'Misfits' writer Arthur Miller dead at 89

Arthur Miller, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 20 stage dramas including "Death of a Salesman" and the Northern Nevada wild-horse movie "The Misfits," died Thursday night.

The cause was heart failure, according to his assistant, Julia Bolus.

Miller died at his home in Roxbury, Conn., surrounded by his family. He was 89.

Taking advantage of Reno's liberal divorce laws, Miller came to Northern Nevada in 1956 to divorce his first wife, Mary Grace Slattery, so he could marry Marilyn Monroe.

On June 11, 1956, Miller was officially divorced after spending the required six-week residency period in Sutcliffe at the Pyramid Lake Ranch, according to Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha.

During his stay, he encountered "misfit" cowboys and watched the roundup of wild horses. The result was a story first published in Esquire magazine in 1957 and later developed as a screenplay called "The Misfits."

With an all-star cast featuring Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift, the film began production in 1960 and was built to disappoint. Expectations were too high.

The film "eerily captures Monroe and Gable in their last appearances on (a completed) film," according to Rocha.

"The pair drive off in a truck. Monroe's character asks Gable's: 'How do we get home?' Gazing into the night, he replies, 'We'll follow that star and we'll get there.'"

At the time, Miller and Monroe's marriage was already in shambles. Written for Monroe after she suffered a miscarriage, the filming of "The Misfits" did nothing to bring the couple back together.

Gable, 59, was quietly killing himself, insisting that he do his own stunts (just 12 days after shooting the final scenes in Los Angeles, he died of a heart attack). A month before, somewhere east of Dayton, "Gable had shot the stallion fight sequence, being dragged around by the powerful horse," Rocha said.

Miller's marriage to Marilyn Monroe ended in divorce in 1961. Monroe's fatal overdose occurred the next year. Montgomery Clift was gone within four.

"The Misfits" premiered in Reno on Jan. 31, 1961, at the Granada Theater.

In his more than 50-year career, Miller stirred audiences from New York to Beijing with his poignant, idiomatically American dramas dealing with success, failure and man's desperate quest to fulfill the American Dream.

In 1949's "Death of a Salesman," Miller introduced perhaps his most famous character, the deluded salesman Willy Loman.

The "subjective realism" of the play would become a trademark of Miller's, but would bound him as "out-dated" and "old-fashioned" to many critics at the end of the 20th century.

"He's a good, sound, old-fashioned, traditional moralist - which is not something to scoff at, but neither is it exciting in art,'' veteran critic Stanley Kauffmann told the Los Angeles Times several years ago.

Miller also wrote "The Crucible,"' a parable about the Salem witch trials, written during the Red Scare and the height of McCarthyism of the 1950s.

Like the characters he created (Willy Loman was based on his boisterously competitive Uncle Manny, who had been a salesman), Miller's personal life often bled onto his theatrical scripts and eventually eclipsed it in the realm of pop culture, reaching its peak during his tumultuous marriage to Monroe.

Nearly 50 years after its original run, "The Crucible" was revived on Broadway in the 2001-02 season and his plays were beginning to be received with a new relevancy by critics.

Miller is survived by children Jane, Robert, and Rebecca; and at least four grandchildren.

- Contact reporter Peter Thompson at pthompson@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1215.