Family, fans treasure life of playwright.

Byline: Mark Baker The Register-Guard

It was 1973, and the man who created Willy Loman and Biff, who was once married to the most glamorous movie star America had ever seen, was fiddling with the television in his son and daughter-in-law's home on Lorane Highway.

In walked Diane Kesey, author Ken Kesey's cousin, who had never met the famous playwright. "She thought he was the TV repairman," Erica Miller remembered with a laugh Friday.

Arthur Miller, Pulitzer Prize winner and former husband of Marilyn Monroe, was just trying to fix the vertical hold.

He was just another regular guy in a plaid shirt who pretty much went unnoticed here, Erica Miller said of her former father-in-law's only trip to Oregon to see his son Robert's family.

"He was always very kind to me," Erica Miller said.

Although her memories are more personal than most local reactions Friday to the great playwright's death, Miller, 56, was not alone in expressing her sorrow at his passing.

"He had a wonderful ear for dramatic dialogue and a wonderful feeling for the way people related to each other," said Jeffrey Mason, head of the University of Oregon's theater department. Mason met Arthur Miller in Brooklyn last April and is writing a book about his life, tentatively titled "The Political Theater of Arthur Miller." He also is directing the UO's upcoming performance of one of Miller's most famous plays, "A View from the Bridge." The play will run Feb. 25 to March 12 in the university's Robinson Theatre.

Meeting Miller at that academic conference at St. Francis College was a remarkable experience, said Mason, who came away impressed and reassured that the man who shows so much integrity in his writing seemed the same in person.

Eugene's Stephen Speidel, who just finished directing a Very Little Theatre production of "Death of a Salesman," Miller's best-known work, was in tears Friday upon learning of his death.

"I'm extremely saddened," Speidel said. "He was given to us and was put here to make our journey more bearable. He gave us light and truth and beauty about people. He made it a better world to live in and made my time here easier and will continue to make it easier."

Theater reviewer Dorothy Velasco of Springfield said Miller's works of genius deserve much praise.

"He was a very serious, honest playwright who faced the ugly truth," she said. "So his work, I believe, will live on forever."

Erica Miller, a freelance makeup and costume artist at the Hult Center since it opened in 1982, was married to Robert, better known as "Bobby," for about five years. They met in the late 1960s as part of the "Hog Farm" and Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, who were hired to serve food at Woodstock. They divorced in the mid-1970s after moving to Oregon to live on Kesey's Pleasant Hill farm, but she still lives in the same Eugene home they shared.

Erica Miller said she last saw Arthur at his Roxbury, Conn., home in the 1980s.

"He was funny. It was always interesting to sit around a table with their friends," she said of Arthur Miller and his third wife, Inge Morath, "because politics and world affairs were always being discussed."

Erica Miller remembers Arthur buying a pair of Oshkosh jeans for his granddaughter, Jessica , who is now 32, at a department store that once stood where the Hult Center is.

Jessica was the second child born to Erica and Bobby Miller, now a Los Angeles theater director who once owned a film company in Eugene. Their first child, also a girl, died in her crib in Roxbury in 1971, and Erica Miller recalled a poignant image of Arthur and the granddaughter he barely knew:

"I will always remember him for making bird whistles to soothe the infant child."

CAPTION(S):

Erica Miller owns an autographed "Jane's Blanket."