Timebends (62 page)

A phone call from Martin Ritt, an actor I had heard of as one of the younger Group Theatre people but had never met, was an exciting invitation to come out of isolation. He was appearing in
The Flowering Peach,
Odets's latest—and, as it turned out, his last—play; it was probably going to close in a month or two, and Robert Whitehead, its producer, had agreed to let the cast have the theatre for Sunday evening performances of anything they wanted to play. Did I perhaps have a one-act they could do?

Under the illusion that I was writing for an impromptu group of actors rather than a Broadway opening, it took me hardly two weeks to finish
A Memory of Two Mondays,
a kind of elegy for my years in the auto parts warehouse. I suppose I chose the material out of a need to touch again a reality I could understand, unlike the booming, inane America of the present. In a trivial time that delighted in prosperous escapism, I had managed to seize on the one subject nobody would want to confront, the Depression and the struggle to survive.

Stout and cheerful, a gifted poker and horse player, Ritt was high on the new one-act but thought I needed a curtain raiser for it, something to round out a full evening. I loved this promising atmosphere of sheer play and enjoyed my own power to give actors roles without commercial worries to dampen the happiness of work. Besides, one-act plays were never done in the Broadway theatre, and rarely in the rest of the country, and this added to the attraction of the project. Even better, the people who came on Sunday nights would probably not be the proverbial businessmen but real lovers of the theatre. If I noticed any contradiction between democratic ideals and this comforting exclusion of all but aficionados, it was drowned in the pleasures of composition.

I walked around for a few days trying to think of something short and wonderful, and then, suddenly, my old
Italian Tragedy
seemed to fall into place as a one-act with a single rising line of intensity leading inevitably to an explosive climax. For this informal production,
A View from the Bridge,
which I had been worrying over for years as a projected full-length play for the Broadway theatre, now came to hand in ten days. Reading it, Marty burst into his deep belly laugh at the idea that I had begun it as a curtain raiser, since it was obviously now the main event.

But reality soon flowed back, rapid and destructive.
The Flowering Peach
had to fold sooner than expected, making its theatre unavailable to us. On the other hand, the two new one-acts, performed by a single group playing parts in both, suddenly became attractive to Broadway. Naturally, I was torn between the original pristine notion and Kermit Bloomgarden's enthusiasm for a major new production. Instinct warned against Broadway, where I did not think these plays belonged, but vanity won out. And there were also good reasons for a full-fledged Broadway attempt, especially the availability of quality actors, far less obtainable for an unpretentious production in some corner of town. In 1955 the off-Broadway theatre was still in its infancy.

Nevertheless, casting, as always, was the nemesis.
A View from the Bridge
had come out of the piers and my time in Calabria and Sicily, yet we ended up with mainly WASP actors—among them, only Jack Warden had the lingo and the feel. It was my own fault, for Marilyn Monroe had finally moved into my life, and the resulting mixture of despair for my marriage and astonishment with her left little room for concentration on casting. I had accepted the chestnut that good actors, regardless of type, can surmount anything. They can't. Van Heflin, the son of an Oklahoma dentist, was filled with doubts about his ability to portray an Italian longshoreman and asked me to take him around in Red Hook and introduce him to people. He studied their speech like a foreign language, which was unfortunately how it sounded on his tongue, and it was his preoccupation with accents and mannerisms that kept him from feeling the part in the end.

J. Carrol Naish, an actor who had been taking his repertoire of ethnic characterizations off the rack in Hollywood for decades, did so again here despite Ritt's desperate attempts to make him into a personage resembling someone in real life. Playing Gus, a barrelshaped warehouse foreman in
Memory,
Naish had eight-pound weights built into his shoes to give him a grotesque anthropoid walk, but as the narrator-lawyer of
View
he had no physical gimmick to cling to and on opening night scrambled his lines like a juggler who keeps dropping his Indian clubs: referring in one speech to Frankie Yale, a famed gangster who had once walked the bloody streets of Red Hook, he instead said “Frankie Laine,” naming the popular crooner while looking pleased with himself for remembering the rest of that particularly lengthy speech at all.

If
A View from the Bridge
more than thirty years later has a vigorous life on stages all over the world, it is no thanks to the original production, which made it appear at best an academic and irrelevant story of revenge. That I could blame no one but myself made matters even worse. Deeply involved with Marilyn, I was alternately soaring and anxious that I might be slipping into a new life not my own. My will seemed to have evaporated, and I could only accept Bloomgarden's longing for a Broadway hit when what I had written was something very different, something plain and elementary and frightening in its inexorability. Marty Ritt, who became a successful director of films like
Edge of the City, The Long Hot Summer,
and
Hud,
was on his first time out and went along, as he thought he must, rather than aggressively pursuing his own vision of what the production ought to be. In a word, the play
on the stage had no tang; it lacked the indefinable webbing of human involvement that can magically unify many otherwise dismally ordinary separate parts.

Watching the production, I felt remote from it, as though I had dropped into the theatre as a visitor. Even
A Memory of Two Mondays,
avowedly a reminiscence, seemed to strain for effects rather than strolling through a panorama of time recalled. Less than two years later, Peter Brook did a new, revised, full-length production of
View
in London, and I remember best something he said just before we opened at the Comedy Theatre, after I had asked what he thought the British would make of it. “I'm not at all sure its inexorability won't put them off; the English tend to flee from Ibsen and the Greeks and anything else that shows some underlying logic to life so that if one thing happens it is almost certain to cause something else. If they took that to heart, I suppose they would flee this country, which everybody knows has no future. We are relying here on the arrival of happy accident, and in
View
it just doesn't work that way.”

And indeed the play's main significance for me lay in its unpeeling of process itself, the implacability of a structure in life. For around me I felt a wasting vagrancy of mind and spirit, the tree of life turning into a wandering vine. The much celebrated “end of ideology,” which some influential ex-Marxists were elaborating, seemed to me to dissolve the very notion of human destiny. At bottom, people were to be left to their loneliness, each to himself and for himself, and this compounded the sadness of life, although it might liberate some to strike out on their own and make more money. In America we were then at the very beginning of the Beat movement, which gave a name to the nameless and a form to the formlessness of our existence, and toward which I had no sympathy at all at the time. How to live and how to relax were not the same problem, not if you had children and the anxiety, which would never leave me, that something life-mocking and mean was stirring in the American spirit—something that had to be outmaneuvered and thwarted by the strategies of art. It took me a while to see that the Beats had an eye on the same monster and were foiling him with an entirely different bag of tricks.

The reception of
View
was actually a good deal better than I judged at the time and than lodged in my memory. But I have yet to meet the artist who has not on occasion believed that his critics
have plotted against him. Perhaps it was also a negative memory because something in me was disowning the play even as its opening approached. I was turning against myself, struggling to put my life behind me, order and disorder at war in me, in a kind of parallel of the stress between the play's formal, cool classicism and the turmoil of incestuous desire and betrayal within it.

I no longer knew what I wanted—certainly not the end of my marriage, but the thought of putting Marilyn out of my life was unbearable. My world seemed to be colliding with itself, the past exploding under my feet. And on top of everything else I was once more under attack.

The first barrage had come in 1953.1 had received a cable from the Belgo-American Association, a business group, inviting me to attend the premiere of
The Crucible
in Brussels, all expenses paid. It was the first production of the play on the Continent, and one that I hoped might at last prove its vitality. I wired my acceptance, only to discover that my passport had expired. Monty Clift accompanied me downtown to the Wall Street passport office, and then we went to a rehearsal of
The Seagull
across town on Second Avenue. I had asked for a rush processing since I would have to leave for Brussels by Friday in order to make the opening on Saturday evening and it was already Monday.

When I heard nothing for two days, John Wharton, my lawyer, contacted a colleague in Washington, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., who by Thursday managed to elicit from Mrs. Ruth B. Shipley, the chief of the Passport Division of the State Department, that in her opinion my going abroad was “not in the national interest” and so she was not going to renew my passport. She sounded to me like the Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland,
with the same chance of appeal from her edicts—a matter in any case of weeks or months or even years. I had to cable the Belgian National Theatre that I could not get a passport in time and would not appear. Mrs. Shipley doubtless had my dossier, of which she doubtless distinctly disapproved, with its lump of left-wing entries, petitions I had signed and meetings I had attended, and of course my much publicized break with Kazan, which had received broad press coverage.

The Brussels newspapers had reported that I would be present at the premiere, and when the final curtain fell, a call went up for the author. It showed no sign of decreasing, and finally a man stood up in one of the first orchestra rows to acknowledge the reception. The audience cheered him heartily, naturally mistaking him for the playwright. It was the American ambassador, who was probably
present in deference to the pro-American association that had sponsored the evening. Once the odd substitution was discovered, however, the papers took off against American policy, using my forced absence to embrace my play as their protest against McCarthyism. This Belgian strand would emerge again in the late seventies, twenty-five years later, when I found myself in our Belgian embassy at a reception in my honor. In 1953 the notion of being greeted with applause as I walked into an American embassy would have been madness to conceive.

As
View
was moving into rehearsal, I was hammered by a second attack. Even at the time the wild swings of my life alternately alarmed and amused me. I would be with Marilyn in her subleased apartment high up in the Waldorf Tower while below in the streets the
Daily News,
the
World-Telegram,
and the
Journal-American,
each running all the shots of her they could get as many times a week as they could get them, were indignantly calling on Mayor Wagner and the City Council to dissociate themselves from my subversive, un-American presence.

The issue this time was that film on juvenile delinquency, the one I had spent two months researching in the streets of Brooklyn and was now close to sitting down to write. Though Bloomgarden, Ritt, and I had completed the principal casting of
View
and
A Memory of Two Mondays
in the spring, we would not be going into production until fall, and so I had a long hiatus before me. A young producer unknown to me had proposed that I write a screenplay on the recent outbreak of gang warfare, the dynamics of which nobody seemed to understand. He had a contract with the city, which in exchange for police cooperation with the author and the film crews—in particular, access to precinct stations—would receive five percent of the film's profits, a very liberal cut indeed. Especially vital was the cooperation of Mobilization for Youth, a new city agency that was placing young street workers among the gangs in an attempt to lead them back to civilization. I had turned down many far more lucrative film offers in the past, but this challenge excited me, and I accepted a few thousand dollars as a fee, plus a percentage of the profits should there ever be any.

After months in the streets I had come up with a broad outline that was heartily approved by, among others, the Catholic Welfare Agency, whose longtime involvement with the poor youth of the city had given its leadership a grounding in the perplexities of the gang phenomenon. But the project was not to be: Mrs. Scotti, the HUAC investigator, had quietly shown up in New York to warn the
city administration that only embarrassment awaited any association with me because sooner or later I was going to be destroyed. But she made the nearly fatal mistake of contacting the head of Mobilization for Youth, whose name and background alone assured her of his political sympathies. James McCarthy, although a thoroughly Irish Notre Dame graduate, detested his namesake's assaults on democracy and was a firsthand witness of my rather hard-won views on delinquency, which he enthusiastically shared.

I was subjected to a political means test in a session with the nominal board of Mobilization, which had never before met. It consisted of the chiefs of every city department, including Sanitation, none of whom had the slightest acquaintance with social work. They were now called upon to question me and to vote on whether I should be allowed to write this screenplay. Ever optimistic, if not quixotic, I had the sense as we assembled in a large City Hall room that most of them were somewhat embarrassed by being forced into the position of adjudicating a case in which they had no claim to the slightest competence. But one woman, looking distraught and undernourished and literally wearing tennis shoes, shrieked that Arthur Miller had killed our boys in Korea and kept fingering a four-inch-thick folder filled, she said, with the government's record of my treason—no doubt Mrs. Scotti's contribution to world knowledge. In my turn, I said that I thought my qualifications to write such a film were demonstrated by my work and that I was not going to discuss my political opinions in order to gain a right with which I had been born. The board made its decision in private, and I lost by one mere vote, a happy and even invigorating surprise at that moment in history. Such were the times.