Miller’s FBI files released

In the summer of 1956, playwright Arthur Miller married screen idol Marilyn Monroe in a Jewish ceremony, an event of high-level gossip for much of the world and of high-level curiosity for the U.S. government.

“An anonymous telephone call” has been placed to the New York Daily News, an FBI report notes at the time. The caller stated that the “religious” wedding -- Miller was Jewish and Monroe had converted -- was an obvious “cover up” for Miller, who “had been and still was a member of the CP [Communist Party] and was their cultural front man.”

The memo is one of many included in Miller’s FBI files, obtained by the Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act. Miller, who died last year at 89, was a longtime liberal who opposed the Vietnam War and supported civil rights. His play “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials of the 17th century, had the Cold War pursuit of communists as its subtext.

His files became available only after his death, but the government’s interest in Miller was well established in his lifetime. In 1956, the House Un-American Activities Committee asked him to give names of alleged communist writers with whom he had attended some meetings in the 1940s. Miller refused and was convicted of contempt of Congress, a decision eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

For a decade before his congressional testimony, the FBI kept track of the playwright, but ended up making a more convincing case that Miller was a dissenter from the Communist Party rather than a sympathizer.

“Miller became disillusioned with the party because the party did not stimulate in him the ability and inspiration to do creative writing as he had expected when he joined the Party,” one informant told the FBI.

In vain, the FBI probed for communist influence in his plays. One memo cites an “informant” who reported that “several communists” have been turned down for roles in various “Arthur Miller playlets.”

His files end in 1956, except for a brief reprise in 1993, when a background check was submitted to Bernard Nussbaum, White House counsel to President Clinton. The occasion was not subversive activity, but the imminent presentation of a National Medal of the Arts.