My Dinner with Arthur Miller — Stephen Legawiec

I ran a small Equity theatre in Vermont from 1988 to 1995 and one of our regular audience members was a man named Ned Coffin. His brother William Sloane Coffin was a clergyman and famous peace activist in the 1960s. And Ned and Bill were close friends of Arthur Miller. In 1992, Ned said to me after a performance, “Arthur Miller is coming over to our town hall to read an excerpt from his new play. Do you want to have dinner with him?”

Did I answer yes? Let me think.

If he was coming to the town for an event, I thought I would be one of a hundred people having dinner, farm style, in a big hall. As it turned out, it was just the Coffins, Miller and his wife, and me.

A stand-up comic recently said, “Here’s phrase you’ll never hear any more: Oh I wish I had a camera.” At the time, I thought it gauche to bring a camera and ask for a photo. Looking back, being gauche would have been a small price to pay for photo with Arthur Miller.

The Coffins lived in Strafford VT, about a half an hour’s drive north of my theatre, which was in White River Junction. When I arrived in the mid-afternoon on Thursday, Miller and his wife (the photographer Inge Morath) were already there. They were spending the weekend in Strafford.

The August weather was clear and warm, and the five of us sat on the Coffin’s back porch and we ate chicken and potato salad. Miller was 77 at the time. I had to look this up before writing this, because he did not seem 77 (whatever that means.) He seemed younger.

Miller and the Coffins talked a lot of politics – Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot were all running for president that coming fall. Well, Perot had been running, but dropped out in July. A month before that in June, a Gallup poll showed Perot leading Clinton and Bush, unprecedented for a third-party candidate. Perot would come back into the race in another eight weeks, but for now he was out. We then talked theatre and I was able to tell him about my company, and some plays that I had written and directed. And then the conversation turned to The Crucible.

The Crucible just happened in be my dramatic debut in high school. I played John Proctor at the age of 15 and, if I recall correctly, I was really bad. I did not bring this fact up to Mr. Miller, however.

The reason The Crucible was on his mind is because Miller had been in Salem, Massachusetts on the previous day. (I’m guessing this is why he decided to shoot up to Vermont to visit the Coffins.) Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel had dedicated a newly-built memorial to victims the Salem witch trials on their 300th anniversary – 1692-1992. The memorial consisted of a grass courtyard surrounded by granite walls with stone benches, each bearing the name of one of the twenty victims who were executed in the hysteria. Etched into the stone were the words spoken by the victims, proclaiming their innocence.

Salem Wich Trials Memorial — Salem Witch Trials Memorial / photo by Kate Fox

It was a big event with a great number of attendees and a lot of reporters. Miller was asked to speak, since he had made the trials famous with his play – which, by the way, is his most-performed work. The Crucible is performed twice as often as Salesman. Miller told us that after he made his remarks, he took questions from the press. “It became clear very soon as I listened to their questions,” he said, “that none of them had any idea what had gone on in Salem - the New York Times, included.” I had to take that in. Miller put down his plate of food and went on. “As far as the press was concerned about what happened in 1692, it all boiled down to this in their minds: that there were witches - and it was bad that we hanged them.” Miller spoke passionately and bitterly. “They had no idea that people were coerced into naming their neighbors as witches for leniency, while others were convicted for refusing to indict their friends.”

What was striking to me about Miller’s acrid commentary is that he spoke these words as if he had actually been there.

And of course, in a way, he had been.

Miller wrote The Crucible after the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) investigated many prominent people in the movie industry (beginning in 1947) for alleged ties to the Communist Party. As far as HUAC was concerned, America’s very security was tied to the rooting out of all present and past Communists, real or imagined. Some of the Hollywood people were considered “unfriendly witnesses,” and who believed that HUAC had no right to interrogate them about their friends and colleagues. The most high profile Hollywood screenwriters under fire were called “The Hollywood 10.” Screenwriters were targeted for supposedly sneaking socialist/communist messages into their films, which, in case anyone is interested, was not true.

Such an unfriendly witness was playwright Lillian Hellman, who refused to “name names,” as it was called. Hellman famously said, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashion.” Dalton Trumbo, who wrote Spartacus, was another unfriendly witness. He defied the Committee and shouted as he was forced to leave his interrogation, “This is the beginning of the American concentration camp!” He and others were subsequently blacklisted, not by the U.S. Government, but by the Hollywood studio bosses who wanted to distance themselves from anything that smelled of controversy, and thus would lead to low box-office receipts. Careers and lives were ruined.

Miller says in his autobiography Timebends that “a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington was made in my mind…The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows – whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people.”

The friendly witnesses cooperated with the committee and offered up the names of their colleagues in April of 1952, as a way to demonstrate “patriotism.” The most famous friendly witness was Elia Kazan, who was not only best friends with Miller, but had directed Death of a Salesman three years earlier. Contrasted with those who careers where destroyed by defying the Committee, Kazan’s friendly testimony rewarded him with a sterling career in Hollywood. He won the Oscar for directing On the Waterfront the next year (a movie which, by the way, makes a hero of the informer, Terry Malloy.)

Kazan’s testimony effectively ended the friendship between him and Miller.

Years after The Crucible opened, Miller himself was called before HUAC and was also asked to name names. He refused and was found guilty of contempt of congress, which carried a fine and a prison sentence. A year later his conviction was overturned on appeal.

This idea of indicting innocent people, just to save yourself was palpably repugnant to Miller. And fully forty years later, even at a backyard bar-b-que in Vermont, those events still burned inside him.

After our early dinner, we accompanied Miller and his wife to the Strafford Town House, a beautiful hall built in 1799. There, to a crowd of a couple hundred people, he stood at a podium and read excerpts from his new play, The Last Yankee, which was not even in rehearsals yet. I tried to concentrate on the play, but I was distracted by Miller’s remarks about The Crucible earlier in the day. I don’t usually think of him in connection with HUAC, and marveled over what a complex life he had lived up to the age 77. Here was a giant of American theatre, who, along with his body of dramatic work, had weathered a political hurricane, and had come out the other side. Plus, among everything else that Arthur Miller ever did – lest we forget – he was also at one time married to Marilyn Monroe.

The Town House was warm, but it was a pleasure to hear him read his play.

Afterwards, we all went down to the basement and ate pie.