Timebends (60 page)

The political question, therefore, of whether witches and Communists could be equated was no longer to the point. What was manifestly parallel was the guilt, two centuries apart, of holding illicit, suppressed feelings of alienation and hostility toward standard, daylight society as defined by its most orthodox proponents.

Without guilt the 1950s Red-hunt could never have generated such power. Once it was conceded that absolutely any idea remotely similar to a Marxist position was not only politically but morally illicit, the liberal, with his customary adaptations of Marxist theory and attitudes, was effectively paralyzed. The former Communist was guilty because he had in fact believed the Soviets were developing the system of the future, without human exploitation and irrational waste. Even his naivete in seeing Russia not as an earthly empire but rather as a kind of spiritual condition was now a source of guilt and shame.

The House Un-American Activities Committee had been in existence since 1938, but the tinder of guilt was not so available when the New Deal and Roosevelt were openly espousing a policy of vast social engineering often reminiscent of socialist methods. But as in Salem, a point arrived, in the late forties, when the rules of social intercourse quite suddenly changed, or were changed, and attitudes that had merely been anticapitalist-antiestablishment were now made unholy, morally repulsive, and if not actually treasonous
then implicitly so. America had always been a religious country.

I suppose I had been searching a long time for a tragic hero, and now I had him; the Salem story was not going to be abandoned. The longer I worked the more certain I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling.

By midsummer I had found the moment when Proctor, able at last to set aside his guilty feelings of unworthiness to “mount the gibbet like a saint,” as I had him say, defies the court by tearing up his confession and brings on his own execution. This clinched the play. One of the incidental consequences for me was a changed view of the Greek tragedies; they must have had their therapeutic effect by raising to conscious awareness the clan's capacity for brutal and unredeemed violence so that it could be sublimated and contained by new institutions, like the law Athena brings to tame the primordial, chainlike vendetta.

“Every playwright has to have Jed Harris once,” George Kaufman had said, “like the measles.” After two productions with Kazan and our sharing of ideas about plays and life, finding a new director was a hard thing to face. Jim Proctor, who had done the publicity for
All My Sons
and
Salesman,
was old enough to recall, as I was not, the string of triumphs Harris had directed in the late twenties and early thirties, when, as sometimes happened on a Broadway that still had dozens of straight plays running at the same time, a star director would rise and spin off show after show for years and even decades and dominate an era with his personality. Harris had produced
Coquette
with the ingenue Helen Hayes,
Broadway, The Royal Family,
and
The Front Page,
and had directed
Uncle Vanya, The Inspector General, A Doll's House, Our Town,
and Sartre's
Red Gloves,
among others, but by the fifties his legend had all but faded. A couple of years earlier, however, he had taken over and revised a failing production of
The Turn of the Screw,
retitled it
Washington Square,
and turned it into a success. He had fathered a son with Ruth Gordon and had fought with practically everybody who was anybody in the Broadway theatre, something I was not privy to when Jimmy brought us together for the first time on a gleaming sixty-foot motor yacht in the Westport, Connecticut, harbor.

Jimmy Proctor had a flattened nose, a thick neck, a bald head, and the pigeon-toed lope of a myopic wrestler, which he had been
at Cornell in the mid-twenties. He also had a lisp and, like so many newspapermen of his era, was incurably sentimental, especially about people with talent, whether for tightrope walking or play-writing. His father had showed up periodically during his boyhood on home leave from one or another South American revolution, or sometimes from an expedition into some gold-rumored jungle. Early on, therefore, Jimmy had developed a tendency to romanticize people with unusual or exotic personas—of whom Jed Harris, as it turned out, was one of the foremost examples in the twentieth century. “A lot of people will badmouth Jed,” warned Jimmy in one of his rare understatements, “but he's a kind of genius, and I don't believe a man can ever lose that.”

As I later learned, Harris had temporary use of the yacht, a venerable and immaculately kept vessel, pending his decision to buy it (although surely not with money, of which he had none). There was also a totally silent and lovely young woman on board, doubtless on a similar trial basis. I quickly surmised that what was good about Jed was what was bad, a visceral, physical power and an appetite that brooked no denial. When it was Sunday and he said it was Tuesday and you corrected him, he would grin mischievously with his heavy lower jaw jutting forward and say, “I never argue with talent.” I had suspicions from the outset that he was just too classy for me and would be trouble, but he was also refreshingly knowledgeable about plays and actors, as well as a self-confessed connoisseur of poetry and literature in general. He was one of those men who, without saying it in so many words, could get up from dinner and leave you with the feeling that he had rather intimately known Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, and maybe Gertrude Stein. Jed had style, which is always suspicious, especially when it is not only a form of entertainment but also a weapon.

But like all stylish fellows he had his blind, naive side, as when I drove him up to Boston in my Ford and he yelled for me to stop just as I was passing through a tollbooth after paying the attendant. I braked and asked him what the problem was. Gesturing back to the tolltaker, Jed said, “You didn't tip him.” As an introduction to a new director this boded ill for a shared sense of reality, but even better news was on its way. I was taking him to Boston to see Arthur Kennedy in a new show there. Kennedy had been in two plays of mine, and I thought of him as a possible John Proctor. But Jed had detested the idea from the moment I first mentioned it.

“Where's he come from?” he asked.

“Worcester, Mass.”

“I thought so. He's got those feet.”

“What feet?”

“Those
feet
!Didn't you ever see his feet, for Chrissake, and you had him in two shows?”

“I don't understand what you're talking about.”

Seeing Kennedy onstage that evening, Jed nudged me and pointed. “There! You see? He's a fucking potato farmer, see how he puts his feet down? He's in mud, clump, clump, clump!”

On the way down to New York I insisted that Kennedy was capable of great lyricism, and we ended up hiring him, but Jed's ludicrous objection to his feet was a signal of his misconception of the play, which with my usual optimism I preferred to overlook. Kennedy was too common, he felt, ignoring the fact that John Proctor is not an actor but a Salem peasant. Indeed, Harris saw the production as a “Dutch painting,” a classical play that had to be nobly performed—an invitation to slumber, I thought. But he was correct about the rest of the casting, which was decidedly on the majestic side, with the eighty-year-old Walter Hampden a magnificent presence as Danforth, knife-mouthed Philip Coolidge as Hathorne, E. G. Marshall as Reverend Hale, Beatrice Straight playing Elizabeth, and an aged vaudevillian named Joseph Sweeney with a knowing and bitter wit as the octogenarian farmer Giles Corey, who is pressed to death with stones for refusing to testify.

After ten days of rehearsal with this powerful company something leaden and dead lay on the stage, and I remembered an old saw to the effect that there had never been a hit in Puritan costumes. (Which may have been a takeoff on Max Gordon's declaration after the flop of a Napoleon play he had produced: “I will never do another play where a guy writes with a feather!”) There was little spontaneity in the performances, and I knew that the players were simply scared of Harris, who would sometimes break into a scene to ridicule an actor nastily for moving beyond a certain fixed point on the stage. He would even mouth their lines to emphasize a vowel, or turn them bodily so that whole passages were performed without their looking at one another, this to underline some classical depersonalized restraint he insisted on imposing. The whole thing was becoming an absurd exercise not in passion but in discipline. It would not work, and one morning Jed did not appear for rehearsal at all.

I got him on the phone in his borrowed Central Park South apartment and thought he was not exaggerating when he whispered, after a long half-minute's silence, “Arthur, I am dying.”

“What does the doctor say?” I asked a few minutes later, after rushing to his bedside.

Jed shook his head hopelessly. “Doesn't know,” he answered. I might have known that any illness of Jed's would be beyond the ordinary reach of medical science. “I want you to take rehearsal,” he whispered, his teeth chattering as he reached a hairy arm from under the cover and took my hand. “You're a good boy,” he said solemnly, as though this was to be our final moment together on earth.

Assuring him that we would all be eager to see him again once he had recovered—a lie for which I instantly found it perfectly possible to forgive myself—I returned to the theatre, where after half an hour of rehearsing, I turned and saw Jed sitting behind me in his overcoat, collar up, teeth still chattering, a hostage to his art. Within the hour he was back on the stage telling Kennedy exactly where to place his cloddish feet and how many degrees to turn as he spoke a line.

Of the large troupe only E. G. Marshall ever stared Jed down, unafraid. Arriving for an evening rehearsal, he carried a quarter-full bottle of whiskey that he insisted on keeping in his hand as he played Reverend Hale in the scene where he presses Proctor to recite the Ten Commandments to prove his piety. E. G. stood there as Kennedy reeled off his catechism, and when Jed climbed on the stage and asked him to move forward a few inches, he first tipped the bottle straight up, drained it, turned at his leisure, and joyously flung it across the entire orchestra up into the darkness of the balcony, where it crashed. Then, turning to Jed and smacking his lips, he asked, “Now, what is it you'd like me to do?” Jed, so far as I know, never gave him another direction.

Jed was a charming man living at the raveled edge of his self-control, and I suppose that was the source of his authority. We tend to obey the crazy. Nevertheless, he could be wonderfully funny. I arrived in his apartment one day to find him on the couch reading an enormously thick book. I said that one rarely saw new books that size. “Oh, yes,” Jed said, “and although long, it is not interesting.” But his shifts of mood were severe. A few minutes later we were standing at his elevator waiting for it to open, chatting and relaxed. Without warning he began kicking and pounding on the sheetmetal door with all his force until it boomed, yelling, “Come up here!” over and over again. After a minute or so the operator, a fragile old man in his seventies, appeared at the open door with frightened eyes, trying to explain the delay, but Jed could not keep himself from grabbing the man by his lapels and roaring, “I've
been ringing!” as he banged him violently against the wall of the elevator before I could pull him away. By the time we reached the street he was himself again, talking about buying a used Chrysler, one with a divider between chauffeur and passengers. It was obvious by now that he hadn't the money to maintain a chauffeur-driven car, but on our way to the theatre he insisted on showing it off to me in the showroom on Broadway, getting in and out of it a couple of times, closing and opening the doors, and giving the dealer the impression of an imminent sale.

By the time we were ready to leave for the first public performance in Wilmington, Delaware, Jed, I thought, knew that he hadn't found the play's key, and so for several days he made one incredible demand after another—the firing of some of the actors, for example—until the producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, thought the time had come to separate. This proposal clearly pleased Jed, who, however, insisted on being given a large percentage of the show in return for pulling out—an impossibility.

An enthusiastic tumult greeted the first performance in Wilmington, home of the Du Pont empire, which I had regarded as a provincial company town since my last visit with
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
nine years before. At that time the audience there had seemed like a summer theatre crowd, unengaged and remote, but now these people were on their feet at the end calling for the author. I was standing at the back of the house beside Lillian Hellman and Bloomgarden, still unhappy with the stifled spirit of the production, with no real confidence in its New York fate, when Jed appeared on the stage, flanked by an obviously startled Kennedy and an openmouthed E. G. Marshall, and took an author's bow. The curtain came down on a genuine demonstration of affection for me, even if I looked a decade or two older up there than I had in this morning's local paper. Lillian, who had taken a fancy to Jed, was doubled over with her choking laughter, and Bloomgarden, having learned the word from her, kept repeating, “Shocking! Shocking!” Immediately Jed appeared, holding out the palm of his hand and showing me some torn threads on his jacket. “The actors pulled me onto the stage. Look, they tore off my button!” he explained. Something seemed to have penetrated at last, telling him his attempted impersonation was not too classy. I grinned at him and patted him on the shoulder, with which he turned to Lillian and Kermit to repeat his button-and-jacket act as proof that he was still one of nature's noblemen. Kennedy and Marshall, of course, hadn't pulled him onto the stage at all.