Death of a reputation

Arthur Miller’s reputation as the great moral conscience of middlebrow America never impressed me all that much. Chalk it up to getting hammered with Death of a Salesman in high school. Though he was supposed to represent The Common Man As Tragic Hero and the American Dream Gone Sour, Willy Loman always seemed like a delusional schizophrenic, and his thuggish sons nothing more than budding career criminals. Miller’s bizarre dialogue (”Nobody dast blame this man!”) didn’t help much, and what was supposed to be the crowning emotional moment (worshipful son ruined forever by discovery of Dad’s adultery!) was too pathetic to register as anything but low comedy. The play led to my first true Theater Experience, when I had a front row seat at the Circle in the Square for the revival starring George C. Scott as Willy Loman, but Scott’s larger-than-life style had the perverse effect of making Loman even less believable.

So, having never put Miller on a pedestal in the first place, I didn’t have any illusions to be shattered by this story in Vanity Fair:

Only a handful of people in the theater knew that Miller had a fourth child. Those who did said nothing, out of respect for his wishes, because, for nearly four decades, Miller had never publicly acknowledged the existence of Daniel.He did not mention him once in the scores of speeches and press interviews he gave over the years. He also never referred to him in his 1987 memoir, Timebends. In 2002, Daniel was left out of the New York Times obituary for Miller’s wife, the photographer Inge Morath, who was Daniel’s mother. A brief account of his birth appeared in a 2003 biography of Miller by the theater critic Martin Gottfried. But even then Miller maintained his silence. At his death, the only major American newspaper to mention Daniel in its obituary was the Los Angeles Times, which said, “Miller had another son, Daniel, who was diagnosed with Down syndrome shortly after his birth in 1962. It is not known whether he survives his father.” Citing the Gottfried biography, the paper reported that Daniel had been put in an institution, where Miller “apparently never visited him.”

Miller’s friends say they never understood exactly what happened with Daniel, but the few details they heard were disturbing. Miller had not only erased his son from the public record; he had also cut him out of his private life, institutionalizing him at birth, refusing to see him or speak about him, virtually abandoning him. The whole matter was “absolutely appalling,” says one of Miller’s friends, and yet everyone probably would have kept silent had it not been for the rumor that began to spread earlier this year, passing from Roxbury to New York City and back. Although no one was sure of the facts, the story was that Miller had died without leaving a will. Officials had gone looking for Miller’s heirs, and they had found Daniel. Then, the rumor went, the state of Connecticut had made Arthur Miller’s estate pay Daniel a full quarter of his father’s assets, an amount that was believed to be in the millions of dollars.

For some of Miller’s friends, the possibility that Daniel had been given his fair share brought a measure of relief that, finally, a wrong had been righted. Attention had been paid. The feeling was shared by the social workers and disability-rights advocates who have known and cared for Daniel over the years as it became clear that he had indeed gotten a share of the Miller estate. “An extraordinary man,” “very beloved by a lot of people,” Daniel Miller, they say, is a “guy who’s made a difference in a lot of lives.” They also say he is someone who, considering the challenges of his life, has in his own way achieved as much as his father did. The way Arthur Miller treated him baffles some people and angers others. But the question asked by friends of the father and of the son is the same: How could a man who, in the words of one close friend of Miller’s, “had such a great world reputation for morality and pursuing justice do something like this”?

If Arthur Miller had turned out to be a sterling character in every way, it wouldn’t raise my estimation of his work. But for people who have accepted Miller as a spokesman for the high road of morality and ethical behavior, this article is going to have a huge impact.