AP: FBI Shadowed Playwright Arthur Miller

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/06/20/entertainment/e120918D61.DTL

NEW YORK (AP) -- 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, an "unidentified male," stated that Miller "had been and still was a member of the CP (Communist Party) and was their cultural front man" and that Monroe also "had drifted into the Communist Party orbit."

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 age 89, was a longtime liberal who opposed the Vietnam War, supported civil rights and, in one play, "The Crucible," linked the Cold War pursuit of communists to the Salem witch trials of the 17th century.

His files only became available 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.