Mike Wallace se sienta con el dramaturgo ganador del Premio Pulitzer Arthur Miller para discutir el contenido de la autobiografía de Miller, "Timebends", incluidos sus sentimientos sobre la fama, la muerte de un viajante, la era McCarthy y su difícil matrimonio con Marilyn Monroe.
Crédito: Manufacturing Intellect
Crédito: Manufacturing Intellect
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00:00Timebends is the title of Arthur Miller's just-published autobiography, and Timebends
00:05is a strangely appropriate way to characterize the course of the life of this preeminent
00:10American playwright, because over his 72 years, his life and times have bent in and out of
00:15the bitter Depression years, in and out of immense professional acclaim, in and out of
00:20two failed marriages and into a long, fine one, in and out of political controversy,
00:26and in and out of fashion in the fickle world of American letters.
00:31You wrote Death of a Salesman when you were 33 years old. How long did it take you?
00:35Well, the first act, more or less, was a matter of one day and a night. I then rested and
00:49worked about six weeks on the second act, and put the whole thing together. But, of
00:55course, there's a lifetime in that play.
00:57Death of a Salesman was a triumph for Arthur Miller. It won him both the Pulitzer Prize
01:01and the New York Drama Critics Award. The critics were comparing him to Henrik Ibsen
01:05and Eugene O'Neill.
01:07You inevitably begin to feel a kind of impact of power, which is sexual, it is financial,
01:16it is everything. You begin to shift and change, if you're not careful, which I wasn't. People
01:22now were talking to me differently. Women, men, they were looking at me like an icon
01:28of some kind.
01:29Arthur Miller came a long way for a Jewish boy born in Harlem and raised in Brooklyn.
01:34He was the son of an immigrant coat manufacturer, a man who couldn't read English. His father
01:40lost everything in the crash of 1929, and so Miller grew up a child of the Depression,
01:46and that was to show in his writing and his politics. He had to work and save for two
01:50years before he could afford to go to the University of Michigan in the 1930s. And at
01:55school in the Midwest, he seemed to be trying to reach beyond the New York he knew to touch
02:00the American heartland he knew so much less about. He even looked for this in his first
02:05wife, Mary Slattery, an Irish Catholic from the Midwest.
02:09Yeah, we wanted something, each one from the other. She wanted the experience of the intellectual,
02:17the Jew, the artist, and I wanted America, something beyond New York. That's part of
02:30what attracted both of us. We were mysteries to each other.
02:34During the middle 40s, Miller wrote what he called trunk plays. That's where they wound
02:38up, in the trunk. And he had one flop on Broadway. Discouraged, he gave himself one last chance
02:44at playwriting, and wrote All My Sons in 1947. It was a breakthrough for him, a success.
02:52But nothing prepared him for the success of Death of a Salesman, and the impact it would
02:56have on his personal life and his marriage.
03:00The night that it opened...
03:00Well, then I felt with my wife then...
03:04Mary Slattery.
03:05Yes, that we were... It wasn't enough for me, suddenly. I thought I had a feeling that
03:15we were not close, that we were not one.
03:18That you had outgrown her?
03:19I had outgrown her.
03:20It's hard for you to say.
03:21Yeah.
03:22I hadn't realized until I read the book that you were in psychoanalysis for some time.
03:27Yeah.
03:29What drove you to do it?
03:30My marriage. The fact that I was unhappy.
03:34Your first marriage?
03:34Yes.
03:35To Mary Slattery.
03:35And I thought that that would teach me something that I didn't know about how to live. Well,
03:42it really didn't. It just illuminated the fact that I didn't know how to live. And that
03:48I could have told you in the first place.
03:51The Millers kept their marriage together through the early fifties, a period in which he produced
03:55The Crucible, a play about the Salem witch trials. That play opened during the hearings
04:00of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the parallels were striking. A few years
04:06later he heard from the committee himself. They wanted to ask him about some left-wing
04:10meetings he had gone to.
04:12They wanted you to name names?
04:14Yeah.
04:14And what did you say to them?
04:15I said, look, I'll tell you about me, but I'm not going to tell you about anybody else.
04:19Had I thought, put it this way, that somebody I knew was a spy or working against the United
04:26States, that'd be a different story. What are we talking about? We're talking about
04:30actors, a few playwrights. Most of them were actors, directors. What earthly effect could
04:37these people have on security in the United States, or anything else?
04:43And they held you in contempt?
04:45They voted me in contempt, and we appealed it to the Court of Appeals, and they threw
04:49it all out.
04:51Your friend, Elia Kazan, named names.
04:52Right.
04:53You couldn't accept that?
04:54No, it seemed to me to be a wrong thing to do.
04:59Elia Kazan had been the director of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman.
05:04Kazan had been your good friend.
05:06Oh, yeah.
05:07Collaborated.
05:08I loved him. Very close friends.
05:09And that simply split it?
05:11Yes, it did.
05:12How long didn't you speak?
05:16I don't know. It was a number of years.
05:19It was during this time that Miller divorced his first wife, Mary, and his impending marriage
05:24to Marilyn Monroe became headlines in the tabloids. Miller maintains that his appearance
05:29before that committee, in a strange way, had more to do with Marilyn than with the committee's
05:34search for communists.
05:35Chairman Walter proposed to my lawyer just before the hearing began that if it could
05:41be arranged for him to take a photograph with Marilyn, he'd call off the whole thing.
05:46The congressman wanted a photograph with Marilyn Monroe?
05:49With himself.
05:50Yes.
05:51In the picture. We could have aborted the whole thing in five minutes.
05:55And declined to do it?
05:57Yeah. And I didn't do it.
06:00Their marriage caused a sensation. Arthur Miller moved from the theater pages to the gossip columns.
06:05You know that people said at the time that you were together,
06:08what in the world is Arthur doing this for?
06:11Arthur is an innocent.
06:14What in the world? Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe?
06:17That innocence is exactly the point.
06:20She also, in a way, was moving into a world she knew nothing about.
06:27A world of getting up in the morning, making breakfast, and living in it.
06:31That was an innocence there.
06:33Did she want that, do you think?
06:35With part of herself. She wanted it with part of herself, yes.
06:39And with the rest?
06:40She wanted to be a great star.
06:43He wrote about her,
06:44I never saw her unhappy in a crowd.
06:47Her stardom was her triumph, nothing less. It was her life's achievement.
06:51The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that
06:54no space existed between herself and this star.
06:57She was Marilyn Monroe, and that was what was killing her.
07:01You knew that it was doomed.
07:03I didn't know it was doomed, but I certainly felt it had a good chance to be.
07:09You said to her, I keep trying to teach myself how to lose you,
07:13but I can't learn yet.
07:15And she says, why must you lose me?
07:19Well, it just shows you the power of instinct over what's left of your brains
07:26at such moments when you're being drawn to someone,
07:30and you sense that it may not work,
07:35and you can't stop it anyway.
07:37Your face changes when you talk about her.
07:39Excuse me?
07:40Your face changes when you talk about her.
07:43In what way?
07:44Well, I think you're still...
07:48Those were tough years.
07:50Wonderful years and terrible years.
07:51Sure.
07:53They were.
07:55Although it was a lot of pain, certainly for her and certainly for me.
07:59Why? What did it do to you?
08:00Well, it's a defeat.
08:02It always is.
08:03And she was for you quicksand.
08:05In a way.
08:06Yeah, but you could have lost your way.
08:08As a matter of fact, there are those who feel that you did lose your way for five years because of it.
08:13Well, you could say that, I guess.
08:16At the same time,
08:20she was a great person to be with a lot of the time.
08:25She was full of the most astonishing turns and revelations about people.
08:32She was a super-sensitive instrument,
08:35and that's exciting to be around until it starts to self-destruct.
08:40And you and Marilyn were divorced when?
08:43About 61.
08:46And you married Inga a year later.
08:48Yeah.
08:50Today, at the age of 72,
08:52Arthur Miller spends most of the time at his house in the Connecticut countryside.
08:56He has been married for 25 years now to Inga Moran,
09:00a world-class photographer.
09:02They have a daughter, Rebecca, who is a promising young actress.
09:07He has a small cabin on the property where he still writes every day.
09:11Writing every day, right up in that building.
09:13Plays?
09:14Yeah, I'm writing a play now.
09:16Don't ask me why, but I love doing it.
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