Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition)

by Mel Gussow

  AM: He came in and read the part. You associate him with such danger: he’s a gunman. I cannot imagine him being able to play a role and ever escape that identification. Ben is supposed to be a bit of a larcenist. He’s fooling around with Biff and suddenly Biff’s on the floor, and he doesn’t know what hit him. In this production Ben’s got a sword cane. The guy in the original production was an over-the-hill opera singer, Tom Chalmers, a baritone with the Metropolitan Opera. This time it’s Louis Zorich. Dustin wanted to know what this guy was like in reality, somebody who would be the colonialist and walk into a jungle, and come out rich. He was being Willy in all situations. We would have actresses come and be the woman in Boston. He played a whole scene with each one, to see what a different kind of woman she was. Also Miss Forsythe. There are all kinds of Miss Forsythes. She can be a dumb broad, she can be super sophisticated. Her background is never explained; it’s implied.

  MG: What about the sons?

  AM: We ran through a lot of Happys. At least two were superb.

  MG: How does Malkovich compare to Arthur Kennedy, the original Biff?

  AM: In 1949, nobody would act like Malkovich. Arthur Kennedy came on with a kind of extroverted energy that was his own, the character’s, and the style of the time. This is pre-Brando, pre-James Dean, before actors thought of emotion as coming off an inner cool. Malkovich is of a different school completely, but very effective.

  MG: Could Brando have played the role?

  AM: Sure, it could have easily been him. And in fact if you think of him in Streetcar, his extroversion in Streetcar was in contrast to that moody introverted vitality that we later identified with him. Malkovich is more introverted, more private.

  MG: And Stephen Lang?

  AM: That’s Happy. The more sincere he gets, the more humorously unbelievable. He has an incredible physical life.

  MG: Kate Reid as Linda Loman?

  AM: She’s got tremendous power.

  MG: She’s not too old for Dustin?

  AM: I was worried about that. I don’t think so. When they come on stage, they both seem to be very profoundly married. If you go too young, then it makes Dustin younger.

  MG: Didn’t you find yourself losing your patience when the casting took so long?

  AM: Yes, I never like casting. I hate it because I have to meet all the actors and shake their hands at the end and then I just get pained at the idea of having not to hire them, especially when they’re good actors and they’re just not right or someone else is better. That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed away from directing. I just can’t face it every morning. You have to come in and look at twenty-five actors and know at a glance that quite likely some of these people are not going to work.

  MG: Rudman was hired as the director because you had seen his London production of Salesman?

  AM: Pure and simple. He had done that and they had paid my fare so I went over. I had grave doubts that they could ever pull it off, with the accent and all the rest of it. Warren Mitchell was extraordinary. Michael showed a grasp of the play in talking to him later. Dustin also happened to have seen that production. I think that this may have given him a little kick because Warren Mitchell – I don’t know how old he is, but he can’t be older than Dustin. When he was cast as Willy Loman, the British press thought it was a joke. But he won every acting award. Dustin called me from London after I got back – he didn’t know I had been there – to tell me how excited he was about the play. He’s been fixed on it for many years.

  MG: He often talks about his return to the stage. Just about every two years he talks about Hamlet.

  AM: After this, I would hold my breath. He might well be able to pull that off.

  MG: Does he have the voice?

  AM: Well, he’d get it! For example, Lee Cobb had to leave the production in less than four months, I think, because he couldn’t speak anymore. Lee had a big baritone voice, which he misused. There’s a certain amount of yelling that you have to be careful about. Cobb was in the Group Theatre. He was a Stanislavsky actor. He knew all about using your voice, but he didn’t bother with it. He also smoked cigars. I guess that didn’t help. We had a specialist there all the time trying to keep his vocal cords from being destroyed. And I warned Dustin early on. When we started rehearsing, I heard that shout. I went over to him and said, ‘Look, kid, nobody can do this – and yell. You’ll be out of gas.’ He went to a doctor. At the moment he’s still a little bit hoarse, but I suppose that’s always going to be the case. I can hear it immediately when he walks on stage, if he’s doing it right or not. He’s got to get his voice down there [lowers his voice] so he can use it. I don’t think he’s ever had a part that required this much talking at an intense level. Almost every scene he’s in starts like that! You can’t do that for very long. He works at it. He doesn’t let it slide. He’s not a procrastinator like most of us are. If there’s a problem, he goes after it. He’d be a great military commander. He’d laugh if I ever said that, but he attends to details and never forgets the objective.

  MG: Maybe he could do Patton as well as Willy Loman. How would you compare George C. Scott [who directed and starred in a revival of the play on Broadway] to Dustin?

  AM: Scott was very much closer to Lee. He had tremendous power. As I told him, I don’t believe an actor ought to direct himself. There’s simply too much to do in that part to be directing that play. Only somebody with the iron constitution of George Scott would attempt it. I don’t believe in that way of working. Olivier did it with Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl, and it didn’t work. The picture would have been immeasurably better with a good English director.

  MG: In a movie there is more to worry about.

  AM: There’s plenty to worry about in this play. The detail in this thing – it really swamps the mind. It reminds me of trying to do a full-blown production of one of the Elizabethan plays. Suddenly you’ve got a whole new gang of characters on the stage. Take the restaurant scene. There are two women who have got to come on, a waiter, a different atmosphere completely, a whole new mood. All the stuff you’ve been doing up till then – forget it. You’re in a new situation.

  MG: If you were writing the play today, you probably wouldn’t allow yourself to do that.

  AM: Probably not. Very often I look at it and I say, what a heroic idea – not in the moral sense – but in the aesthetic sense. And I think of Tennessee’s work. We had a different idea of the theatre. I think it changed somewhere around Beckett’s entrance. With Beckett the emphasis was on the intensified incident.

  MG: Two or three characters in an intense situation.

  AM: Yes. With us, it’s a tapestry, the whole story, with all the details, with a beginning, a middle and an end. So how could anybody want to act it and direct it at the same time?

  MG: What’s the range of people who have played Willy? You directed it in China.

  AM: I have a book coming out called Salesman in Beijing, which was my log or diary of that production. That guy in China was a Dustin guy, now that I think of it. He’s about Dustin’s size, but stockier, wider. He came to the end of each night and looked at me and said, ‘This is quite a job.’ He’s a wonderful actor, a very literate guy who speaks perfect English. He said, there’s one part of this character I can’t quite link up to because our societies are so different – that Willy is so proud of these great stores that he dealt with. He said, in China, in the scale of Confucian values, the merchant is at the bottom, and no merchant would put his own family name, for example, on his business. He would call it the Grocery Store of the First Happiness. They never want to be involved in trade. He said, ‘I’m trying to find some similarity in China of this idea you have of the salesman going forth into the darkness to conquer the enemy.’

  Up until the First World War, or earlier, there were goods trains moving from Beijing out into the country, and they had been protected by horsemen whose job it was to escort those trains against bandits. When the railroads came in, their services w
ere no longer necessary. They ended up in county fairs doing tricks with guns, a little bit like Annie Oakley and Wild Bill Hickok, and they could talk with romantic nostalgia about that past.

  MG: How did you feel about Fredric March in the movie of Salesman?

  AM: He had been our first choice for the play, but he was in a movie at the time. I don’t think he understood the script. A lot of people didn’t. He would have been terrific on stage. But I think that movie [of Salesman] was misdirected and misconceived. They made Willy into a psycopathic case. It was symptomatic of the ’50s to try to take off any criticism of the system. Instead of using Willy as representing something, he represented nothing but Willy. The consequence was that Freddy was simply playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde again. A little loony, pathetic. It was a great disappointment to me. They also cut out parts of the play that were too inflammatory, not just about the system but about relations between people. They made them milder. They feared any kind of fire. They blanded it out.

  The integration of that play is, if I must say so, total. I wouldn’t know where to set a break. It’s a real weave of my own preoccupations. It’s a web of being that’s got a structure – I can’t tamper with it. I wouldn’t know how to do it. We’re going to do a television film of this production. I’m going to see that it stays right there.

  MG: You’re not going to put Willy in a car, as they did with Fredric March in the movie.

  AM: I knew that was an error, but I didn’t know why. I just felt it was impossible. I know now why. The play’s not a realistic play. It’s Willy’s obsession and all the voices in it are various voices. This is taking place in his head. You know my first title was The Inside of His Head. It’s only as years went by that I realized that’s a subtitle. They’re all moving around inside of his head.

  MG: And your original idea for the set was a cranium?

  AM: Yes. The first set that I wanted – not seriously, because I couldn’t imagine how you could do it – was a concave cranium. This is a better set, I must say.

  MG: On screen and on stage, Dustin has always played naturalistic comedies or dramas.

  AM: What he’s had to do in this one, I guess, is to combine that sense of a documented social type with the inner dynamics of this poem, which is what it is. They did a production at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre [in Minneapolis]. The Cronyns played it [Hume Cronyn as Willy, Jessica Tandy as Linda]. Guthrie didn’t know the play. He turned to me and said, ‘They all say this is a realistic piece. This is a poem for eight voices.’ Therefore, to take it out and suddenly document it with automobiles, highways – it simply violates the thing. It’s part dream, and the hermetic nature must never be broken, no matter what medium you’re going to use. The Swedes did Salesman three years ago. Bo Widerberg, who did Elvira Madigan, made the same mistake. It was to give it soulful documentation. You can’t do that.

  MG: Is that a problem with Dustin?

  AM: He’s trying to do something better. He’s making it absolutely recognizable in every detail, the right handkerchief, everything the way it should be. He’s not just playing the naturalistic side, which can easily be done. You can reduce the whole thing. This has been his major, basic preoccupation.

  MG: Is Willy necessarily more Jewish in this production?

  AM: Well, Lee was as Jewish as Dustin. Maybe more, because Dustin comes from a different generation. I don’t know. You’d have to ask somebody else about that. I never noticed it.

  MG: I felt that more in the London production with Warren Mitchell.

  AM: Well, he was trying to do that. The whole thing is absurd to me because it’s played everywhere in the world, and this is not a consideration. I guess Lee was the only Jew in the first production. That was just the way it worked out. The same thing here with Dustin. I never discussed that with him. He’s playing his father’s generation. But in truth, such is the calendar that his father would have been a son of Willy. It’s the wrong generation. I met his father and I was surprised to see that he was born after some of the stuff that I remember.

  MG: Did his father remind you at all of Willy Loman? Or of your father?

  AM: Well, in a way. Any guy who sells; they have a certain forward motion. They’re making it, and they love it! It reminds me about Willy’s love of business. The love of worrying about these selling problems, supply, demand. Businessmen who are successful are all in love with their work. Willy adores it.

  MG: Even when it kicks him in the face.

  AM: In the deepest sense it’s a game. You don’t play tennis well, but you keep coming back to it for another game. You never envision yourself really being a great tennis player, or golfer, or runner. There’s something about playing it – it’s acting. Salesmen are actors. They devise strategies in performance. In China, it occurred to me: I thought this whole thing is about an actor, and when I wrote it I knew very few actors. The moment when the actor is not in demand anymore.

  MG: And you play a role you don’t want to play.

  AM: Playing for others.

  MG: Has this production taught you anything new about the play?

  AM: I don’t think so. I directed it myself in China and to direct it in another language you really have to translate it. So I had been through it last May. I think I circumnavigated that play pretty well. As a cultural artifact what they make of it is quite interesting.

  MG: Dustin has often based his characters on real people in his life. In playing Willy, was he perhaps thinking of you?

  AM: No, he thinks of me more like Charlie [the neighbour]. I’m more unflappable than Willy, although when I read it to him, when I give him line readings, he loves that. He says, ‘That’s the way it sounds!’ But I don’t think it’s my character. He wouldn’t be able to make use of that, I don’t think. Too much of life is inside. It’s not outside.

  MG: You wouldn’t want to play Willy?

  AM: No. I don’t want to play anything.

  MG: It’s been a long time since Dustin’s done something that’s firmly scripted and established.

  AM: He loves that about it. He says, ‘Imagine, we don’t have to change anything.’

  MG: Doesn’t he want to?

  AM: Oh, no. He loves the discipline of that text. He plays upon it. He relies upon it. It’s hard to think of limits for him. He’s a fanatic, gets his teeth into something and makes it yield. He’ll create a new Willy. It ain’t going to be the other one.

  MG: It won’t be yours?

  AM: It’s Willy. It’s just different than any Willy I’ve seen.

  MG: Certainly the shortest.

  AM: That’s right. It makes the dream bigger, somehow, the fact that he’s grappling with this tremendous force, the society. He’s plucky; there’s a certain pluckiness in the character because he has so few advantages in relation to the struggle.

  MG: He has charm and the smile.

  AM: Dustin is charming. They adore him. The imprint of a star like that is engraved deep in the mind. He’s been in disguise a lot. Maybe that helps. Maybe the audience is not as amazed as one would imagine. There’s no question in mind that he has drawn so far a far younger audience than we would normally expect to see for any play, any straight play, certainly any play about an old man. You don’t expect to see them pouring out of colleges and high schools. They do for him.

  MG: Does that encourage you to bring back The Crucible?

  AM: The Crucible is done a lot more than Salesman. With Salesman, it’s a naive audience in the sense that there’s a tremendous energy in that audience. When there’s laughter there are blocks of it. When they’re shocked, you can hear them gasp. When Willy loses his job, they groan. It’s a real surprise. It’s very visceral. They’re more alive to it. Older people sit there: what else is new? If we succeed, it may be the most important thing it accomplishes, to bring in a new audience. In Chicago, I would say every night there are at least a half dozen people who look to me to be twenty years of age standing outside with a handwritten sign, ‘I want to buy on
e ticket.’

  MG: Cobb left the theatre and then came back years later to do Lear – and he couldn’t do it.

  AM: He left Salesman and became a sheriff on a horse. You can’t be a sheriff on a horse and then suddenly do King Lear. It’s a rigorous art, if you’re going to do it well.

  MG: Dustin hasn’t tuned his instrument for the stage for all those years.

  AM: Well, he’s having to tune it now. He picked one now. He needs an orchestra up there. Every night he comes off shaking his head: ‘Jeez I didn’t do that thing right.’ I say, ‘Well do it right tomorrow,’ and he says, ‘Now I lost the other one.’ Trying to hold that whole thing. And he’s a perfectionist. If it’s almost good, it’s more excruciating than if he missed it altogether.

  The next day I flew to Chicago and went to the matinee of Death of a Salesman. Afterwards I went backstage. On the door of Dustin’s dressing room there was a sign that said ‘Dave Singleman,’ the man who died ‘the death of a salesman, in his green velvet slippers in the smoker of the New York, New Haven and Hartford.’ After Dustin showered, we were driven back to his hotel where we talked about Miller and Salesman.

  MG: How much is Willy your father?

  DH: I started off thinking it was all my father. That’s all I had to draw upon. I think it’s the first play I ever read. I have a book of American plays edited by John Gassner that my brother gave me in 1954 when I was in high school. Death of a Salesman was the first play in the book. I was seventeen and it just knocked me out. And my father was a salesman, and to me it was my family. If anybody, I was Happy, trying to stop fights by clowning around. The relationship between my brother and my father had a lot of similarities, in terms of the emotional struggle.

  My father was a representative of wholesale furniture that factories made. He had swatches, pictures of dining room sets and he would try to sell to the retailers. He got fired in his sixties – they didn’t need him any more – literally by saying, ‘Don’t come in.’

  Lisa [Hoffman’s wife] says that when she watches the play she sees a lot of Arthur mixed in with my father. I hung around with Arthur almost daily since last June. When you study the play and hang around with him, you hear the rhythm. He says a lot of the same words in the play. He says, ‘Isn’t that remarkable?’