Arthur Miller's plays are a testament to his social conscience, but in his own life, it has recently emerged, he all but disowned a son with Down syndrome, writes Belinda McKeon
The eulogies were eloquent, emotional, intense. They told of a life and of an art remarkable for its integrity, for its commitment to empathy and to truth; they showed a man and a writer battling against social and political injustice, against dishonesty, against discrimination. Arthur Miller was "the great conscience of the American nation", said one obituary when he died at the age of 89 in February 2005. He had written, after all, Death of a Salesman, that great dismantling of the American Dream, and The Crucible, that most searing indictment of social hypocrisy and intolerance; he had taken his stand against McCarthyism, against Vietnam, against the oppression of artists who had had their freedom and their voices taken away. He was often called "the American Ibsen", said the LA Times obituary, for his "passionate morality and fierce distrust of social institutions".
And, noted the same obituary in a brief paragraph about a quarter of the way through, he had left his youngest child, a boy with Down syndrome, in an institution for disabled children a week after his birth. The boy had been called Daniel, the obituary said. Nothing else - not even whether he had survived his father - was known.
The revelation should have torn like an arrow through the curtain lowered solemnly on Miller's life and career, but it seemed to dissolve again as quickly as it had emerged. The LA Times was the only obituary to mention Daniel, despite the fact that his existence had been disclosed, and Miller's reaction to his condition described, in the first major biography of Miller, by Martin Gottfried, published just a year previously. The facts were there, but the elegists chose not to see them.
And the truth about Daniel Miller might have stayed hidden, perhaps hidden even from the pages of future biographies, had a rumour about his father's will not begun to do the rounds of New York and Connecticut artistic circles earlier this year. The rumours said that there was no will, that Miller had died without leaving one, that a search for heirs had led to Daniel, and that the state of Connecticut had ordered the estate to pay Daniel the millions of dollars to which he was entitled. With word about their brother spreading rapidly in a tale that cast them in a less than favourable light - having to be ordered to pay a man with Down syndrome his legal due - the Millers seemed to decide that it was time for a family secret to pass into the public sphere. So, when Vanity Fair contributing editor Suzanna Andrews approached them for a story about Daniel and about their father, they - or at least some of them - talked. As did several friends of Miller and of Daniel's mother, Inge Morath, most of them anonymously, and a host of social workers and disability-rights advocates who have known Daniel over the years. The result, as published in the new issue of Vanity Fair, is a story as astonishing for its humanity and its compassion as for its stark, unsettling sadness.
ARTHUR MILLER BELIEVED that theatre should be a "well-defined expression of profound social needs". Yet all but the most basic needs of his own son were neglected for almost 20 years as he grew up in an institution so poorly run that it eventually came under an order of federal contempt.
Miller and his wife were overjoyed at first by the arrival of a son; Rebecca, at four, was a "precious" child and they planned to call her brother Eugene - after, Andrews suggests, Eugene O'Neill, of whom Miller was in awe. But a day later, Miller was in anguish, and calling the child a "mongoloid". Though his wife wanted to keep the baby, Miller, concerned for Rebecca's best interests, was adamant that he should go into care, and the medical wisdom of the time supported him. From a New York home for infants, Daniel went, at four, to the Southbury Training School in Connecticut, where the social workers of the period remember children sleeping 40 to a room, some tied to chairs or door handles, many of them wearing nappies into adolescence because Southbury lacked the staff to toilet-train them. Inge, Miller's wife, visited Daniel every Sunday, except for very "rare occasions". Miller himself stayed away. In his 1987 memoir Timebends, in which he recounted planting thousands of seedlings before Rebecca's birth, and watching them grow to maturity as she did, there was no mention of his son; and 1966 was a year he remembered for a "new life being born" - by which he meant the growing success of International Pen, the worldwide association of writers.
Monstrous as his behaviour may appear, it seems Miller was simply unable to deal with the emotional demands of having a son with Down syndrome; he had watched how his cousin, who also had Down syndrome, was "mocked" and raged at by his mother, how his presence "played into everything", affected everyone, how it required - in his view - excessive sacrifices to be made. His sister, Joan Copeland, describes him taking a similar attitude to her son, who was born with cerebral palsy. And friends talk about his determination that nothing should interfere with his work - work in which he forced his characters to confront the sorts of psychological hardships from which, in his own life, he cowered. Miller was chronically "detached", says his sister; if he didn't speak about something, he thought it might go away.
BUT DANIEL MILLER was not going away. At 17, his social workers secured his release from Southbury, and helped him to set up in a group home, where he thrived. Even amid the misery of Southbury - described by his mother after one visit as "like a Hieronymus Bosch painting" - he was bright and outgoing, his social workers say, "among the more able" of the children with Down syndrome. And it's the story of his life, rather than of his abandonment or his tragedy, that emerges most forcefully from the Vanity Fair piece. Here is a man who competed in four sports at the Special Olympics; who, after a few years in the group home, qualified for his own apartment and got a job; who became deeply involved in disabled rights groups and called for the closure of Southbury and places like it. And who greeted his father at a disability event (Miller was speaking on behalf of a disabled prisoner) with an embrace that was met, according to the witnesses interviewed by Andrews, with great warmth - although a letter-writer to the Denver Post had, in 2005, described the same scene quite differently, with Miller "barely acknowledging" his son and exiting abruptly, leaving him "crushed".
In the years before her death in 2002, Daniel's mother visited him often, spending her last Christmas with him in the home of the elderly couple who had been like parents to him after his release from Southbury. Rebecca Miller, too, became close to "Danny", and has continued to visit him with her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, and her children. Andrews suggests it was Day-Lewis, "appalled" by Miller's attitude, who pushed him most firmly towards the idea of getting to know his son. And Miller, in his own last years, did establish an acquaintanceship with Daniel. But he never, in truth, went very far beyond a bare acknowledgement. It was his tragedy as much as that of his son; very possibly much more so.
As for the estate, Miller in fact bequeathed an equal share in his fortune to each of his four children, so those rumours of neglect, at least, can be put to bed. Sadly, though, it seems that Daniel, now 41, is at risk of losing out in any case, bizarrely because his father made him too wealthy: in the US, if the assets of a disabled person go above the poverty level, not only do they lose their government assistance, but the state often swoops in to take almost every cent of their windfall, all in the name of care. It's the kind of duplicity about which Miller would have written with an unblinking eye. And there lies the rub.