Marilyn Monroe (31 page)

A View from the Bridge
was Miller’s answer to Kazan’s defense of the informer in
On the Waterfront.
In Miller’s play, a man’s decision to name names leads inevitably to his destruction. Miller longed for a world where, he said, “actions had consequences again.” It’s not hard to see why he would have felt that way. On Broadway,
The Crucible
had been a critical and commercial failure. Miller, in speaking out against the HUAC witch-hunt, had reaffirmed his credentials as a man of conscience. He had acted bravely at a time when it was dangerous to speak one’s mind. He had gone on record against the prevailing insanity, a gesture that seems all the more impressive when one considers that Miller was innately cautious. Miller, unlike Kazan, had done the right thing. But as a playwright, he had disappointed. Meanwhile, with
On the Waterfront
, Kazan had climbed back to the top. No wonder Miller was drawn to what he called the “inexorability” of his story. At least in art, if not in life, the rat paid a price for his actions.

In
A View from the Bridge
, Miller returned to a play, “An Italian Tragedy,” that he had tried to write following his first encounter with
Marilyn in Los Angeles. In 1951, Miller, troubled by his own feelings for Marilyn, had been attracted to the wayward husband’s tale. Filled with guilt, he could identify with the betrayer. And at a moment when, in Miller’s absence, his friend Kazan was sleeping with Marilyn, the playwright had been naturally drawn to the idea of a sexual triangle. Then there was the protagonist’s decision to inform on the illegal immigrant, an element that would have held little personal interest at the time unless Miller fantasized (unconsciously?) about destroying his rival in love.

In 1955, however, there can be no doubt that the informer theme was of prime concern to Miller. Add the author’s wish to see betrayal punished, and one can see why the play jelled as it had not in 1951, when Kazan’s HUAC testimony had yet to come between them. In one significant way, Miller, in
A View from the Bridge
, altered the anecdote he had heard long ago on the Brooklyn waterfront; he added an accusation that Rodolpho, the illegal immigrant, is secretly a homosexual. Eddie, the longshoreman, makes much of the fact that Rodolpho is a singer, a curious detail as Miller himself once aspired to sing professionally. As a teenager, Miller had practiced at home, crooning in a tenor-baritone voice with a lamp for a microphone.

Whereas in 1951 Miller would have identified with Eddie, four years later Kazan was, literally, the informer. Thus, in the later version, Miller and Kazan exchanged places in the triangle. Miller, always cautious and a bit fearful with women, appears to have glimpsed some aspect of himself in Rodolpho. That, no doubt, was part of the story’s appeal: working with emotionally-charged material Miller did not fully comprehend. In the play’s most disturbing scene, Eddie kisses his niece. Then he forcibly kisses Rodolpho on the mouth to show that that’s what the young man really wants. Was Miller trying to make sense of his own powerful emotional connection to Kazan? Was he trying to understand why, the first time around, he had chosen to leave Marilyn?

A View from the Bridge
was not the only Miller work that seems to have been created in reaction to
On the Waterfront.
Not long after Kazan’s film dominated the Academy Awards, Miller, in New York, began work on a new screenplay, his first since
The Hook.
Significantly, Miller and Kazan, in cooperation with Kermit Bloomgarden, had once hoped to set up an independent film production company on the east coast.
On the
Waterfront
had been shot independently in the east, and that was Miller’s plan for his own screenplay-in-progress, “Bridge to a Savage World.”

In an echo of Kazan’s treatment of alienated youth in
East of Eden
, Miller’s script dealt with the gangs of violent, rebellious teenagers that terrorized American cities in the mid-1950s. They “rumbled” with rival gangs; they fought with chains, zip guns, switchblade knives, and broken bottles. Combined Artists, a small independent production company, had commissioned Miller to write a feature film. It would be made with an “important” cast in association with the New York City Youth Board. In exchange for 5 per cent of the profits, the municipal agency would give the filmmakers access to police and social workers.

For several weeks, Miller interviewed gang members in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He saw the boys as savages. He compared them to “the hordes that roamed the virgin forests.” He wrote: “These are children who have never known life excepting as a worthless thing. They have been told from birth that they are nothing, that their parents are nothing, and that their hopes are nothing.”

Their fight for self-respect reminded Miller of Marilyn. The script, as it evolved, focused on a Youth Board worker who tries to get through to one of the boys. “To save one of these,” said Miller, “is obviously a great piece of work.” By his own account, Miller saw himself as engaged in an effort to “save” Marilyn. Thus, as so often with Miller, in his own feelings about Marilyn he discovered the emotional connection he needed to write.

By July, Miller had completed an outline and the Youth Board had approved it. Before the project went forward, however, it had to be approved by the city government. Suddenly, Miller found himself caught in a political firestorm. Since
The Crucible
, it had been inevitable that the political right would come after Miller in revenge for what Eric Bentley called “Broadway’s principal challenge to McCarthyism.”

In 1954, Miller had had the first hint of what was to come, when he was denied a U.S. passport to attend a Belgian production of
The Crucible.
The right had put him on notice that they intended to punish him. One year later, the attempt to enlist the Youth Board’s help for the gang film provided Miller’s enemies with a pretext to go after him again. On July 22, 1955, the
New York World Telegram and Sun
, a prominent right-wing newspaper, ran an article headlined “Youth Board Filmster
Has a Pink Record: Miller Hit Kazan for Telling All.” The article questioned whether a city agency ought to underwrite Miller, “a veteran backer of Communist causes.”

As proof of Miller’s Communist sympathies, the newspaper offered his attitude to Kazan: “But three years ago, he broke up a long, deep-rooted and profitable friendship with Elia Kazan, after the latter testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The playwright, the
World Telegram and Sun
disclosed at the time, would not tolerate Mr. Kazan’s identification of Communists in the party unit to which he once belonged. He expressed strong disapproval of the testimony to Broadway intimates and cut all communication with his theatrical teammate, asserting he no longer wanted the director to profit from his writings.”

HUAC planned four days of entertainment business hearings in New York in August. The committee, sensing that there were no more big names to go after in Hollywood, decided to set up shop temporarily on Broadway. The theatrical figures they pursued, however, were largely obscure and unsuccessful. A notable exception was Arthur Miller. One of the committee’s tactics of harassment was to suggest unofficially that certain individuals might soon be called; Dolores Scotti, a HUAC investigator, notified city officials that Miller was about to be subpoenaed. The merest suspicion of subversive activity was often enough to infect one’s ability earn a living.

Miller’s prestige made him a particularly desirable target for a committee that found itself increasingly starved of the publicity that was its lifeblood. The political climate in the United States was quite different from what it had been when Kazan testified in 1952. A number of factors had contributed to a lessening of public interest in the hunt for Communists, including the end of the Korean War and the 1954 Senate vote to “condemn” Senator Joseph McCarthy. HUAC in 1955 was like a great wounded bear, all the more threatening and dangerous in its weakened condition.

Mrs. Scotti warned that Miller was likely to be an unfriendly witness and that that would embarrass the Youth Board. She noted that Miller had a “heavy front” record. She declared that he had participated in various “Communist-dominated and-controlled organizations.” She mentioned his ties to the National Council of American–Soviet
Friendship and the Committee of the Arts and Sciences and Professions. She pointed out that his dossier was already one and a half inches thick.

The city government deferred its decision until after Miller had appeared before HUAC. Initially, it was anticipated that he would be called in mid-August. Almost as soon as the Board had decided to postpone the decision, Mrs. Scotti announced the launch of a full-scale investigation of Miller in hopes of finding someone to “place him in the Party.” They would not call Miller in August after all. The new plan was to delay the subpoena until November. Mrs. Scotti said it was a shame they had to wait so long, but if Miller were called individually the liberals would complain that HUAC was persecuting him. HUAC planned to round up some other people and throw Miller in with the group.

With this political cloud over his future, Miller began rehearsals for
A View from the Bridge
in August. Each day, as he entered the New Amsterdam roof theater—the same theater where Miller and Kazan had once prepared
Death of a Salesman
—Miller walked past a life-sized cutout of Marilyn, her skirt flying up in the air, advertising
The Seven Year Itch.
Her image was everywhere in Manhattan. The whole city, indeed much of the nation, seemed to be fantasizing unrepentantly about Marilyn. But it was Miller alone who had actually realized the fantasy of the male character in
The Seven Year Itch.
He was having an affair with Marilyn while his wife and children were away in the country. The author of a famous play, set in a Puritan colony, about the perils of sex had fallen in love with “the girl.” That summer, no one seemed more eager to believe he’d been wrong about sex than he.

Interestingly, even as Miller was working to bring to life his version of the Miller–Kazan–Monroe triangle, elsewhere in the city that triangle seemed to be on Kazan’s mind as well. Marilyn’s love affair was no longer entirely a secret; during weekends on Fire Island with the Strasbergs, she poured out her heart to Paula, who could hardly resist the temptation to spread the news. Kazan also had reason to think of Miller when his own name came up in the newspaper coverage of Miller’s political problems. And of course, by this time the script of
A View from the Bridge
was in circulation among theater people in New York. So it comes as no surprise that, whether consciously or not, Kazan’s feelings about the triangle would surface in a project of his own.

That summer, Tennessee Williams, in Rome, had been sending off
bits and pieces of his
Baby Doll
screenplay for Kazan to work on. Marilyn was Williams’s first choice for Baby Doll Meighan as the playwright then conceived her: a witless, fat, sexy, languid, thumb-sucking woman who sleeps in a crib. In late July, at almost the precise moment that the Miller story broke in the
New York World Telegram and Sun
, Williams sent Kazan his ideas for the third act. The letter elicited a curious response; Kazan, admitting that his own concept was quite weird, asked Williams to consider the very different third act he had in mind. Though at length Williams rejected the proposal in every detail, it provides a fascinating glimpse into Kazan’s mind.

The men in Baby Doll’s life are her foolish husband, Archie Lee, and his smarmy, manipulative business rival, Silva. Silva manages to seduce Baby Doll, whose marriage has not yet been consummated. In the end, as Kazan saw it, a snake bites Archie Lee’s heel. Silva, on his knees, cuts a slit in the other man’s skin with a pocket knife. Then, in an act of brotherhood, he puts his lips to the wound and sucks the venom. It’s an image more charged even than the kiss in
A View from the Bridge.

A feeling of comradeship develops between Silva and Archie Lee. Spitting out a mouthful of poison, Silva exclaims that he certainly never thought he’d be doing this. Afterward, the shaken, exhausted men, once rivals, go off together for a drink, leaving Baby Doll alone. It is striking that, like Miller, Kazan described a heterosexual triangle with homosexual overtones. He, too, seemed to be stalking the emotionally loaded topic of the men’s relationship with each other. Miller and Kazan were not on speaking terms, but they communicated through their work; they communicated through their views of Marilyn.

At the end of August, Miller went on the road with
A View from the Bridge
and its minor companion piece,
A Memory of Two Mondays.
The first tryout took place on August 22 at the summer theater in Falmouth, Massachusetts. In Boston, Miller ran into trouble with the city censor after the press described the show as containing “some of the strongest Anglo-Saxon words heard on Boston stages in years.” At the last minute, words and phrases had to be blue-penciled, but even then there were problems. Several ladies fled a matinée after the actor Van Heflin kissed Richard Davalos on the lips. Nonetheless, the show proved to be popular and advance ticket sales in New York were substantial. And for Miller, in the midst of his political troubles, there was the
consolation of a visit from Marilyn. Incognito, with a white knitted cap that covered her brow, Marilyn spent a carefree day with him in Boston. Unusually for her, at the moment Marilyn was the one who seemed to believe everything was going to be all right.

On September 29, Marilyn attended the Broadway premiere of
A View from the Bridge
at the Coronet Theater. She sat on the left side of the orchestra, so that she would not run into Arthur or his wife. She did, however, meet Arthur’s parents, Isadore and Augusta Miller, when Augusta rushed up to the movie star and introduced herself as the playwright’s mother.

“I admire Mr. Miller’s plays,” Marilyn replied cautiously. “I’m a first-nighter at all of them.”