Timebends (53 page)

Warner was clearly interested in talking seriously only with Kazan, whom he would have liked to employ whatever his leftist reputation. Soon, as a friendly witness before the Un-American Committee, Warner would gravely reassure the members that he had always made it a policy “to turn my back whenever I see one of those Reds coming.” (Which, a quarter-century further on, would aid me in understanding some of the ferocity of ostracism in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.)

The all but announced themes of these evenings seemed to be sex and employment. On reflection many years later, I was reminded of the court of Louis XIV, with its similar shuttlings and weavings of people trying to intercept the trajectories of power. At Versailles, however, women often held and administered power, while in Hollywood they never had more than the pleasure of momentary contact with it, and the memories of service to it for
their old age. But the part of me that was still a boy was nevertheless dazzled by men and women I had seen on the screen and directors whose names I had long known, and as we awaited Harry Cohn's decision on the script, I began to look forward to these dinners and their famous guests. Since my normal environment was four walls surrounding a typewriter on a desk, all this excitement was unreal but fascinating, and the conversation was by no means always vapid; the political drift of the country, for example, had a direct bearing on the movies one could expect to make, so there was more than an academic interest in what was really going on underneath the headlines. As nowhere else, there was a hunger here for the inside dope. And I had never before seen sex treated so casually as a reward of success; the immemorial. right of the powerful to bed women of choice, a right claimed by men around the world, from Darryl Zanuck to Mao Zedong, was the practice here to the point of boredom, but a provocation nevertheless.

On one of these evenings a young woman to whom Kazan had introduced me some days before created a quickened center for the company's interest, attended by its barely suppressed sneer. Her agent and protector, Johnny Hyde, had recently died, but not before managing to get her a few small roles that had led to John Huston's using her in
The Asphalt Jungle
as Louis Calhern's mistress. In a part practically without lines, she had nevertheless made a definite impact. I had had to think a moment to recall her in the film. She had seemed more a prop than an actress, a nearly mute satirical comment on Calhern's spurious propriety and official power, the quintessential dumb blonde on the arm of the worldly and corrupt representative of society. In this roomful of actresses and wives of substantial men, all striving to dress and behave with an emphatically ladylike reserve, Marilyn Monroe seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that it was the best one in the room. And she seemed younger and more girlish than when I had first seen her. The female resentment that surrounded her at-Feldman's approached the consistency of acrid smoke. An exception was the actress Evelyn Keyes, a Huston ex-wife, who managed to draw Marilyn out, sitting with her on a settee, and who softly said to me later as she watched her dancing with someone, “They'll eat her alive.” The eye sought in vain to find the least fault in the architecture of her form as she moved with her partner, her perfection seeming to invite the inevitable wound that would make her more like others. And so it was a perfection that aroused
a wish to defend it, though I suspected at the same time how tough she must be to have survived here for so long and with such relative success. But apparently she was now alone in the world.

A few days earlier I had gone to the Twentieth Century Fox studio with Kazan, who was under contract there and had many friends working on the sound stages. One of them, his former film editor, was now directing
As Young As You Feel,
a comedy with my father's bâte noire Monty Woolley and, in a bit part, Marilyn. Moviemaking was still an exotic and fantastic affair for me, and full of mysteries. We had just arrived on a nightclub set when Marilyn, in a black openwork lace dress, was directed to walk across the floor, attracting the worn gaze of the bearded Woolley. She was being shot from the rear to set off the swiveling of her hips, a motion fluid enough to seem comic. It was, in fact, her natural walk: her footprints on a beach would be in a straight line, the heel descending exactly before the last toeprint, throwing her pelvis into motion.

When the shot was finished she came over to Kazan, who had met her with Hyde on another visit some time before. From where I stood, yards away, I saw her in profile against a white light, with her hair coiled atop her head; she was weeping under a veil of black lace that she lifted now and then to dab her eyes. When we shook hands the shock of her body's motion sped through me, a sensation at odds with her sadness amid all this glamour and technology and the busy confusion of a new shot being set up. She had been weeping, she would explain later, while telling Kazan that Hyde had died calling her name in a hospital room she had been forbidden by his family to enter. She had heard him from the corridor, and had left, as always, alone.

Her slight role in the movie finished, she tagged along with us the next day to Harry Cohn's office at Columbia Pictures. It was a vast space, his office, but something makeshift about its cheap lumberyard stained paneling declared his stubborn grip on reality, a reminder that he had come up out of the waterfront slums of lower Manhattan. A tough dreamer who prided himself on having no important stockholders, Cohn was the last of my father's breed, along with Jack Warner and one or two dying others. He could hardly keep his eyes from Marilyn; trying to recall where he had seen her, he marched around in front of her hitching up his pants like a Manhattan cab driver getting ready to fight. His face has receded from memory, but not his flowing brutality and candor as he peered at her, growling, “I t'ink I know whose goils you were,” while she sat there in her special agonized mixture of amusement
and shame. In a shaft of sunlight poking through the edge of the brown Venetian blind, her face seemed puffed and not especially beautiful, but she could hardly move a finger without striking the heart with the beauty of its curving line.

“This picture won't make a dime,” Cohn aggressively announced once he had settled himself behind his desk. But he kept hearing messages through the air, it seemed, and would interrupt himself to punch a button and yell into an intercom to his secretary beyond the closed door. He knew every yard of the studio complex and what was happening everywhere and sent commands and questions down the barrackslike halls as we went on talking about our picture. “But I come from back there, though,” he said, jabbing a hairy finger down at the script, “and I know the whole story. But it won't make a dime, but I'll go in with yiz, pervided yiz don't take any money unless it makes money. And I'll back it because”—he turned and pointed straight at Kazan—“I want you to make a picture for me after this.”

Then, suddenly, he turned to Marilyn and said, “I remember you!” It was, apparently, an unpleasant memory; in fact, he had wanted her aboard his boat a time ago, and she had refused to go unless his wife came along—a grievous insult that for a moment passed a reddened blush of anger over his forehead.

His memory seemed to move him again to his buttons. Bending over the desk, he punched and yelled, “Get me fear!” For a moment he stood in calculation, growing angrier, and now he pushed the button and roared with all his force, “I want fear! Now!”

There were running footsteps outside the door, which opened to admit a small sixtyish man in collar and tie and cufflinks: Joe Fier, Cohn's majordomo. He was heaving for breath and perspiring, having no doubt run some distance.

“Yes, Mr. Cohn,” he was able to gasp, cheeks red and bald head blanched white.

With such open contempt that it was hard to watch, Cohn gave him some perfunctory command and then turned his back on him and quite calmly picked up our conversation where we had left off, his eyes again gazing at Marilyn, who sat apart, not saying a word, her eyes lowered. Fier departed soundlessly, having played out his role as victim of Cohn's power, a demonstration to us of our coming subjection.

“Is it a deal? No money till we're in profits, okay? I mean if yiz are so fucking idealistic, right?” His gleeful grin cut, but his challenge seemed to me acceptable enough: he would gamble his money and studio; I would throw in my script, and Kazan his work.

With the terms set, Cohn announced that the script had to be vetted by his labor relations man since the story dealt with a union. This seemed rather strange, but in a world so new to me I had no precedents and did not object. Whereupon Cohn yelled down at his desk for said executive, who promptly showed up, an Ivy League gentleman unusual at first glance for his collar and tie and blazer reminiscent of the formality of the East. He negotiated union contracts for Columbia. With a trim, imperturbable Yankee face, he seemed a man of some depth who did not spend emotions lavishly but grinned only slightly or allowed a twinkle to slip into his eye. Cohn had given him the script the day before, and now, to Cohn's request for his opinion, he replied that he thought the script terrific and in his experience an accurate depiction of the New York waterfront situation. For the first time Cohn looked impressed, glancing over at me with some small deference now that I had been complimented by a tough-minded civilian rather than some show business ignoramus.

A relaxed air seemed to surround Cohn now, doubtless because he imagined he had pulled off a coup in getting Kazan and me on spec, with the added prospect of winning points for producing an unprecedentedly realistic movie about a major social issue that no other studio would touch. Looking pleased with himself, he pulled a book out of his drawer and handed it to me, asking me to consider doing a screenplay based on it. I had no intention of hiring out but agreed to read it. I was still trying to believe that we had accomplished what we had come for and were going to expose the longshoremen's condition in the bargain; I was high on the thought of what was about to happen to something that had begun as graffiti chalked on the walls of Brooklyn Heights. I looked over at Marilyn, who was staring at me, smiling secretively lest she draw Cohn's attention to herself again. Kazan was talking about shooting dates and the unusually long schedule he hoped to be allowed for the film. I desperately wanted her and decided I must leave tonight, if possible, or I would lose myself here.

“I just have to check it with the FBI.” I heard Cohn's gruff voice and for a moment wondered what he meant to check with the FBI. It turned out to be the script.

I thought for a moment that he was kidding. “What's there to check?” I asked, astonished.

Cohn shrugged. “They've got a good man here, I'd like him to look at it. Being it's about the waterfront.”

Driving away in that everlasting sunshine, I wondered what precisely we were in for. If he meant that Kazan and I were being
checked for background, they hardly needed to look at the script. This was threatening to become the briefest triumph I had ever experienced, but I still hoped for the best, if only because Cohn now seemed positively attached to the story, possibly as a result of his own youthful waterfront experience and his labor relations man's objective enthusiasm for it. I remembered reading about gangsterism in the Hollywood unions and wondered if
The Hook,
as the screenplay was called, might be a roundabout blow he thought to strike.

In any case, we did not yet have Cohn's commitment, and I thought I had better stay on a day or two more until the FBI had given its judgment. And so we went the rounds, the three of us, visiting Kazan's friends—waking the Robert Ardreys in the middle of the night, having a drink with Alfred Newman, the
Streetcar
musical director, laughing hilariously at our own silly remarks, released not only by Marilyn's beauty but, I thought, by her orphanhood, which heightened her charged presence; she had literally nowhere to go and no one to go to.

The three of us wandered through a bookstore, Marilyn wanting to find
Salesman.
When I turned to hand her a copy I had found on the drama shelf, I saw out of the corner of my eye a man, Chinese or Japanese, staring at her from the next aisle while masturbating in his pants. I quickly moved her away from the man, whom she had not seen. She was wearing an ordinary blouse and skirt, not at all provocative, but even here, with her attention on other things than herself, the air around her was charged. She had said she liked poetry, and we found some Frost and Whitman and E. E. Cummings. It was odd to watch her reading Cummings to herself, moving her lips—what would she make of poetry that was so simple and yet so sophisticated? I could not place her in any world I knew; like a cork bobbing on the ocean, she could have begun her voyage on the other side of the world or a hundred yards down the beach. There was apprehension in her eyes when she began to read, the look of a student afraid to be caught out, but suddenly she laughed in a thoroughly unaffected way at the small surprising turn in the poem about the lame balloon man—“and it's spring!” The naive wonder in her face that she could so easily respond to a stylized work sent a filament of connection out between us. “And it's spring!” she kept repeating on our way out to the car, laughing again as though she had been handed an unexpected gift. How pleased with her fresh reaction Cummings would have been, I thought, and resolved all over again to leave California as soon as possible.

There was still silence from Cohn. I gave up altogether trying to concentrate on the script, which kept cracking up and blowing away in the relentlessly beautiful days beside the pool. Instead I swam endlessly back and forth trailing blood from barbs of lust but confused by some sublime, trackless spirit in this incomprehensible young woman with whom—hardly touching—I had exchanged something secret, and something like hope, it seemed, for each of us. Rummaging for some skeptical explanation, I wondered if maybe no one had ever given her a book before and told myself for the last time that I must go.