The Genius and the Goddess by Jeffrey Meyers

Author:Jeffrey Meyers [Jeffrey Meyers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409061441
Publisher: Random House

Twelve

Heading for Disaster

(1957–1960)

I

While married to Mary and before he met Marilyn, Miller had led a structured and productive life. For Marilyn's sake he gave up a great deal – not only his long-term marriage and children, but the privacy, peace and secure way of life that had sustained his greatest work. Like Orpheus, he descended into a troubled underworld to rescue his Eurydice, and he, too, was doomed to fail. Miller thought he'd been unhappy with Mary, but now found himself far worse off. Exposed to the glare of publicity and scrutiny of the media, swept into Marilyn's chaotic life and tormented by a woman who was impossible to please, he became what Norman Mailer called "the most talented slave in the world."

After returning from England in November 1956, Miller took Marilyn back to his country house in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he hoped they could lead a normal life. The two-story house, built in 1783 during the colonial period, had huge ceiling beams. It was surrounded by 325 acres of land and planted with fruit trees. There was no other house in sight, and a cool breeze blew through a row of maples. The back veranda, with its view of endless hills, led to a swimming pond with water so clean you could drink it.

It soon became clear that they would have trouble combining their habits, tastes and interests. The contrast between Marilyn's lofty dreams and reckless indifference to money and Miller's down-to-earth realism and notorious frugality became obvious that autumn when she asked Frank Lloyd Wright to design a new house. Though Miller told Wright that they wanted to live rather simply, Wright's grandiose plan included, Miller wrote, "a circular living room with a dropped center surrounded by ovoid columns of fieldstone some five feet thick, and a domed ceiling, the diameter no less than sixty feet, looking out toward the view over a swimming pool seventy feet long with fieldstone sides that jutted forth from the incline of the hill." This gigantic pleasuredome, suitable for an oriental potentate, fulfilled Wright's own fantasies but ignored his clients' needs. It had "only a single bedroom and a small guestroom, but did provide a large 'conference room' complete with a long boardroom-type table flanked by a dozen high-backed chairs." In the end they rejected his concept as far too impractical and outrageously expensive and decided to preserve the old house. They modernized the rear part, put in sliding doors, and built a garage and a separate one-room study for Miller.

For Marilyn the housewife's routine had no charms. Life in a rundown house with a husband who spent the mornings reading and writing in his study and the afternoons replacing rotten timber and putting in plumbing must have come as a shock. Mailer satirized the homespun Miller as "the complacent country squire, boring people with his accounts of clearing fields, gardening, the joys of plumbing ('Nothing like taking a bath in water that comes through pipes you threaded yourself')." Miller was self-sufficient, fully occupied and used to solitude.

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