“A character is defined,” I once wrote in a notebook, “by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”
But what I had omitted out of inexperience was the overwhelming power of the past to overflow the dam of lifelong restraints so that choice itself floats off in the debris. In the Bay Ridge streets life had burst the last respect for rule in the gang boy’s brutal revolt against such specious moral rationalizations as his school and parents had bothered to give him. At the same time I was groping day by day toward a similar romantic vision of a more authentic life, one that would welcome its own evolution rather than trying to deny it. I had become estranged from my own past, which now seemed a parade of impersonations. And I was helplessly aware of moving in parallel to a breakdown around me of old credos and restrictions, all somehow connected to the wild thrashings of the untamable rogue force of paranoia in the political life of the country. The rules had been revoked, the ropes around the ring cut, and the fight had spilled out into the crowd itself. Such was my sense of life then.
One night on an abandoned pier from which the Wall Street skyline could be seen, two gangs assembled for a new kind of battle that Riccio had invented. A war had been brewing between the gangs, insults had been exchanged, satisfaction refused, and Riccio had convinced the leaderships (replicating the knightly jousts of individual horsemen, a tradition he knew nothing about) that each side should elect a champion to represent it and stage a “fair fight.” Weeks of negotiation followed, culminating in this night, when some fifty guys, ages twelve to eighteen, congregated on the splintered pier. There were to be no weapons, only fists and feet. Few could box well; they were street fighters who always handled weapons, chains or knives or sometimes a bag of steel bearings.
There was no moon, and it was hot even beside the river. A few freighters lay out in the roads, and from one of them a Puerto Rican radio commercial could be heard floating across the water. “This music I heard across the water,” I thought, incorrectly recalling a lovely line so separate from this ugly time. Kenny Costello—a thin boy of sixteen with an uncontrolled temper, already an ex-jailbird, and a fair player of the guitar, an instrument he had taken up after stealing it from a Fulton Street pawnshop—came dancing from among his cohorts in the lights of a police cruiser that obligingly appeared just as he and his opponent, a much heavier, clumsy Italian boy whose name I never got, faced each other with Riccio between them as referee. Costello broke open a bees’ nest of short sharp jabs that sent the larger guy falling backwards, and the fight was finished in a minute, no more. The relief was almost wide open on all sides that something had been settled, no one quite knew what. Riccio made a charming speech beginning with “Listen, fellas, I gotta say this—you make me proud,” praising all of them for inventing a world-shattering new way of settling disputes. Calling the leaders together to shake their hands and congratulate them for their wisdom in safeguarding the honor of their troops, he shortcut any smoldering objections of the frustrated young brawlers by promising both gangs nothing less than a city-paid-for mass bus ride to Coney Island the following evening, with a free hotdog and a soda for each guy, and maybe more if there was money left over.
I caught a glimpse of the two cops in the cruiser as it turned and majestically moved away into the darkness. They were not amused by Riccio’s display of an authority that had always been exclusively theirs. They had been accustomed to prowling the neighborhood and, on finding a clot of boys on a corner, getting out and batting them, around for a few sporting minutes to “disperse an unruly crowd.”
It was about then that strange men began appearing on those same corners, unmolested by the police, men who would take a curious boy into an alleyway and make him a present of some powder he might want to try. What was in those glassine bags would make this time of the gangs seem like high good health, the last period of dignity that many such neighborhoods would ever know.
They were boys nobody wanted, that much was as clear to them as to any observer. They were excess, and in the bars after they got out of jail they would pridefully unfold their newspaper clippings, accounts of their arrests and trials, which they carried around carefully folded in an envelope, like actors with their notices. Everything was publicity; if your name was in the paper you existed, and your photo on top of that was immortality—you had made it out of this throttling anonymity, this nothing.
Since I was married and Marilyn could hardly peek out of her hotel room door without being photographed, we spent much time alone together, drawn into far lengthier talks than if we had been able to move freely amid the usual distractions. The bond of shared silences, as mysterious as sexuality and as hard to break, also began to form. Looking out over the sparkling city at night, we were each, I think, finding the presence of the other difficult to tear away from dream. Our connection seemed about to vanish, it was obviously a wrong fit, as though we had come out of two climates that could not correspond. But beneath the clash of dissimilarities there seemed a dark carpet of wordless being on which we could walk at our ease together. In each stood an image that could not yet be turned and seen full face but only obscurely, from an angle that drew us on, at first with curiosity, and gradually with the hope of being transformed by our opposite, as light longs for dark and dark for light. Many years later in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the relief sculptures of full-bodied crowned goddesses, with their stone stares and their faint but confident world-containing smiles, would bring back to me the silent tumult of those evenings, when the nowness of life seemed alive around us and there was no future and no past.
After one of those silences I said, “You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met.”
She first thought this a defeat; men, she had said once, only wanted happy girls. But then a smile touched her lips as she discovered the compliment I had intended. “You’re the only one who ever said that to me.”
We were confirming new roles for each other as people do in love, renewing the world as we saw each thing freshly, like people reborn. From those windows the whole city below seemed recently constructed from someone’s dream. In the streets I had come to feel a strange new tenderness toward others, reminding me of the births of my own children, when I had brought them home from the hospital driving the car with anxious care in traffic that suddenly seemed dangerously heedless.
My mind kept discarding her and then rushing to bring her back—fleeing the brutalized woman I now knew was in her and returning again to the child.
They were often inseparably mixed. “I never intended to make all that much about being an orphan. It’s just that Ben Hecht was hired to write this story about me, and he said, Okay, sit down and try to think up something interesting about yourself.’ Well, I was boring, and I thought maybe I’d tell him about them putting me in the orphanage, and he said that was great and wrote it, and that became the main thing suddenly.”
Of course she had not been an orphan, not really, not with a mother and maybe even a father somewhere, like lots of other kids who were never called orphans. But they had parked her in an orphanage when her mother was institutionalized and there was no other place she could stay. Gradually her orphanhood had taken hold as a fact that Hecht confirmed in his story. Actually, the real shock had come when on approaching the orphanage she realized what it was and dug in her heels and yelled, “But I’m not an orphan! I’m not an orphan!”—the terror of being denied by her own mother and given to strangers. As the years passed and I saw her continuing need for unstable older women, whose exploitation of her found some perverse pleasure center deep inside, it seemed one more inevitable stone in the wall of her monument. But that was not yet.
To me now she bore the news of the grungy, Byzantine demiworld of southern California, from whose sunny and rotting moonscape she had fled. During our rehearsals of A View from the Bridge —held like Salesman ’s in the dust-filled and collapsing New Amsterdam roof theatre on Forty-second St
reet—I passed a life-size cutout of her in the lobby everyday, the famous laughing shot from The Seven Year Itch, in a white dress with her skirt blowing up over a subway grate, whereupon I would sit for six hours as Van Heflin-Eddie Carbone struggled with a compulsion he could not nail and destroy. How to get up on the stage and describe to Van the sensation of being swept away, of inviting the will’s oblivion and dreading it? For that was what the production lacked, and perhaps the play too at that stage of its writing. How could one walk toward the very thing one was fleeing from?
I could not understand how she had come to symbolize a kind of authenticity; perhaps it was simply that when the sight of her made men disloyal and women angry with envy, the ordinary compromises of living seemed to trumpet their fraudulence and her very body was a white beam of truth. She knew she could roll into a party like a grenade and wreck complacent couples with a smile, and she enjoyed this power, but it also brought back the old sinister news that nothing whatsoever could last. And this very power of hers would eat at her one day, but not yet, not now.
It was impossible to guess what she wanted for herself when she herself had no idea beyond the peaceful completion of each day. When she appeared the future vanished; she seemed without expectations, and this was like freedom. At the same time the mystery put its own burden on us, the burden of the unknown.
One evening as we sat staring down at the city, she said, apropos of nothing in particular, that when she was fourteen or fifteen her elderly “aunt” Ana, a Christian Scientist who was the one intelligent and kind woman she had known, took ill and died; loving her, Ana had been for a while an impromptu guardian, and Marilyn had come to rely on her. She had not been living with Ana for some time, but the shock of her death was terrible. “I went and lay down in her bed the day after she died … just lay there for a couple of hours on her pillow. Then I went to the cemetery and these men were digging a grave and they had a ladder into it, and I asked if I could get down there and they said sure, and I went down and lay on the ground and looked up at the sky from there. It’s quite a view, and the ground is cold under your back. The men started to try to fool around, but I climbed out before they could catch me. But they were nice and kidded me. And then I went away.”
Oddly enough, she seemed not to know fear as she went about rearranging her life; it was when she tried to assert herself and act that the terrors she was born to had to be downed. Strasberg had suggested she study the part of Anna in O’Neill’s Anna Christie, and one evening she tried a few pages out on me. Here was the first inkling of her inner life; she could hardly read audibly at first, it was more like praying than acting. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she suddenly said, laughing. Her past would not leave her even for this private affirmation of her value, and that past was murderous. Something like guilt seemed to suppress her voice.
It was not merely her mother’s malign influence—the woman had always been paranoid, an institutionalized schizophrenic who had tried to smother her in her crib as an infant; it was also the condemnation of religion that she had had to defend herself against. And the stain kept reappearing like a curse.
She was only five or six years old when the fundamentalist church to which her foster family belonged held a vast open-air service in which hundreds of children, all dressed alike, the girls in white dresses and the boys in blue trousers and white shirts, stood ranged against the sides of a tremendous natural amphitheatre somewhere in the mountains in the Los Angeles area. Each girl had a cape, red on one side and white on the other, and at the start they wore the red side out. On signal during a revivalist hymn they were all to turn their capes inside out, from sinful red to the pure white of the saved. Magically the mountainside turned white on the proper verse of the hymn, all except one red dot in the middle of the expanse. She would laugh with affection for the little girl, herself, caught there in the wrong. “I just clean forgot. It was all so interesting, everybody turning their capes inside out, and I was so glad that they all remembered to do it on cue that I just clean forgot to do mine!” And she bent over laughing, as though it had been yesterday rather than twenty-five years before. But she was beaten for her failure anyway, condemned by Jesus himself, she was told, and it was only one instance of God’s irremediable dislike. “Jesus is supposed to be so forgiving, but they never mentioned that; he was basically out to smack you in the head if you did something wrong.” Of course she could laugh about it, but something in the back of her eyes was not laughing even now.
Everything speeded up. In Boston the play seemed more moving than I had expected, but I still doubted we had found its voice. I reread the first act of Hamlet in my hotel room, and in the business of his seeming insanity I suddenly saw not madness but a silliness, the way one gets when a dilemma is at once obvious and absolutely insoluble; he must avenge his father, but at the same time he feels joy at the thought of taking his place. What can you do but laugh? He is sure everyone around him is lying even as he feels himself false too. He has no way of cleanly and loosely expressing affection without fear of betraying—what, he no longer even remembers. All he knows is that he is more truthful than anybody else, but once alone he knows his own duplicity. More and more estranged from my family, I nodded at his self-condemnation and resentment, his grinding hatred for his guilt, his repeated failure to step outside it.
Marty Ritt took me to the racetrack several afternoons and explained the dope sheets, which I couldn’t begin to understand, and we won a few dollars. His mother had been a professional gambler. He could always come away at least a little ahead. I had never realized how light, almost toylike, racehorses are.
He was modest about directing, somewhat like Kazan in this, totally the opposite of Jed and his bragging. Marty, I thought, saw the director as an essential force but basically an assistant to God rather than the Boss himself. The first job, he said, was to discover what the script was saying, not what it reminded you of. He had few cultural pretensions—too few, in fact, since he read considerably—and he did his work with his shoulders as much as his head; he feared making actors think too much at the expense of instinctively sniffing out the role and situation. Again, this was a lot like Kazan’s approach. I thought it might have been their acting background that made them so earthy.
Thirty years later, Dustin Hoffman would say it—“You always win by the skin of your teeth”—but in that first production of View we were unable to make the ultimate demand on ourselves and tended to let “pretty good” stand. In 1965 Ulu Grosbard’s off-Broadway production would magically catch this play’s spirit, helped by a combination of good judgment in the casting and amazing luck. Two unknown young actors, Robert Duvall and Jon Voight, played Eddie and Rodolpho. I could not imagine how a type right off the Brooklyn piers like Duvall could give such a profound performance. Backstage afterwards, he introduced me to his parents, his father an admiral standing there in his stiff white uniform, and Duvall himself speaking perfectly cultivated English. There was also an adenoidal young assistant stage manager popping in and out whom Grosbard, incredibly, told me I should keep in mind to play Willy Loman in a few years. My estimate of Grosbard all but collapsed as, observing Dustin Hoffman’s awkwardness and his big nose that never seemed to get unstuffed, I wondered how the poor fellow imagined himself a candidate for any kind of acting career. Grosbard, however, was looking not at Hoffman but at an actor, at a spirit, and this kind of naked skin-on-skin contact with essentials was what his production had in every role.
After the play had been running a while the actors noticed a man who kept showing up night after night in one of the front rows a few feet from the stage. He was always deeply moved and among the last of the audience to leave. One night an actor came down and talked to him. “I knew that family,” he said, wiping his eyes. “They lived in the Bronx. The whole story is true, except the end was changed.” How had it ended in real life? “The girl came in when Eddie was having his nap and stabbed him in the heart.” Of course, I knew noth
ing of this Bronx family, but what an ending!
Marilyn came up to Boston for the day. No one recognized her in her heavy cable-knit sweater, a deep white knitted hat that came down over her forehead, a black-and-white-checked woolen skirt, and moccasins. At twenty-nine, she could have been a high school girl. Her sunglasses attracted a few glances on the street since the weather was so dark and overcast. We took a long walk, saw a new movie, Marty, in a neighborhood theatre, and ate in a diner where the waitress, mysteriously drawn to her, kept talking at her, instinctively smelling out something unique about her even in those unexceptional clothes.
A podiatrists’ association, she said, wanted to take casts of her feet because they were so perfectly formed, and a dental school wanted one of her mouth and teeth, which were also flawless. Not without fear we sat looking at each other waiting for the future to come closer.
“I keep trying,” I said, “to teach myself how to lose you, but I can’t learn yet.”
Her face filled with an unspoken anxiety. “Why must you lose me?” And she removed her glasses with a compassionate smile.
The waitress, a middle-aged woman with bleached hair, happened to pass our table just then and overheard Marilyn. Her mouth dropped open in recognition, and she turned fully to me with a mixture of amazement and resentment, perhaps even outrage, that I would be so stupid or cruel as to cause her idol the slightest unhappiness. In that second her proprietary sheltering of Marilyn, whom she knew only as an image, sprang forth. In a moment she was back with a piece of paper to be autographed.
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