Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition)

by Mel Gussow

  You had to say, nothing is going to work, so why should I worry about it? And then dip into your pocket and you got a few dollars – if you had a few dollars. Hemingway had been part of that culture, which said, in effect, to hell with the economy and the political stuff, right through the ’20s. He was basically a Bohemian. In To Have and Have Not, it reached him. The line was something like, ‘One man alone is no goddamn good,’ meaning that there had to be some kind of organized resistance to this slide. One didn’t admit to having one’s own nihilism.

  MG: Couldn’t it have driven you into one of the professions, into medicine, or, perhaps, law?

  AM: I had these fantasies from time to time, and they always collapsed because the idea of all that memorization simply floored me. At one point at [the University of] Michigan, history fascinated me. In fact that was the time I first learned about the Salem witchcraft. It was simply a bizarre incident. I had no attitude toward it. I began considering becoming a history teacher. But the appalling amount of boring material – I simply couldn’t discipline myself that much. I couldn’t discipline myself well enough to become a teacher of anything. I was really groping from one subject to another.

  MG: What made you sit down and write a play?

  AM: That was my sophomore year at Michigan. At that time, the theatre was the most exciting form. That’s where all the action was. I don’t recall attaching that much excitement to prose writing. The short story was exciting, novels less so. This was ’33, ’34.

  MG: Weren’t Hemingway and Fitzgerald coming along then?

  AM: They were the great novelists – and Steinbeck came out.

  MG: For a young man at that time, deciding to be an artist, the attraction might have been to go off to France, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

  AM: I knew the subject was here. France was the moon, as far as I was concerned. The subject was right here. There was never a question in my mind about that. It was the most exciting place I could imagine. I had no connections to European culture at all. It literally was a cultural lunar landscape. I gravitated toward the theatre, I think, in part because it seemed to be exciting. The Group Theatre was making the first noises, and there were all sorts of revolutionary things that were going to address the population directly. But I think it’s more internal than that. My talent was to write scenes, dialogue. When I tried to write prose, it was the dialogue that became the most persuasive, and the descriptive parts the most laboured. I was aware of that, too. I think that’s essentially why I became a playwright. Carried along with it was the feeling that with a play you could change the world.

  MG: Why would you think that?

  AM: That was the propaganda of the moment, the cultural notion of these new theatres, especially the Group. Harold Clurman [a founder-director of the Group Theatre] was a great issuer of edicts, papal bulls. And I began to be struck by the great nineteenth-century European playwrights. That reached home quicker than any of the literature, excepting for the Russian novelists. But who could write Russian novels? I was swimming with the given conception. Basically, though, it was my own bent.

  MG: The idea that Odets could write about the common man as hero must have been an inspiration.

  AM: That’s right. Theatre before the Depression, at least, so far as my consciousness was concerned, was all make believe. It involved people one would never hope to meet, played by Gladys George or some other lady, or a very handsome leading man. It was also the way the new actors were looking. Nobody could mistake John Garfield for anything but a guy from the block. Or Kazan, when he was an actor. Or Lee Cobb. Or any of them. Morris Carnovsky. They had a sprinkling of Franchot Tone, a little style, that was all.

  MG: You wrote eight plays and buried them all.

  AM: Well, they got buried. But they helped. I won prizes with them. I was hoping I would write one that would get produced. I was testing the reality of my vision, that I could make somebody else see what I thought I was seeing. Most of the time it didn’t work. Partly the reason it didn’t work, I’m convinced, is that behind seemingly ordinary stories, I was labouring with some metaphysic, which I was unconscious of, but it was trying to get out, and the metaphysic was a kind of doom. The first time it really showed any aborted expression was a play about Montezuma and Cortez, The Golden Years, which I wrote in ’38, ’39.

  MG: Looking for turning points in your life: the first was the Crash; the next was when All My Sons was a success?

  AM: No. It was winning the awards at Michigan as a playwright. That was the first recognition. The Hopwood Award was judged by outside writers like Susan Glaspell, a number of critics, other playwrights, and it was all done anonymously. The scripts were unsigned. On some objective level, somebody thought I had some ability. It was such a shock. But it turned me around. I realized that I could hope to make a life writing. That was very important.

  MG: Your very first play was a straightforward realistic play about your family, and it won a Hopwood prize.

  AM: And the Federal Theatre did a production of it for a week in Detroit, and that was the end of it. But it won another prize, the one that Tennessee won, from the Theatre Guild. They gave me $1250 which was a fortune. The play had several titles. The Grass Still Grows. [It was also known as No Villain and They Too Arise.] Another turning point was the failure of my first Broadway play [The Man Who Had All the Luck]. The next big turning point was when I decided to write a play, which I would be able honestly to defend every moment of, however long it took to write it. I spent two and a half years on All My Sons, with that in mind.

  MG: Can you think back to what provoked you to write that play?

  AM: Yes. My then mother-in-law who lived in Ohio, a little town called Berea, told me about a young girl during the war who had turned in her father. I don’t recall what he did, but it was some thing with the government selling them defective stuff. It was fairly early in the war and I was very struck by that. It was a shocker. Anyway, that got changed into a boy. At that time I had written seven or eight plays and I wasn’t getting any produced. I was getting on to thirty, and I knew a lot of young writers who clearly were never going to make any life out of this thing. I didn’t want to do that. Then this story hooked me, so I decided I would try to be as remorseless with myself as I could be and be sure that every page was really working.

  By this time, I had been taken up by Herman Shumlin, who had produced Lillian Hellman. He was one of the two or three director-producers of any seriousness on Broadway. Of course there was no Off Broadway, so Broadway was where you went. Or nowhere. He read the play and said, ‘I don’t understand it.’ I thought, what is there not to understand? Kazan and Clurman had just set up a company to produce plays and both of them were offering themselves as directors. Kazan appealed to me more. He seemed more my style. Clurman seemed a little bit remote. And that’s how it started. It didn’t require a lot of rewriting. I eliminated one long speech.

  MG: Even after All My Sons, you were not completely convinced of playwriting as a career?

  AM: Two weeks after All My Sons opened, and after the initial struggle it became rather a success due to [Brooks] Atkinson [drama critic for the New York Times], and it won the critics’ award [the New York Drama Critics Circle prize for best American play]. I was making $7000 a week. All My Sons was doing very well. I feared I would be torn loose from reality by all this, because I was making more money in a week than I would ever hope to make. Suddenly fame beckoned, and I was resisting. I just felt that’s not where I want to be. I just went down to the unemployment agency run by the state. I took the first job they offered, which was in Long Island City, in a box factory. It was terrifying. I’m glad I did it because I reminded myself again that a lot of people were doing that work. They were putting dividers in wooden boxes. Beer bottles were stuck in these dividers. The work was so boring, I couldn’t bear it. After a couple of weeks I realized I could do more good to myself and to the human race.

  MG: You’ve written about the rehear
sals of Salesman, when Lee J. Cobb was lying low . . .

  AM: Lying low? Dying! Dying a slow death.

  MG: Then finally one day coming alive.

  AM: That was maybe the most single magical moment of my life in the theatre. It was close to two weeks into rehearsal. In those days, you had your first public performance in Philadelphia about three and a half weeks in. Here we were, about half that time. Everybody else in the cast was prepared to perform. They were very quick and eager, and you could barely hear him. He seemed to be totally disconnected from anybody else, walking around looking for something on the floor. We had been calling him the walrus. He would lie there with his flippers spread out, swaying from side to side. Kazan kept saying, ‘He’s finding it.’After about twelve days I noticed that Kazan began to say it with far less assurance. And after about fourteen days, he began talking about maybe we have to get somebody else. Who that might be, the appalling idea of having to go out now and start to recast this role with that Philadelphia date staring us in the face . . . He kept after Cobb, tried to make him come to life. But there was no visible change that I could see.

  We were up on the New Amsterdam Roof. I think there were only Kazan and me and Jimmy Proctor [the press agent], and Eddie Kook, from Century Lighting. Lee came to the line in the first scene, ‘There’s more people now. The competition is maddening.’ And he cried that out. [Laugh.] It was the first time you could really hear him. Nobody among us five or six moved. I thought, he’s going to lapse back. Then he went on and played the rest of the show. I was simply elevated. I forgot I was in the theatre. He became a dream figure. I was moved to tears by the wonder of his performance, that a human being could do this. There was no set, of course. I had only the haziest idea of what the set was going to look like. But he peopled that block, that city. You suddenly saw an apartment house. It’s indescribable. He created life in front of your eyes – and it never ceased.

  MG: Have you ever had a comparable experience with another play?

  AM: Never like that. I doubt many people have, if only because not many actors would have been able to have suppressed all this for so long. There literally was no sign of life. You always pray that this is going to happen. Of course, Lee was a great great actor in that part. I don’t know if he was in every part, but he certainly was in that.

  MG: He never had the career one would have thought he should have had.

  AM: I was appalled that after some months, he wanted to leave the play, all because he was being offered Hollywood roles that were, in my opinion, not up to his ankles.

  MG: In contrast to Garfield, who had some great roles.

  AM: Garfield I understand absolutely. Garfield’s career should have gone into movies. He was a romantic lead. Lee was not a romantic lead; he never could be. Why would he do that? It was a sign of success for an actor to go to Hollywood. He was making pretty good money, I think, in that role. Certainly everybody was sending him plays.

  MG: I wonder if we could talk about something more personal. How do you deal with Marilyn Monroe in your book?

  AM: I deal with Marilyn as a person in my life rather than as a figure in a national dream, because that isn’t the way I met her.

  MG: How did you meet her?

  AM: I was in Hollywood to get a film made about a conflict with the ILA, the longshoreman’s union, which was then in a kind of a turmoil. Of course in Hollywood then, they weren’t doing pictures like that. Kazan thought that if we both went we might talk Harry Cohn into doing it because he came from the west side waterfront as a boy, and also he was enough of a maverick to try something.

  Anyway, we stopped by a Fox movie, which was being directed by Kazan’s former film editor, and there was this girl crying in the corner, beautifully dressed, waiting to go on to play a part, a tiny role with Monty Woolley. I think it was As Young As You Feel. I never saw the film. She was so striking and so terribly sad that the combination struck me. She had to walk across the floor of a nightclub in the film, and she did that a half a dozen times, and we left. I found out later that her agent and lover Johnny Hyde had just died. I had never known him, and that’s where we met. Along with ninety-eight per cent of the American people, I had never heard of her.

  MG: How long was it before you started going out?

  AM: It was about four years. We corresponded once in a while. [Pause.] She was really my wife, and that’s the way I deal with her in the book.

  MG: That whole period must have been a very traumatic time for you.

  AM: The only thing that came out of it so far as my work was concerned was The Misfits. Until I got married to Marilyn, I never thought about writing a film at all. I didn’t like screenwriting because basically you’re not in control of it, unless you’re going to be the director. So it was chaotic, complete chaos, because she was very badly ill a lot of the time, as she was for most of her life.

  MG: Was she ill when you married her?

  AM: She really was, yes. More ill than I knew. I loved her. I thought she was the most wonderful person. I couldn’t imagine living without her. If I had not felt that way, I would not have. It just couldn’t work, as a lot of things can’t. It was a tragic circumstance, not the first and not the last.

  Either it kills you – or it doesn’t!

  MG: Did it change you considerably?

  AM: In many ways, sure. It changed my attitude towards acting, toward actors, toward theatre, toward art. I don’t any longer consider that any sacrifice is valid for an actor or an actress to make. To be an actor or an actress is a very vulnerable position. Unlike any other artist, you’re placing yourself on the line. You can get killed doing that because it’s you that’s being attacked when it isn’t working, as well as you who is being glorified when it is working. To have anything in reserve is the art. Living through it. She had no reserve. Everything she was was up there. She took it too seriously. Any actor or actress I see doing that, I can smell smoke. And I wouldn’t have thought that way before. Some of my feelings about it all are in After the Fall, because the play was the after-wake of that.

  MG: How good an actress was she?

  AM: She was a very fine comedienne. Whether she could have done other things I can’t say. She had a remarkable oblique and therefore very modern or shall I say, postmodern, attitude toward emotion. Apparently she was both able to feel what she was doing and comment on it at the same time. So that irony made her sexuality funny. That’s a great talent. Whether anything like this would have counted for her in a non-comic part you can only judge by The Misfits, which was a straightforward attempt to act.

  MG: The common theory is that she was spoiled by the Actors Studio, by [Lee] Strasberg forcing her into something that did not come naturally.

  AM: I think she was made more dependent rather than less, and in her psychological condition that was bad because she needed to have something to depend upon. The nature of Strasberg’s approach was to force his domination rather than to free up somebody to do without him. She’s not the only one about whom that could be said, but she was so vulnerable that she couldn’t recover from it. She became more and more addicted to that dependency, and therefore that was bad for her. Some of the methodology, I suppose, enabled her to work, but all I saw was that it made her more and more despairing that she could ever rationalize herself into a role. She had a natural gift, and she didn’t live long enough to absorb any teaching without crippling that gift. So she was working not only to teach herself but to keep that vitality alive, the native vitality that was untaught and unconscious. To do that in her case turned out to be impossible.

  MG: When she died, was it . . . devastating?

  AM: I didn’t know anything about her life by that time, at all, but as the world knows now she was suicidal many times in her life. I assumed as everybody did that she had gone over the edge. Slipped over the edge. I can’t say that I was absolutely surprised. It was horrible. I was horrified by it. At the same time, I knew that she was playing Russian roulette all h
er life.

  MG: Could she have not been an actress?

  AM: That’s hard to imagine. She was so beautiful – it would have been incredible that she be anything but that. Especially in those days, the studios were all there was in Los Angeles. In different circumstances, she might have been strengthened by her art. The way it is now, the movies are an exploitation situation.

  MG: She was really a creation of that mechanized movie business.

  AM: And its victims lie all over the scenery. She’s just the most pathetic of them, and the most known. This is the cost of that system of production.

  MG: Do you think about her?

  AM: Oh, sure. She suffered a lot. It was beyond me or any other human being to alleviate it at all. I tried to do it in The Misfits, surrounding her with people who would love her and whom she would respect and admire.

  9 January 1987

  ‘Tennessee felt his redemption lay in writing. I feel the same way. That’s when you’re most alive’

  We met at Miller’s apartment in Manhattan. I had just seen a new play by another talented writer and expressed my disappointment in it. We began talking about playwriting and the difficulty of the profession.

  MG: How have you managed to survive as an artist?

  AM: I suppose partly I was helped by Europe. I think without that I might have given up. I should add though, I was also helped by the resident theatres in the country, and in Latin America, where my work never ceased to be done. In the last twenty-five years there has been a steady deterioration of the theatrical system. It had little or nothing to do with me or with any individual. For whatever reasons, it’s dried up. A number of theatres are dark. These are the death throes. We’re always talking about the thing dying, but I don’t think it’s ever come to this extremity. There seems to be no visionary move on the part of the commercial managements.