Arthur Miller, loves and women of a Salesman – Herald Tribune

  International Editor

  EFE

 

 The centenary of the birth of Arthur Miller, one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, considered “the conscience” of the United States today is met.

 The playwright, author of Death of a Salesman, died on 10 February 2005. This seeks to remember, not to mention his work, his delusions of love heart.

 Loves traveling

 

 Mary Slattey, Marilyn Monroe, Inge Morath and Agnes Barley were, in that order, the women who accompanied the desire to “metamorphosis” of “smooth transition” by Arthur Miller.

 “This desire to move forward, to morph (…). Be prepared for change, be in constant transition, “Arthur Miller wrote in his memoirs Timebends to life (1988), reprinted in Spanish by Tusquets, for the centenary of his birth, this day of 1915.

 

 That “continuous transition” the author of some of the masterpieces of the twentieth century plays, in addition to fiction, essays and criticism was always accompanied by a woman’s name.

 

 Audiences for his social commitment and for his private life, possibly as few men have known Miller reflect the frustrations and disappointments of American society.

 

 And possibly they have been so few men like that Miller envied able to woo Marilyn, one of the most desired women and actress. She was 25 and he was eleven when they first met. He was already a recognized intellectual and it began to emerge in cinema. Five years later they were married by the Jewish rite, the June 29, 1956, when she was already the super sexy woman whose image remains as an icon of feminine beauty.

 

 Marilyn Monroe was her third husband, Arthur Miller was his second wife, after fifteen years (1940-1956) he spent with Mary Slattey, his college sweetheart, with whom he had two children (Jane and Robert), and of always admired his “integrity”.

 

 His union with Marilyn (“a whirlwind of light”), at the height of the harassment he suffered during the “witch hunt” of McCarthyism, which became the focus of a press which was not used. The good intentions of both were not enough to overcome addictions actress and loneliness dragging since childhood. Your link only lasted five years until 1961.

 

 Apart from its explosive femininity, which melted Marilyn Miller was his “touching tenderness.” Therefore, perhaps it won the Pulitzer for Death of a Salesman (1949) who was to understand the existential void of the goddess platinum closer.

 

 And in his attempt to save “sad woman” who had known, why was “fascinated”, wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, with a role for highlighting his skills as a dramatic actress.

 

 But paradoxically it was during the eventful shooting of the film directed by John Huston when the marriage broke into pieces, with Miller exhausted by the vagaries of the complex and sickly personality Monroe, and his addiction to barbiturates.

 

 “I loved her as if she had loved all my life; his pain was my pain, “Miller confesses in Timebends to life, but he was” exhausted and hopeless and to recover it. “

 And it was in that context nightmare on the set of The Misfits, in that emotional wreck when his life came the Austrian Inge Morath, the Magnum agency exclusively photographed shooting the film. This young “noble air,” “shy and energetic at the same time” gave “the best time of my life,” Miller wrote.

 

 The “high priestess of photography”, as defined Huston, joined Miller in 1962 and remained with him until the cancer spread them in 2002, forty years later. She was 78 years old, and left the memory of a life accomplice and two children.

 

 Shortly after the death of his third wife, the writer met Agnes Barley, a painter for 34 years, 55 years his junior. The flame ignited immediately and would have ended in marriage if the cancer patient and his old heart stopped beating in February 2005.

 

 Four loves, four women and one certainty: the confession in his memoirs that when he learned of the “horrible” news that Marilyn had died took several weeks to get used to it

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 “Even then, he wrote, hoped to have seen once again, as it were, anywhere, to talk sensibly of all that had passed, and it is likely that in that case I would have fallen in love with her.”