Timebends (91 page)

But at the time I knew nothing of all this. As I was coming to the end of the writing of
After the Fall,
the horrifying news came that Marilyn had died, apparently of an overdose of sleeping pills.

There are people so vivid in life that they seem not to disappear when they die, and for many weeks I found myself having to come about and force myself to encounter the fact that Marilyn had ended. I realized that I still, even then, expected to meet her once more, somewhere, sometime, and maybe talk sensibly about all the foolishness we had been through—in which case I would probably have fallen in love with her again. And the iron logic of her death did not help much: I could still see her coming across the lawn, or touching something, or laughing, at the same time that I confronted the end of her as one might stand watching the sinking sun. When a reporter called asking if I would be attending her funeral in California, the very idea of a burial was outlandish, and stunned as I was, I answered without thinking, “She won't be there.” I could hear his astonishment, but I could only hang up, it was beyond explaining. In any case, to join what I knew would be a circus of cameras and shouts and luridness was beyond my strength. I had done all that was in me to do, and to me it was meaningless to stand for photographs at a stone. For some reason what I had said to her long ago kept returning—“You're the saddest girl I've ever known.” And she had replied, “Nobody ever said that to me!” and
laughed with an inward-looking surprise that reminded me of my own as a boy when the salesman with the artificial leg suddenly remarked, “You've gotten serious,” and made me see myself differently. It was so strange that she had never really had the right to her own sadness.

And now, naturally, the press gathered to chorus its laments, the same press that had sneered at her for so long, whose praise and condescension, if not contempt for her as an actress, she had taken too seriously. To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.

Coming out of the forties and fifties, she was proof that sexuality and seriousness could not coexist in America's psyche, were hostile, mutually rejecting opposites, in fact. At the end she had had to give way and go back to swimming naked in a pool in order to make a picture.

Years later, her life would be taken up by a writer whose stock-in-trade was the joining of sexuality and the serious, but avowedly desperate for money to pay his several alimonies, he could only describe what was fundamentally a merry young whore given to surprising bursts of classy wit. If one looked closely, she was himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power. Pain of any kind would have unnecessarily soiled the picture even though he was describing a woman on the knife edge of self-destruction all her adult life.

I had to wonder if her fate at the great author's hands would have been better had she agreed back in the fifties to my suggestion that we invite him for dinner some evening. I had heard that Norman Mailer had bought a house in Roxbury, and from what everyone knew of him, he would have rushed to meet her. Though I remembered our short conversation long ago in front of the Brooklyn Heights brownstone where we both lived—when, astonishingly, he had announced that he could write a play like
All My Sons
anytime and presumably would when he got around to it—I dismissed it as a youthful overflowing of envy, which every writer feels and does well to outgrow. Now, some ten years later, he might make good company for an evening. I thought then that we were too much alone and more visitors might ease her distrust of strangers. But she rejected the idea of inviting Mailer, saying she “knew those types” and wanted to put them behind her in this new life she hoped to create among civilians who were not obsessed with images, their
own or other people's. Reading his volume, with its grinning vengefulness toward both of us—skillfully hidden under a magisterial aplomb—I wondered if it would have existed at all had we fed him one evening and allowed him time to confront her humanity, not merely her publicity.

And so as the subject of his novel-that-was-not-fiction and at the same time his non-novel-that-was-not-actually-true, she would emerge precisely as she hated to appear, as a kind of joke taking herself seriously; but it was a picture that allowed the reader to condescend to be charmed. The basics of her career were supplied by that disinterested witness Milton Greene, who had been prized out of her financial life by main legal force, while her beloved supporters—her analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had fought for her life to the end, and her nurse-companion, an elderly woman—were caricatured as almost frivolous about her welfare. Indeed, questioned on television by Mike Wallace as to why he had alleged the nurse's possibly lethal carelessness on the fatal evening, badly damaging her professional reputation and her honor, when it would have been easy to check her movements in the final hours, the author replied that he could not get in touch with the lady; and when a surprised Wallace said that he had had no trouble finding her through the Los Angeles telephone book, the author resumed his literary excursus on the ancient license of the fictionalist, finding it convenient at this particular point that his “Marilyn” not be quite a real person surrounded by real persons, although on other occasions he would of course desire her to be taken as such, as when a prospective reader looking for the real goods picked up his book in a store and considered buying it with real money. Indeed, asked by Wallace why he had written the book at all, he candidly replied that he needed the money.

She had been right in the first place, and I had been far too trusting, often witlessly and irritatingly so; I wasn't used to the ocean of great fame seething with sharks—but I unwillingly watched them attack again and again, to the point where the whole fame game became an institutionalized paranoia that stunned the soul and made one dead. But to live day after day in the fog of unrelieved suspicion had seemed pointless and, as it turned out, was finally impossible for her as well.

Coming so soon after Marilyn's death,
After the Fall
had to fail. With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal,
not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman. Altogether ignored was the fact that the counterattack on me was supplied by practically paraphrasing Quentin's acknowledgment of his own failings—by the play itself; it was as though the critics had witnessed an actual domestic quarrel and been challenged to come to Maggie's rescue.

I could not help thinking that this gleeful and all but total blindness to the play's theme and its implications was one more proof that they could not be faced, that it was impossible to seriously consider innocence lethal. It was this kind of denial that had brought about the play's tragic ending. I was soon widely hated, but the play had spoken its truth as, after all, it was obliged to do, and if the truth was clothed in pain, perhaps it was important for the audience to confront it uncomfortably and even in the anger of denial. In time, and with much difficulty, I saw the justification for the hostility toward me, for I had indeed brought very bad news.

But
After the Fall's
reception was not as uniformly negative as I imagined in the heat of the moment. When I looked back, it was obvious that aside from
Death of a Salesman
every one of my plays had originally met with a majority of bad, indifferent, or sneering notices. Except for Brooks Atkinson at the beginning, and later Harold Clurman, I exist as a playwright without a major reviewer in my corner. It has been primarily actors and directors who have kept my work before the public, which indeed has reciprocated with its support. Only abroad and in some American places outside New York has criticism embraced my plays. I have often rescued a sense of reality by recalling Chekhov's remark: “If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter.”

An old friend looked down at year-old Rebecca in her stroller. We were the same age, nearing our fifties, had married in our twenties after leaving college, and had had our children at about the same time. Now here I was, the owner of a stroller again. After smiling at her, he turned to me and said, “Didn't we do this already?”

Rediscovering fatherhood a second time, I was finding that like youth, it is wasted on the young. A child underfoot in middle age was a steady remonstrance against the prevailing pessimistic view of life in the warring sixties, for there is some absurdity in an older man as a new father, an unnaturalness through which he sees a
small child's movingly imperious demand that life return life to her clear, primordial gaze. I found in myself a certain protectiveness toward whatever around me seemed hopeful, and a suspicion of all easy negativism. I was not sure what the source of this feeling was, but I dreaded that life was very easy to kill. It may simply have come from knowing that I was growing old.

But I also knew times had changed when neither Bob nor Jane showed any interest in going to college, which seemed irrelevant to them. I recalled that in my last couple of years as a student I had been impatient to go out into the far more interesting world and had stayed in school mainly because there was no choice, what with jobs so hard to find. Though they seemed to be in danger of cutting themselves off from the culture of the past by this total rejection of academic work, I lacked conviction in opposing them, unsure that I understood their vision of the real. Even before the Vietnam War had taken its toll on their generation's belief in America, they seemed to have lost something of the success drive that I had more than once lamented as a distorting pressure on my generation. And now I was worrying that they had turned their backs on it! But one dared not say this openly anymore. I relied on my faith in them. What would be would be.

Marcello Mastroianni came down to the Chelsea one afternoon to talk about his doing Quentin in Franco Zeffirelli's production of
After the Fall.
A more unprepossessing human never lived; he really seemed to see himself with the same ironic humor he applied to everyone else, as though life in general was a nearly total misunderstanding. His first part had been as Biff in
Salesman
years before. I thought he would be wonderful as Quentin because he seemed to be trying to puzzle out what was happening to him while still regarding himself from a certain distance. I was curious about his attitude toward the play, which I suspected might seem rather strange to him, given what I had heard of his experiences with women.

“How do you connect with Quentin? Can you sympathize with what he does in the play?”

“Of course. The same thing happens to all of us one time or another.”

“So you understand him?”

“Oh, yes.”

I sensed some reservation and pressed him to let me have it.

“But so much trouble over a woman?”

“Why? What would you do?”

“I would”—he flipped out his hand to indicate a long distance—“take a walk.”

In fact, the American notion of having to relate one's own personality so closely to a part was a strange idea. He was on his way home to talk to Fellini, who wanted him for a film, which he would of course accept sight unseen (and which would prevent him from playing Quentin for Zeffirelli). It turned out to be 8½. He had no idea of the story and was content to be handed the script on the first day of shooting. “An actor is first of all an animal; if he hasn't that, he has nothing. I am happy to be so.” It was somehow a relief just talking to him, as though a weight had been lifted from the whole idea of performing.

The attacks on me for
After the Fall
were not easy to accept, but I found some small solace in recalling the incomprehensible hostility that the very announcement of a Lincoln Center repertory company aroused even before a program had.been chosen. I confess I am not sure I understand this yet. I thought it exciting that successful and talented people like Whitehead, Kazan, Bobby Lewis, and Harold Clurman should be lending their prestige and idealism to an untried enterprise. After all, most of their generation had left the theatre for TV and films, and they were among a very few who might hand on an American theatrical tradition. But the press, especially certain academic commentators in the more literate journals, was perplexingly and bitterly hostile, quite as though something underhanded were being plotted, while the professional theatrical writers stood aside, at best neutral if not mildly cynical toward this attempt at a new noncommercial theatre. So damaging was this negativism-in-advance that Clurman had received few scripts for consideration as future productions. I went to several schools to encourage young writers to send in their plays, but the propaganda was as successful as it was incredible.

With Jason Robards as Quentin and Barbara Loden as Maggie, Kazan created a production of great control and truthful feeling, surely one of the best things he had ever done. I had not made it easy for him; with stream-of-consciousness evocations of characters, abrupt disappearances, and transformations of time and place, the play often verged on montage. He never tried to simplify his
job by thinning out the material, and he faithfully sought to bring out the play's intentions. The audiences that packed the temporary theatre on West Fourth Street seemed deeply moved, despite all the surrounding antagonism. My one great regret was my failure to stop Loden from wearing a blonde wig, which seemed to invite identification with Marilyn. Later I had to ask myself if this blindness was my own form of denial, but as usual I was buried in the play's structure, and the characters' resemblance to real models was far from the center of my attention.

Whatever its failings, Lincoln Center was conceived as a theatre that would reach out to the general public. By confronting the unconverted rather than a congenial cultural clique, playwrights and actors would be called on to stretch and deepen their art. But the “revolutionary” critics and avant-garde establishment scorned the whole project as a creation of bankers and old theatre “pros.” Actually the real battle inside this theatre was between a banker, George Woods, and the old pros Whitehead-Kazan-Clurman, but it went entirely unreported, a matter of no interest to journalists and academics out to establish their own chic credentials; nor, it must be said, would Whitehead break ranks and go to the press with the facts, hoping instead to win a new theatre as a gentleman among gentlemen.