Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  “You can leave by the back door,” Hills added. “I have a car and driver parked behind the building. I’ll tell him now that you might be coming, and he can drive you to the airport. I’ve got the judge coming over in about twenty minutes, so there won’t be any need to go to court.”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered. Royce grabbed my hand, gave me a wonderful stare of encouragement, turned, and went out.

  “Let me know,” Hills said, and returned to his office.

  I stood at the window again trying to think clearly. My disappearance would cause a tremendous sensation now that it was known that Marilyn and I were to be married sometime soon, and the brunt of it all would fall on her. A new, lurid chapter of her life, but this time with overtones of disloyalty. And there would be no chance to explain to my children. But the image of a lone house on a couple of thousand acres made me yearn for its peace. Perhaps there I could begin to write again . . .

  I had to move my legs, I was all tightened up. I went out to the elevator and rang. I could see an open filigree cage rising to the gate before me. A man was in it. The gate opened, and he glanced at me and proceeded toward Hills’s door. The words were out of my mouth before I could think.

  “Are you looking for me?”

  He turned and came back to me: a comfortable man of the suburbs in his late forties, almost my height, a stranger to agony in a checked linen sports jacket of pinkish hue, slacks, and a good snug haircut. I thought there was a look in his eye of surprised disadvantage at being taken unawares. Maybe this was why I had made the move when I could have gone down the elevator and out into Texas. I did not want to be running, I guess, from myself or anyone else, and I resented being afraid.

  He took the pink onionskin subpoena out of his breast pocket and, while asking me if I was Miller, touched it to my lapels, technically serving me. I looked at the paper, seeing nothing. Now he relaxed and asked if I would join him for a cup of coffee, two ordinary citizens again. Out of curiosity I agreed, and we went down into the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Mapes across the street.

  His name, William Wheeler, rang a bell; I had read about this diabolically clever investigator, who had had much success in bringing film people to see the light. I wanted to know what it felt like to be worked over by a talent like that. And it may also have been a thirst for reality in this dreamlike affair that made me want something more than a mere piece of paper as executioner.

  After a few falsely relaxed preliminaries about the weather and Nevada’s gambling-dominated society, of which he was amusingly disapproving, he said, “I’d like to talk this over. There’s really no need to make this overly public.”

  I nodded, said nothing.

  “By the way,” he interjected awkwardly, as though he had only this moment thought of it, a not too persuasive bit of acting, “I’m a very close friend of Lee Cobb’s. Do you ever see him?”

  “No, but he lives in California, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, but I just wondered. He thinks the world of you.”

  This, apparently, was one of his deft ploys to smoke out my attitude toward Lee, who had informed to the Committee three years earlier, an act for which I might denounce him now or with darkened brow refuse to discuss his treachery. But Lee, of course, was incidental; the real question on the table was how I would behave before the Committee, as pussycat or rattler, and it pleased me not to let on just yet. In fact, I could not help thinking of Lee, my first Willy Loman, as more a pathetic victim than a villain, a big blundering actor who simply wanted to act, had never put in for heroism, and was one of the best proofs I knew of the Committee’s pointless brutality toward artists. Lee Cobb, as political as my foot, was simply one more dust speck swept up in the thirties idealization of the Soviets, which the Depression’s disillusionment had brought on all over the West.

  “What do you think of him as an actor?”

  “Well, he certainly was my favorite Willy.” My praise seemed to surprise him; apparently he had expected moral indignation against an informer. I decided to match blandnesses and revealed, “In fact, I offered him the part of Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge. He was my first choice.”

  Wheeler’s face showed a real confusion whose unconcealment lowered my estimate of his professional cool. Could this really be the subtle genius, the Svengali, who had turned so many actors and directors to his gods?

  “I never knew about that,” he said rather skeptically.

  “Why don’t you ask his agent?”

  “An actual offer?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You talked to him yourself?”

  “No, Bloomgarden talked to his agent. You see,” I added, “there was no doubt in my mind that Lee would have made the best Eddie Carbone I could imagine, and since I don’t believe in blacklisting artists for their political opinions, even when I absolutely disagree with them, I told Bloomgarden to make the offer. Marty Ritt had no objection either,” I put in, since he must have known about Ritt’s low opinion of his old friend’s having broken before the Committee.

  Wheeler was silent, seemed unsure where to put his foot down next. “You’re different than I expected,” he finally said. “You should check this with Lee’s agent.” “He’d have been good in that part.”

  “Oh, yes. He wanted to do it, too. But the agent told Bloomgarden that Lee was afraid to act in one of my plays because the Legion would make it hot for him again.” As I didn’t need to remind Wheeler, View was, among other things, about a man who informed on his own relatives to the immigration authorities. Cynically or not, I had thought that under the circumstances Lee would bring the pain of the harried longshoreman onto the stage rather than some studied impersonation.

  “Maybe you’d like to talk to me again,” Wheeler said. “I could see you in New York or LA, either one.”

  “What I have to say I’ll say to my lawyers.”

  “I see.” He seemed to want to press on but gave it up quickly. “Well, okay.” In short, I would get the full treatment from the Committee.

  We got up from the table, and I gave him an unsmiling goodbye. He wandered off into the lobby, where even at this early hour the slot machines were thumping away. Ridiculously, I could not help wondering as he was swallowed up by the lobby crowd whether this event had had any meaning for him or was simply a government-paid junket from LA to Reno for a little chat that would fill up quite a nice report before he got back to his golf game. But few are that jaded; we all believe in something, I suppose. Of course in our brief exchange of words there was no mention of my having broken a law. Purely a matter of my agreeing to a public rite of contrition was what it came to, an obligatory kowtow before the state, the century’s only truly credible god, for having had in the past certain thoughts that I had indeed harbored, and for having met, as I had also done, with other like-minded writers in an attempt to advance the idea of socialism, or more especially human brotherhood, however muddled and profoundly unexamined the means. That all of this was now long gone with the wind was beside any conceivable point, there being no trace of an American left anymore and nothing in reality to be loyal or unfaithful to. Nothing, that is, except the most generous thoughts of one’s youth, which, to be sure, had turned out to be badly mistaken in practical terms, but whose impulse had had some touch of nobility; it was youth’s ample heart that was now up for betrayal or disavowal or mockery. From such Marxism as I had once espoused I had not wanted anything for myself, that was certain; it had been far less a political than a moral act of solidarity with all those who had failed in life, an abnegation of power in the guise of a materialistic thrust for it, a redemption from the self. Just as I had gone, a week after the success of All My Sons, and offered myself to the employment service for a menial job that I could bear for a week and no more, so I had from time to time thrown myself toward one or another Party front and stayed long enough to be bored and frustrated all over again by its rote emptiness. However, by this time, 1956, I had learned to
trace the leveling impulse to less exalted arenas than morality and public reform, back to the ancient competitions with my brother and illiterate father, whose metaphoric retaliation for my victories I had dodged by declaring my equality with the least of the citizenry while in the real world working day and night to achieve what glory and superiority my art might win me.

  In twenty-two years I would hear my own story—from the mouths of Chinese writers returning from exile after the Cultural Revolution. Of course their punishment had been immeasurably greater, but my own experience made their emotions uncomfortably easy to grasp.

  The plane to New York was half empty, and I could stretch out across a couple of seats. There was time now for fear, not so much of what would become of me but of being unable to answer this summons to explain my life and justify it as an authentically American one when in fact I didn’t understand my life. It was one of those moments when unfinished recollections return with their embarrassing unanswered questions. Maybe I had simply been a conformist and not a radical at all, fearful of the left’s opprobrium for those who failed to fail and proved thereby that a robust pulse remained in the body of America. For example, I had realized long ago what lay behind the Communists’ disapproval of Salesman and All My Sons: their success and critical acceptance had thrown doubt on the shibboleth that American theatre could not, and theoretically should not be able to, support socially truthful plays. A work that really told how it was could not succeed. The left had been living in the Last Days before the Coming, a pleasing mental environment for the passive moralist who need only know Truth to experience Salvation, a fix as old as Pauline theology and as seductive as justification by faith alone. But as an artist I knew that creation demanded a forward motion, an assault upon the world’s slothful sleep of sensibility. My whole life had been a struggle between action and passivity, creation and detached observation. Flying toward New York, I made a note recalling a dream I had had some years before, of a theatre where I was watching one of my plays with an audience that I suddenly realized was motionless as death, and in one sweeping glance I saw the faces of family, friends, all the people I had ever met in my life, and I shouted, “My God, I have killed them all!” as though to create likenesses was to steal the spirit out of the bodies of those portrayed; yet I felt an illicit exhilaration, too, at having violated the Commandment, for I had made life, just like God.

  I now recalled my six months on the WPA Theatre Project after graduating from Michigan; there had been some forty or fifty playwrights who, in 1939, were drawing $22.77 a week to turn out plays, most of which I read and found execrable, totally incompetent—and indeed, not one of these people was heard from again once the project closed down as the war drew closer. Shrouding my secret dissociation from their untalented ranks, I had posed as a fellow victim of Broadway commercialism’s contempt for real art, all the while believing that those with some modicum of talent were simply too lazy to press it to its limits and preferred to go on blaming the system for the sloppy raggedness of their scenes. The truth was that I had always lived in the belief that a good man could still make it, capitalism or no capitalism.

  But the subpoena in my pocket was too blunt an instrument to allow delicate nuances: in defense of honor I must confound the Committee, a stand that would inevitably force me not only to seem pro-Soviet when I had long since lost the last shred of faith in the Soviet system but also—more privately and painfully—to pose as one content with submergence in the community of the ineffectual and the artistically failed, the sentimental drones of the literary left from whose ranks I had forever been separating myself. There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I would never give the Committee the names of people, all of them writers, whom I had known to be Communists, and this had nothing to do with anything but myself; I might have every rational reason to conform to the fashion of the time except for a single overriding consideration: I simply could not believe that anything I knew or any individual I could name was in the remotest sense a danger to democracy in America. My real view of American Communists was of a sect that might as well be praying somewhere in the Himalayas for all the relevance they had to any motion in the American world. But I could not think they had particularly harmed me personally, and I had no need for either revenge or even some impassioned break when they were simply inconsequential, fellow loiterers on the platform waiting for the Redemption train to come through.

  But how to make any of this comprehensible, especially to a booming and increasingly self-satisfied country, was beyond me. Indeed, I was sure that the failure of A Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge was in some part due to their images of privation and even desperation; as usual, America was denying its pain, and remembering was out. My inarticulateness would be repeated down the road when the people of the Vietnam War sixties found it impossible to pass on their cataclysmic visions to an indifferent new generation. MacLeish was right: America was promises—and it was not interested in recalling those that had failed.

  On top of everything, the news about the coming marriage was out; clearly, Wheeler would hardly have come all the way to Nevada except to make sure that the imminent publicity would include the Committee, which badly needed it now in its threatening ebb time.

  In certain situations one can get scared enough to grow calm. Since I was damned already, I felt worse for Marilyn than for myself. Besides, it was all unreal, something unserious about it kept panic away; Carl Royce in his beautiful dove gray cowboy outfit sat beside me now. He must be back on his Texas land by this time, but his simple manly skepticism, his blessed American anarchy of heart, was flying with me. From somewhere I had inherited a reliable tendency to slow down in the face of menace, maybe from our two thousand years of tenting on the lip of the abyss, and I lay back and let the earth’s inertia take me. I was an American, after all, a citizen of the unexpected isle, the roller-coaster society. Who knew?—maybe something good was on its way. Or should I have confronted reality by fleeing to Texas?

  To paraphrase Winston Churchill’s characterization of the Germans, the press with Marilyn Monroe was either at her feet or at her throat. Papers like the New York Daily News, then in its far-right incarnation, were bound to resent my entry on the scene, but even apart from that ungrateful lapse, her breaking up what they had decided was the perfect American marriage, with Joe DiMaggio, had simply been unforgivable. Thus, on her return from making Bus Stop, they thought it vital that not only her persona be destroyed but her beauty defaced, the more so now that her dream of acting with Olivier was about to come true. Instead of joining in limbo the innumerable overreaching starlets with pretensions to art, she would be leaving for England shortly after our wedding to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl. Something had to be done about this.

  We were temporarily living in a Sutton Place apartment house at whose entrance a crowd of photographers had begun to appear as early as eight o’clock each morning. A tribute to her amazing popularity, I first thought. But even after the two of us finally held an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk in hopes of getting them to leave, the documentarians of the News and Post (then in its liberal phase) returned each day at the crack of dawn. Why? we wondered. The answer came one morning when Marilyn, spotting them from within the lobby, backtracked and went down into the basement in an attempt to escape through the service entrance. She had no makeup on and was dressed in a sloppy oversized sweater, with a bandanna wrapped over her hair and knotted under her chin as though she had a toothache, a getup she often used in order to make it across town to her analyst without attracting notice.

  The working press came tearing down the alley, cornered her amid the trash cans, and got the shot they were fixing to get for days, the News giving it all of page one. And there she was, this so-called beauty, America’s sweetheart, snarling, puffy-eyed, brandishing a hand at the reader like some crazy bag woman cursing out an innocent passerby, surrounded by garbage. The same newspapers, quite naturally, gave over practically
entire editions to their editors’ unbearable expressions of grief upon her death hardly six years later.

  Once again Twentieth Century Fox mysteriously reached into my life; Spyros Skouras paid us a surprise visit the evening before I left for Washington, in a try at getting me to cooperate with the Committee. He had called from Hollywood to ask Marilyn if he could stop by as soon as he got to New York. I knew what this meant, of course, since the president of Twentieth Century Fox was not in the habit of making such flying visits, not to see Marilyn, at any rate, when the studio was still at odds with her. He would be trying to get me to avoid a possible jail term for contempt of Congress. Not that I mattered to him, but if the rumors that we were going to marry were true, the patriotic organizations might well decide to picket her films. Such were the times. If there was any surprise in his phoning, it was that he had not done so earlier. He was reputed to have worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.

  When she returned to me from the phone, I must have looked disconcerted at her announcement that it was Skouras, for she quickly asked me not to refuse to see him. And this was curious.

  By turns she resented him, hated him, and spoke of him warmly as a friend of last resort at the studio. Although she was furious at his denying her the ordinary perquisites of a great star, which she unquestionably was by this time—the best dressing room, her choice of cameraman and director, and the respect due her as by far the public’s favorite performer—she could still be moved by his repeated reassurances, often accompanied by actual tears, that she was closer to him than even his own adored daughter. At the same time she was sure it was his obduracy that denied her recognition as the number one Fox draw.