Timebends (76 page)

“Your passport will expire next month, Mr. Miller.”

“Oh? I guess it does, I hadn't looked lately.” So that was it: I had been allowed only a limited six-month passport because my trial in federal court for contempt of Congress was coming up in a few months. The long arm of the State Department and the Committee and all my admirers in the U.S. government was stroking my neck. “What about it?”

“We were wondering about your plans once the film is finished.”

“My plans? We're going home.”

“I see. That was really all.”

“I understand. I couldn't figure out what the hurry was in my appearing here.”

He chose not to register my soft rebuke. “You have children in America, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“And do you own property in this country?”

“No.”

“And of course no relatives here.”

“I can't wait to get home.”

“I should think so. Well, thanks very much for coming.” He rose. We shook hands.

“Frankly, it didn't sound like I had much choice.” We now laughed. He decided to explain, a little.

“There have been people who have decided not to return under circumstances like yours, and we would rather avoid anything like that in your case …”

In other words, the mortifying of America should I decide I'd had enough badgering and wanted to live in England, as Chaplin had, and Joseph Losey, Larry Adler, and quite a long line of other artists during the past five or so Cold War years. A really hot flush of international embarrassment, come to think of it, if Marilyn were to set up house here too. The poor things in Washington must not have slept for nights before deciding to gather me into their arms again.

On the drive back to Surrey I warded off disillusionment with an England whose freedoms I had come deeply to admire. But they were so politically helpless now that their economic independence was washing away. A pity. One less reassurance in the world. And of course it was never far from my mind that withal I was being driven by a uniformed chauffeur to a lovely English country house. Surrealism was naturalism in 1956. In another, more logical time I would have been skulking along hedgerows to escape notice, a political pariah. No wonder it was so difficult to name the real, to touch it, and to feel one's bedrock authenticity. John Proctor and even Eddie Carbone had had God and a community announcing an orderly and a full-throated condemnation. Now? I had my twin in the car with me, an impersonator whose face I shaved every morning and whom I sent out to speak to reporters when that was required, or to the Foreign Office if need be, but who apparently had only the barest resemblance to me, else how could I have been imagined a candidate for flight from the United States, a country I loved as much as my twin was reputed to hate it.

That afternoon I returned to my desk and
The Misfits,
a story of three men who cannot locate a home on the earth for themselves and, for something to do, capture wild horses to be butchered for canned dog food; and a woman as homeless as they, but whose intact sense of life's sacredness suggests a meaning for existence.

It was a story about the indifference I had been feeling not only in Nevada but in the world now. We were being stunned by our powerlessness to control our lives, and Nevada was simply the perfection of our common loss.

Whatever Marilyn was she was not indifferent; her very pain bespoke life and the wrestling with the angel of death. She was a living rebuke to anyone who didn't care.

And there was a political refraction in all this; with the worst war in history only a decade past, the two main allies against Hitlerism were at each other's throats, or almost. Pointlessness was life's principle, and it spread its sadness.

England's kindness would be withdrawn if I should ever ask for shelter here. I thought of the security man and his brutal interrogation of the Hungarian couple.

Surrey resembles some of the Westchester suburbs above New York City—the quiet wealth, the clipped hedges, the comfort. I was really an outlaw, or would be in a few weeks when my passport ran out. Once I got home I would be tried in federal court and probably convicted—everybody cited for contempt was—and might go to jail. I wondered how I could be so unmoved by it all. It came at me like mere information.

One night at Pyramid Lake I had stretched out on the shore, unable to sleep. It was like lying down in a Douanier Rousseau painting, with a motionless moon hanging low over a vast black landlocked sea from whose edges rose the spectral mountains. Deep in the water swam the unchanging prehistoric fish. The island owned by rattlesnake colonies lay off there in the darkness. Nothing moved. I could be part of someone else's dream and might fall out of it into the void. My children must be wondering what had really become of me. Who could explain this world? What was the right question? The moon knew, that one unblinking eye. There was something Nevada-like about England now. Or had I detected some slight hint of regret in the crippled Spitfire pilot's manner as he settled in to question me? It would be nice to think so . . .

One of the minor satisfactions of having survived so long is to realize that the names of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons are all but unknown to anyone but relicts of the show business past. If Hollywood before its disintegration into smaller particles was an imperial confederation of half a dozen powerful production companies
whose tentacles wrapped around the globe, these two syndicated gossip columnists were the guardian Furies, the police matrons planted at the portals to keep out the sinful, the unpatriotic, and the rebels against propriety unworthy to breathe the same pure air as such apostolic exemplars as Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, Sam Goldwyn, and a handful of others. Millions read their dispatches every day, received their opinions from them, learned whom to hate and whom to applaud. It would have been a joke except that a real campaign against an individual, such as they had waged against Chaplin for his links with liberals and leftists, could sink a film like
Monsieur Verdoux
and help drive him from the country altogether.

The treasure these two ladies guarded was many-faceted, but its name could be summed up in one word,
entertainment.
Without theorizing about it they understood in their bones that in the oncoming decades ours would become a nation whose primary business was, in fact, to be entertained. With extremely few honorable exceptions, American movies had simply ignored the rise of fascism, the depth and degree of suffering in the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the breadth of civic corruption in the country, or if these topics were mentioned, it was with a thick syrup of sentimental reassurance that leveled out the bumps and covered the sores.

The ladies' ferocity toward Communism was matched only by their duplication of some of its practices—as I was reminded in the Soviet Union a decade later when I read the Party's directions to Soviet writers to cease linking wisdom to criticism of the country and either praise or shut up. The American movie was there to praise American values, which coalesced in the idea of entertainment; indeed, I have wondered over the years whether the real, if half-conscious, reason for HUAC's fixation on Hollywood leftists was not that their politics imperiled the nation but that they were a menace to entertainment. And in fact, for their part, some screenwriters voluntarily brought stacks of their scripts into the hearings as evidence that they had never introduced a political, nonentertaining idea into any of them. They apparently took for granted that the more vacuous the writing the more American it was.

Terence Rattigan, for many years a highly skilled and successful writer of high comedies, gave a party for Marilyn at his home in London. At one end of a vast salon of some considerable formality, with a small orchestra soothingly playing American musical hit
tunes while the cream of British theatrical society danced or stood chatting, Louella Parsons, a wide woman in black lace mantilla, looked on from a raised carved armchair that gave her the aspect of a priestess in her tabernacle. She received, never got to her feet. I was astounded, once I learned her identity, that her influence could have spread even to this island, but one after another the actors and directors and their companions made obeisance to her. And she was clearly excited; this was real British class, not Hollywood schlock.

Amazingly enough, a look of pleasure spread across her stout face as I was introduced. It was a face worn and tired from searching other faces for the secrets of dereliction whose exposure had been her daily travail for decades. She actually leaned toward me with outstretched hand and in a mid-American whine invited me to sit beside her. “How wonderful to meet you! Please! Sit down!” I took the much lower chair beside her and looked up as to a papal presence. “How marvelous that you two have come together. We all love Marilyn, it's so wonderful to know she's happy at last. And she does look really and truly happy.” I could only nod, recalling that her columns had never been free of a sneering contempt for Marilyn's ambitions to escape the starlet's fate—thereby menacing entertainment.

I looked out at the dazzling company. It was like a dream of being caught in a locked theatre with a hundred actors doing scenes, dancing, calling to one another forever and ever. Yet there were some very gifted people present who doubtless genuinely welcomed Marilyn. I suddenly felt exhausted with trying to read anyone's sincerity; I simply wanted to get out of this theatre and go home.

A play title that occurred to me at the time,
Music for the Deaf,
might symbolize my feelings about our return to the States and what followed. Beethoven conducted the Ninth Symphony's premiere after he had gone totally deaf, and during the performance lost the tempo; so there he was waving his arms and hearing what he was hearing while the audience heard something quite different.

I could not hear the tempo of the time anymore; the theatre and the country seemed to confuse art with self-indulgence, as though the naive alone had truthfulness in it. On some days there was the flowery whiff of nihilism in the air, but who was I to level judgments? Laying judgment was getting harder even than it had been before. But on some days this seemed to me a good thing, for I was no longer able to romanticize the moralism of the thirties and forties.

We found a surprisingly inexpensive but spacious apartment right off the East River. Soon there was a routine, with Marilyn off to her analyst in the mornings and to the Strasberg's apartment in the afternoons for hours of private lessons with Lee. Occasionally we went out to Brooklyn to visit my parents, who would bring in the neighbors to shyly adore Marilyn. The street out front would be full of kids who cheered her when she came out of the little house. She took much pleasure in these ordinary folk and especially loved my aging father, who simply lit up at the sight of her. He had always been mad for light-skinned people and appreciated beautiful women, but it was his unquestioning fatherly indulgence that
was a kind of reassurance for her. He carried around a worn newspaper picture of himself with her, showing it to anybody who would stop and look. He had the vulnerability of age, which moved her to a flowing tenderness with him, and all the strain seemed to leave her when she sat comfortably on the couch at his side. In touch with her his fading feelings lost their pallor. She opened my eyes to his uninstructed sensitivity and good taste in theatre and his level-headed judgments of performers. Once again I saw how refreshingly unsentimental he was compared to my mother, how much harder to fool by fraudulent acting and dumb screenplays. The truth was that I had always been able to tell from his reaction to any story I told him whether it would register in its finished play form. Since he could barely read and write, he had developed an aural intelligence and listened avidly, like a peasant; with no pretensions to taste or learning, he could give back a native human reaction of great purity to what he heard. I found that if I could not make something clear to him, it was not really clear to me or had become too mental and lost its heart, and when I saw his blue eyes
seeing
what I was describing, I knew I had something real and alive to say.

It was strange to think that I would soon be facing a federal prosecutor and judge in Washington and might conceivably go to jail. In the meantime I was trying to straighten out the tangled lines of a new play. I had written only
A View from the Bridge
in the city, the rest in various country places, and I went scouting for a house we might buy, sometimes with my young son, Bob, beside me in the car.

I wrote an experimental scene about a young genius, Carlo, the physicist son of a great physicist, who reveres his father but objects to his advising the military about new weapons. He has developed a theory about a ray that could be directed from the atmosphere and stop all electrical activity in its path, which means it could stop the heartbeat. He dreads what he has discovered and decides to ask his father for advice. But when he begins describing his ray, he realizes that he cannot trust his father not to give the information to the military.

The scene was the perfection of stalemate. Retreating into silence, Carlo becomes his own hostage, deprived even of the ego gratification of the tremendous scientific victory he knows he has earned. The secret, inevitably, begins burning him up, and he is tempted to reveal the incredible power he has created to a colleague who he deeply suspects is in contact with the Russians; he wants the thing stolen from him, he wants it to materialize no
matter what. But as with his father, he breaks off before he has unburdened himself to this man.

His self-estrangement moves him into a dappled world of light and shade; he feels omnipotent one moment and helpless the next, even wondering at times if some buried and unacknowledged rage in him has wrought merely an imagined weapon of total destruction that has no reality except as a projection of his own wish to destroy. But the objective truth is impossible to ascertain without disclosing his discovery and risking its release into a world he simply cannot trust with it. Keeping the secret rots him as it possesses him, spreading to his every waking moment and his dreams. He quite literally becomes his secret, until there is nothing left of him but a story that cannot be told.