Timebends (74 page)

“You are both very guilty,” she said one afternoon as we had our tea together in the music room.

“I can't understand why.”

“You both have the same conscience.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“You can't accept what you don't think you deserve; you take exception to each other when it was supposed to be perfect. So you're punishing yourselves.” And she sighed then, as one of life's chief self-punishers, and shook her blonde head and laughed. She was a beautifully made woman who had held onto her innocence into her middle twenties, and I had railed against her general naiveté, which seemed to rebuke my attempts at reasoning her into a victory over failure. “Oh, God, Arthur, what unfits us all for life?” Hedda, born Hedwiga Rowinski, often sounded like a Chekhov character. She was good to have around, although one knew she could stand only so much trouble. In not too many years she would die of the smoke she was so deliciously inhaling and that she understood but refused to believe was going to kill her.

There were startling moments when suddenly it was impossible all over again to judge how real or unreal Marilyn's perceptions were. On the set one day, in a momentary lull in the talk and noise as a new shot was being set up, the voice of the venerable Dame Sybil Thorndike, a very great actress over many decades, was heard saying, “That little girl is the only one here who knows how to act before a camera.” In a flash, all of Marilyn's suspicions seemed to turn true, her efforts to deepen a shallow role became praiseworthy and correct, and the trouble was simply that she was surrounded by mediocrity, petty jealousies, and maddening reassurances of “It's good enough.” At such moments I visualized myself faced by an actor paraphrasing one of my speeches instead of speaking it accurately, and I recalled my own wild-headedness at this stupidity, my sense of being trod upon and disdained, my vision mocked by idiots. Once I made such an identification with her, I could sit and remorsefully hold her, certain once again that we could make it through to some area of peace. One could easily go mad shuffling about in this darkness, looking for something real. But the real comes like a bird lighting on a branch after a very long and wayward flight, not reasoned down out of the air.

And through it all, to make matters even more encouraging, a contingent of reporters never left the entrance gate before the house, a steady column of them traipsing to and from a lovely pub on the country corner a few hundred yards up the road. As British technological inventiveness has receded before the originality of the Americans and then the Germans and Japanese, the creativity of her journalists has correspondingly increased; in their typewriters we were two characters in a novel of manners, with little domestic dialogues popping up at least twice a week in one or more of the papers, harmless chatty bits, fairly moronic, of course, but never vicious and all totally invented. I had saved her, it seemed, from a nasty fall off her bicycle, or the Hungarian maid had burned the toast and Marilyn had patiently taught her how to do it just right in a half-column of print, advising her how to change her hairdo in the bargain.

But one morning a paper reported a conversation we had actually had a few days earlier, and pretty much word for word. It was eerie reading it, an inconsequential and meaningless verbal exchange, to be sure, but one that had happened within the house. Were we tapped? Was someone outside, in the pub perhaps, tuning in to our conversations?

A tall security man in raincoat and mustache, brogans, and burr drove up from the studio soon after I had told Larry of our problem, and promptly summoned the Hungarian couple, who appeared before him in the salon. Without even taking off his raincoat or introducing himself to them, he fixed them in a stare of ice. My heart went cold at the first sounds of his growling voice strained between clenched teeth while he kept a grin on his face that emphasized the threatening glaze of pleasure in his eyes.

With no preliminaries whatsoever: “There is a plane on Thursday to Budapest. You have nothing but temporary permits to remain in this country, so you will be on it and will not be allowed another entry again in your lives.” The couple stood wide-eyed, terrified, white with horror. Turning to the man, who had always been soft-spoken with us, if not timorous, he asked, “How much were you paid to betray Mr. and Mrs. Miller?” The ferocity in him was like a hot wind in the Hungarian's face.

“We did not know . . .”

“Don't lie to me, you little bastard!”

I started to interrupt, there having been no evidence, no right
of rebuttal, nothing but this terror tactic, but the security man quickly got to his feet, gave me a warmly civilized smile, and said, “I don't think there will be any further problem with these people.” And turning to the pair, “Will there?”

“No, sir,” man and wife said in unison, and looked wonderfully relieved to have made this sudden if oblique confession.

“How much was it?”

“Five pounds, sir,” the man said flatly, the cloth of his trousers shaking.

“And how much more have you told them?”

The woman tried to mitigate. “It was only . . .”

“Don't use that word with me!
Only
is not a word for you to use, at all!” She looked at the carpet with bulging eyes. “How much more will there be, then?”

“Nothing more,” the man said, desperately now.

“Very good. You will go out to them at the gate and explain that if a single word more of what you have told them sees print, you are both on the plane to Budapest, have we got that straight?”

“Yes, sir. I will tell them now.”

Nothing more was ever quoted again. The instantaneous transformations of the security man from such ferocity to the most sensitive British politeness stunned me. You need a long-lived empire to create such characters to police it.

Daily the bags of mail arrived, affording a view of English society that was probably unique. A movie star of Marilyn's magnitude is obviously no longer human, but what she is instead is hard to define without calling up the supernatural; she is a form of longing in the public's imagination, and in that sense godlike. The public holds her up before the sun to collect its rays to a burning point that will somehow stop time for them and make them feel her life on their flesh. Some of the letters addressed her as an institution, quite confidently asking for money for an operation, a mortgage payment, an education. But occasionally a container of feces would arrive, or a worn gardener's hat offered her as a keepsake now that the old rose fancier was dying. And always the bewildered queries about sex and marriage. Something like fifteen percent were quite insane; several offered to put her out of her misery, free of charge in some cases, for a fee in others. One man invited her to meet him “with the boys” in a coal mine, another to go fishing in a Scottish lake. Perhaps the most pathetic were from baffled women wanting
to know how they could become wonderful “like you,” as though she were a fairy who might touch them with the tip of her wand, all sparkly and nice, like Billie Burke in
The Wizard of Oz.
Though Marilyn rarely had the peace of mind to look at the bags of letters, Hedda handed her the ones she knew would move and encourage her, and invented replies that Marilyn insisted on signing herself.

But gradually Hedda was wearing down, as much because she found it too painful to witness her friend's seemingly endless anguish as because Marilyn was slowly becoming impatient with her; Hedda seemed to be withholding the total support she had formerly given and would blurt out, referring to some slight Marilyn was angry about, “But are you
sure
Larry meant that?” Hedda felt a trap closing; by declining to support everything Marilyn believed, she risked the charge of unfaithfulness, and yet she could not in principle reinforce her friend's unhealthy illusions. She returned home before the film was finished, but Marilyn would always remain her poetic girl, the golden feminine whose power over the male imagination Hedda joyfully celebrated as a kind of revenge on life's injustices to all women. “Oh, my dear,” she would wistfully say as she looked at Marilyn in a new dress or momentarily caught in a pose of perfect, flaring beauty, “you have everything!”—leaving unsaid her question as to why she could not be happy. But Marilyn understood, and they would end in laughter, helplessly shaking their blonde heads as they fell into each other's arms.

I seemed unable to take a step without running into governments; now the lord chamberlain's office announced that
A View from the Bridge
could not play in a British theatre because Eddie Carbone accuses his wife's cousin Rodolpho of homosexuality and to prove it grabs him and kisses him on the lips. No doubt because it was so widespread, if not yet accepted as commonplace, homosexuality in 1956 could not be referred to directly on the stage.

Binkie Beaumont, head of H. M. Tennent, the venerable and still the most active theatrical producing firm in London, almost instantly conceived a solution that was not only elegant but characteristically profitable, at least for him. Under the law a private theatre club was permitted almost complete freedom. The Comedy Theatre, in all respects a normal commercial enterprise, he forthwith transformed into the Comedy Theatre Club, and the equivalent of about forty cents was added to the ticket price for a
club membership, which one had to buy to get in. Even Bob Whitehead, one of the play's American co-producers, never thought until it was too late to demand a cut of this added price. And when he did, Binkie produced one of his smiles—what I called “English impish,” of which he had a stock in hand—wearing down with it not only Bob but also my agent in his demands for my percentage. I liked Beaumont because he was uncomplicatedly ambitious for a hit even if the show was literary or artistic. There was only one audience for him, not several of varying sensibilities, and as in Elizabethan times, the challenge was to conquer it. A tough negotiator, he seemed to love the theatre and good plays and knew what good acting was and wanted that too. There were long months when he put another new play into rehearsal every Monday morning, and he had casts rehearsing all over the city. When I complimented him on his beautiful Rolls, in which we were all driven to my play's opening, he had a one-word response, “Rented” (no doubt to sidetrack any further discussion of percentages). He was a producer who could simply say yes and proceed to put a play into production without consulting anyone else, one of the last of a breed that had not only money but also faith in its own judgment. But of course the English were probably the best audience in the world, and that helped a lot.

The
View
auditions were held in a theatre whose back faced the vegetable stalls of Covent Garden. I would sit beside Peter Brook listening in some pain as one actor after another who seemed to have arrived fresh from Oxford recited the words of Brooklyn waterfront Italo-Americans. One day in desperation I asked Peter if we couldn't interview some of the Cockney hawkers in the hive of working-class types behind the theatre, exactly the kind of men the play needed. “Doesn't a grocer's son ever think of becoming an actor?” I asked.

“These are all grocer's sons,” Peter replied, indicating the group of young gentlemen awaiting their turns at one side of the orchestra, “but they have trained themselves into this class language. Almost all the plays are written in that language and are about those kinds of people.” It was a moment that returned to me in China almost thirty years later when I insisted that the actors in my
Salesman
production not attempt to disguise their Chinese identities with Western wigs and makeup. They were shocked at first by this departure from the traditional conventions of a theatre that had little connection with actual life; people in China went to the theatre hoping to escape into poetry and music and interpretation, not for any imitation of reality.

There being no way for them to learn a deep Sicilian-American accent, Anthony Quayle, Mary Ure, and the rest of the cast worked out among themselves an accent never heard on earth before, but as it turned out, it convinced British audiences that they were hearing Brooklynese. The actors also thought they were speaking it correctly, and I did nothing to disabuse them, for this newly minted language along with their mode of acting created a wholly fictional world, but one that was internally consistent and entirely persuasive even if its resemblance to the Brooklyn waterfront was remote or nonexistent.
View
came over under Brook's direction as a heroic play of great emotional force, the working-class characters larger than life, grand and rather strange. The play began on a Red Hook street against the exterior brick wall of a tenement, which soon split open to show a basement apartment and above it a maze of fire escapes winding back and forth across the face of the buildings in the background. On those fire escapes the neighbors appeared at the end like a chorus, and Eddie could call up to them, to his society and his conscience, for their support of his cause. Somehow, the splitting in half of the whole three-story tenement was awesome, and it opened the mind to the size of the mythic story.

And something else was novel about this production. On the day the set was first erected, a dozen or so wives and children of the stagehands, invited by Peter, sat watching while their husbands proudly described and demonstrated the mechanics of the scene changes; especially impressive was the rolling apart of the tenement. The families oohed and aahed. In New York I had never noticed the faintest interest of this kind on the part of the backstage people, and the realization was saddening. With us it was all pure bucks.

It seemed an exotic play to the English at the time, especially when their own theatre was so middle-class and bloodlessly polite. The reception in the press was very favorable, and the acting community especially found it a sufficient challenge that within a few weeks a large meeting was held at the Royal Court Theatre to discuss what might be done about the condition of the British stage.