By Barry Egan
Sunday Mar 23 2008

'MOST marriages, after all, are conspiracies to deny the dark and confirm the light," Arthur Miller once said. His daughter Rebecca's marriage to Daniel Day-Lewis seems just such a conspiracy.

The "dark" might be that he left Isabelle Adjani when she was pregnant (his oldest son, Gabriel Kane is now 12) in 1995. Media reports that Daniel ended the relationship with the French actress by fax -- thus labelling him the world's biggest shit -- possibly added to the darkness, but not long after Daniel and Rebecca married. The Guardian wrote that Daniel entered "another retreat, his longest yet, five years". The "light" in Rebecca and Daniel's marriage is definitely the love they share for each other. The only child of Miller and photographer Inge Morath (who met on the set of The Misfits while Miller was still married to Marilyn Monroe), Rebecca Miller is a woman you don't meet every day. Not least because she treasures her privacy, living in virtual seclusion in her county Wicklow idyll with her reclusive genius of a husband. They live with their two sons, Cashel Blake and Ronan Cal. "We have been based here for real for the last three years," she says of Ireland. "I have been coming here for 11 years, but we had our kids put in school here in the last years."

Daniel and Rebecca can happily while away the evenings bonding over having famous literary fathers. (It has been written that Daniel became convinced he was talking to the ghost of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis when he played Hamlet in 1989. He walked off mid-performance and has never returned to the stage).

Like a ghost, Daniel appears to leave the house about once every three or four years to self-surrender to a part of a movie that will either get him nominated for, or win, an Oscar for his magnificent Method acting, like De Niro and Brando at their peak. For her part, Rebecca is something of a post-modern Renaissance woman, having been an actor, a painter, a novelist and a film director.

Her childhood growing up on a ranch/farm in the Connecticut countryside stood to her imagination. She spent years dreaming amid the Edenic splendour of nature. "I spent hours in a row boat on a pond," she remembers. Young Rebecca would just go round and round looking for frogs. "I was in a dream for hours. Or I would sit in my room and stare at the wall for hours. You'd think I was watching TV!"

She believes it was a form of meditation, looking back on it now. She would stare at something until it started to move or wiggle "like you had taken an hallucogenic. I remember doing this staring when I was eight or nine. It gave me the kind of concentration that I can use now. It kind of trained me "

Quite so. The Day-Lewises share a school run with another family, and Rebecca writes right up until her children come home from school. Although Daniel doesn't do that many movies, when he is away on location, she says, it is generally in the summers and she and the family can be with him for most of that time.

"We pretty much stick together the whole time." She was in Rome with him for six months when he shot The Gangs Of New York. Today, she has left her Wicklow xanadu to come to Dublin for the day to talk about her novel. The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, wrote Variety, "centres on a dutiful wife whose husband falls for a younger woman, freeing her to explore her buried sensuality and leading to a very quiet nervous breakdown." Pippa, Rebecca says, "is someone who I would like to ask advice from, even though she has had this mad life and in some ways is as out of control as the rest of us."

How does your out-of-control-ness manifest itself?

"Mine? I think mine is more and more in my imaginative life. I think in my case, the fact that my imaginative life saves me from being out of control as a person."

"Also, in a funny way," she says, "it is the chaos in my head by disciplining it and saying, 'I'm writing from 9am to 1pm.' It is the very ordered life. It is the way of controlling, because my mind is very ... it is a kind of manic. I have too many things going on, too many ideas. I need external discipline otherwise I become a little chaotic."

I ask her do the kids make her less chaotic.

"Definitely. I think family life is really good for me, personally." Wicklow is, she says with a laugh, "so quiet. Except our house is loud inside." I enquire what is making the loud noise exactly. "Sometimes there's music. There's piano playing going on. There's my little son listening to his songs he is supposed to remember." She adds that he was given an iPod by someone and he is still trying to figure out how to work it. "They are not the most hooked-in kids, culturally yet. They are really still country kids. They live to ride and play with cats," she laughs. "They are not all hooked into the pop culture yet. "It is going to happen" she adds but Rebecca and Daniel are just not in any rush for the children to be swamped by it.

What are you like as mother? "I'm cuddly and pretty affectionate. Very ... "

Were you conscious when you had your first child with Daniel that, because you were an only child, you wanted to have another one?

"Yes, definitely," she smiles. "I really wanted to have two children at least. I thought I wanted to have four then I had two and I realised that was fine. And also Daniel's oldest boy Gabriel is with us sometimes so then we have three, and that's great. Yeah, I wanted to have more than one child. They seem to like me so far! We'll see how it goes," she laughs.

Tall of leg and long of imagination, Rebecca Miller (born September 15, 1962) is an intriguing and extemely witty woman all right. In person, her sentences go off in tangents -- some never come back, some return whole minutes later. She is hard to pin down. "I have very different parts of myself, like most people. I don't think that is unusual. Like most people, they have very distinct parts of their identity, and that's what this book is about. The multiplicity of selves that one person carries inside of them, and I just find that fascinating."

How would Daniel describe you? "I think he would describe me as basically a funny and cheerful person," she laughs.

I say that some people would probably imagine the two of them sitting up all night intensely discussing Beckett and Sartre, while the truth is that they are more likely to be tickling each other with feather dusters watching Duck Soup by the Marx Brothers.

"Or worse!" she laughs.

"I mean, humour is the main way of surviving life. And that's it. Without that, you can just die. You can just forget about it. Not that I find everything funny, but that's the primary thing that would attract me to a person as a friend or a husband or anything else." Daniel Day-Lewis's wife thinks for a moment before adding: "And to share that way of looking at the world -- there is no better intimacy."

Arthur Miller was, she says, very much a funny man. For him, she continues, life, even at its most depressing, was "fundamentally funny, even when it was darkly funny". I tell her the story that Frank McCourt told me at Christmas: he was a neighbour to Miller at his 400-acre ranch in Connecticut (the same one in which Rebecca grew up) for years. One night over dinner at McCourt's, a few years ago, talk turned to the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Frank remembered. "Arthur said: 'What I'm worried about is the environment....' I said: 'The environment? C'mon Arthur'. He replied: 'Those 250,000 Gis have to shit. What is going to happen to the landscape? The level of Iraqi land that will be American shit.' This is the way he would talk. And there would be a twinkle that doesn't get into his work."

"That's a whole other perspective on Iraq!" Rebecca laughs. "That is certainly novel. My dad just had a way of looking at life that is basically humorous and ironical, but not in a cruel way or a satirical way. But that was the base: humour. And that would have been true of my father's family before him. It was a way of looking at the world. Which maybe comes from people who just have to survive, in part. It may have to do with being Jews in difficult circumstances and passing on a certain way of looking at things but I mean, then again, one of the things I like about Ireland so much is that I find the people have basically a humorous way of looking at the world. It is certainly not that you're Jews but is probably for the same reason. It is a different humour, for example, to English humour. It is one of the reasons why I feel so at home here."

Daniel's sense of humour is, she says, "very hard to describe. I wouldn't be able to put it in words. He is very funny though". I recount to her the story of Arthur Miller bringing Marilyn Monroe to meet his mother at her small house in Manhattan. During dinner, Marilyn goes to the bathroom, which is next to the room where they were eating. To disguise any sound of the call of nature being answered, Marilyn runs the tap in the sink. Later that night, Miller anxiously rings his mother to ask for her opinion of his famous new girlfriend. "What did you think of her, ma? Did you like her," he asked. "Marilyn's a lovely girl, son," Rebecca Miller's grandmother replied, "but she pisses like a horse."

"That's funny," she roars with laughter. "I never heard that one." She has, regrettably, heard the story of how Daniel is alleged to have left Adjani by fax. "Ohh! That is just ridiculous!" she laughs. And completely untrue?

"Oh yeah ... "

That fact that it has been written down as fact in newspaper reports must hurt.

"It is unreal to me. It means nothing. Absolutely nothing." She breaks off.

("I knew at that time only too well what my responsibilities were," Daniel said in 2003, "and in what sense I had failed myself and people that I loved and so forth. But I was quite appalled by the extent to which that was taken and elaborated -- to the point where I seemed to be like an antichrist. Of course, I found that very hurtful. The reality, the facts of that situation, were hard enough... yes I was vulnerable to that stuff, absolutely ... ")

In fairness to Rebecca, she is not here to talk about the fiction writing of the tabloid press in England nor The Private Life Of Rebecca Milller. She is here to discuss her own work of fiction ...

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is full of beautifully intriguing sentences like "Gradually, I stopped crying about my mother. I bled the emotions from my memory until they hung lifeless in my mind like a pig on a hook in a butcher's shop window."

She isn't particularly enamoured of the word autobiographical being applied to her novel. "I think it would be doing a disservice and just an untruth to the book to try and directly line it up biographically with my life because it just wouldn't work. What is there are themes and concerns and interests that I have. And let's be precise. Like Suki, certainly isn't my mother." Is the old editor character, Herb, your father?

"Is Herb my dad?" Rebecca says. "Well, you know, for sure, like an old Jewish guy, he's got an intellectual ... there's definitely rhythm. It is the rhythm. But at the same time, he's not ... there's a big difference. Even though he is an editor and in many ways has the charisma of an artist, he is not an artist. That is a huge divide. So that would be a huge part of my father that certainly is not there. In fact, the truth is I have a good ear for music and the way people speak and dialogue. There is a lot of borrowing going on."

There are, however, some fascinating bits in Pippa Lee that it would be rude not to ask whether they were autobiographical.

Did you, like your character, have a frisson with a school girlfriend?

"I'm not telling you that!" she laughs.

What about an affair with a teacher?

"I'm not giving away all my secrets right here and now!" she laughs again.

Did you ever run away from home?

"No! I talked about it. I told my mother," she says, "which is always a bad idea when you are planning on running away from home."

She describes the deaths of her parents as the lowest point in her own life. "They lived long lives. So it wasn't like having someone ripped away from you that's young that you didn't expect to lose. It is something because it is natural you know that is OK and you know that you had to lose them," she says. She believes that with her father's death in particular, her expectation of how she would react to the loss was so great that by the time it happened it was like she had prepared herself so well. It was like she had almost mourned in advance. "In part that is what [The Ballad of] Jack And Rose is about," she says referring to the 2005 movie she wrote in which Daniel starred, "thinking you can't live without someone. That's part of what I was talking about."

How do you think you could live without Daniel?

"You know, you can't ... I think people live without each other, but whether you could be happy without them. You live, but it would be devastating. My father outlived my mother by a couple of years." After she died, Arthur wasn't, she says, "the same. He continued to have his life. He didn't dry up and become an old man but there was definitely something missing from him. I think when you are with each other for a long time, you grow into each other."

Is that what you're like with Daniel?

There is another long pause for thought. "I suppose, yeah, in a way. I think it is important to keep your individuality but at the same time as you are doing that grow into each other." With that, the leggy, iconoclastic brunette is up and gone back to Wickla to continue that growth. The original Dan and Becs.

The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee, €12.99, by Rebecca Miller is published by Canongate.

- Barry Egan

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