Death of a Playwright

Playwrights don't marry Marilyn Monroe. Arthur Miller was the exception.

The celebrated writer of Death of a Salesman, Miller died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, of congestive heart failure. He was 89.

Even before Monroe formally entered the picture in 1956 as his second wife, Miller was famous for his words.

Death of a Salesman, the 1949 play that brought Miller the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize and celebrity, was the heartbreaking tale of Willie Loman, a man who wore out more than shoe leather looking for the American dream.

The Crucible, the 1953 Tony winner for Best Play, echoed the era's Communist witch hunts in Congress with the story of the 17th century witch hunts in Salem, Massachusetts.

Playing for Time, the 1980 TV movie that earned Miller an Emmy for Outstanding Writing, was the portrait of a real-life Nazi concentration camp internee, played by Vanessa Redgrave, who used her violin to stave off execution.

In part, Miller's writing won him four Tonys, two Emmys, one Oscar nomination (for the 1996 film version of The Crucible), the Pulitzer, and a host of lifetime achievement honors, including those bestowed upon him by the Kennedy Center in 1984 and the Tonys in 1999.

As an aside, the writing gave him entree to Hollywood, and access to Hollywood's quintessential creation, Marilyn Monroe.

"She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery," Miller wrote of Monroe in his 1987 autobiography, Timebends, "street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past adolescence."

Miller and Monroe became involved as his first marriage to Mary Grace Slattery was cooling, and the House Un-American Activities Committee was grilling him for information on suspected Communists.

"I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him," Miller said at the time.

In 1957, Miller was found guilty of contempt for refusing to cooperate with the Congressional probe. The conviction was overturned on appeal in 1958.

His marriage to Monroe enjoyed no such stay. It ended in 1961, after five stalked-by-paparazzi years. The union produced no children, but one film, The Misfits (1961), which Miller wrote and Monroe starred in.

Directed by John Huston, The Misfits was a stark, black-and-white portrait of obsolescence in the New West--a cowboy (Clark Gable) without a range, a wife (Monroe) without a marriage, a trick rider (Montgomery Clift) without love for the sport.

The film marked the first, and last, pairing of sex symbols Gable and Monroe. Gable died shortly after filming ended in 1960; Monroe died in 1962, at the age of 36, having never completed another picture.

"You're the saddest girl I've ever met," Miller once told Monroe. She did not disagree.

A year after his divorce from Monroe, Miller wed photographer Inge Morath. They had two children, including writer-director Rebecca Miller, and remained married until Morath's death in 2002. (Arthur Miller also had two children by his first wife.)

Born Oct. 17, 1915, in New York City, Miller stocked shelves, edited stories for the Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan (where he attended college), toiled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, published two novels and staged a Broadway flop (1944's The Man Who Had All the Luck), before enjoying breakout success as a playwright with 1947's All My Sons.

His signature play, Death of a Salesman, would be performed all over the world, including a historic run in China in the 1983, and preserved several times on film. The 1985 TV production, starring Dustin Hoffman, earned Miller an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama/Comedy Special.

Well into his eighth decade, Miller continued to write, and write successfully. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan brought him a 2000 Tony nomination for Best Play. A film version to star Michael Douglas is said to be in the works.

Survivors include his two grandchildren by daughter Rebecca and her husband, Oscar winner Daniel-Day Lewis, who starred in the 1996 big-screen edition of The Crucible.

To Miller, "Grandpa" was a foreign concept to an artist still so vital.

"There was no denying my resistance to that word," Miller wrote in Timebends. "My God, I had hardly begun!"