Arthur Miller Interviewed About Marilyn Monroe In 1987

[0:03]London Airport, down in the passenger list as Mr and Mrs Miller, a honeymoon couple arrive in Britain to face the biggest headline since Caxton set up in business. Yes, it's Marilyn Monroe arriving with her play right husband, Arthur Miller. Flash bulbs were popping from every angle, but Marilyn had nothing to say for the microphone. By 1956, Miller had married Marilyn Monroe, although he had met her years before during one of his fruitless trips to Hollywood. Leaving California after their first meeting, Miller wrote, I knew I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. With all her radiance, she was surrounded by a darkness that perplexed me. Although it took several years before the two of them were finally together, it was always for many outside observers, a relationship that remained a mystery. Didn't it seem unlikely to you that sort of that that that partnership, a partnership with Marilyn? No, it didn't. It seemed there was an unlikely quality to it, sure, from cultural point of view, if you want to call it that, but, uh, in a way, we were both trying to do the same thing, which was I was desperately trying all my life to, uh, unify experience and myself in that experience. I tried to do it, as I mentioned earlier, in salesman, there would be one figure, a unified figure with society, psychology, everything in one casket. Likewise, one self, I thought there should be a unity in yourself and she, the very, uh, inappropriateness of our of being together was to me the sign that it was appropriate. that we were we were two parts, however, remote of this society, of this life, one was sensuous and life loving, it seemed. while in the center of it, there was a darkness and a tragedy, that I didn't know the dimensions of at that time. Uh, the same thing was true of me, so it wasn't that crazy. And yet, and then at a certain point, you decided, well, you you fell in love, basically. Yes.

[2:27]After that first meeting, though, your first impulse, I think, was to escape, to resist. You write, you've written in the book, flying homeward, her scent still on my hands. I knew my innocence was technical merely, and the fact blacken my heart. But along with it came the certainty that I could after all lose myself in sensuality. In other words, you'd fallen head over heels in love and, uh, That's right.

[3:00]But at the beginning, why do you think she needed you? What drew her to you, do you think? First of all, I took her at her own evaluation, which very few people did. I I thought she was a very serious girl way back. Uh, and uh, that she was struggling, I thought. Because she generally was thought of as being a rather light-headed, if not silly, human being. Uh, that's because I loved her, so I took that attitude toward her. And uh, so the best of her, she thought was in my eye, therefore the hope she had was was with me for that for that time in her life. Many people patronized her, one feels even now today that she's still patronized. Yeah, she's a walking, uh, she's some kind of a, uh, dancing bear or a that she shouldn't be able for example, to have any interest in anything but, uh, sex, uh, showing off for uh, saying dopey things to the newspapers. But you perhaps more than anyone was was was close to her for during that period. Do you, can you describe what you refer to as the inevitability of her tragedy? Why did she have to struggle, do you think, in the way that she did? Uh, basically, her struggle was a psychological struggle against abandonment, against abuse. In our terms today, she would have been thought of as an abused child. Uh, now the psychological damage that that creates is very well known. And uh, she struggled in a lifetime and lost against that damage, that's fundamentally what what it was. Uh, her mother condemned her, her mother was, uh, mentally ill. And uh, try to destroy her at one point. And uh, she it was also a question of a surrounding, uh, fundamentalist religion, which condemned exactly what she was doing, namely acting. Being in show business. Uh, so that there was a stain of the illicit and the condemnation always there at the same time. She was in rebellion when she acted, and she expected punishment as a result of it, somewhere in that psyche. Uh, it's there's a number of forces that were working for it, but many some of them were particular to her, but, uh, by no means an unheard of type. The great thing about her to me was that the struggle was valiant. She was a very courageous human being and, uh, she didn't give up really, I guess till the end. The screenplay of the Misfits, based on Miller's own short story about three small-time horse traders in the Nevada Desert, was motivated by his desire to write a film that would enhance Marilyn's opportunities as a performer. But by the time that John Houston came to direct the film in 1962, Miller's relationship with Monroe had broken down irrecoverably, despite those occasional moments during shooting, when they still appeared to be a couple. The circumstance of making that work were difficult because that was just your last period of life. It was, uh, she would, Marilyn was ill physically, uh, she was destroyed psychologically. Everything was coming to a crisis at the same time, she was having to do the first dramatic role she'd ever tried to do. Uh, she was also in a crisis really with her the way she's being managed by, uh, Paul Strasberg. Uh, that too was everything was coming together in an explosion. So that the picture took months longer than it should have taken and she was simply worn out, as anybody would be. We were shooting in 110° heat some days. It was a Turkish bath up there on that dry lake, unbelievable. So, anyway, it was the end of our marriage, but, uh, it was also a terrible physical time for her. It was precisely at that time, at this very difficult time that you met Inga Morath, who has become your wife and who you've lived with ever since. She was you met her on the set of the Misfits, didn't you at that very moment? She was one of, uh, several photographers from Magnum Photos, which is a cooperative photographic agency in New York, who came out with, uh, Katia Bresson and photographed the Misfits. At that time, however, I had no time for her, or which I just was so absorbed in that movie and trying to keep myself afloat. But we did meet there, and then I met her again some months later in New York. By this time I I was no longer with Marilyn.

[8:27]Look, if you start going under tonight, I'm calling the ambulance. I haven't the strength to go through this alone again. All the experiences of meeting Inga, the breakup with Marilyn and her later suicide, came together in a complicated dramatic form and after the fall. A play which deals with the dilemma of personal responsibility. Then put that stuff away and go to sleep. Could you just stay like five minutes?

[9:11]Oh, Maggie, I've sat beside you in darkened rooms for days and weeks on end. You lost patience with me. That's right, yes. So you lied, right? Yes, I lied. Every day, we're all separate people. I tried not to be, but one finally is a separate person. I have to survive too, Mag. We you're going to put me? You talk it over with your doctor. But if you loved me. Oh, yes, but how would you know, Maggie? Do you know anymore who I am, aside from my name? A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for. So, I'm removing myself and maybe it'll lose its point. Carrie. You based After the Fall on Camus's novel, The Fall, in which a man fails to save a woman from suicide. What made you change the dilemma of the of the central character when you came to doing the play? Uh, it gradually began to occur to me, well, that's one dilemma, but what about the supposing you had tried to save her and supposing you'd saved her? He would now be confronted with a complicated human life of a woman who wanted to kill herself. What is his responsibility then? How does he relate to that responsibility, was now he really has taken on the role of the man who saved her. He has put himself in the way of God, he rescued her from death. And, uh, after the fall is involved with that gradually, slowly, that idea, which I extrapolated into the whole Nazi experience. Because, uh, in the interval, I went it through Germany for months with Inga. And, uh, in those days, you could still walk among the concentration camps, haven't cleaned up so as they have been now. And the whole question of one's relationship to the destroyed, to the people who finally get it in the face, uh, was also in that play. Uh, and it was the after the fall, the play was an attempt to arrive at a real relationship with the self-destruction. There were some people who thought that the play had rather unscrupulously traded on on Marilyn's suicide. What was the general reaction of the public to after the fall? It was mostly ferocious. And uh, it blew my image away for a lot of people that hated me. And uh, I uh rationalized it anyway as being, see there's something you deny. You deny the murder in you, you deny the complicity with evil. That's why evil goes on, if we didn't deny, if we cease to deny it and saw our own culpability, maybe it wouldn't be as prevalent. But, uh, that's evil, we're good, but we don't do bad things. Uh, people did not want to be confronted with what is that play is saying and that play is saying at a certain point, you are ready to sacrifice somebody. As the Jews were sacrificed in, uh, Europe.

[13:16]As, uh, who knows what every day of the week is not sacrificed by human beings who simply are tired of having the responsibility for them. Well, nobody wanted to hear that. They still don't want to hear it. They will never want to hear it. That's why the Bible goes on forever. Because that's what the Bible is telling you, if one only knew that we're all connected.