The Genius and the Goddess (43 page)

The Misfits
and
After the Fall
are like the heaven and hell panels in
a Renaissance diptych. Marilyn was vulnerable, sweet and appealing
in the former; neurotic, drugged and destructive in the latter. In
The
Misfits
Miller had focused on Roslyn and explained why he'd married
Marilyn. In
After the Fall
he focuses on his less devoted and adoring,
more defiant and critical self. When he wrote the film script for
Marilyn, he had to portray the positive aspects of her character and
provide an (ironically) happy ending. In the play, he dramatizes the
charming and attractive side of her character when they first met and,
five years later, when they married. But he also portrays her irrational,
selfish, irresponsible side, her sense of being victimized, her
lack of personal responsibility and her inevitable doom. The play's
title and hero suggest the emphasis is on Miller himself. The play is
about the process of falling and its author is living "after the fall,"
after his loss of innocence and crushing emotional defeat.

Miller builds on Roslyn's melancholy moods and quaint speech to
characterize Maggie. Both women long for their lost mothers; both
feel that they're a joke and that people laugh at them. Roslyn uses
the uncolloquial "Whereas" to describe the small birds of the desert
and people's indifference to whether her dancing is real or fake;
Maggie uses this characteristic and slightly pretentious word five times
in the play. Like Gay with Roslyn, Quentin tells Maggie that "I almost
feel honored to have known you!" and that "Your eyes make me
shiver."
⁶

Marilyn was alive when Miller began
After the Fall
and had died
by the time he finished it. Her death and apotheosis, as well as Barbara
Loden's blond wig and imitation of Marilyn's mannerisms, emphasized
the play's
autobiographical source and the many intriguing
parallels between Marilyn and Maggie. In
The Seven Year Itch
the girl,
played by Marilyn, keeps her panties in the refrigerator to cool off
during the hot summer. In
After the Fall
one of her fans keeps Maggie's
"hot" records in the fridge to prevent them from melting. The
wounding entry in Miller's private diary, which Marilyn read in
England and Maggie discovers in the play, is identical: "The only one
I will ever love is my daughter." Miller said that Maggie, like Marilyn,
was "a slave to the idea of being victimized" and "had an inexorable
lust for destruction."
⁷

Quentin's first two scenes with Maggie portray Marilyn's troubled
background and appealing qualities. Maggie has never known her
father, who abandoned her as an infant and refused to see or even
talk to her when she later tracked him down. Her grandmother once
tried to smother her with a pillow. She didn't finish high school, but
is interested in books and wants to improve herself.
Miller captures
Marilyn's naïve and childish directness when – in an amusing and
charming non sequitur – Maggie says that she'd like to have a dog
"if I had a way to keep it, but I don't even have a refrigerator."

Miller had seen how Marilyn's physical beauty and palpitating sexuality
made men treat her like a cheap tart and constantly proposition
her. In her Marx Brothers' movie,
Love Happy
, Marilyn tells Groucho:
"Men keep following me all the time!" and he knowingly replies,
"Really? I can't understand why." After Maggie is propositioned in
After the Fall
, Quentin asks: "That happen to you very often?" and
she admits, "Pretty often." By contrast Quentin, like Miller, is shy and
"polite." He encourages and sympathizes with her instead of trying
to seduce her.

Like Marilyn, who'd posed for the notorious nude calendar, Maggie's
name floats "in the stench of locker rooms and parlor-car cigar smoke!"
She has a similar history of promiscuity and has generously offered
herself to callous men who gave her nothing in return. Maggie becomes
the pupil of the famous coach Ludwig Reiner (based on Lee Strasberg),
and is engaged to Quentin when he appears as a defense lawyer before
HUAC (as Marilyn was engaged to Miller when he was subpoenaed).
Under Quentin's influence, Maggie adopts left-wing political views
and absurdly tells him that the much reviled communists are "for the
poor people. Isn't that what you believe?"
⁸
Maggie's singing at the
London Palladium recalls Marilyn's acting with Laurence Olivier in
The Prince and the Showgirl
and singing at Kennedy's birthday party.
Maggie does not know how to take care of herself and has no close
friends. She's been exploited by agents and lawyers, and has signed
several disadvantageous contracts. In a useful summary, a critic wrote
that both Marilyn and Maggie "are the illegitimate daughters of
disturbed mothers; both are vain, exhibitionistic, neurotic, and infantile,
yet idolized and desired by millions; both quit high school, have
an affair with a senior professional associate, and are forbidden by his
family to visit him on his deathbed; both suffer from addiction to
alcohol and tranquilizers, are in psychoanalysis, and work on their
chosen craft with a fabled teacher; both end as suicides."

Despite all this (and the blond wig to top it off ) the blindly self-absorbed
Miller maintained that "he failed to notice in time that the
actress who plays the role identified by many playgoers with Marilyn
Monroe could so obviously be identified." Shortly before the play
opened, Miller nervously told
Robert Whitehead, "It just hit me. I'm
awfully worried that this is going to seem like a play about Marilyn."
The stunned producer inevitably replied, "Of course they're going to
think it's a play about Marilyn. How could they not?" Though the
connection between Marilyn and Maggie was obvious, Miller looked
foolish when he disingenuously insisted in
Life
magazine that Maggie
"is not in fact Marilyn Monroe."
⁹

In his analysis of Maggie's character, Kazan, noting her change of
attitude toward Quentin, wrote that she "feels that Quentin is the
first person, the first and only, who has ever aroused in her a sense
of worth. And a sense of her potential as a human" being. She is "an
orphan looking for support. She . . . [wanted] to join a family, to
belong . . . and hoped for a miracle from Quentin (saviour). Then no
miracle happened. Quentin didn't live up to
what she thought he was
."
In his autobiography, Kazan added that in the play Miller was unusually
honest and self-critical:"he put into the mouth of Maggie precisely
what Marilyn had thought of him, particularly her scorn for him at
the end of their marriage. This character is true and has an interesting
dramatic development from adoration to contempt. Art is rough
on himself, giving us all that Marilyn said in her disappointment and
resentment."
¹⁰

The marriage begins to fall apart halfway through Act Two as
Maggie, unstable and insecure, turns on Quentin. She reads his criticism
of her character in his private diary and, revolted by his moral
superiority, begins to hate him. She becomes jealous of other women
and quarrels with her mother-in-law. Though deeply in debt, she's
wildly extravagant, and fakes sickness when she needs money but
doesn't feel like working. She constantly attacks him, claiming he's
emotionally cold and sexually unresponsive; that he doesn't defend
her interests and cares only about cash. Though he devotes half his
time to her, instead of concentrating on his own work, she blames
him for all her betrayals and broken hopes. She forces him to fire an
innocent musician. When he protests that "I've fired three others in
three other bands," she humiliates him by replying: "Well, so what?
You're my husband. You're supposed to do that. Aren't you?" Brutal
with her colleagues and employees, she's come a long way from sympathizing
with poor people and underdogs.

Maggie begins to add pills to her heavy drinking, and Quentin
saves her twice from suicide. She's unable to face the consequences
of her actions and demands much more than he's able to give. She
wants to die and to destroy him as well. In a dramatic reversal of his
earlier love for her, Quentin realizes that he can no longer help her
and must try to protect himself. The whole play leads up to this
moment of severance, the split that leads to the Fall. In his crucial
speech Quentin, finally pushed to the limit of his endurance, urges
her to stop acting like a victim and accept responsibility for her faults:
"if you could only say, 'I have been cruel. . . . I have been kicked
around, but I have been just as inexcusably vicious to others, called
my husband idiot in public, I have been utterly selfish despite my
generosity, I have been hurt by a long line of men but I have
cooperated with my persecutors.'"

After the Fall
, Miller's most innovative and underrated work, dramatizes
Marilyn's radical change from trusting to suspicious, from adored
to contemptible, from saint to succubus. Her transformation is signaled
by a cutting-blade metaphor. At first, Quentin protectively tells Maggie,
"they're carving you." Later on, she assumes the dominant role and
tells him, "you don't see the knives people hide."
¹¹
She begins as a
victim, he as a protector; in time she becomes a monster who victimizes
him. Finally, unwilling to face her failures and overwhelmed by
her demons, Maggie kills herself. In this cathartic play, Miller tried
to portray Marilyn, soon after her death and for the first time, with
all her contortions of mind and complexity of suffering. He also
wanted to justify himself: to show how deeply he had loved her and
how cruelly she had treated him. Miller also reaches beyond the
merely personal dimensions of the drama to illuminate a recurring
pattern in our sexualized entertainment. Actors and singers who
achieve great fame remain friendless, lonely, compelled to seek oblivion
in drugs and early death. Those whom the pop-culture gods love, die
young.

The drama critics resented Miller's astonishing success and glamorous
marriage, his years of silence and exalted reputation, his uncharacteristic
boldness and lack of restraint. Most critics censured the play as a vulgar,
hypocritical and megalomaniacal attack on the martyred actress. His old
adversary
Robert Brustein, writing in the
New Republic
, believed Miller
had exploited and sensationalized Marilyn, and then ungallantly blamed
her for their disastrous marriage. Brustein dismissed the play as "a three
and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing
explicitness." Maggie begins "as a giddy, simpleminded, generous
creature who only wants to love" and develops into "a raging, screaming,
suicidal shrew. . . . He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an
act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs." Brustein felt, As Bertrand
Russell remarked of D.H. Lawrence's intimate revelations in
Look! We
Have Come Through!
, "They may have come through, but I don't see
why I should look."

Richard Gilman, another influential critic, agreed that Miller
engaged in "self-justification which at any time is repellent but which
becomes monstrous in the absence of any intelligence, craft or art."
The English playwright Noël Coward, equally severe in his private
diary, criticized Miller's personal, intellectual and artistic qualities more
than his exploitation of Marilyn:

The play is a three-and-a-half-hour wail about how cruel life
has been to Arthur Miller. What it does
not
mention is that the
cruellest blow life has dealt him is that he hasn't a grain of
humour. He is capable of writing one or two fairly effective
'theatre' scenes. His philosophy is adolescent and sodden with
self-pity. His taste is non-existent. The Marilyn Monroe part of
the play is really vulgar beyond belief. Out of all this pretentious,
turgid verbosity emerges the character of a silly, dull man
with a mediocre mind.

But Coward (who was himself condemned for satirizing friends in
his plays) was mistaken when he claimed, "It has, needless to say,
been hailed as a masterpiece and treated with the greatest possible
reverence."
¹²

Miller made matters worse by trying to defend
After the Fall
, and
sabotaged himself with his pitiful lamentations and portentous rhetoric.

Instead of denying the obvious autobiographical elements, he
should have admitted that he began with a personal impulse and
transformed it into art. When he said "I honestly feel that I have
nothing to complain about," his interlocutor cheekily reminded him,
"But you're always complaining." Thinking of O'Neill, Odets and
Tennessee Williams, as well as himself, Miller maintained, "The story
of American playwrights is . . . celebratory embraces soon followed
by rejection or contempt." He tended to blame the critics and whine
about the condemnation of his play instead of trying to explain his
method and ideas. He told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that
he'd been deeply wounded:"I did not expect such a narrow-minded
reaction; so cruelly and miserably mean. I did not expect such incredible
and degrading short-sightedness."
¹³
In his
Paris Review
interview he attacked, without vanquishing, his unnamed enemies:
"The ironical thing to me was that I heard cries of indignation from
various people who had in the lifetime of Marilyn Monroe either
exploited her unmercifully . . . or mocked her viciously, or refused
to take any of her pretensions seriously." He didn't seem to realize
that pretensions could not be taken seriously. But Miller triumphed
over his critics by continuing to write serious plays until he was
eighty-nine and by leaving an estate worth nearly twenty million
dollars.
¹⁴

The critical condemnation of the play permanently damaged Miller's
reputation in America, and toward the end of his career prevented
his new work from being produced on Broadway. In
After the Fall
Miller may have been narcissistic, self-justifying and provocative, but
he made an effective drama out of this fascinating material. He explored
his love for Marilyn, their marriage and the reasons for his failure
with self-lacerating honesty.