The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Before his fall from grace, Miller believed he could sustain his love for Marilyn. After the Fall portrays the death of their love. The play has essentially the same biblical theme as Milton's Paradise Lost: the loss of prelapsarian innocence; the curse of sin, guilt and death; the possibility of salvation. Holga, the resister and survivor of cosmic evil, ultimately redeems Quentin. His mother also suggests the theme of salvation by alluding to Christ's words in John 8:12: "I am the light of the world" and by twice telling her son, you are "a light in the world!"5

  The Misfits and After the Fall are like the heaven and hell panels in a Renaissance diptych. Marilyn was vulnerable, sweet and appealing in the former; neurotic, drugged and destructive in the latter. In The Misfits Miller had focused on Roslyn and explained why he'd married Marilyn. In After the Fall he focuses on his less devoted and adoring, more defiant and critical self. When he wrote the film script for Marilyn, he had to portray the positive aspects of her character and provide an (ironically) happy ending. In the play, he dramatizes the charming and attractive side of her character when they first met and, five years later, when they married. But he also portrays her irrational, selfish, irresponsible side, her sense of being victimized, her lack of personal responsibility and her inevitable doom. The play's title and hero suggest the emphasis is on Miller himself. The play is about the process of falling and its author is living "after the fall," after his loss of innocence and crushing emotional defeat.

  Miller builds on Roslyn's melancholy moods and quaint speech to characterize Maggie. Both women long for their lost mothers; both feel that they're a joke and that people laugh at them. Roslyn uses the uncolloquial "Whereas" to describe the small birds of the desert and people's indifference to whether her dancing is real or fake; Maggie uses this characteristic and slightly pretentious word five times in the play. Like Gay with Roslyn, Quentin tells Maggie that "I almost feel honored to have known you!" and that "Your eyes make me shiver."6

  Marilyn was alive when Miller began After the Fall and had died by the time he finished it. Her death and apotheosis, as well as Barbara Loden's blond wig and imitation of Marilyn's mannerisms, emphasized the play's autobiographical source and the many intriguing parallels between Marilyn and Maggie. In The Seven Year Itch the girl, played by Marilyn, keeps her panties in the refrigerator to cool off during the hot summer. In After the Fall one of her fans keeps Maggie's "hot" records in the fridge to prevent them from melting. The wounding entry in Miller's private diary, which Marilyn read in England and Maggie discovers in the play, is identical: "The only one I will ever love is my daughter." Miller said that Maggie, like Marilyn, was "a slave to the idea of being victimized" and "had an inexorable lust for destruction."7

  Quentin's first two scenes with Maggie portray Marilyn's troubled background and appealing qualities. Maggie has never known her father, who abandoned her as an infant and refused to see or even talk to her when she later tracked him down. Her grandmother once tried to smother her with a pillow. She didn't finish high school, but is interested in books and wants to improve herself. Miller captures Marilyn's naïve and childish directness when – in an amusing and charming non sequitur – Maggie says that she'd like to have a dog "if I had a way to keep it, but I don't even have a refrigerator."

  Miller had seen how Marilyn's physical beauty and palpitating sexuality made men treat her like a cheap tart and constantly proposition her. In her Marx Brothers' movie, Love Happy, Marilyn tells Groucho: "Men keep following me all the time!" and he knowingly replies, "Really? I can't understand why." After Maggie is propositioned in After the Fall, Quentin asks: "That happen to you very often?" and she admits, "Pretty often." By contrast Quentin, like Miller, is shy and "polite." He encourages and sympathizes with her instead of trying to seduce her.

  Like Marilyn, who'd posed for the notorious nude calendar, Maggie's name floats "in the stench of locker rooms and parlor-car cigar smoke!" She has a similar history of promiscuity and has generously offered herself to callous men who gave her nothing in return. Maggie becomes the pupil of the famous coach Ludwig Reiner (based on Lee Strasberg), and is engaged to Quentin when he appears as a defense lawyer before HUAC (as Marilyn was engaged to Miller when he was subpoenaed). Under Quentin's influence, Maggie adopts left-wing political views and absurdly tells him that the much reviled communists are "for the poor people. Isn't that what you believe?"8 Maggie's singing at the London Palladium recalls Marilyn's acting with Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl and singing at Kennedy's birthday party. Maggie does not know how to take care of herself and has no close friends. She's been exploited by agents and lawyers, and has signed several disadvantageous contracts. In a useful summary, a critic wrote that both Marilyn and Maggie "are the illegitimate daughters of disturbed mothers; both are vain, exhibitionistic, neurotic, and infantile, yet idolized and desired by millions; both quit high school, have an affair with a senior professional associate, and are forbidden by his family to visit him on his deathbed; both suffer from addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers, are in psychoanalysis, and work on their chosen craft with a fabled teacher; both end as suicides."

  Despite all this (and the blond wig to top it off ) the blindly self-absorbed Miller maintained that "he failed to notice in time that the actress who plays the role identified by many playgoers with Marilyn Monroe could so obviously be identified." Shortly before the play opened, Miller nervously told Robert Whitehead, "It just hit me. I'm awfully worried that this is going to seem like a play about Marilyn." The stunned producer inevitably replied, "Of course they're going to think it's a play about Marilyn. How could they not?" Though the connection between Marilyn and Maggie was obvious, Miller looked foolish when he disingenuously insisted in Life magazine that Maggie "is not in fact Marilyn Monroe."9

  In his analysis of Maggie's character, Kazan, noting her change of attitude toward Quentin, wrote that she "feels that Quentin is the first person, the first and only, who has ever aroused in her a sense of worth. And a sense of her potential as a human" being. She is "an orphan looking for support. She . . . [wanted] to join a family, to belong . . . and hoped for a miracle from Quentin (saviour). Then no miracle happened. Quentin didn't live up to what she thought he was." In his autobiography, Kazan added that in the play Miller was unusually honest and self-critical:"he put into the mouth of Maggie precisely what Marilyn had thought of him, particularly her scorn for him at the end of their marriage. This character is true and has an interesting dramatic development from adoration to contempt. Art is rough on himself, giving us all that Marilyn said in her disappointment and resentment."10

  The marriage begins to fall apart halfway through Act Two as Maggie, unstable and insecure, turns on Quentin. She reads his criticism of her character in his private diary and, revolted by his moral superiority, begins to hate him. She becomes jealous of other women and quarrels with her mother-in-law. Though deeply in debt, she's wildly extravagant, and fakes sickness when she needs money but doesn't feel like working. She constantly attacks him, claiming he's emotionally cold and sexually unresponsive; that he doesn't defend her interests and cares only about cash. Though he devotes half his time to her, instead of concentrating on his own work, she blames him for all her betrayals and broken hopes. She forces him to fire an innocent musician. When he protests that "I've fired three others in three other bands," she humiliates him by replying: "Well, so what? You're my husband. You're supposed to do that. Aren't you?" Brutal with her colleagues and employees, she's come a long way from sympathizing with poor people and underdogs.

  Maggie begins to add pills to her heavy drinking, and Quentin saves her twice from suicide. She's unable to face the consequences of her actions and demands much more than he's able to give. She wants to die and to destroy him as well. In a dramatic reversal of his earlier love for her, Quentin realizes that he can no longer help her and must try to protect himself. The whole play leads up to this moment of severance, the split that leads to the Fall. In his crucial s
peech Quentin, finally pushed to the limit of his endurance, urges her to stop acting like a victim and accept responsibility for her faults: "if you could only say, 'I have been cruel. . . . I have been kicked around, but I have been just as inexcusably vicious to others, called my husband idiot in public, I have been utterly selfish despite my generosity, I have been hurt by a long line of men but I have cooperated with my persecutors.'"

  After the Fall, Miller's most innovative and underrated work, dramatizes Marilyn's radical change from trusting to suspicious, from adored to contemptible, from saint to succubus. Her transformation is signaled by a cutting-blade metaphor. At first, Quentin protectively tells Maggie, "they're carving you." Later on, she assumes the dominant role and tells him, "you don't see the knives people hide."11 She begins as a victim, he as a protector; in time she becomes a monster who victimizes him. Finally, unwilling to face her failures and overwhelmed by her demons, Maggie kills herself. In this cathartic play, Miller tried to portray Marilyn, soon after her death and for the first time, with all her contortions of mind and complexity of suffering. He also wanted to justify himself: to show how deeply he had loved her and how cruelly she had treated him. Miller also reaches beyond the merely personal dimensions of the drama to illuminate a recurring pattern in our sexualized entertainment. Actors and singers who achieve great fame remain friendless, lonely, compelled to seek oblivion in drugs and early death. Those whom the pop-culture gods love, die young.

  The drama critics resented Miller's astonishing success and glamorous marriage, his years of silence and exalted reputation, his uncharacteristic boldness and lack of restraint. Most critics censured the play as a vulgar, hypocritical and megalomaniacal attack on the martyred actress. His old adversary Robert Brustein, writing in the New Republic, believed Miller had exploited and sensationalized Marilyn, and then ungallantly blamed her for their disastrous marriage. Brustein dismissed the play as "a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness." Maggie begins "as a giddy, simpleminded, generous creature who only wants to love" and develops into "a raging, screaming, suicidal shrew. . . . He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs." Brustein felt, As Bertrand Russell remarked of D.H. Lawrence's intimate revelations in Look! We Have Come Through!, "They may have come through, but I don't see why I should look."

  Richard Gilman, another influential critic, agreed that Miller engaged in "self-justification which at any time is repellent but which becomes monstrous in the absence of any intelligence, craft or art." The English playwright Noël Coward, equally severe in his private diary, criticized Miller's personal, intellectual and artistic qualities more than his exploitation of Marilyn:

  The play is a three-and-a-half-hour wail about how cruel life has been to Arthur Miller. What it does not mention is that the cruellest blow life has dealt him is that he hasn't a grain of humour. He is capable of writing one or two fairly effective 'theatre' scenes. His philosophy is adolescent and sodden with self-pity. His taste is non-existent. The Marilyn Monroe part of the play is really vulgar beyond belief. Out of all this pretentious, turgid verbosity emerges the character of a silly, dull man with a mediocre mind.

  But Coward (who was himself condemned for satirizing friends in his plays) was mistaken when he claimed, "It has, needless to say, been hailed as a masterpiece and treated with the greatest possible reverence."12

  Miller made matters worse by trying to defend After the Fall, and sabotaged himself with his pitiful lamentations and portentous rhetoric.

  Instead of denying the obvious autobiographical elements, he should have admitted that he began with a personal impulse and transformed it into art. When he said "I honestly feel that I have nothing to complain about," his interlocutor cheekily reminded him, "But you're always complaining." Thinking of O'Neill, Odets and Tennessee Williams, as well as himself, Miller maintained, "The story of American playwrights is . . . celebratory embraces soon followed by rejection or contempt." He tended to blame the critics and whine about the condemnation of his play instead of trying to explain his method and ideas. He told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he'd been deeply wounded:"I did not expect such a narrow-minded reaction; so cruelly and miserably mean. I did not expect such incredible and degrading short-sightedness."13 In his Paris Review interview he attacked, without vanquishing, his unnamed enemies: "The ironical thing to me was that I heard cries of indignation from various people who had in the lifetime of Marilyn Monroe either exploited her unmercifully . . . or mocked her viciously, or refused to take any of her pretensions seriously." He didn't seem to realize that pretensions could not be taken seriously. But Miller triumphed over his critics by continuing to write serious plays until he was eighty-nine and by leaving an estate worth nearly twenty million dollars.14

  The critical condemnation of the play permanently damaged Miller's reputation in America, and toward the end of his career prevented his new work from being produced on Broadway. In After the Fall Miller may have been narcissistic, self-justifying and provocative, but he made an effective drama out of this fascinating material. He explored his love for Marilyn, their marriage and the reasons for his failure with self-lacerating honesty.

  II

  Later in life, despite a happy third marriage and successful career as a playwright, Miller, as if probing a wound, returned to his obsession with the ideal and real Marilyn. His marriage to Inge Morath inspired his exploration of the holocaust theme in After the Fall, Incident at Vichy (1965), Playing for Time (1980) and Broken Glass (1994). But the last play is also a vehicle for exploring his relationship with Marilyn. In Broken Glass she reappears as Sylvia Gellburg, Miller himself is the model for Sylvia's husband, Phillip, and Ralph Greenson is portrayed as Harry Hyman (whose surname is the first name of Marilyn's internist, Hyman Engelberg). The title of the play refers to Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass) on November 9–10, 1938, when the Nazi government encouraged mobs throughout Germany to burn synagogues, break the windows of Jewish stores and ransack Jewish homes. On that violent night 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. A newspaper photograph, showing elderly bearded Jews forced to crawl on their hands and knees and to scrub filthy gutters with toothbrushes, has traumatized Sylvia. She suffers from a psychosomatic illness that has paralyzed both legs.

  Dr. Greenson was in his early fifties when he treated Marilyn. Dr. Hyman is "in his early fifties, a healthy, rather handsome man, a determined scientific idealist." Greenson received his medical education in Berne; Hyman got his medical degree in Heidelberg. Both doctors see patients in their homes and use extremely unconventional methods. Hyman, like Greenson, admits, "I don't know. I'm out of my depth! I can't help you." But Hyman is actually in love with Sylvia – a warm, buxom woman with a strong body and beautiful (though inert) legs – and openly expresses his sexual desire for her. He excites her by ecstatically declaring, "I haven't been this moved by a woman in a very long time," that "Your body strength must be marvelous. The depth of your flesh must be wonderful." Though Sylvia has not slept with her impotent husband in twenty years, Hyman tells her, "I want you to imagine we've made love" and kisses her on the mouth. One scene ends as she "lets her knees spread apart."15

  Like Marilyn, Sylvia is hypersensitive to the suffering of others and fears she'll be put away in an insane asylum. Her paralysis is a way to harm both herself and her husband. At one point Miller conflates Phillip Gellburg's authoritarian behavior at his grandmother's funeral with DiMaggio's imperious behavior at Marilyn's funeral. Hyman's wife describes him as "a dictator, you know. . . . He stands outside the funeral parlor and decides who's going to sit with who in the limousines for the cemetery. 'You sit with him, you sit with her.' And they obey him like he owned the funeral!"

  Like Miller with Marilyn, Gellburg realizes that Sylvia is "trying to destroy me!" Thoroughly disillusioned with the pernicious doctor (as Miller was with Greenson), he scr
eams at Hyman, "Since you came around she looks down at me like a miserable piece of shit!" At the end of Broken Glass Gellburg, looking into the mirror of unbroken glass, begs Sylvia "not to blame me anymore."16 In a dramatization of what might have happened to Miller himself if he'd stayed with Marilyn, Gellburg dies, Sylvia walks – and recovers at his expense.

  III

  Marilyn makes a startling appearance as Cathy-May, the eponymous hero's dead lover, in Miller's little-known late play, Mr. Peters' Connections (1999). Harry Peters, a retired airline pilot, turns up in an abandoned New York nightclub. As people from his past appear and disappear, he tries to bring together the strands of his experience and make sense of his life. Cathy-May appears twice, with and without clothes, and seems more vivid to him when dead than when she was alive. Miller's italicized descriptions, interwoven with his characters' comments, portray her as sexually alluring and irresistible, as well as naïvely self-deprecating: "Cathy-May comes to him; she is naked, in high heels; a big smile breaks onto his face as she approaches. She is giggling. Ah yes, how proud of your body." In her second appearance she's dressed in virginal white and even more seductive and alluring than when naked: "Cathy-May enters. She is in a tight white miniskirt, transparent blouse, carries a white purse. . . . and wears a dog collar. . . . Case I get lost" – though it's not clear where she lives and to whom she belongs.

  When Peters sees her, his passion flares up once again. Cathy-May's ex-husband Larry (crudely based on DiMaggio) and Peters' brother Calvin both respond, as Miller himself did, with gustatory and almost orgasmic lust: "She's juicy. A prime sirloin. A ripe pomegranate. A Spanish blood orange. An accordion-pleated fuck. . . . She looks perfect. With a white angora sweater. And pink plastic spike-heel shoes. A little on the pudgy side but not too fat . . . just . . . you know, perfect." Cathy-May, a lost soul who has no identity or real life of her own, merely exists as Peters' sexual fantasy. He remembers that she'd once loved him, but she's now forgotten all about him. He wonders if her past anger has subsided and if, under the right conditions, their love could have succeeded. Despite her tarted up appearance, Peters insists "she's not really a common slut."