TOM MILLER AT 100!

That one above is Tom in 2007, a couple of months before his death at the age of 85. Had he lived until October 24, 2022 he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. No reason why we can't.

​What follows is an array of photos from his life, with accompanying verbiage.

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Tom with his mother, Addie Miller. 1935. Tom was 13. She died a few months thereafter, the great tragedy of his younger years. He had refused to kiss her before she was driven from home to the hospital. After her death he wrote a letter to her and burned it, thinking the smoke would take his message to her in Heaven.

Tom with his father, Clyde Miller, possibly 1936. The family was living on Water Street in Las Cruces, NM at the time, and I believe that Clyde had remarried by then, Leanah, a good friend and fellow schoolteacher of Tom's older sister Norma.

Tom had been born in Carier Mills, Illinois, a coal mining town, but his family moved to Las Cruces when he was a child because of spots on his lungs. They joined Norma there: she had already moved to Las Cruces to teach.

Tom's sister Norma, 17 years his senior and a rock of stability in the Miller family. Here she is in 1937 at the age of 31 and in 1999 at the age of 93, a year before her death. She spent the last 6 years of her life in a retirement complex in Tuscaloosa under our care and died in September 2000 surrounded by family: her brother, the 2 younger sisters, and several nieces and nephews.

​Las Cruces, 1940 (?), with his dog Toady.  A couple of years later he joined the U.S. Coat Guard. He had seen all those WW1 war in the trenches movies and knew that wasn't for him. Coast Guard: they'll be hugging the coast? No, they were all over the Pacific as well.

Tom's father died while he was in the Coast Guard. He was granted compassionate leave, but Clyde died just before he arrived home.

​Signalman 2d Class Tom Miller. During his war years he wrote lots of letters home from  various locations on the Atlantic and Pacif coasts and the wider Pacific, where his ship was involved with supplying the troops. His sister Norma kept all of these letters and arranged them chronolcally into a couple of scrapbooks. That archive formed the timeline and aide-mémoire for his book "Boy at Sea," written as a memoir but later published as a novel with all names of persons and ships changed because he discovered that a central character was still alive and might kick. After his death I donated those scrapbooks and the memoir/novel to the  Veterans Memoirs collection at the Library of Congress.

After the war Tom returned to Las Cruces (left) and a few months later moved to Los Angeles to where he attended Los Angeles City College (as it was known then). On the right, Tom in front of his bungalow on West 4th.

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Below, two more shots taken of Tom during his LA years.

Already Tom was a writer. All his life he wrote song lyrics, and while at LA City College his musical play "The Darwin Theory" was produced to some acclaim. He wrote book and lyrics had hummed the music, which was written down by Jerry Goldsmith, a fellow student who went on to fame and acclaim as composer of movie scores (Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, Alien, and Poltergeist, among many others). While working on this production Tom became close friends with one Wyatt Cooper, and they planned to work on a play together but that never came to pass. Wyatt told Tom that his big goal in life was to marry a rich woman. He managed to do so, and with his wife Gloria Vanderbilt produced 2 sons, one of whom is big on CNN these days. In the early 1960s Tom relocated to New York, hoping that would be a better location for a hopeful playwright. To suport himself he took staff publicity positions at American Internation Pictures, MGM, and Embassy. He (in)famously left Embassy after seeing an advance screening of "The Graduate" and hated it, and thought it would destroy Embassy.

I met Tom in 1967, introduced to him at a party thrown by Walter Brown McCord, also a refugee from my home county, who worked with Tom at MGM. Tom and I remained a team for the next 40 years, and when he died I was holding his hand.

Tom decided to branch out from being a staff publicist to become a unit publicist, working on movies while they were in production. His idea was that such a career would give him more down time for his writing. There follows a selection of shots from his unit publicity career:

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That's Tom in dark glasses just above Jeanne Moreau's head. Back to camera and talking with Moreau is Donald Sutherland. This was his first unit job. Sutherland almost got Tom fired in a kerfluffle started when Tom compared the movie ("Alex in Wonderland)" to Disneyland, of which Sutherland disapproved. Featured in the cast was Ellen Burstein in one of her first major movie roles, and they got along great. The movie is (possibly justifiably) forgotten now, but I'd like to take a fresh look at it.

"Boardwalk." Also forgotte;n. But Tom loved the experience of working tith Lee Strasberg, Ruth Gordon, Janet Leigh, and others. He wrote a title song for the movie's end credits, but the director insisted on a total rock score (the grandson was trying to become a rockstgar).










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Below, "The Chosen." Tom loved working with Barry Miller, Robby Benson, Rod Steiger, and Maximilian Schell.

Tom had worked with a number of big names over the years, some at the beginning of their careers and some at the end. On "The Wrath of God" there were Robert Mitchum, Rita Hayworh, (her last movie), and Frank Langella (among his earlier movies).

Langella played the son of Hayworth, which makes his later acknowledgment that they were lovers a bit strange.

​I have always loved this shot of Tom on location at La Luz, Mexico, out from Guanajuato. I spent 3 weeks with Tom in Mexico at the tim, half in Guanajuato and the rest in Mexico City. I loved the La Luz location. We spent a good bit of time with Hayworth, and we (like all the rest) wrote off early signs of her Alzheiner's as a result of overindulgence in drink. 

Tom worked on 2 movies directed by Paul Newman: "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-ion-the-Moon-Mariglds," filmed in Bridgeport, CT. and "Harry & Son" in Ft. Lauderdale. Joanne Woodward starred in the first and had a featured role in the second. On the latter Tom got to work withk Robby Benson again.

​Above, Marigolds. To right, Harry & Son.

 
And of course he had worked with Robert De Niro on "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straigt." Tom had been friends with De Niro ever since he worked on the New York release of "Bloody Mana," one of De Niro's early notalble efforts. Below: De Nioro in the middle, Jerry Orbach on the left, Tom on the right.

Other movies Tom worked on include "Shaft," "Blow Out," "Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon,"  "A Gatheriong of Old Men" (his last), and Elaine May's "Mikey and Nicky" and Francis Coppola's's "The Cotton Club." His experiences on those last 2 are described in his movie memoir "A Fever of the Mad." A full listing of his movies is found here: Tom Miller - IMDb

​(You will note that on his earlier movies he is listed as "uncredited." At that time producers were not required to give the unit publicist screen credit. That changed.)
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Tom Canford: that was the name he used for his published works, which include the family memoir "Baker's Daughter, Miller's Son" and the novels "The Curse of Vilma Valentine" and "Ghost Guitars."

I elected to move home to Alabama in March of 1989, taking early retirement from Columbia University Libraries, to take over house and environs after my parents had died close together a year before. Tom agreed to come with me. His intention was to continue working on movies , but knee and hip problems put a stop to that. He held on to this New York apartment for a year and a half, but he decided to give that up and relocate to Sawyerville permanently. I knew he would be happy as long as he had a good place to work, and we turned what used to be my parents' bedroom into an office for him and later for me. His decision was no doubt influenced by our 4 goats (they came with the property) and Huckleberry, who came into our lives totally by accident 10 days after the move.  And then later there was Roscoe, who survived Tom by exactly 2 and a half years.

Huckleberry (1989-1999)                                                                                    Roscoe (1999-2010)

I think Tom enjoyed his life in Sawyerville. We were greatly supported by his family and mine, and as I mentione above we took care of his sister Norma during the last 6 years of her life, which further encouranged visits from their other 2 sisters and their spouses and several of hs nieces and nephews. There were health issues, most of them managed fairly well, including a hip replacement in 1980. But nothing had prepared us for the accelerating medical problems of 2007, cumulating ih the GIST (Gastro-Intestinal Stromal Tumor) that led to serious surgery the Monday before Tthanksgiving that yhear followed by 3 weeks in ICU before his death from a pulmonary embolism.

I remain grateful for our 22 years together in New York and our 18 in Alabama. I believe Tom was too.