Arthur Miller: Writer

What a real playwright has to do

is to say to the audience, in effect,

"This is what you think...

you're seeing in life every day,"

and then to turn it around and say,

"This is what it really is."

Imagine if we knew the truth.

Man: That's a very lovely thought, all right.

That would be great thing.

And once, sometimes, in a lifetime,

a playwright can get at it, really.

Man: Playwright Arthur Miller has received

virtually every artistic award which denotes

distinction, creativity, and acclaim.

Man 2: A great deal of publicity attended Arthur Miller.

Dick Cavett: ...with a giant of the American theater--

Arthur Miller.

Rebecca Miller: My father had become

a national icon of the theater decades before I was born.

He had lived through so many different eras,

almost like different lifetimes.

Man 4: Why did you refuse the invitation

of President Johnson?

Man 5: Are you a member of the Communist Party

or have you ever been

a member of the Communist Party?

Rebecca: Early on, I recognized

that his public persona was so different

from the man I knew,

and I felt I was the only filmmaker

that he would let close enough

to really see what he was like.

So I started doing interviews with him

and his siblings, friends,

taking a lot of home footage

and gathering old movies and photos,

over a period of about 20 years.

And all that footage sat in storage

for quite a long time, until I decided

it should be shut away no longer.

Rebecca: Have you decided on what to wear?

Arthur Miller: Well, you sort of decided for me.

It's what I wore all week.

I got up and I sat down, and I'm just breathless.

Rebecca: OK, Pop!

Miller: All those goddamn angles drive you crazy.

Rebecca: Dad, do you think there are any similarities

between building furniture and writing plays?

The way I look at it, it's...

there are forces that want to break out,

and forces that want to contract.

And if you've got a sense of form,

you can make that projectile on stage...

move like a living...thing.

And move people with it.

If it just lies there... motionless,

it means that some of the forces in it

haven't been captured.

Or you haven't evoked them.

Did your father like to eat as much as you do?

Some restaurants, they loved him,

so they'd never let him pay.

I went into one restaurant in those years,

twenty-five years ago,

sat down, had a little lunch,

waiter came over to me and said--

leaned over the table and said,

"Your father was a better dresser."

Miller: My father had arrived in New York all alone,

from the middle of Poland,

before his seventh birthday.

Came here alone

with a tag on his...coat.

And his family was here.

But why--I never understood why,

how they could have done that.

I think they must have thought there was something wrong with him.

Miller: He used to say that

he would always be sleeping with idiots.

And I have the feeling that he may have been

in some kind of an institution.

Rebecca: You think that they thought there was something--

Yeah.

I can't imagine them leaving him here otherwise.

Rebecca: You mean in Poland?

Miller: Yeah, I think he's right.

Miller: He arrived in New York.

His parents were too busy to pick him up

at Castle Garden,

and sent his next-eldest brother Abe,

going on 10, to find him,

get him through Immigration,

and bring him home to Stanton Street

and a tenement where, in two rooms,

the eight of them lived and worked,

sewing the great, long, many-buttoned cloaks

that were the fashion then.

They sent him to school for about six months.

Figured he had enough.

He never learned how to spell, he never learned how to figure,

then he went right back into the shop.

By the time he was twelve,

he himself was employing two other boys

to sew sleeves on coats alongside him

in some basement workshop.

Kermit: He went on the road,

when he was about 16, as a--

selling at a wholesale level.

He ended up being the support of the entire family,

because he started a business in 1921 or something,

the Miltex Coat Company, which turned out to be

one of the largest manufacturers in this country.

See, we lived in Manhattan then...

on 110th Street, facing the park.

It was a beautiful apartment up on the sixth floor.

We had a chauffeur-driven car; the family was well fixed.

It was the '20s,

and I remember our mother and father

going to a show every weekend

and coming back Sunday morning.

She would be playing the sheet music

of the musicals.

And we would fight about who was going to sing with her.

Or who wasn't going to sing with her.

And who wasn't going to sing with her.

Generally, he wasn't going to sing.

Rebecca: That's nice.

Dad, what does this remind you of?

It reminds me of...

Miller: You know, she could read a novel

in an afternoon.

She was the fastest reader

I have ever met in my life.

Not only that, but she'd remember it

for the rest of her life.

Well, she was a very complicated woman, very complex.

She had the energy of a dynamo.

She could sing, she could play the piano...

She could be quite flamboyant.

She used to dance on the table New Year's Eve.

She could draw, she could-- she was a helluva bridge player.

- She was funny. - Very bitchy.

She had an attitude about most things.

Rebecca: But you kept kosher when you cooked?

Well, yeah. Till she started making bacon.

She loved bacon.

I think she tried to rule and divide the kids.

See, I always considered myself the favorite.

Rebecca: Who was your mother's favorite?

Miller: Yeah, I think I was.

I would, for example, if I didn't want to go to school,

I'd start limping around.

My mother immediately caught on, and she said,

"You don't have to go school today,

you're limping."

And we'd both go to some place and have oysters.

Rebecca: But your mother,

you said that she saw portents in a lot of things, right?

She saw signs.

She saw...mysterious things in the air from time to time.

She'd have feelings from people.

She once sat up in bed in the middle of the night,

she suddenly said, "My mother died."

And indeed, at that moment, her mother had died.

It was spooky.

How you you think that it translated into you, though?

Well, I used to think that the way that a play

was not about what was spoken,

but was between the spoken lines.

That the world, essentially, is not what we call "real."

And these arts are attempting to approach that world.

And it all comes from my mother.

You know, in my case, it's always coming from somewhere.

She was that way.

She idolized artists,

pianists, writers, and so on.

My father had no knowledge of any of that.

Fran: And it was an arranged marriage.

For a woman of her ability to be married off

to a man who couldn't read or write--

I think Gussie taught him now to read,

and then to sign his name.

Miller: She knew she was being wasted, I think.

But she respected him a lot,

and that made up for a lot.

Until he really crashed economically--

she got angry then.

Newsman: These tremendous crowds

which you see gathered outside the Stock Exchange,

are due to the greatest crash

in the history of the New York Stock Exchange.

Miller: First, the chauffer was let go

and the summer bungalow was discarded,

the last of her jewelry had been pawned or sold--

and then another step down: the move to Brooklyn.

Not just the case of my father,

but every boy I knew.

I used to pal around with half a dozen guys,

and all their fathers were simply blown out of the water.

The whole family orbit changed.