Arthur Miller on glamour worship

    One dictionary defines glamour as “the attractive or exciting quality that makes certain people or things seem appealing or special.”
    Glamour worship, to the Saunterer, is as life-enhancing as garbage worship. Glamour worship is a factor in making us a third-rate race (animals, plants, us). Arthur Miller thought so too:

Glamour is a youth’s form of blindness that lets in light, incoherent color, but nothing defined. Like the rainbow, it is a once uplifting vision that moves away the closer you come to it.
    My father, on the other hand, got more glamour-struck the older he became. He loved to stand in front of a theatre where a play of mine was on and every once in a while stroll in to chat with the box office men about business. “How do you know they’re giving you the right count?” he would ask me. Indeed, how did I know?
    In 1962, after our divorce, Marilyn took him as her escort to John Kennedy’s birthday party in Madison Square Garden and introduced him to the president. My father would treasure a news photographer’s picture of the occasion: Marilyn stands laughing with her head thrown back while Kennedy shakes hands with him, laughing with spontaneous, innocent enjoyment at what I am sure must have been one of my father’s surprising remarks. I was not aware that for the rest of his life, which lasted some four more years, he spent considerable time on the lookout for his name in the gossip columns and entertainment news, until one day he gravely asked me – he was about eighty then – “Do you look like me or do I look like you?”
    This was serious. “I guess I look like you,” I said. He seemed to like that answer.

    (Quoted from Timebends: A life, by Arthur Miller. Grove Press, 1987.)
    For a brief biography of Arthur Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Arthur Miller, click here.