On second thought, maybe the problem with identifying the universals in the Nazi condition was precisely that power and stupidity were so commonly joined in the world that there was something unremarkable about it, something lacking in explosive illumination.
It was after returning from Germany that I began to feel committed to the new play, possibly because its theme—the paradox of denial—seemed so eminently the theme of Germany, and Germany’s idealistically denied brutality emblematic of the human dilemma in our time. The theme’s most poignant manifestation was in Lorraine, the character from the unfinished pharmaceuticals company play, in whom I saw symbolized a far more general irony. For she appeared so trusting in her candor, and as strong and nonjudgmental as a fine animal, while within she felt painfully illicit, a kind of freak whose very candor brought her little but disguised contempt in the serious opinion of the world. And so, bewildered and overwhelmed, she secretly came to side against herself, taking the world’s part as its cynicism toward her ground down her brittle self-regard, until denial finally began its work, leaving her all but totally innocent of insight into her own collaboration as well as her blind blows of retaliation. She felt besieged, could trust nothing anymore. The complex process of denial in the great world thus reflected in an individual seemed a wonderfully illuminating thematic center, and so completely did it overtake my imagination that, as Robert Whitehead remarked later, I was totally surprised to hear him say that everyone would of course reduce Lorraine, renamed Maggie, to a portrait, purely and simply, of Marilyn. I was sure that the play would be seen as an attempt to embrace a world of political and ethical dilemmas, with Maggie’s agony perhaps the most symbolically apparent but hardly the play’s raison d’ ê tre. The play was about how we—nations and individuals—destroy ourselves by denying that this is precisely what we are doing. Indeed, if Maggie was any reflection of Marilyn, who had many other dimensions, the character’s agony was a tribute to her, for in life, as far as the public was concerned, Marilyn was practically barred from any conceivable connection with suffering; she was the “golden girl,” the forever young goddess of sexuality, beyond pain and anxiety, a mythically anesthetized creature outside the reach of ordinary mortality, and hence of real sympathy. But of course she had unwittingly worked to create this myth, which seemed her triumph once it was established.
Looking back, I could see that in disconnecting the fictional character from any real person I was blinding myself to the obvious, but blame was certainly no part of the play; the very point of it all was that Maggie might be saved if she could cease to blame, either herself or others, and begin to see that like everyone else she had essentially made her own life, an awesome fact toward which one had to feel humility and wonder rather than such total remorse as was implied in her denial of any decisive part in her calamity. In this sense, innocence kills. But as I would shortly discover, it reigns, as it doubtless will forever.
I had not begun with the idea that Maggie would die but that she and Quentin would part, a stronger ending in that it would prevent the audience from disposing of the tale with comforting death. But as the character formed, she seemed more inescapably fated, and I could feel the bending of that arc toward death. And this also separated her in my mind from Marilyn, who as far as I knew was busy making films again, had bought herself a house, and was probably leading as good a working life as the movie business would permit.
Buying a paper at a New York newsstand one afternoon, I happened to see a photo of her—it may have been in Life —that showed her in a swimming pool, her nude body stretched out in the water and her face turned up to the camera. The accompanying copy said that she had insisted on not faking the nudity in Something’s Got to Give, a comedy she was starting to shoot with Dean Martin. It seemed to me that she had a grin of willed insouciance quite different from the genuine joy with which she had shown off her glorious body years before. It was hard to down the feeling that she should not be doing this anymore, that she was past the need to rely so patently on her body; were all her years of travail for this naked swim in a pool? That photograph, meant to celebrate the return of the old carefree Marilyn, was overcast with a kind of doomed coolness for me, as though she had given up trying to cease being the immemorial prey.
An item in the paper said that Something’s Got to Give had been canceled because Marilyn had been consistently late for shooting. An ad in Variety signed by the grips and other workers on the picture sarcastically thanked her for having self-indulgently cost them their jobs in a difficult time. Nothing could have wounded her more terribly.
I knew her analyst cared deeply for her and had allowed her practically to make herself one of his children, to visit with the family and hang around the house like one of his daughters. But after this latest shock I hoped he would move in strongly with special precautions, because it was just the situation to send her searching for the relief of unconsciousness. In Hollywood during another film I had been driven to call in the head of the University of California Medical School to persuade her to break her barbiturate addiction; all the other doctors had gone along with her demands for new and stronger sleeping pills even though they knew perfectly well how dangerous this was. Her very name and power conspired to attack her life. She had reached the point of toxicity, and the professor had swept all the bottles off her night table. His firmness had impressed her enough to keep her clear of pills for some days, but to continue she would have had to face down a lethal combination of ideas that chained her to the conviction that she was meant to be a sacrifice and a victim. In a quiet moment the professor seemed to have almost convinced her that it was she who was poisoning herself, but his authority could not overcome her lifelong self-image. Besides, there were always new doctors willing to help her into oblivion.
One day Bob Whitehead came to the Chelsea with exciting news. He had been appointed head of a new repertory theatre to be installed in the Lincoln Center complex then under construction above Columbus Circle, due for completion about two years hence. Bob had co-produced A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays with Kermit Bloomgarden and was the most artistically ambitious producer on Broadway. As successful as he had been, his real desire was for a permanent theatre, like the National or the Old Vic in England, where American artists—writers, actors, designers, directors—could develop in a coherent way, spared the instant disbanding of commercial productions at the end of a run. To do his Lincoln Center job he would give up producing on Broadway, a financial sacrifice that indicated his dedication to the project.
Would I write a play to open this theatre? The question he wanted to put to me right off was whether I thought I could work with Kazan, who would be the artistic director, along with Harold Clurman, dramaturge and general adviser, and Bobby Lewis, who would head an acting school as well as direct some of the productions. Obviously, it was the old Group Theatre resurgent two decades after its demise, but this time with public financing and a permanent home. It was a thrilling prospect.
As for Kazan, I would have to define my feelings. I did not know if we could, in fact, work together; for my part, I had not changed my opinion that his testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee had disserved both himself and the cause of freedom, and I had no doubt that he still thought himself justified. In the intervening years, of course, the whole Communist issue had gone cold, and a new generation hardly understood what it had all been about. What it came down to now was whether his political stance and even moral defection, if one liked, should permanently bar him from working in the theatre, especially this particular kind of publicly supported theatre. As for morals, perhaps it was just as well not to cast too wide a net; for one thing, how many who knew by now that they had been supporting a paranoid and murderous Stalinist regime had really confronted their abetting of it? If I still felt a certain distaste for Kazan’s renouncing his past under duress, I was not at all sure that he should be excluded from a position for which he was superbly qualified b
y his talent and his invaluable experience with the Group. Nor could I be sure that I was not merely rationalizing my belief that he was the best director for this complex play; but to reject him, I thought, was to reject the hope for a national theatre in this time.
My more immediate concern at that moment was whether I could finish the play in time to open Lincoln Center. I was still swimming through a couple of hundred pages of dialogue with no sight of the farther shore. And as a practical matter, I could hardly afford to give a play to a repertory theatre that would only perform it a limited number of times a month; since it always took me years to come up with a play and I was barely making it financially, I was in no position to be generous. But after some weeks and a lot of talking with an increasingly enthusiastic Clurman and Whitehead, and several conferences with Kazan about his production concepts, I finally agreed to go ahead. In short, with all the weightier factors pointing me toward the exit, I followed my enthusiasm and opted for joining up.
I had no position in the new theatre except that of a contributing playwright, and no interest in the interior politics of its administration. I wish I could say that too much has been written about its controversial history to call for more now, but the truth is that with all the tonnage of theatrical journalism in New York and elsewhere, a just and accurate account of what happened to the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre under Whitehead and Kazan remains to be written.
It is beyond the scope of this book to tell that important story in its entirety; I can only touch on what I knew at the time and learned at second hand afterwards, which is by no means the whole of it. It is important for more than the personalities concerned that the facts be known, if only because immense amounts of public money were involved, not to speak of the hopes of artists and audiences who deserved better than they received. Finally, if this country is ever to create a national theatre worthy of the name, we shall have to learn the buried lessons of this lost attempt to build such an institution.
In a nutshell, the board of Lincoln Center was made up largely of bankers who had raised the money for the buildings. They accepted that opera and ballet and a symphony orchestra would show operating deficits each year, but—for reasons peculiar to the American culture of which they were part—they assumed that theatre should return a profit or at least not lose money. Over months of discussions and statistical demonstrations, Whitehead, a man of enormous patience and sympathy with such types, explained the paradox that the more successful such a theatre was the more money it had to lose. This made absolutely no business sense to the board; after all, Whitehead had made money on Broadway producing Robinson Jeffers, Carson McCullers, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Robert Bolt, so why not here? But on Broadway a producer was not paying to store the sets of two, three, or more productions waiting to take their places in a repertory company’s always changing program; or supporting a whole troupe of actors, many of whom were idle for days, weeks, or even longer; or making and storing costumes for more than one production, and so on. That the highly successful Old Vic and lately the National Theatre of Great Britain were always running enormous deficits failed to take root in these bankers’ psyches. The chairman, George Woods, then president of the World Bank, was especially impervious to so seemingly uncomplicated a situation.
But at the time I knew nothing of all this. As I was coming to the end of the writing of After the Fall, the horrifying news came that Marilyn had died, apparently of an overdose of sleeping pills.
There are people so vivid in life that they seem not to disappear when they die, and for many weeks I found myself having to come about and force myself to encounter the fact that Marilyn had ended. I realized that I still, even then, expected to meet her once more, somewhere, sometime, and maybe talk sensibly about all the foolishness we had been through—in which case I would probably have fallen in love with her again. And the iron logic of her death did not help much: I could still see her coming across the lawn, or touching something, or laughing, at the same time that I confronted the end of her as one might stand watching the sinking sun. When a reporter called asking if I would be attending her funeral in California, the very idea of a burial was outlandish, and stunned as I was, I answered without thinking, “She won’t be there.” I could hear his astonishment, but I could only hang up, it was beyond explaining. In any case, to join what I knew would be a circus of cameras and shouts and luridness was beyond my strength. I had done all that was in me to do, and to me it was meaningless to stand for photographs at a stone. For some reason what I had said to her long ago kept returning—“You’re the saddest girl I’ve ever known.” And she had replied, “Nobody ever said that to me!” and laughed with an inward-looking surprise that reminded me of my own as a boy when the salesman with the artificial leg suddenly remarked, “You’ve gotten serious,” and made me see myself differently. It was so strange that she had never really had the right to her own sadness.
And now, naturally, the press gathered to chorus its laments, the same press that had sneered at her for so long, whose praise and condescension, if not contempt for her as an actress, she had taken too seriously. To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.
Coming out of the forties and fifties, she was proof that sexuality and seriousness could not coexist in America’s psyche, were hostile, mutually rejecting opposites, in fact. At the end she had had to give way and go back to swimming naked in a pool in order to make a picture.
Years later, her life would be taken up by a writer whose stock-in-trade was the joining of sexuality and the serious, but avowedly desperate for money to pay his several alimonies, he could only describe what was fundamentally a merry young whore given to surprising bursts of classy wit. If one looked closely, she was himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power. Pain of any kind would have unnecessarily soiled the picture even though he was describing a woman on the knife edge of self-destruction all her adult life.
I had to wonder if her fate at the great author’s hands would have been better had she agreed back in the fifties to my suggestion that we invite him for dinner some evening. I had heard that Norman Mailer had bought a house in Roxbury, and from what everyone knew of him, he would have rushed to meet her. Though I remembered our short conversation long ago in front of the Brooklyn Heights brownstone where we both lived—when, astonishingly, he had announced that he could write a play like All My Sons anytime and presumably would when he got around to it—I dismissed it as a youthful overflowing of envy, which every writer feels and does well to outgrow. Now, some ten years later, he might make good company for an evening. I thought then that we were too much alone and more visitors might ease her distrust of strangers. But she rejected the idea of inviting Mailer, saying she “knew those types” and wanted to put them behind her in this new life she hoped to create among civilians who were not obsessed with images, their own or other people’s. Reading his volume, with its grinning vengefulness toward both of us—skillfully hidden under a magisterial aplomb—I wondered if it would have existed at all had we fed him one evening and allowed him time to confront her humanity, not merely her publicity.
And so as the subject of his novel-that-was-not-fiction and at the same time his non-novel-that-was-not-actually-true, she would emerge precisely as she hated to appear, as a kind of joke taking herself seriously; but it was a picture that allowed the reader to condescend to be charmed. The basics of her career were supplied by that disinterested witness Milton Greene, who had been prized out of her financial life by main legal force, while her beloved supporters—her analyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who had fought for her life to the end, and her nurse-companion, an elderly woman—were caricatured as almost frivolous about her welfare. Indeed, questioned on television by Mike Wallace as to why he had alleged the nurse’s possibly lethal carelessness on the fata
l evening, badly damaging her professional reputation and her honor, when it would have been easy to check her movements in the final hours, the author replied that he could not get in touch with the lady; and when a surprised Wallace said that he had had no trouble finding her through the Los Angeles telephone book, the author resumed his literary excursus on the ancient license of the fictionalist, finding it convenient at this particular point that his “Marilyn” not be quite a real person surrounded by real persons, although on other occasions he would of course desire her to be taken as such, as when a prospective reader looking for the real goods picked up his book in a store and considered buying it with real money. Indeed, asked by Wallace why he had written the book at all, he candidly replied that he needed the money.
She had been right in the first place, and I had been far too trusting, often witlessly and irritatingly so; I wasn’t used to the ocean of great fame seething with sharks—but I unwillingly watched them attack again and again, to the point where the whole fame game became an institutionalized paranoia that stunned the soul and made one dead. But to live day after day in the fog of unrelieved suspicion had seemed pointless and, as it turned out, was finally impossible for her as well.
Coming so soon after Marilyn’s death, After the Fall had to fail. With a few stubborn exceptions the reviews were about a scandal, not a play, with barely a mention of any theme, dramatic intention, or style, as though it were simply an attack on a dead woman. Altogether ignored was the fact that the counterattack on me was supplied by practically paraphrasing Quentin’s acknowledgment of his own failings—by the play itself; it was as though the critics had witnessed an actual domestic quarrel and been challenged to come to Maggie’s rescue.
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