MILLER: Well, Willy Loman was based on him…. I was standing in the lobby of the Colonial Theatre in Boston in ’47—a matinee of “All My Sons,” I guess that would have been, and I hadn’t seen him in, oh, fifteen years maybe. I saw him coming out of the theatre at the end of the show, and I was delighted to see him, because I always loved to see him. And he had tears in his eyes at the end of the play. He saw me. We confronted one another. And he said, referring to his eldest son—out of the blue, now mind you I haven’t seen this man in all those years—he said, “Bobby is doing very well.” That was the name of his son. Manny was living in two places at the same time. And I thought, Wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to do a play where somebody is in two or three different place concurrently. That’s when the penny dropped.
Manny lived in his own mind all the time. He never got out of it. Everything he said was totally unexpected. People regarded him as a kind of strange, completely untruthful personality. Very charming. I thought of him as a kind of wonderful inventor. For example, at will, he would suddenly say, “That’s a lovely suit you have on.” And for no reason at all, he’d say, “Three hundred dollars.” Now, everybody knew he never paid three hundred dollars for a suit in those days. At a party, he would lie down on his wife’s lap and pretend to be sucking her breast. He’d curl up on her lap—she was an immense woman. It was crazy. At the same time, there was something in him which was terribly moving. It was very moving, because his suffering was right on his skin, you see.
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