Timebends (37 page)

In one scene, taken from the book sent me by BBD&O, Juarez's troops crossed the Rio Grande at night to pick up a great pile of rifles left on the U.S. side by order of Lincoln, who was supporting Juárez against Emperor Maximilian, the Hapsburg princeling whom the French had made puppet ruler of the country. This scene had to go.

“But I got it from the book you sent me, and it's a good scene. Besides, it shows how friendly the U.S. was to the Mexican revolution and justifies Juarez's faith in Lincoln.”

In fact, BBD&O had seized on the Juárez story to celebrate Pan American Day, which coincided with the day of our broadcast. Applegate was adamant. The scene could not stand. I persisted. It would be difficult to supplant it with another so late in the day, when we were broadcasting in about twenty-four hours, and anyway I hadn't an alternative idea in my head. I kept asking what was wrong with the scene.

Applegate hesitated and then said that they did not want Du Pont accused once again of gunrunning in Latin America.

But it was Lincoln who had ordered arms to be left there, not Du Pont.

“They were Remington arms, and Remington is linked to Du Pont,” Applegate said, “corporately.”

More than forty years later it is impossible to remember whether I pulled the scene or not, but I tend to think that they finally let it stand—trembling, no doubt, at the possible consequences. Like many power people here and in other countries, they often made the strangest and most unlikely decisions. Another time they assigned me to write the story of the Merritt brothers, providing me with two books documenting what seemed to me the most brutally rapacious corporate tale I had ever heard. Briefly, the Merritt brothers were miners up in Minnesota before the turn of the century who had been led by an Indian—as though, they said, by Providence itself—to outcroppings of pure iron ore on the earth's surface, which they promptly laid claim to. This turned out to be nothing less than the largest opencut iron deposit on the face of the earth, the legendary Mesabi Range. The news spread quickly to New York and the first John D. Rockefeller, who immediately dispatched his personal Baptist minister to convince the brothers
to sell him the rights. For John D. was a religious man, and his agents had informed him that the Merritt boys were steeped in God. But the Merritts did not want to sell, planning instead to exploit the mine themselves and give the proceeds to the Indians and the poor, an idea whose nobility stirred Rockefeller down to his depths. In short order, of course, having constructed enough of the mine to begin operations, the simple brothers ran out of money, and Rockefeller's minister promptly reappeared, this time with an offer to finance their efforts to help the poor. Little by little, Rockefeller held out more and more of the tempting bait, gathering up their IOU's to the point where the Merritt brothers awoke one day to learn, as they testified to a U.S. Senate investigating committee a couple of years later, that “Rockefeller was the owner of Mesabi and they did not have the nickel for carfare on the trolley across Duluth.” Ownership of this limitless supply of ore made possible the starting up of the U.S. Steel Corporation across the lake and was the real reason for the burst of industrial production in the Midwest cities of Michigan and Ohio. It was a fabulous tale, and incredibly, it was not only to be sponsored by Du Pont, but on the night of the broadcast the top executives and other personnel of the corporation all over the country were going to hold dinners and listen en masse.

I called Homer to ask if he had read the research. Yes, he knew the story. “And they're going to broadcast this?” I asked.

“Write it and let's see.”

I wrote the story straight, hewing very faithfully to the sources. The script was quickly approved, rehearsed, and broadcast, and the local Du Pont klatches loved it. The Du Pont family, many of whom suffered from deafness and had to have special hearing apparatus connected to their radios, were also very enthusiastic, it was said.

Later I asked Homer to explain it to me. “They don't see it the way we do,” he said. “To them the story shows Rockefeller's foresight and acumen and ability to organize one of the largest mining operations—in fact, it was the largest—efficiently and for the good of humanity. To them it shows what enterprise and imagination can accomplish.”

“But,” I said, “his minister really conned them, saying that John D. was going to devote the wealth to the poor and all that. He gulled those guys. The Senate investigating committee was outraged.”

“True,” replied Homer, “but that's not the way they see it. The
Merritt boys were just unable to manage this kind of wealth, and it was in the country's interest, and humanity's interest, that the one who could manage it should.”

“In other words, God's in his heaven.”

“He sure as hell is.”

That we see what we wish to see was dramatized again a few years later when
The Man Who Had All the Luck
opened its pre-Broadway run in Wilmington, Delaware, the home of the Du Pont corporation. The actor playing David Beeves was Karl Swenson, who had for years been a leading actor on Cavalcade shows, so we were invited by Russ Applegate to have a drink with him in the Du Pont Hotel before one of the performances. He showed up with his wife and two of his subexecutives and their wives, pleased that we alumni of the Du Pont show were now to be on Broadway. Inevitably, the talk turned to politics, since Roosevelt was running for his fourth term in an exceptionally bitter campaign against Thomas Dewey. Applegate, the eyes and ears of Du Pont in its relations with the public, now turned to Swenson, who as a rich actor was bound to be a Republican, and with an anticipatory smile of satisfaction asked, “Well, Karl, how do you see the election?”

Swenson, actually a secret Democrat, looked uncomfortable as he pretended to think for a moment. In those days employees of banks and big businesses hid their Roosevelt buttons until they got out into the street. Besides, Du Pont was the money behind the Liberty League, a far-right pressure group. Applegate's question, therefore, was carrying a certain load, especially given his supremely confident smile. Swenson decided to dive off the board.

“Well,” he drawled, swiping back a platinum lock and flashing his handsome grin, “I guess I'd have to say my impression is that most people are going for Roosevelt.”

“Roosevelt!” Applegate nearly shouted, a bitterness narrowing his eyes. “Why, that's impossible—nobody
we
know is voting for him!” And he glanced about at his two subordinates for a confirmation that they did not begrudge him. Of course Roosevelt did win handily.

I had no doubt that Applegate was being blinded by self-interest and his ideological commitment, and to a nearly comical degree. His hatred of Roosevelt and the New Deal was almost religious in its intensity, yet no hint of it ever appeared in his company's advertising or publicity or in the normal course of his daily business life. With an opposing ideological slant I behaved much as he did, however, and this doubleness, this obedience to a civil code of
behavior, created a certain unreality. I suppose that it was a civility imposed by the war itself, for with victory and Roosevelt's passing, with the United States the most powerful nation on earth and the only solvent one, the restraining hand was struck away and a new age of unbridled and even joyous accusation opened, the age of the political investigating committees of Congress, of McCarthyism, of openly antileft legislation like the McCarran-Walter Act, which set up a political means test for any foreigner wishing to so much as visit the country. I would have cause to recall this little scene in coming years when the people “we know” were having their revenge for the two decades of political and cultural isolation imposed on them by liberal and left assumptions about the real and the true. Russ Applegate's comic narrowness, in fact, would one day remind me of my own.

My first attempt at a play, rather inevitably, had been about an industrial conflict and a father and his two sons, the most autobiographical dramatic work I would ever write. I was gunning for a Hopwood Award, which at Michigan was the student equivalent of the Nobel. But I had two jobs and a full academic schedule, and between dishwashing three times a day and feeding three floors of mice in a genetics laboratory in the woods at the edge of town, I would fall into bed each night exhausted. I had used up almost all of the money with which I had come to Michigan the year before as a freshman—one had to show a bankbook with a minimum balance of five hundred dollars to assure the school that one would not become an indigent ward of the state. The mousehouse job was my cash source, fifteen dollars a month paid out by Roosevelt's National Youth Administration, which subsidized student jobs administered by the universities. Every afternoon at four I would walk the two miles out to the lab, where another student, Carl Bates, and I would break open crates of rotting vegetables garnered from Ann Arbor grocery stores and distribute them in the hundreds of wire cages stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling. Wired to each cage was a steel identification tag, and when the thousands of mice heard us entering the silent, tree-surrounded building, they would rush around, and the jangling of the tags on the cages would send chills up my spine. Two biologists, a young man and woman in white coats, worked on the ground floor in a small room and never seemed to speak. They were carrying out long-range genetic research that required absolute separation of
the mice families, each of which was branded by differently shaped holes punched in their ears, a code that placed every individual in the total scheme. A violent electric bell had to be rung immediately if a stray mouse was discovered running loose, lest it get into the wrong cage and screw away a whole year's work. Naturally, it was I who volunteered to design a trap that would capture mice without injury, but after half a semester of tinkering I had to give up. There was every imaginable size mouse in the place, some so tiny a hair would hardly bend if they stepped on it, so that a gate that would shut behind a very light fellow would be so sensitive that it would chop the tail off a heavier guy or come down on his neck.

There were other distractions as well, like the occasional copulations of the two silent researchers on the desk in their little office, excitingly echoing what the mice were doing, as the delicate tinkling of the cage tags constantly made evident. I was also detailed about once a week to carry a cageful of mice that had outlived their usefulness out to a shack behind the laboratory, small, low-ceilinged, windowless, and black dark, where two owls sat on a shelf snapping their beaks together as I entered carrying their prey. The birds would hum and hoot threateningly, fluffing out their wings and stamping about on their shelf, impatient for me to release the mice—not an easy job when they clung to the wire mesh and had to be shaken violently until they dropped out onto the hay-strewn ground and occasionally scampered up my leg for safety. As I danced out through the splintery old door, fearful of stepping on a hysterical mouse underfoot or letting an owl escape, I had to remind myself that this too had research significance—every week some graduate student would come riffling around in the hay on the floor and proceed to count the surviving mice in order to determine which color mouse was better protected. Duly noted was the fact that the white, orange, and yellow mice, indeed all the lighter-colored ones, were gobbled up, while the plain gray and dark brown were more likely to survive. This conclusion seemed fairly predictable to me, but I was still in awe of scientific types making notes on clipboards and thought there must be something here that I did not understand. There wasn't.

A concrete cube set off by itself in the dense woods, the mouse-house was as often as not empty of humans when I hurried in to work in the late afternoons, and it was a strange feeling to think of these thousands of rodents, each with his little conniving brain, sitting in his cage trying to figure a way of getting out. Besides,
there was Carl Bates giving me the creeps by making a meal for himself out of the mouse salad, cutting away the rotten parts of grapefruit, carrots, and lettuce. Carl had to save pennies in order to send home a couple of dollars a week for his family, aside from supporting himself. He had a bad case of acne but was always cheerful in a stunned sort of way, which may have come from having been raised on a northern Michigan potato farm where, I supposed, the days were long and silent. Contrasting with the volatility of New York and the Jews I had known, Carl's depth of undemonstrated emotion broadened my education. His older brother had converted to Christian Science and insisted on praying over his crushed right thumb, which had gotten caught under a toppled auto engine in the Engineering School. Once I accompanied Carl when he went to sit with him, quietly trying to persuade him to go to the hospital as the thumb seemed to be dying on the hand, but he silently read on and on in Mary Baker Eddy until, in a week or so, it began to heal. As materialists, Carl and I remained unconvinced. In 1935, America was as far beyond the reach of prayer as a collapsed bridge.

I decided to remain in Ann Arbor rather than go home for the spring vacation and to use the week to write my play. Why it had to be a play rather than a story or novel I have never been sure, but it was like the difference, for an artist, between a sculpture and a drawing—it seemed more tangible. One could walk around a play, it excited an architectural pleasure that mere prose did not. But it may mainly have been my love of mimicry, of imitating voices and sounds: like most playwrights, I am part actor.

I had actually seen only a few plays, and those so many years before in Harlem, plus a recent college production of
Henry VIII
in which I played a bishop who thankfully had no lines but merely nodded gravely on cue. I was living at 411 North State Street in a house owned by a family named Doll. One of the sons, Jim, lived in a room across the corridor where he made the costumes for the theatre on his sewing machine, from his own designs. On a budget of pennies he generated a flood of Renaissance clothes of incredible richness, even Henry's famous S-hook necklace, which he made of common drapery hooks bought from the five-and-ten and painted gold. When spring vacation drew near I asked Jim how long an act was, and he said half an hour or so. I began to write and in about a day and a night had finished what felt to me like Act 1.1 set my alarm clock for half an hour and read the act aloud to myself, and exactly as the curtain fell the bell, to my amazement, went off. The
very notion of a fixed form like this was of course normal for that era. It was only later on that I became aware of Strindberg, the mystical rather than social reformist side of Ibsen, and the German expressionists. In a few of the avant-garde theatre magazines, almost all politically on the left, I had begun to read one-act protest plays about miners, stevedores, and the like, but nothing came near the work of Clifford Odets, the only poet, I thought, not only in the social protest theatre but in all of the New York theatre. And the only theatre there was was in New York, the academic theatres being devoted almost exclusively to restaging the latest Broadway hits, usually the comedies at that. The more ambitious would occasionally stage one of the Greek classics or a Shakespeare play, in productions that put everyone to sleep.