Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  “Has he spoken to John yet?”

  “Oh, no.”

  It was the “oh” that troubled me. Why “oh, no”? Was Lee already positioning himself against Huston when they would surely have to cooperate if things were to change?

  In the elevator to the Strasbergs’ apartment I rehearsed my complaints. Lee answered my ring. The absurdity of his costume blew all my plans out of my head; in this hundred-degree weather he was dressed in a stiff brand-new cowboy outfit—shiny boots, creased pants, ironed shirt with braided pockets and cuffs—but with the same whitish intellectual face and unexercised body.

  “That’s quite a getup,” I said.

  He grinned adventurously. “Yes, it’s very comfortable.”

  “The boots too?” I doubted that pointy Western boots could be comfortable on first wearing.

  “Oh, they’re wonderful,” he said, bending his knees.

  Paula had not risen from the couch, where she lay on her side in a dragoned kimono with her head propped up on her hand, a smile of proud assurance on her face now that her champion had come to take up her burden, her hair let down intriguingly over her shoulder, an odalisque in the round.

  Lee’s expression turned to a frown. “We have to have a serious talk, Arthur.”

  “Yes, I’ve been hoping to do that for some time.”

  “Yes, the situation has become impossible.”

  “I know.” He must already have worked out a new approach that would save the day, such was the impacted drive I sensed moving within him. For an instant I happily thought I had had him wrong and that he indeed possessed a secret that could restore a Marilyn whose soul was falling through space even as we spoke.

  “Yes. If something isn’t done immediately I will have to take Paula off the picture.” He looked directly at me, as though demanding a statement.

  Paula? Was this about Paula? I glanced over to her on the couch, where she was grinning contentedly as though she had at last ceased to be ignored.

  “I don’t get you, Lee.”

  “Huston has been refusing to talk to her. This is insulting! I won’t permit her to go on unless it is agreed that he show her respect. I will not tolerate this kind of treatment of her. She is an artist! She has worked with the greatest stars! I simply will not allow her to be treated this way!”

  Stunned, I floundered trying to grasp his meaning. Had Paula not told him that Marilyn was in extremis, that perhaps her very life was in danger, and certainly her ability to finish the film in question? How else could he stand here complaining about his wife’s not getting respect from a director? Or was it possible that Paula was so insanely self-obsessed as not even to have noticed that Marilyn was in very bad trouble? And had Lee finally agreed to come out here simply to assert his authority on the pointless problem of his wife and thus distract from his being totally at sea as to how to help Marilyn?

  It was too terrible to think that. Seeing him here in his crazy costume, like a jolly tourist on vacation, I suddenly wondered if maybe I was taking everything far too seriously, had reacted too personally to Marilyn’s anger, which might simply be her normal frustration as an actress creating a role. Total confusion.

  On he went … how Paula had been feeling abandoned and insulted, how she had put a life into coaching great performers, how he himself had not wanted to interfere but now had to “for Marilyn’s good as well.” It was impossible to address him, it was demeaning to speak seriously to him, infatuated as he was by his own importance and his wife’s. Marilyn’s suffering was a distant star that might occasionally be glimpsed as it dimmed out far, far away, but not more.

  “I must get this settled before I can do anything else, Arthur.”

  “You can’t expect me to settle it. It’s between her and John.”

  “It’s your picture, you must act.”

  “My script, not my picture. There’s nothing I can do about it, Lee. John is not used to dealing with an actor through a third party, and I doubt he’ll change. Are you going to be talking to Marilyn?”

  “Then I will have to take Paula home with me.”

  “It will probably mean the end of the picture”—and of Marilyn, I needn’t have added, if she failed to finish it—“but I guess you have to do what you have to do. But I hope you get to talk to Marilyn, she needs help now. Will you?”

  “I’ll talk to her, yes,” he conceded. I understood the rules he was laying down—he would do what he could but was not going to take responsibility for her under any circumstances, most especially not when she was on the ropes. And he was the only person she trusted. Such was the perfection of her fate.

  Shooting had ground to a complete halt. There was no point transporting scores of crew members across the mountains to the salt lake when there was so much uncertainty about getting any work done. The crisis was upon us. Whatever Lee said to her, it had apparently left her unchanged as far as her ability to work was concerned, and now he had gone back to New York. I went up to Paula’s apartment, afraid that in her opaque, absentminded way she might be failing to at least keep watch. It was still unclear whether Paula understood how sick Marilyn was. I was never sure that she was truly listening.

  She let me into the living room with her finger against her lips, then walked into the bedroom, and I followed. Marilyn was sitting up in bed. A doctor was feeling the back of her hand, searching for a vein into which to inject Amytal. My stomach turned over. She saw me and began to scream at me to get out. I managed to ask the doctor if he knew how much barbiturate or other medicine she had already taken, and he looked at me helplessly, a young scared fellow wanting to give the shot and get out and not come back. Paula was standing beside the bed in her black shift, hair freshly brushed and pinned up, looking healthy and powdered and maternal, and vaguely guilty, I thought; yes, now she must know that she had made a bad bargain and was not in control anymore, and she wanted help and she wanted credit for her mothering love even as something in her could not care less because it was all hopelessly disconnected. I thought to move the doctor away from the bed to stall off the injection, but the screaming was too terrible, and her distress in my presence canceled out any help I could hope to give, so I left and stood in the living room and waited until the doctor came out. He was astonished that she could remain awake, having given her enough for a major operation, but she was still sitting up and talking. He believed he was the last doctor in the area to be called in, but he would not agree to any more shots of anything, fearing for her life now that he had seen what he had seen. I went back into the bedroom and she looked at me, ravaged but slowing down at last, merely repeating, “Get out,” as in a dream.

  Paula was warm to me now. “I’d like to get some dinner …” I felt a rush of warmth toward her, too, I suppose because I was so desperate for help and because in the corners of her eyes I saw fear, and if she was afraid she must be sane, and if she was sane and was still hanging in here she must have some feeling left for someone other than herself. I said thanks to her apropos of nothing in particular, and she touched me with her hand and left for dinner with one of the cast.

  Marilyn lay down and shut her eyes. I watched for signs of labored breathing, but she seemed at peace. She was a flower of iron to survive this onslaught. I despaired at my presumption, the stupidity of thinking that I alone could keep her from harm, and I cast about for someone else whom she might permit to take responsibility. I was exhausted and without hope that I could reach her anymore; I had doubtless stayed too long, had nothing left but a stubborn holding on to responsibility when what she wanted was to ride the next wave thundering toward the shore, a mystic goddess out of the sea. Scoffing at magic, she still wanted her subjects to glow joyously at her touch, a sacred sort of artistry and power that was as much part of her as her eyes. I thought of her Los Angeles doctor, but he could hardly leave his practice to come here—and stopped myself again; why could she not take responsibility herself? Of course she could, and in fact it was her only hope … and yet
she could not, not when she was still so dependent on sleeping drugs, chemicals I had been very slow to realize had removed her from me altogether … and the circle turned again, and I found myself believing that no one else would really stick with her. But I was worse than useless to her now, a bag of nails thrown in her face, a reminder of her failure to pull herself out of her old life even when she had at last truly loved someone.

  It was the first quiet time we had had together in so long, and in the silence the idea of her trying to work in this condition was plainly monstrous—we were all crazy, what could possibly justify it? I must find some way to halt the picture. But I could see her indignant fury at what she would interpret as an accusation that she had caused the picture to be canceled, something that might break her career besides.

  I found myself straining to imagine miracles. What if she were to wake and I were able to say, “God loves you, darling,” and she were able to believe it! How I wished I still had my religion and she hers. It was suddenly quite simple—we had invented God to keep from dying of reality, yet love was the realest reality of all. I summoned a vision of her harsh, suffering eyes turning to their old thrilling softness, for this was the look of hers that to me would always be her very self, her unique sign; on the other side of love, everything else about her, about people, in fact, was appetite and frightening.

  What, I wondered, if she no longer had to be this star, could we live an ordinary decompressed life down on the plain, far away from this rarefied peak where there was no air? For an instant the thought of it was like a crutch pulled from under me; she seemed to lose her whole identity. An ordinary person and hardly able to spell—what would she do with herself? But pressing into that vision, I began to imagine a wonderfully quieted Marilyn no longer backed into a terrifying corner, a young and natively intelligent woman piecing her way through each day to evening and then going unremarkably to bed. Was it possible? Surely she had been most dear to me when she was hardly known.

  And then the shocking egotism of my thought stared me in the face—her stardom was her triumph, nothing less; it was her life’s achievement. How would I feel if the condition of my marriage was tractability, the surrendering of my art? The simple fact, terrible and lethal, was that no space whatever existed between herself and this star. She was “Marilyn Monroe,” and that was what was killing her. And it could not be otherwise for her; she lived on film and with that glory forsworn would in some real sense vanish. If she loved to fool in a flower garden and endlessly move furniture around the house and buy a lamp or a coffee pot, these were pleasing preparations for a life she could not live for long without a new flight to the moon in a new part and a new film. Since her teens she had been creating a relationship with the public, first imaginary and then real, and it could not be torn from her without tearing flesh.

  I realized now, as I longed for a miracle, that I had come to believe no analysis could reach into her. Perhaps only a shock of recognition, a quick but convincing sight of her own death, could rouse her to a desperate attempt to trust again. Somewhere in her she seemed to know this, inviting these drugged temporary deaths whose threat would deliver her at last.

  I had no saving mystery to offer her; nor could her hand be taken if she would not hold it out. I had lost my faith in a lasting cure coming from me, and I wondered if indeed it could come from any human agency at all.

  One thing only was sure; she must finish the picture. To fail would confirm her worst terror of losing control of her life, of going under the pulverizing wave of the terrible past. She went on sleeping. I wished again that I knew how to pray and invoke for her the image of that which only knows love. But it was too late for that too.

  A year or so earlier, in Hollywood during the shooting of Let’s Make Love, a stupefying comedy that Fox had forced upon her, Walter Wanger had come to our bungalow to discuss my writing a screenplay for him based on The Fall, the novella by Albert Camus. I had reread it at his bidding, but I had no desire to write a film, and so we just chatted for a while about the book. I had heard of Wanger as the producer who had filmed Blockade, with Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll, during the Spanish Civil War; one of the few attempts by Hollywood to deal with that catastrophe for democracy, it had been picketed by the patriots despite its equivocal support of the Republican side. He seemed serious and well educated. But he was a movie producer above all, a man of the older Hollywood scene, who some years before had shot his wife’s lover, as I vaguely recalled reading.

  Apart from its philosophical conundrum, The Fall is about trouble with women, although this theme is overshadowed by the male narrator’s concentration on ethics, particularly the dilemma of how one can ever judge another person once one has committed the iniquitous act of indifference to a stranger’s call for help. The antihero, a self-described “judge-penitent,” has on his conscience his failure to come to the aid of a girl he saw jump off a bridge into a river.

  It was a beautifully carved story whose conclusion, however, had left me in doubt of its willingness to face something perhaps worse than mere indifference to a call for help. What if the man, at risk to himself, had attempted her rescue and then discovered that the key to her salvation lay not in him, whatever his caring, but in her? And perhaps even worse, that strands of his own vanity as well as his love were entwined in the act of trying to save her? Did disguised self-love nullify the ethical act? Could anyone, in all truth, really save another unless the other wished to be saved? Was not the real question how to evoke that wish? And if it refused evocation, when did one confess failure? And how was failure justified, or could it be? The Fall, I thought, ended too soon, before the worst of the pain began.

  Finally, suicide might not simply express disappointment with oneself but hatred for someone else. The Chinese custom was for the suicide to hang himself in the doorway of the person who had offended him, clearly a form of retaliation against others as well as an act of self-destruction. In Christian custom it is forbidden to bury the suicide in sanctified ground; is this because he has died in hatred not only of himself but of God and God’s gift of life?

  Her sleep was not sleep but the pulsation of an exhausted creature wrestling some demon. What was its name? She seemed able to see only that she had been victimized and betrayed by others, as though she were a mere passenger in her life. But like everyone else, she was also the driver, and how could it be otherwise? I suspected that she knew this but could not bring herself to admit it to me. And that was why I was useless to her now, an irritant at best. The terrible irony was that I had reinforced the idea of her innocent victimization because I could not bear to accept her life as it was, because I had wanted to heal her of it rather than acknowledge it as hers. I had rejected the horrors she had lived, denied their power over her, but she saw herself rejected. Only some sublime act of grace could transcend this. And there was none. All that was left was for her to go on defending her innocence, in which, at the bottom of her heart, she did not believe. Innocence kills.

  Huston took the bull by the horns, the unfinished film being now at the point of abandonment, and arranged to have Marilyn flown to a private hospital in Los Angeles where she could go off barbiturates under the care of her analyst. In some ten days she was back—her incredible resilience was almost heroic to me now—and looking wonderfully self-possessed if not yet bright-eyed. But perhaps that would come if she remained clean of the sleeping drugs. Days of concentrated work sped by now, and we could talk again. If she regarded me remotely, it was at least no longer with open rancor. Without discussion we both knew we had effectively parted, and I thought a pressure had been removed from her, and for that much I was glad.

  The final shot was also the closing scene of the picture. Langland stops his truck so Roslyn can untie his dog, which was left behind while the mustangs were being rounded up. It was a studio process shot done in Los Angeles; a filmed track in the desert rolled away through the truck’s back window, coming to a stop when Marilyn jumped out to g
o to the dog. Gable was supposed to watch her with a mounting look of love in his eyes, but I noticed only a very slight change in his expression from where I stood beside the camera, hardly ten feet away.

  “Cut! Fine! Thanks, Clark; thanks, Marilyn.” Huston was brisk and businesslike now, in effect refusing any sentimental backward look; hardly lingering, he said he had to be off to work with the film editor. I asked Gable if he thought he had shown sufficient expression in the final shot. He was surprised. “You have to watch the eyes. Movie acting is all up here”—he drew a rectangle around his eyes with his finger. “You can’t overdo because it’s being magnified hundreds of times on the theatre screen.” He turned out to be right, as I was relieved to see in the rushes of the scene; he had simply intensified an affectionate look that was undetectable a few feet away in the studio.

  Now, about to say goodbye, he told me that he had seen a rough cut the night before and that he thought The Misfits was the best picture he had made in his life. He was grinning like a boy and gripping my hand and warmly touching my shoulder, with an excitement in his eyes I had never seen before. A friend of his was standing by to drive him up north for a week of fishing and hunting. We looked at one another for a moment more with a sense of relief and perhaps of accomplishment, then he turned and got into a big Chrysler station wagon and was off. He was dead in four days of a sudden heart attack.

  As his car pulled away, I glanced about for Marilyn and spotted a brown limo with Paula sitting inside looking straight ahead and, I thought, avoiding me. A healing indifference was moving into me very fast, a numbed cutting of losses. For all I knew, maybe Paula had been doing her damndest to prevent things from getting any worse than they were.

  Marilyn came out of the building as I was opening the door of my car, moving so well and with such an alertness in her face and manner that I wondered again whether I had made too much of her difficulties. After all, she had suffered in much the same way in each of her last three or four pictures. Maybe I had let myself feel guilty about her necessary travail and anger, and in that way had failed her. “Men like happy girls.” Anyway, we were leaving in separate cars, which struck me as very nearly funny.