Dropped Names

by Frank Langella

  “I want to revive After the Fall in New York. Do you think Arthur would give me the rights?”

  “Ask him,” Bob said. “Here’s the number.”

  I prepared a detailed speech as to why I thought the play would be well received; a long time had passed since Marilyn’s death, changing mores, etc., and nervously dialed the phone. He answered himself and listened patiently as I made my case.

  “When do you want to do it?”

  “Immediately,” I said.

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  I secured the rights for a nominal fee and would produce it with partners that year at a theater on East 92nd Street in New York. Arthur was then sixty-eight and I was forty-six, exactly his age when I’d first met him.

  We began pre-production in earnest. For several months Arthur came to my apartment at least four nights a week. I was married at the time with a son who was two and a newborn daughter. He never entered their rooms or asked to see them, was never anything but perfunctorily polite to my wife, usually just saying “Thank you, dear” after she gave us dinner and retreated with me to my office to work on cutting the play. A View from the Bridge was having a successful revival at the time, and Arthur was excited that After the Fall was going to be given a new life.

  “Who knows,” he said, “maybe the tide is turning for me.”

  If it was, Arthur was going to swim against it as hard as he could. He was completely agreeable to my cutting all the pontificating, sermonizing, and complicated plotlines involving the House Un-American Activities Committee, but totally unreceptive to any investigation into his hero’s inner soul.

  No matter how many ways I came at it, Arthur felt the character was not in need of any more investigation. He had been played originally by the great Jason Robards, a lifelong struggling alcoholic.

  “You know these drunks,” Arthur said, “they’re all crybabies. I don’t want that. Jason made fun of the character because he was afraid to commit to it. Typical boozer.”

  I asked if he would write me just one speech toward the end of the play in which Quentin might show some remorse, perhaps shame, even a touch of self-awareness.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  By now all the superfluous plotlines, extraneous characters, and Arthur’s efforts to relate personal guilt to the world’s guilt were gone from the play with his approval. It was a lean look into the character of Quentin and his relationship with his wife, Maggie. It was what I’d hoped it would be, a play primarily about Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe and their private pain.

  One afternoon I went to his apartment on East 68th Street to work with him. It was a modest, small place, sparsely furnished, feeling like a struggling young writer’s humble beginnings. He proudly showed me a wooden chair he’d made himself and brought in from Roxbury, Connecticut, his country home.

  “So what’s the anger about toward the play, do you think?” I asked.

  “They can’t forgive me. People can’t bear to face their own aggression. But when you don’t have resistance, you don’t have the truth. If I don’t blush from the truth, I know I’m writing badly. They accused me of being unkind, but they were very cruel to her while she was alive and idolized her after she died. No one wants to believe it but I began this play when Marilyn was alive and doing well. It’s not a revenge play. And I’ll tell you something, Frank, no matter what they wrote about her, they all sweat when she walked into the room. Every son-of-a-bitch sweat in her presence.”

  Inge Morath, Arthur’s wife whom he’d met while still married to Marilyn, came into the room. She’d been the still photographer on Arthur and Marilyn’s last film, The Misfits. She gathered up her camera equipment and headed for the door, declaring cheerfully:

  “I hope you do this play while we’re far away in China.”

  After she left Arthur said, “Just take the thing and run with it, Frank. I’ll stay away.”

  After a long silence, he leaned forward in his rocking chair, put his hand on my knee, and said:

  “Frank, I know what you’re trying to get out of me. And I’ve got a line I think might work. How’s this: ‘They slept with the sword of guilt between them.’ And it’s true, you know, we did.”

  I wasn’t quite certain how to respond to that line, so I got up and went into the kitchen to make some tea. When I came back I said:

  “Arthur, do you mind if I speak very personally?”

  “No,” he said, “go right ahead.”

  “Tell me what you would like the play to say to an audience.”

  “Well, if you can pull it off, Frank, I think it can be a kind of warning. A help signal to people.”

  “In what way?”

  “The knowledge that there are some people who just can’t be saved, and you have to get out from under them and save yourself.”

  “But if we don’t go deeper into the character of Quentin, and take a look at his responsibility, perhaps even his complicity, are we going to get that message across? It’s very difficult for an audience to sympathize with a man who is so adored by everyone in the play; his mother, his wives, his friends, and a man who has had so much personal success. He’ll just appear remotely curious about Maggie’s plight and detached from his own emotions.”

  “Do you think I’m not stumbling around in the dark just like everybody else?” he said. “Maybe I can’t show my vulnerability. You don’t.”

  “But you can write about it, Arthur. You can give us something of who the man Quentin was before he met Maggie, and how her presence in his life might have changed him.”

  He sat silent in the living room, looking straight ahead. And then said:

  “How about we have the Mother come in there and talk about him?”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. His resolute lack of introspection was, in an odd way, charming and naïve. I thought, he must know this quality in him is part of his power over people.

  It was dark now and for the first time during our months together, I said:

  “Tell me about Marilyn.”

  I knew instinctively that he was not going to talk about their sex life, about which I and everyone else in America was curious. Nor did I think he would express any overt anger toward her. He was silent a long while. This is the story he decided to tell me:

  “We were hiding out in a little place in Brooklyn. She had just tried to off herself and it had been a nightmare. The press was all over us. So we were secretly holed up in this apartment, and she did it again. I couldn’t face another circus. So I looked for a doctor in the phone book in the neighborhood and called him. He didn’t believe it was me, so I said I’d go down on the street and wait for him. He was only a couple of blocks away. When he got there, he recognized me and I brought him upstairs. He went into the bedroom and saved her life. When he came out, he told me she’d be okay.

  “ ‘She’s groggy now,’ he said. He took out a prescription pad and a pen and handed them to me.

  “ ‘Would you get her autograph for me?’

  “I went in, held her hand, and she scribbled her name.

  “He took it and said, ‘You don’t owe me anything. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone where you are.’ ”

  Arthur was not a man to show deep emotion. But this moment was the closest I ever saw him come to genuine pain and sadness. After a few moments, I asked him for a tagline to describe the play for our ad campaign. Without missing a beat, he said, “How about: ‘After the Fall—a play about the death of love with a lot of laughs.’ ”

  Once the production was locked in we began our search for a suitable Maggie. Jessica Lange turned us down. After a long reading Arthur rejected Michelle Pfeiffer. The next candidate, Kathleen Turner, was rejected by our director, John Tillinger. Next we offered the role to Judith Ivey, who was otherwise engaged.

  Two days before rehearsals were supposed
to begin we were without our leading lady. Into the room came a diminutive, dark-haired young actress. Tiny eyes, not much bosom, very thin, no obvious sex appeal. She read magnificently. Arthur said yes, Tillinger said yes, I said yes. We had our Maggie. This young actress was, at the time, seeing Arthur’s agent, the legendary Sam Cohn. Her name was Dianne Wiest.

  The first day of rehearsal, Arthur’s only comment to John and me was “Don’t lay anything on top of this play. Just do it.” And true to his word, he stayed away. He came to the first preview, with Inge, and was wildly enthusiastic about what he saw. Dianne’s performance would be closer to Judy Garland than to Marilyn in both demeanor and appearance, and she played the role with stunning vulnerability and pain. Arthur walked into my dressing room, tousled my hair, which was for him an enormous show of affection, and said: “You know this is a pretty good play.”

  We took a cab to a local restaurant to discuss it. I rode in the front, and when we arrived, Arthur, in his enthusiasm, jumped out and slammed the door just as Inge was about to step out.

  “Arzhaa, Arzhaa,” she said, “you slammed ze door on me.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear. I thought you were getting out on the other side.”

  “Vhy vould I vant to get out into ze traffic?” she said.

  The play was being very well received during previews, and Arthur’s spirits soared.

  “Maybe enough time has passed,” he said. “Maybe now they’ll see.” He was as jubilant as I had ever seen him. Not enough, however, to pick up any of the restaurant checks, which was, after all, true to form.

  As we got closer to opening, emboldened by the audience’s response, I made one last plea for an epiphany from Quentin. No luck.

  “Well, would it be okay if Maggie slapped him?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, don’t you think somebody should?”

  To his credit, he laughed and said, “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

  The slap didn’t help. Not to mention the fact that on opening night Arthur, the man who’d promised to “stay away,” sat himself in the fifth row center of a small off-Broadway theatre, dominating the room. I rarely recall an opening night in which an audience sat as still and quiet as that one. When he came backstage, he said: “Tough crowd.”

  And I said, “Arthur, what do you expect? You were sitting smack dab in the middle. Everyone knew you were there.” He seemed utterly oblivious to how inhibited the audience must have felt by his presence.

  The next day, the reviews once again were critical of the lack of introspection in the central character I’d asked Arthur to investigate. And it was dismissed, once more, as Arthur Miller dancing on the grave of Marilyn Monroe. I called him late in the morning.

  “They’ll never forgive me,” he said.

  We ran for several months and closed having made not much more than a minor ripple. Arthur lived on for twenty more years. It was in that time that we shared many evenings out. I’m sure Inge’s no-nonsense German stoicism must have appealed greatly to Arthur after Marilyn. The fact that Arthur was Jewish and Inge German added to the banter between them. Arthur would often say how he hated “cultural Jews—what a waste of a life,” he said. “All that deep intellectualizing.”

  “We Germans don’t have that problem,” Inge said.

  “No, you don’t,” Arthur said. “And Germany is a great country to die in.”

  Inge predeceased Arthur and, not long after, he began his relationship with Agnes Barley.

  One evening as we were having dinner at Café Luxembourg on West 70th Street, Arthur was doodling on the paper tablecloth. After he finished, I said, “Would you sign and date that for me?” He did. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket.

  “What are you going to do with that?” he said.

  “I’m going to keep it and, when you’re dead, I’m going to auction it off,” I joked.

  “Make sure you send a cut to my estate.”

  I still have the doodle, but I doubt auctioning it off would bring me a return on the monies spent feeding him over the years. His multimillion-dollar estate will just have to do without another dividend.

  My futile efforts to get Arthur Miller to reveal the soul of his most biographical character fell on ears most likely deaf to anything but praise and adulation. My guess is he met his match in Marilyn Monroe, a troubled woman who most certainly needed a man with an available heart.

  During his final decade, Arthur was not shy of accepting public tributes. The one I found most fascinating was an evening in which I watched him sitting on a dais, staring straight ahead, as his sister, Joan, sang “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” to a packed house. When she got to the lyric “I’ll sing to him, each spring to him, and worship the trousers that cling to him,” I thought, well, why not. This was a man who, it seemed all his life, had courted and enjoyed worship. A man who, as a boy, had after all been given the nickname God.

  ANNE BANCROFT

  The most common cliché used to describe members of my profession is “Actors are babies.” There are, of course, exceptions, but I would say the vast majority of us fit that description, with perhaps one additional adjective: “Actors are angry babies.”

  And I knew of no baby angrier than little Anna Maria Italiano, known to the world as Anne Bancroft; an elegant moniker about as suited to her as Cuddles would have been to Adolf Hitler.

  We first met in the summer of 1966 at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She was to star as Sabina in a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, to be directed by Arthur Penn. Having been guided by Arthur to an Oscar-winning performance for Bill Gibson’s The Miracle Worker and two Tonys—one for the play of the same title and the other for her Broadway debut in Bill’s Two for the Seesaw, opposite Henry Fonda—she was at the top of her game, thirty-five years old, beautiful, funny, and angry. She died thirty-eight years later, still beautiful, funny, and angry.

  I spoke at Annie’s memorial service in New York, along with, among others, Arthur Penn, Mike Nichols, Patty Duke, and Sidney Lumet. A week or two later, Mel Brooks, her husband, rang and asked if we could meet. It took us a while, but we finally managed dinner together in California, and I asked him how he was doing. “Still trying to please Annie,” he joked, but neither of us laughed.

  She was, indeed, just about impossible to please, and that flaw in her often obliterated the loving, warm, and fiercely loyal friend she was to those of us who tried hard to weather her storms.

  It was the unpredictability of those storms that could lull you into a sense that perhaps time had mellowed her. Like sand suddenly rising to a fury in a benign desert, she could go from zero to sixty in as many seconds; her voice, body, and demeanor becoming lethal weapons deployed without reservation or discretion.

  Potentially one of the greatest actresses of her generation, she was consumed by a galloping narcissism that often undermined her talents and forced her back into the persona of the little Italian girl she was; dancing on street corners near her birthplace on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and smiling for the customers.

  She told me one day of a woman who stopped her on a street and said, “Hey Annie, I love your work.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “But don’t smile so much, honey.”

  She also told me of a day she was walking through Bloomingdale’s, stopped to smell some perfume at a counter, looked up, and saw a woman across the way smiling at her. She smiled back. The other woman returned hers with an even broader smile. And Annie said she felt inextricably drawn to this woman, wanting to go around the counter to embrace and kiss her passionately, until she realized she was looking into a mirror.

  But in the summer of 1966, none of her narcissism was as yet disturbing, or even noticeable to my twenty-eight-year-old adoring eyes. She, Mel, my girlfriend, and I became virtually inseparable friends. “Hey
Mibby [Annie’s nickname for Mel], these are the two kids I told you about from my show.” The four of us spent almost every waking hour together, beginning that summer in Stockbridge, then in New York, Fire Island, and holidays for the next five years.

  Our first summer together, after performances, we’d gather almost every night around a large table on a sunporch at the home of the playwright William Gibson and his wife, a renowned psychiatrist named Margaret Brenman, who was practicing at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge. Those gatherings, peopled occasionally with the likes of the actress Kim Stanley, theater director Harold Clurman, and the Penns, were about as full of consistently riotous laughter as any I have ever known. Led by Mel, they were stupendous evenings of improvised insanity. I can still see Mel standing before us, singing “You’re My Everything” to his imaginary penis, which grew larger and larger as he first took it in one hand, then both, flung it over his shoulder, wrapped it around his neck, tripped on it, and slowly began to roll it back in as if it were a garden hose on a storage wheel. Annie’s hopeless, helpless laughter made it even funnier, and up she’d get, put on the music, and dance for us.

  The production of Skin of Our Teeth was a giant success and sold out mostly due to her box office draw. Following that summer, Bill Gibson wrote a play entitled A Cry of Players, in which I would play young Will Shakespeare and Annie his wife, Anne Hathaway. It was to be directed by Gene Frankel. We first performed it at the Berkshire Theatre Festival in 1967. Will was unquestionably the leading role, with Anne a strong support. She was doing the play because she felt a deep loyalty to Bill for Two for the Seesaw and The Miracle Worker.

  After the first preview performance in Stockbridge, there was a note in my mailbox that at the second performance the order of the curtain calls would be changed. Annie had had the last call, with me preceding her. But from then on it would be reversed, with me taking the final bow.

  I went to her dressing room, truly chagrined at the turn of events, and protested that I couldn’t do such a thing. She was a big star, I was the new kid on the block, blah blah blah. She was putting on her makeup, brushing her hair, and generally avoiding my gaze in the mirror as I stood over her protesting. Finally she said: