by Mel Gussow
AM: Yes, but everybody in that play is obsessed with the same thing, how people get lucky or unlucky, how their fates are determined. In any realistic work, you would never find that. It’s a fable. I think this is what sunk it. They simply couldn’t place it in any category, because it was a reasonably fair production.
MG: Do you think the failure of the play had something too with the fact that it opened during World War II and dealt partly with the shortcomings of capitalism?
AM: I think it was a stylistic problem. I don’t think the content had much to do with it. Today, if a character came on stage and said openly, ‘I don’t know why I have everything and everybody else has nothing,’ that would not be a remarkable statement anymore.
MG: How did it feel watching the play again?
AM: It amuses me a lot because it’s so naive – but that’s its strength. People may sit there and gasp at some of the naivety, but the play penetrates because it’s asking questions everybody asks and can’t answer. At one point, I had the character commit suicide. There was a critic on the Journal-American named John Anderson. I was of course totally unknown. The play had just closed, and I got a phone call from him. I met him. He said, ‘You should be writing tragedies. There’s a tragic overcast to this whole play, which is very hard to create in the theatre. You really believe in the doom that’s gathering over this man’s head.’ Had I more interest in it, I may have well returned to that ending because without striving for it in any way, there is a sense of gathering doom. Maybe it should have ended tragically, but somehow I didn’t feel it had earned that.
MG: Did you change anything in the play for this production?
AM: No.
MG: Not even a pause, as Pinter would do?
AM: No. There aren’t many pauses in this production. Of course, they have this fabulous automobile [a vintage Marmon was the centrepiece of the set]. It’s got a lively unpretentious spirit about it. Underneath it all is a kind of a joke, a joke which is deadly. Just when he’s absolutely sure his longed-for retribution is about to happen it turns out he does something right and deflects it. That’s when the audience laughs and says, wait until the next time.
MG: The play makes a point about the wages of success – and you wrote it before you had any success.
AM: Right. Of course, that theme is forever in the air in this country.
MG: What if the play had been a success in its time?
AM: I wouldn’t have written [the novel] Focus. I would have probably gone right back and written another play.
MG: Now when you watch The Man Who Had All the Luck, do you think of it as being written by another person?
AM: No, I know where I come in there.
MG: Is there much of you in David Beeves [the protagonist of the play]?
AM: As you’ll see, the father-son conflict is underlying the whole thing. When I began writing that, I had no such idea in my mind at all. It just happened. Suddenly I knew how to organize that play. I remember the day, because originally these two guys [David and his brother who wants to be a professional baseball player] were not brothers. They were just friends.
MG: Reading the play, I can see certain connections to Death of a Salesman? Were they apparent to you?
AM: I see that now, but not at the time. When I wrote Salesman, I wasn’t thinking of this at all.
MG: What do you see now?
AM: Well, obviously the two brothers and the father, and the disappointment of the father.
MG: What about the hatred of the girl’s father toward David Beeves? That made me think just a bit of the reaction of Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge to the immigrant who is in love with Eddie’s niece.
AM: God knows where that came from. I left it wide open as to why that man hates him that way. That’s another element in the fabulous nature of that work. It’s just pure hatred. It’s basically a hatred of sexuality more than of a person.
MG: Pinter’s Birthday Party failed first time around, but it soon came back. Here it’s taken you fifty-seven years.
AM: The secret is to live long enough to see that happen.
MG: How is the new play [Resurrection Blues] going?
AM: It’s all done. I’m letting David Esbjornson direct it. I have a meeting with him and Bob Whitehead on Sunday about where to do it. It ought to be done away from the city. There’s an experimental side to it. I would just like to see what an audience makes of it, and what I make of it once it’s up there. I think it could be very exciting. The theatre here aborts the continuation of the growth of a play. In the old days, in the real old days, you went out of town for four or five weeks. The actors became indoctrinated with the play. A lot of discoveries were made, even if there were no script changes, or very few. It all started to come together. There was time, which you don’t have here.
MG: At our panel of playwrights, you told the story about your experience with Pinter in Turkey. Pinter’s luggage was lost and he had to borrow your clothes.
AM: He was apoplectic, and he couldn’t blame that on the United States because it was a British airline.
MG: So he had to wear your shirts.
AM: He had nothing but what he had on him.
MG: Is there a metaphor there? Pinter putting on your clothes, assuming your cloak, so to speak.
AM [laughs]: Maybe. He wore the same suit all week. I gave him a couple of shirts, underwear, socks.
MG: So when he protested at that dinner at the ambassador’s house, Pinter was wearing your underwear.
AM: What a pretentious human being that ambassador [Robert Strausz-Hupe] was. He reminded me of Lee Strasberg. Unbelievable! He was eighty-seven, or something like that.
MG: He didn’t know what was going on in Turkey?
AM: He knew what was going on, but they wanted to prevent Turkey from going left. They didn’t much care how that would happen. You see the menace there was the Soviet Union, which was practically as close [to Turkey] as New Jersey [is to New York]. The country was horrendously poor. Then they had that Kurdish problem.
MG: At the panel, you also spoke about the Turkish courts, the fact that one man who was condemned to death was allowed to be free – until it was time for him to be executed.
AM: That was the most surrealistic thing. I also walked around in the centre of Istanbul with a writer. We passed a very tall building, a twenty-five-storey skyscraper, and he said that was where all the torturing took place – up on some high floor. It was a building such as you would find on Park Avenue.
MG: What was the reaction in Washington to your speech about politics and the art of acting?
AM: There were twenty-five members of Congress in that audience. That is supposed to be the most prestigious speech of the year, culturally speaking. I think they all came expecting a reassuring literary lecture. You look at the list of the people who had spoken there in the past. I don’t think they expected what I had to say. The place was full – a lot of young people, too. It took me over an hour to deliver the speech because they were laughing their heads off. As I was reading it, it occurred to me that if [during the 2000 presidential campaign] some Democrat, preferably Gore, had just spoken plainly about the way he really felt . . .
MG: In the speech, you said, if only politicians spoke with ‘relaxed sincerity.’
AM: I think often of FDR, that aristocratic way he had. He’d nail somebody to a wall. Just a happy phrase of some kind, and the guy would never get loose of it.
MG: You said that among presidents Roosevelt was the best actor, and perhaps Clinton was second best.
AM: FDR was the star. I’ll never forget hearing him on the radio. He was building up to his third term. [It was 1940 and he was running against Wendell Willkie.] He had three major Congressional enemies, Joe Martin, who was the head of the Congress [Joseph Martin, the minority leader of Congress], a guy named Barton [Bruce Barton] and another one named Fish [Hamilton Fish]. He was speaking in Boston. He would say, we have tried to do – whatever it was �
� but unfortunately it ran up a wall which was built by Martin, Barton and Fish [they were three isolationist congressmen who were opposed to giving aid to England]. Then he took another issue: ‘We tried to pass that one, but unfortunately there was a deep hole dug on the road to progress by Martin, Barton and Fish.’ On the second repetition, the crowd took it up. As soon as he said ‘Martin,’ the whole damn place said, ‘Barton and Fish!’ He did that about five times. The place was rocking! He walked out of there and he couldn’t lose. [The mockery of Martin, Barton and Fish was considered to be crucial in Roosevelt’s victory over Willkie, because by inference it linked Willkie with isolationism.]
MG: That’s also a playwright’s trick: to refrain a motif.
AM: Bob Sherwood [the playwright Robert E. Sherwood] must have written that speech. And Sam Rosenman [Samuel I. Rosenman], a judge who was a very good writer, must have had his hand in it. [They both did, and in Rosenman’s book about Roosevelt, he said that when he and Sherwood placed the names, Martin, Barton and Fish in that rhythmic order, Roosevelt smiled broadly.] But the ineptitude of the whole [2000 Presidential] campaign, just dramatically speaking, was agonizing to me. I looked at Gore and I thought, that’s just a bad actor. Sinking everything.
MG: And as an actor, Bush was marginally better.
AM: Yes. I saw Bush in Rome on television two days ago, and the camera was coming down at him, which is always dangerous because it foreshortens everything. He wrinkled his brow the way he does when he is in deep thought and he said, ‘I happen to believe what I believe and I believe that what I believe I believe is true.’ It was horrifying.
MG: Sounds like Dan Quayle: ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste.’
AM: I think Quayle was a hair better. After all, until the age of forty, there seemed to be no events worth recording in Bush’s life. William Sloane Coffin was the chaplain at Yale when Bush was a student, and of course Yale was jumping with protest. Coffin said Bush was remarkable even at Yale for having not the remotest interest, either pro or against: he went through college six feet off the ground. There were plenty of students there who were opposed to the demonstrations and supported the war. Not him. He was just nowhere, drinking his beer, floating through Yale.
MG: He was ‘well-liked.’
AM: Probably he was affable. And he’s the president! He isn’t the first, of course. After all, we had a president named Warren Harding, who in a speech said, ‘Wherever I go, I see people living together in families.’ That was it; that was his remark. No problem. He sees people living together in families. His really rash statement was, ‘We must get back to normalcy.’ It seems that they [the Republicans] really long for a pre-Roosevelt America, a McKinley sort of a place. Who would have the nerve and the insensitivity to put all those oil people in big jobs in Washington? At least they could have gotten some faceless lawyers. It reminds me of the time we opened The Man Who Had All the Luck at the Dupont Theatre in Delaware. In that production David was played by an actor [Karl Swenson] who, probably forty-five weeks a year, played the lead in any Dupont Cavalcade of America show [on television]. A very nice guy. When we arrived in Delaware to do the show, the head of public relations at Dupont invited us for drinks. The guy’s name was Russ Applegate. They were thrilled that their man was on stage. They didn’t know he was a Democrat. We were right in the middle of the election campaign. Roosevelt was running against Wilkie. In the course of the conversation, Applegate turned to Swenson and said, ‘Well, what does the election look like to you people?’ He said, ‘I don’t know much about it, but it seems to me that Roosevelt is going to win.’ There were five or six of them and their wives; they all looked absolutely bowled over. Applegate said, ‘Really? Nobody we know is voting for him.’ That was a lesson. That guy was head of public relations for Dupont all over the world. They thought there was no point talking to anybody else. That’s a real poll.
MG: How many presidents have you met?
AM: I only met Reagan. I met Kennedy for a minute. I was at that famous dinner in Washington with [Andre] Malraux. That night I had a very close look at LBJ, but he wasn’t president yet. There was a line of people waiting to go in to dinner. I saw this man twenty feet away leaning against the wall of this beautiful room. He was wearing a blue tuxedo. I was standing next to Saul Bellow. I said, ‘Saul, who is that?’ He said, ‘That’s the vice president of the United States.’ The frustration coming out of that man! He was patently unhappy. I’m sure he felt he should be the guy.
MG: When you won your Kennedy Center Honours, Reagan was president.
AM: What keeps this country going is beyond me. We had congregated in a room in Kennedy Center, waiting for our turn to appear on a balcony. Behind the balcony is this reception room. We’re waiting five minutes, ten minutes, suddenly Reagan comes in, walks over to me, says, ‘Art. I just shook the hands of a hundred and thirty old ladies. And you know, when they grab your hand, you can’t get loose. They’ve got a grip! So what you’ve got to do . . . Hold out your hand.’ I held out my hand, and he grabbed my hand and pressed his finger down on my wrist. He said, ‘You press down and then they let go.’ Another president of the United States!
MG: I thought you were going to say that he said something to you about Marilyn and Hollywood.
AM: No. Now that I see Bush, I think Reagan was a genius. If you look at it from the point of view of his whole life, he had to work himself from nothing. He had to deal with all kinds of people.
MG: In your speech in Washington, you said that Eisenhower was a lot smarter than people knew.
AM: Oh, yes. He was regarded – and it’s probably one of the reasons he was selected by Roosevelt to head the invasion – he was regarded as the intellectual among those generals. Like it or not, running an invasion of that dimension, the diplomacy required to deal with Poles, French, English, everybody with their own vital interests – that takes a lot of doing. Today nobody would know that this country has an intellectual core, probably greater than any in the world – in almost any field.
MG: Except politics.
AM: In government: apes. Harold [Pinter] is always outraged.
MG: When I asked him if he could ever imagine running for public office, he said he couldn’t join a political party.
AM: He could join a party, but he would sink it in about a week.
MG: What about you?
AM: I couldn’t stand it either. Look, it comes with the territory. A politician has got to get elected. An unelected politician is of no significance – like an unproduced playwright. It doesn’t matter what he says. As soon as you concede that, which you have to do, you’re in an area which is very untidy. People start smiling when they’re not happy. They start laughing when they’re not amused. They start weeping when they’re not sad. The acting begins. It’s very tiring. But that’s inevitable. We get such a distorted view of everything through politics. I was just thinking of LBJ. If he had not fallen into the old hubris, vis a vis the Vietnam war, he probably would have been one of the greatest presidents we’ve had.
MG: He was a supreme politician and what he did for civil rights was remarkable.
AM: He was exactly the right man to do that. A northerner couldn’t have done it. An outright liberal couldn’t have done it. A reactionary couldn’t have done it. It had to be him – and he did it. And he destroyed himself. Those Greek philosophers knew the whole story. You know LBJ told Harrison Salisbury, ‘Well, FDR had World War II, Truman had Korea, Wilson had World War I, and I have Vietnam.’
MG: Perhaps it’s better to have a war in Grenada, as Reagan did.
AM: That was a Reagan kind of war. You know, we spent a week on Grenada not long after that. You can’t satirize it. It’s so absurd, it’s crazy. They went in there to rescue these students: there was a medical school. It consisted of about forty people: surfers, sons of rich Europeans who were too stupid to go to a recognized medical school. The medical school is a hundred yards from the ocean, and there are palm trees. One classr
oom, and they would have a lecture whenever anybody thought about it. I talked to one of them, an Englishman, he said we never knew what was happening. Suddenly there were all these ’copters coming in. I said, were you ever threatened? He didn’t know there was a problem. The thing was totally invented.
MG: It sounds like Wag the Dog, that movie with Dustin Hoffman.
AM: Wag the Dog is not too far from the possible truth. I hope they [the Republicans] don’t do too much damage – especially with the environment. I’ve been living in the country forever. It’s hard to imagine how a slight change in the environment can cause catastrophic damage. I have a beautiful pond on an acre and a half. I had it dredged. Stupidly one year I agreed with a local farmer that he could fertilize the field above the pond. So he laid down some fertilizer. This water was pure enough to drink. I wake up one morning and the whole pond is blooming with algae. I never had algae in that pond in fifteen years I owned it. Why? The fertilizer had leached down and created nitrogen in the water, and made that water putrid. There are situations in which people are dependent on water like that to drink. You only rectify it by letting it wash through. It took six months. Once those changes are made, reversing them takes a long time.
MG: When you acted in that play at the University of Michigan, was that your first and only time as an actor?
AM: That was it!
MG: You missed all your lines.
AM: I missed every cue, lost all the lines – and left the stage. I’m always amazed at Pinter. Of course, he started out as an actor. I did act recently. An Israeli director made a film, which hasn’t been released here yet. It has the remotest connection to a novel of mine called Homely Girl. The film takes place in Israel, and he persuaded me to act as the father. It’s two and half minutes on screen. Of course, screen acting is a different story: very simple, not the same problem as coming out on stage – which is like coming out naked. Some actors are really incredible. You could give Arthur Kennedy a complicated change – change a word here, a word there, a pause here – and I would say, ‘Aren’t you going to write it down?’ He would just get up and do the damn thing as though he had been rehearsing it. I could never do that. There’s a kind of inhibition that most of us have that actors don’t have.