by Arthur Miller’s great demand was that attention be paid. His son Danny waited ten minutes away for nearly forty years for the same grace. In the winter of 1990 I was Arthur Kopit’s assistant through my Columbia MFA internship. I had helped him on his Phantom musical with Maury Yeston, and now the work was a staged reading of his new play at Circle Repertory in the Village, a theater with the size and polish of a garage. The play was called Bone-the-Fish, a savage comedy about Hollywood deal-making, and Kopit told me how he had named it. The title was his answer to David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. Mamet’s title meant nothing, he argued, and it had found success anyway, so he imitated the trick and answered with nonsense of his own, aimed at the same target. Better heads prevailed later; when Circle Rep gave the play its full production, it went up as Road to Nirvana. Sigourney Weaver was in the reading. The actors sat on folding chairs with scripts in their laps. There were no sets, no lights to speak of, no money. My job that night was to watch the door for Arthur Miller. When he came in, I walked him quietly to the last row, and we sat together. He did not know I was an intern, did not know my name, knew nothing about me, and asked nothing. At some point he leaned over and whispered, with open disgust, “Oh, hell! This is only a staged reading?” I did not reply. The man next to me had written Death of a Salesman, and I was the intern who had seated him, proud to share his folding chairs.
I admired Arthur Miller. Between 1947 and 1955 he wrote All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, a run of plays that bent the American stage toward conscience. In 1956 he stood before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to name names, took the contempt conviction, and won on appeal. In 1949 he had argued in print that the common man was as apt a subject for tragedy as any king. When he died, the Denver Post called him “the moralist of the past American century,” and The New York Times praised his “fierce belief in man’s responsibility to his fellow man.” Linda Loman’s plea in Salesman became the creed of a whole American theater: “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” I believed every word of it.
Within the last year I learned what the record had been built to hide. The facts come chiefly from Suzanna Andrews, who broke the story in the September 2007 Vanity Fair under the headline “Arthur Miller’s Missing Act,” and who talked it through on NPR when it appeared. Rebecca Miller’s 2017 documentary about her father, Arthur Miller: Writer, confirms the outline. They concern Miller’s fourth child. Arthur Miller and Inge Morath, the photographer he married in 1962, had a daughter, Rebecca, and then, in November 1966, a son. They named him Daniel. He was born with Down syndrome, and his father erased him.
Andrews established the first week. On the day of the birth, Miller telephoned his friend, the Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, overjoyed. He and Inge were planning to name the boy Eugene, possibly after Eugene O’Neill. The next day Miller called again. The baby, he said, “isn’t right.” Doctors had diagnosed Down syndrome. “Arthur was terribly shaken,” Whitehead recalled. “He used the term ‘mongoloid.’ He said, ‘I’m going to have to put the baby away.'” A friend who visited Inge in Roxbury a week later found her propped up in bed, holding the child, and very unhappy. Inge wanted to keep the baby. Arthur would not allow it. Within days the boy was gone, placed in a home for infants in New York City. When he was two or three, Inge tried again to bring him home. Arthur refused. At four, Daniel was placed at the Southbury Training School in Connecticut, a ten-minute drive from the Roxbury house.
One defense exists. In 1966, doctors commonly advised parents to institutionalize a child with Down syndrome, and such children were not expected to live past twenty. Miller took the standard advice of his day. The defense ends there. The tide was already turning; parents by the thousands were ignoring their doctors and keeping their children. And Miller had watched the other road walked inside his own family. His cousin Carl Barnett, a few years older than Arthur, had Down syndrome and was raised at home; the Miller children saw him often. In his 1987 memoir Timebends, Miller remembered Barnett as “a helpless mongoloid” whose mother mocked his fluffy speech to his face. He knew what keeping the child looked like, and he had seen it up close for years. He sent his son away anyway.
Southbury had opened in 1940 as a model institution, handsome brick buildings on sixteen hundred acres. By the early 1970s, around the time Miller’s son arrived, it was overcrowded and understaffed, with nearly 2,300 residents. Children lived in rooms of thirty to forty beds. Televisions blared all day, tuned to whatever the staff wanted to watch. The most disabled children lay on mats on the floor, some covered with nothing more than a sheet. “In the wards you had people screaming, banging their heads against the wall and taking their clothes off,” David Shaw, a Connecticut disability lawyer, told Andrews. “It was awful.” In 1985 the United States Department of Justice sued Connecticut over the conditions; the next year the state was ordered to close Southbury to new admissions. This is where the son of America’s moralist grew up.
Around 1980, a disability rights advocate named Deborah Bowen met Daniel at Southbury. “He was just a delight, eager, happy, outgoing,” she told Andrews. He showed her his room, which he shared with twenty other people, and his dresser, nearly empty, because everyone wore communal clothing. “He really had nothing,” Bowen said. “His sole possession was this little tiny transistor radio with earplugs. It was something you’d pick up at a five-and-dime. And he was so proud to have it. You couldn’t help but think, This is Arthur Miller’s son? How could this be?” Ten minutes down shaded country roads, in the Roxbury house, Daniel’s sister Rebecca was growing up as what family friends called “the precious object,” carried along on her parents’ travels, to dinner parties with Alexander Calder and William Styron. One child got the world. One child got a radio.
The erasure was total, and Miller maintained it for nearly four decades. Miller never publicly acknowledged Daniel: not once in scores of speeches and press interviews, not one line in Timebends. When Inge died in January 2002, her New York Times obituary left Daniel out, and Miller appears to have confirmed to the paper that they had one child, Rebecca. Daniel did not appear at the funeral. When Miller died on February 10, 2005, fifty-six years to the day after Salesman opened on Broadway, Broadway dimmed its lights, and the obituaries performed as trained. Among major American newspapers, only the Los Angeles Times mentioned Daniel, and it got his birth year wrong. At the public memorial that May, at the Majestic Theatre, Tony Kushner praised Miller’s “curse of empathy,” and Edward Albee said Miller had held up a mirror and told society, “Here is how you behave.” Danny was not in the room. The man who wrote “I have given you my soul; leave me my name” had spent his adult life striking his own son’s name from the record, and the record obeyed him.
The sentence that gives him away came late. In his last years Miller began asking his sister, the actress Joan Copeland, about her son: could the young man read, could he write? The questions astonished her, because Miller should have known the answers. Her son had worked in the mailroom of a company for seventeen years. The questions gave Copeland an opening to ask about Daniel, whom she had never met. “I asked him, ‘Does he know you?'” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, he knows I’m a person, and he knows my name, but he doesn’t understand what it means to be a son.'” The playwright of fathers and sons defined sonship as a comprehension test, then acquitted himself on grounds he had spent forty years arranging. The record refutes him in his own terms. In 1995, at a Hartford conference on false confessions, Daniel spotted his father across the room, ran to him, and hugged him. A photograph was taken. “Danny was thrilled,” Bowen said. A person who does not understand what it means to be a son does not run across a room to embrace his father. Daniel understood what it meant. Arthur never learned what it meant to be a father.
When Southbury’s staff wanted Daniel released into a group home, a meeting was called with his parents. Miller attended, said little, and did not object. “He couldn’t connect with his child emotionally, for whatever reasons,” Bowen said, “but he didn’t hold him back. He let him go.” Daniel left the institution for a group home with five housemates. He learned the buses, learned the grocery store, and took a supermarket job. He kept that job long after he stopped needing the money, because he loved it and was proud of it. Social workers sometimes drove him to New York to see his parents. And Inge went to him almost every Sunday, according to the writer Francine du Plessix Gray, while Arthur, in Inge’s own words, “never wanted to see him.” She told a friend the wards looked like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, and then she drove home to Roxbury. She yielded to her husband’s refusal for the rest of her life. The yielding was hers. The refusal was his.
Now weigh the other man in this story. Daniel Day-Lewis was born in London in 1957, the second child of Cecil Day-Lewis, Britain’s poet laureate, and the actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon, who built Ealing Studios. He grew up in a house where literature was the family trade. In 1989 he played Christy Brown in My Left Foot. Brown was born in Dublin with cerebral palsy, written off as unteachable, able to control only his left foot; his mother refused to surrender him, and with that foot he wrote his autobiography. Day-Lewis prepared at a Dublin clinic, where he formed friendships with disabled people. On the set he stayed in the wheelchair between takes and let crew members feed him. He wanted the embarrassments of Brown’s life learned from inside. He won the Academy Award for it. The film’s argument is the one Arthur Miller declined to live: a disabled son is a full person, with an inner life, a self, and a claim on his family’s attention. In 1996 Day-Lewis played John Proctor in the film of The Crucible, the Miller hero who dies rather than surrender his name. On that production he met Miller’s daughter, and they married that November. In marrying her, Day-Lewis acquired a brother he had never met, and he went and met him. He visited Daniel frequently. He and Rebecca folded Daniel into their family, on holidays and in summers. Those around the family credit Day-Lewis with pressing Miller to face his son at last. Six weeks before Miller died, the playwright signed a will that made Daniel a full and direct heir, an equal to his three other children, against common legal advice. The signature was Miller’s, and Vanity Fair gives it to him. The pressure that produced it came from the actor. “Danny is very much part of our family,” Rebecca said, and in that sentence you can hear a house being put right.
What sort of man does the other thing? Morris Dickstein of the City University of New York gave the Times the rule: writers who set themselves up as moralists and public scolds are more vulnerable to criticism based on their own behavior. Miller is the rule’s proof. A writer used to controlling narratives, Andrews concluded, excised a central character who did not fit the plot of his life as he wanted it, and she noted the cost: he never wrote anything approaching greatness after Daniel’s birth. Perhaps, she wrote, Miller was sitting on his greatest unwritten play. I will go further. A father is a job. Miller did the job for three children and refused it for the fourth, the child who needed it most, and he used his fame to keep the refusal invisible. The man who demanded attention for every forgotten salesman in America withheld it from his own son, ten minutes away, for the whole of that son’s life. In the end, the playwright was no man at all. The abandoned son became one.
What, then, do we owe the plays? One option is to stop producing them, which punishes audiences for Miller’s sin and silences the best evidence against him, since Linda Loman indicts her author more cleanly than any essay can. A second option absolves the man because of the work, which insults Daniel twice: once by the father, once by the audience. The third option, and my recommendation, is to keep the plays and strike the saint. Stage the work and teach it. Then attach Daniel Miller’s name to every syllabus, every program note, every tribute, so that the record his father rigged is made whole in the only currency Arthur Miller ever cared about, the written word. The plays argue for the forgotten. Let them argue for Danny too.
I keep returning to that garage in the Village, where I walked Arthur Miller to the last row and sat beside him, an intern whose name he never asked. What disgusted him that night was the unfinished thing: actors on folding chairs, a play with no production, nothing yet worthy of his attention. He noticed what offended him and inquired after nothing. He could not see that the humble hearing is where worth gets decided. I did not answer him in 1990. Here is the answer, thirty-six years later. Daniel Miller turns sixty this year. By the last reporting on his life, he still had the supermarket job he loved, his friends, his advocates, the people who value him. “He’s made a life for himself,” Bowen says. “He is deeply valued and very, very loved. What a loss for Arthur Miller that he couldn’t see how extraordinary his son is.” Somewhere behind that life sits the image I cannot shake: a boy in a room of twenty beds, holding a five-and-dime transistor radio with earplugs, proud of the one thing he owned. The moralist of the American century could not see him. The actor could. Which one we remember is up to us.
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