act version was put on in Britain where Peter Brook directed it. He dies with Catherine’s name on his lips. And this corresponded with the move out of his marriage and into the relationship with Marilyn Monroe. By that stage, he he was the Edie Karbo. And if you like, who now had the niece.
Speaker It was not a tragic figure. We did not know.
Speaker So, as you say, you know, you imagine that if he’s getting a call before he woke, you know, happened before. So why being 55, he is with Barrowland and they go through some silly dance that I don’t want to talk about. But why then is he called in 56?
Speaker I think the only possible reason that Miller was called before you I can 56 was the relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Nothing has changed. The evidence that they have got then is the same evidence that they had had earlier. It’s Margaret Thatcher wants to talked about the oxygen of publicity. And that’s exactly what Hubach needed. Miller alone couldn’t give him anything. His career had dwindled to some degree by then.
Speaker The publicity is this. I mean, the oxygen publicity.
Speaker He was driving them to Arthur Miller, you know, the view from the bridge, the picture they got to bring human to you. I can picture the letter. Why? Why would they pick Miller?
Speaker And in 1956, he had a series of plays which are become less and less successful. He was not the major figure he’d been in 1949. Time to pick him up was around the turn of 49, 50, 51, 52. Even the Crispell 53. They didn’t do it. There was no more information on his file than there had been earlier. The difference was his relationship with Marilyn Monroe and that guaranteed publicity. Indeed, we know from Miller that the chairman of the committee offered to call the whole thing off.
Speaker If Marilyn Monroe in simple terms, or he said, oh, OK, I don’t want to sort of pass those things out. Good. Bette.
Speaker So it’s a crass move, but he works part is this is a new thing for up to the publicity.
Speaker Hugh, it was about publicity as the Senate committee with McCarthy had been about publicity. So, yes, that’s the sole justification, theoretically, of course. People were called before these hearings in connection with legislation. And in this case, passport legislation. And they did spend a little time talking about passports, but they pretty quickly dumped that. It was also clear from the testimony they couldn’t care less about the place either because they were through those in a matter of a minute or two. It wasn’t about that at all. It was about names. So that was the point, though, where he had to put on record the names. And it was a very different world, 1956, from the world of 1952, when Kazan was before the committee. After a career was over, McCarthy had gone. Miller was in the theater. Nobody cared less about theater. He was not quite at the same risk for other people earlier had been, although he still, if he refused to name names, stood have a year in jail and a thousand dollar fine.
Speaker So is he does he have personally as much risk as it does?
Speaker I mean, you know, the stakes stakes were high for Kazam because Cezannes future was to be in films. And there he could be damaged if he refused to cooperate. The stakes for familiar were much lower. I mean, he has this public reputation as being sort of icon of integrity who stood up to him. But he himself doesn’t make those claims because he knows that by then the temperature had gone down considerably. And although he was at risk, his liberty was at risk. He could have been put in jail for for a year, could have had a substantial fine. His career would not substantially have been damaged.
Speaker I want to go back to the second millennium. And the fact I think you’re right and I think Arthur is right, that Maryland is the instigator, at least the switch that knocks them out. So they have said that this commie sympathizer pinko is shtupping America is growing. What is that with precipitating this? They want to keep their marriage from happening.
Speaker I don’t think they had any motive other than self advertisement. I don’t think they particularly care where Mother Marilyn Monroe was going off with Arthur Miller or not. They just wanted Marilyn Monroe on the same piece of celluloid as themselves, on the same news reports, in the same newspaper headlines as themselves. That was the sole function, as far as I can see, of the hearing.
Speaker How naked does it mean? Literally, does it? Yeah. In terms of that desire, in terms of what the committee says before to Arthur?
Speaker Well, the most patent example of that is the offer from the chairman of the committee to waive the entire hearing if Marilyn Monroe will agree to have a picture taken of herself with that chairman.
Speaker I’m going to ask you to help. Which of a story? All right. Where is Arthur?
Speaker How does he get a call? When does he get a call? Does he get a letter? Do they knock on the door?
Speaker Miller Miller was approached by a representative of the chairman of the committee of UAC and asked if he would agree to have a photograph taken off the chairman with Marilyn Monroe. He was assured that if that photograph was taken, the hold hearings would be called off. That’s how serious a threat Arthur Miller was to the American republic. I mean, it’s absurd to me. It’s just it is a total absurdity. But the whole thing by that stage become an absurdity. It was a charade in which everyone had their roles to play. It was a piece of bad theater. And Julie played itself out. The problem was that that piece of bad theater still had the power to damage lives. It cost Miller something like 40 thousand dollars simply to defend himself.
Speaker OK. So Miller, I think we pointed out, has very little at stake and even he agrees that he has very talented. Does Marylyn have anything at stake? I mean, she’s still in that world and it’s still nineteen fifty six. And people still don’t like communists.
Speaker Maria, nobody had anything on Marilyn Monroe. Yes, she was marrying this man who had a past. She had passed of a completely different kind. I don’t think Marilyn’s career potentially was damaged. Well, although the studios believed it was. And immediately before the hearings, the head of 20th Century Fox, Skouras, came and went to them in the apartment and tried to persuade Miller to go in and name names.
Speaker He tried to persuade Marilyn to persuade Miller to do that. And she refused. Not least because she had enormous sympathy herself. She had come from nowhere. Her sympathies were with the common people.
Speaker If Arthur Miller had once had these left leaning principles, they were effectively her principles as well, even if she hadn’t articulated them over the top over this airplane.
Speaker OK. Very, very. That was two way round. Advice about Arthur on and on. What are they afraid of? Help me answer, Kathy.
Speaker Because, you know, it’s easy. Yes. Circa 2002 to say, oh, it’s all a joke, but what are they afraid of in 1956? Even a bit by 1956.
Speaker Hollywood had a hot property and Marilyn Monroe. They also knew that she was anxious to get some sort of independent control over her work. They were at risk of losing her. Suddenly, she’s gonna get married to this man who’s hauled before the House un-American Activities Committee. They want to protect their product. So Spierer, scarce head of Twentieth Century Fox, goes to see them in New York on the eve of the hearings to persuade Arthur Miller to name names and thus protect his investment. Twentieth Century Fox, his investment in Marilyn Monroe. And Marilyn Monroe waiver. Marilyn does not waiver for a second. She supports, unsurprisingly, the man that she’s about to marry. But also, I think, another reason for her not wavering.
Speaker She has enormous sympathy with the dispossessed, the ordinary working person, which is how she interpreted Arthur Miller’s Marxism as operating. So, no, there was a united front against girls. He continued a correspondence after this. He would keep writing to Miller, trying to persuade him at all stages. Even subsequently, when they were contempt proceedings, he was still writing to him to persuade him to change his mind and named names. Scarers was.
Speaker You know, Miller, one of the great courts that I’ve read of Munro, is that Miller is going to tell the community to go itself. But Arthur kind of course, he’s better language. It seems that Miller Monroe not only has this empathy with the working class, but with his great admiration. For Miller and for his integrity. Right.
Speaker And that that sets him apart is that I think part of the attraction for Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller was that she regarded him as a man of integrity. How could she still be attracted to him if he now reneged on that integrity? That was the very thing that had drawn her to him. So, no, she wasn’t going to change and she wasn’t going to undermine his position. Does the testimony go well? The testimony is strange and bizarre and very unlike the testimony back in 1952. It starts with a with Kazam. I mean, it begins with a few desultory questions about passports, moves on to an account of the plays, then moves on to demands for him to name names. And then Miller, strangely, is allowed to make extensive statements about his own political positions and his patriotism. I mean, I think Miller, in retrospect, feels he gave them too much. He should have challenged many of the questions that were put to him, which were simply had nothing to do with passports, which was the reason for the hearings in the first place. So I think he feels that he gave them too much. But if you read Lillian Hellman’s hearings, she, too, comes out as something of a super patriot, even while refusing to name names.
Speaker You know, one of the things that. It’s really Poppen, isn’t it? But his personal beliefs Miller does about his life. But the Hollywood tents said the committee had no right. And it seems to me that it illustrates either what moral weakness on Miller’s part, how much things have changed in 10 years time at least. Right.
Speaker Many of the times that Miller made, he wouldn’t have been given a chance to make if it’s been five years earlier, four years earlier. Whenever anyone tried to provide the context for their beliefs in the past, the gavel would be pounded and they would be immediately silenced. He was allowed to make statements with out interruption. This is very strange and very bizarre. I think to me it shows that they really had not too much interest in the proceedings. I didn’t think they were interested in gunning for Miller. They they were getting what they wanted, which was the headlines, which they duly got, linking their them their names to Miller, but more importantly, to Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker How bad was Ms. OK.
Speaker Was that a plus? Yes. Okay, great. Thanks so. But there is this question also that the Hollywood Ten says you have no right to ask these questions.
Speaker And here’s I think that’s what Miller meant by feeling he’d given one. Tell me. Right. Right. Okay. I think Miller felt that he had given them too much.
Speaker He didn’t actually challenge their right to ask certain questions. The only sticking ground was naming other people. And apart from that, he was willing to answer almost anything they asked. This had not been true of the Hollywood Ten. It had not been true of many of those had appeared earlier. People like Paul Robeson, who simply spent his time mocking the committee very successfully. Do you think Miller regrets? Yeah, I think Miller regrets saying too much. Not challenging them earlier on, just taking out that one piece of territory, although, of course, that one piece of territory was the vital one.
Speaker He says, Do not ask me to betray my sense of self.
Speaker It seems very we have in the background there, we’re seeing you up and standing up.
Speaker He says, you know, my sense of self is very reminiscent of Propter.
Speaker They the moment in the committee hearings when he declares that he is not going to offer up other people’s name and explain that he couldn’t do so because he would be destroying his own sense of who he wants people to do. So is almost a paraphrase of the speech made by John Proctor. And in fact, I asked him about that once and he said, what else is there to say? What Procter says, what he says is, in his view, the only thing you could say with any integrity. And this is what puzzles him about Kazan. How could you live with yourself after you had done this? It’s not just the view of other people that matters. It’s your view of yourself. I think if you read Kazan’s autobiography, there are moments when he wavers or wavered in the subsequent years. He wasn’t sure that he should have done what he did either.
Speaker Yeah. We’re out of here. OK. The bombshell is not that Arthur Miller refuses to name names, but what?
Speaker I mean, the interesting thing to me about the hearings is that Marilyn Monroe probably got him into them. Marilyn Monroe probably got him out of them because when he suddenly announces that he intends to marry Marilyn Monroe. Sounds awfully like news management, as if he’s designing tomorrow’s headlines, which are not going to be about his grilling, but about the marriage of the sex icon of America.
Speaker And if you write this, you get the right, as we say.
Speaker He gets rather mixed spin, as a matter of fact. They managed to put together the fact that he is an ex read or an associate of red and the fact that he’s marrying Marilyn Monroe. The worst part of it for Fox. The absolute worst possible it is. But by that stage, Marilyn’s next film is already set up. And it’s going to be the first Marilyn Monroe Productions film. So she could care.
Speaker But folks, I mean, they’re afraid that, you know, as Miller calls it, the right wing yahoos are going to be picketing Marilyn Monroe.
Speaker Right. Yeah. What the fear is. Yes. That’s the fear. Wow. All right. Obviously, from 20th Century Fox, his worst nightmare is that Marilyn Monroe would be tainted with communism. And as a result of the hearings, her name was associated with somebody who was himself associated with communism so that they had lost everything. Especially since she was now going off to. Especially since she was now going off to appear in the first of her own production printings. I’m sorry, the fox takes those. Yeah. For 20th Century Fox. The headlines that appeared after the Hubach hearings were a disaster.
Speaker So what happens then? I mean, do they just go into a hole or they’re in Maryland?
Speaker Of course, the announcement of the marriage led to a frenzied press conference. Marilyn was then living in Sutton Place. The reporters closed in on her while Arthur was on the train on the way back. And then eventually they had to decide to go ahead with the marriage as soon as possible and headed off up to Connecticut.
Speaker But, you know, you say that Marilyn gets Arthur in and then gets Arthur. He’s part is she just a bystander or she active in any way in helping Arthur get through this?
Speaker Or if you call it or deal about people, it’s called an ordeal. I mean, it’s unpleasant. It’s going to cost him a ton of money.
Speaker She’s just a bystander.
Speaker Marilyn Monroe was enormously supportive during this, as you would expect her to be this man she’s about to marry politically. She didn’t do anything, but then politically, she didn’t have to do anything. It was her mere presence and her association with Arthur Miller that actually had the effect that was wanted.
Speaker So when they go out in front of Sutton Place. I mean, she basically has great command of the press and the headlines. Started Jay, right?
Speaker Yes. The story begins to change almost immediately after the hearings. The first headlines are about the hearings. The next headlines are about the marriage and they’re looking forward. And you can see how the times have changed. No one really is any longer terribly interested in what the House un-American Activities Committee is up to.
Speaker Right. It becomes a story about two lovers that are going to add or maybe not be allowed to take their honeymoon together. I mean, it’s yes, the spin is in favor of them instead of, you know.
Speaker Yeah. Already by 1950, sex is not only on the back burner, the light is virtually out underneath it. It went on, of course, but ever less power, says Miller.
Speaker That’s it. That’s his end of experience with you. He testifies. He says no. They say, thank you very much.
Speaker That’s right. Because he refused to name names. He was potentially in contempt of Congress. And actually, there was a vote and the vote was that he was in contempt of Congress. And he stood to be imprisoned and indeed was sentenced to three months in prison of a five hundred dollar fine. And it took a couple of years before that was reversed.
Speaker OK. So I want to shift gears completely stop for just a quick segment where we talk about the press in Connecticut. You know, when they get married and it’s just it’s just as they say, Araf, I mean, it’s just insane. Do you think Miller felt as though, you know. Well, we’ll get married and then will be able to live a private life.
Speaker Does he have any clue? I think both Miller and Marilyn Monroe had this fantasy of the life they were going to have together, which was that they were going to have some privacy. That was going to be a family life, family life for which Marilyn Monroe had always yearned. And I think Miller in particular was taken aback by the huge crowds that began to pursue them, not only in Connecticut, but when they reach London. Another huge crowd is going to be waiting for them then. And it was the first sign for him that the privacy that he needed in order to work wasn’t going to be granted him.
Speaker It just seems to me he’s getting involved into something that he’s just. Yeah. No idea what he’s stepping into. Do you think, you know, we have this picture of Marilyn falling into Arthur’s arms in Connecticut. Do you think they found comfort in each other at all?
Speaker I think at the beginning of the relationship and of their marriage, they did bring something to each other that each of them needed. I mean, Miller needed that sort of warm personal relationship that he really hadn’t had for a long time. She needed some sort of intellectual stimulation, some sort of support, which is also not had for a long time. She felt as though she was on her own fighting her battles against the studio. But very quickly, things would begin to come unspoiled. Miller had no idea of the degree, for example, to which she was dependent upon prescription drugs. And he had his first insight into that within weeks of the marriage falls apart pretty quickly.
Speaker I mean, it’s not you can’t really say that it was a successful marriage. He said, you know, you can’t.
Speaker I mean, it’s a relationship which had its moments and perhaps had she had the child that she lost. It might have been different. But really, she was motivated by her career. She whatever she thought in her fantasies about giving it up to become a housewife. Deed a Jewish housewife because they married in the Jewish faith, which she quickly abandoned. I think those illusions were just that she was never going not to be a film star.
Speaker It seems to me that they don’t want to go too deep into it, but they really didn’t. They were living separate lives. This was a marriage.
Speaker I think they were looking for something different in the marriage and they never really quite intersected what they did at times. There were idyllic moments and Millers talked about those idyllic moments, but they were fewer and fewer. As the years went went by and he found himself actually not having time to write. But increasingly supporting her. Ironically, he found himself in the position that Mary had been in his own first marriage while she was more than she was more famous than he was.
Speaker What brings Miller back?
Speaker I think because Anna Miller come together again, fundamentally because of Lincoln Center. The project to create a supposedly national theater for America. And Kazan was a prime mover of that. They wanted Miller to write the first play. And therefore, it was natural that Kazan should directed. As it turned out, it was paradoxical. Kazan was also a character in that first play after the fall.
Speaker How much you think Miller’s Broadway failures are driving him back to Kisan? He had his success. I mean, is there that sense of I want to try to recapture something I had lost?
Speaker Miller It always thought that Kazan was the best director of his work. And I’m sure that when the proposal was put forward that he might direct that play, he responded positively, partly for that reason, as well as desperately wanting there to be a national theater, is what Miller It always lacked a theater of his own. And he thought he was going to get it in Lincoln Center. For a while, it looked as though he might have done. And so there were reasons on both sides for Kazan and Miller to get back together again. Well, that doesn’t mean that there was that same easy, brotherly familiarity that had once been some sort of trust had been breached. And I don’t think they ever had that natural relationship again.
Speaker But. Is Miller not being true to himself by working with a guy whose name names? I mean, there are people like normal life and people in the life, like there are people in the public who are upset with Miller for going back to Miller, not being true to his sense of self.
Speaker How fundamentally could Miller have blacklisted Elia Kazan when he was against blacklists? He was never in any doubt and has never been any doubt about the villain of the piece. And it wasn’t Kazan. It was the House un-American Activities Committee. It was that whole period of hysteria in the 1950s that put weight onto people that they should not have been required to bear. Whoever said people should be that strong, he said of Lee Jay Cobb. And I think that applies also to Kazan. Yes, he hated what Kazan did, but he hated still more the system that made him do it.
Speaker You know, there was a sense that Miller alone has more empathy or understanding than almost anybody for workers. And yet there is also, ironically, a sense that Miller is the one man who was held up as the greatest saint of all. I mean, maybe you could hold such a lofty position and be as generous. You need to be in that lofty place to be as generous as well.
Speaker If you look at what after the fall as a play is about. It is a contemplation by Miller of his own life and the failures and betrayals for which he was guilty, but also the failures and betrayals in the public life, which he took is one example. And the Holocaust, which is a part of that play, was another example. It’s a play about the need to accept the fact that we’re flawed. We’re born after the fall. We are guilty. But we have to find ways of reconstructing ourselves and the world and moving forward. And part of that reconstruction is reforging relationships with the people who themselves have been guilty of betrayal.
Speaker So is after the fall. Huge success.
Speaker I mean, was it well received by after the fall was well received by members of the audience, but not well received by almost all the critics who were obsessed by the fact that they believed it to be solely about Miller’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe. That was not, however, how it was received in Europe, you know.
Speaker But let’s talk about New York. I mean, it’s a scam.
Speaker Yes, it was a success, a scandalous success. That is to say, people went to see it. Who’s to say exactly what their motives were? Because Kazan made a point of dressing up Barbara Loden, who played the Marilyn Monroe figure in a blonde wig to look exactly like Marilyn Monroe. And plainly to most people who went to see it in New York, that’s what it was about. It’s a distortion of the play, but it’s an understandable response.
Speaker And the press was upset with Miller. He did not get good notice right now.
Speaker I take it that the press, well, were morally affronted and so were a number of individuals morally affronted that he should have chosen to reveal aspects of Marilyn Monroe’s life as they saw it on the public stage. But of course, her life was also Miller’s life. If it was partly confessional play, how could he tell his own life and exclude from it? Marilyn Monroe and indeed his first wife, Mary.
Speaker Okay. Yeah.
Speaker Oh, hi. I’m sorry. They’ve made the wounds that they were they were inflicted upon them. You know, it’s. It was a half century ago, and yet it seems in so many ways to define how we see life.
Speaker I don’t think either Kisan or Miller will escape the shadow and the implications of those years back in the 1950s or indeed the impact of the 1930s on them. They were what shaped these people. The interesting thing is I think the play’s escape it today. If there’s a production of The Crucible, the person writing program notes has to explain what the House un-American Activities Committee was. Who on Earth Senator McCarthy was? The play is no longer read in the same way, no longer seen. So those seen in that sense, those plays have escaped the past. The people. No, never. But I don’t think we do escape the past.
Speaker I don’t either. You know, Miller. Is seeing, as I say, you’ve heard of it as a saint by many people, as an exemplar of how one should behave in the face of that, kind of as he would commit hysteria. He seems to be one of the very few people, at least that emerged from that dark time unblemished, didn’t lose his job, didn’t challenge his sense of self. Do you think that’s Arthur Miller sees himself?
Speaker I don’t think Miller’s version of himself corresponds with the public view. I don’t think he believes his parents before Kurek was a heroic one. He’s fully aware of the context of 1956 that made it a less fraught occasion than it had been for so many of the people before him. He’s also a few. If you look at a place like after the fourth, aware of his own weaknesses and faults. It’s the astonishing integrity of that play that he admits to those weaknesses and faults. It’s not at all his attempt to absolve himself of guilt, but his acknowledgment of that guilt.
Speaker What is that guilt? And in particular, what do you think? He’s made his testimony before he went unheroic or not not heroic and heroic sort of thing.
Speaker I think his fundamental guilt, like so many other people, was that he was taken in. By the Soviet Union that he did not register quickly enough. The vicious anti-Semitism. Its effect on writers. I mean, later in 1965, he became president of International Pen and worked for the release of writers in the Soviet Union. I think he believes he was a snow job was done on him and a whole generation in the 1930s. And I think he feels guilt for that, responsibility for that. I don’t think that will ever go away. Not in regard to human. In regard to Kurek, I think he was fully aware that he had much greater room for maneuver than many other people had had. I think he feels guilty that he did not peremptorily challenge a number of the lines of investigation inquiry that they underwent. I think he feels that he should not have given them as much as he did, that he shouldn’t have felt it necessary to come across as quite such a super patriot. Not that he’s not patriotic, but the requirement that you should parade your patriotism is something quite other.
Speaker I want to stop for a second. I want to read you, Dalton.
Speaker What do you think is it is it pointless, as Trumbo says, to search for villains or heroes in the story of the blacklist? Is it possible even.
Speaker Is it possible even to find them?
Speaker I think the that statement is almost antithetical to what Miller believes, because its proposition is that we are all victims and hence not responsible for our actions. The whole essence of Miller’s life, the whole essence of his drama, is that we are responsible for our actions. That past decisions have present consequences. What we do in the world changes the world and impacts on the world. Therefore, there is a distinction to be made between those who betrayed and those who did not. At the same time, he knows the pressure that would brought to bear on those people kind of pressure that should not have been brought to bear on that.
Speaker So, I mean, you know, I know everybody focuses on the only victim’s thing. But what I’m trying to get at is other villains and other heroes.
Speaker I don’t think in in plain terms, there are heroes and villains. Every individual was faced with making a decision. Every individual circumstance was different. They appear before the committee at different stages when the politics of America was different. And you have to take that into account at the same time in making that decision. They were aware that there were going to be consequences and that those consequences were not going away. When he had his walk in the woods with Kazan, that was what he said to him. He said, people are going to remember this. And he was right.
Speaker They have.
Speaker Yes, fairly, provided you also remember what it was that put him in the position where he had to make such a choice.
Speaker OK, great. All right. You’ll tell me, soldier.
Speaker Coming up, we’ll be 20, so psychotic. So for a sec. All right.
Speaker We got.
