Timebends (65 page)

To me now she bore the news of the grungy, Byzantine demiworld of southern California, from whose sunny and rotting moonscape she had fled. During our rehearsals of
A View from the Bridge
—held like
Salesman
's in the dust-filled and collapsing New Amsterdam roof theatre on Forty-second Street—I passed a life-size cutout of her in the lobby everyday, the famous laughing shot from
The Seven Year Itch,
in a white dress with her skirt blowing up over a subway grate, whereupon I would sit for six hours as Van Heflin-Eddie Carbone struggled with a compulsion he could not nail and destroy. How to get up on the stage and describe to Van the sensation of being swept away, of inviting the will's oblivion and dreading it? For that was what the production lacked, and perhaps the play too at that stage of its writing. How could one walk toward the very thing one was fleeing from?

I could not understand how she had come to symbolize a kind of authenticity; perhaps it was simply that when the sight of her made men disloyal and women angry with envy, the ordinary compromises of living seemed to trumpet their fraudulence and her very body was a white beam of truth. She knew she could roll
into a party like a grenade and wreck complacent couples with a smile, and she enjoyed this power, but it also brought back the old sinister news that nothing whatsoever could last. And this very power of hers would eat at her one day, but not yet, not now.

It was impossible to guess what she wanted for herself when she herself had no idea beyond the peaceful completion of each day. When she appeared the future vanished; she seemed without expectations, and this was like freedom. At the same time the mystery put its own burden on us, the burden of the unknown.

One evening as we sat staring down at the city, she said, apropos of nothing in particular, that when she was fourteen or fifteen her elderly “aunt” Ana, a Christian Scientist who was the one intelligent and kind woman she had known, took ill and died; loving her, Ana had been for a while an impromptu guardian, and Marilyn had come to rely on her. She had not been living with Ana for some time, but the shock of her death was terrible. “I went and lay down in her bed the day after she died … just lay there for a couple of hours on her pillow. Then I went to the cemetery and these men were digging a grave and they had a ladder into it, and I asked if I could get down there and they said sure, and I went down and lay on the ground and looked up at the sky from there. It's quite a view, and the ground is cold under your back. The men started to try to fool around, but I climbed out before they could catch me. But they were nice and kidded me. And then I went away.”

Oddly enough, she seemed not to know fear as she went about rearranging her life; it was when she tried to assert herself and act that the terrors she was born to had to be downed. Strasberg had suggested she study the part of Anna in O'Neill's
Anna Christie,
and one evening she tried a few pages out on me. Here was the first inkling of her inner life; she could hardly read audibly at first, it was more like praying than acting. “I can't believe I'm doing this,” she suddenly said, laughing. Her past would not leave her even for this private affirmation of her value, and that past was murderous. Something like guilt seemed to suppress her voice.

It was not merely her mother's malign influence—the woman had always been paranoid, an institutionalized schizophrenic who had tried to smother her in her crib as an infant; it was also the condemnation of religion that she had had to defend herself against. And the stain kept reappearing like a curse.

She was only five or six years old when the fundamentalist church to which her foster family belonged held a vast open-air service in which hundreds of children, all dressed alike, the girls
in white dresses and the boys in blue trousers and white shirts, stood ranged against the sides of a tremendous natural amphitheatre somewhere in the mountains in the Los Angeles area. Each girl had a cape, red on one side and white on the other, and at the start they wore the red side out. On signal during a revivalist hymn they were all to turn their capes inside out, from sinful red to the pure white of the saved. Magically the mountainside turned white on the proper verse of the hymn, all except one red dot in the middle of the expanse. She would laugh with affection for the little girl, herself, caught there in the wrong. “I just clean forgot. It was all so interesting, everybody turning their capes inside out, and I was so glad that they all remembered to do it on cue that I just clean forgot to do mine!” And she bent over laughing, as though it had been yesterday rather than twenty-five years before. But she was beaten for her failure anyway, condemned by Jesus himself, she was told, and it was only one instance of God's irremediable dislike. “Jesus is supposed to be so forgiving, but they never mentioned that; he was basically out to smack you in the head if you did something wrong.” Of course she could laugh about it, but something in the back of her eyes was not laughing even now.

Everything speeded up. In Boston the play seemed more moving than I had expected, but I still doubted we had found its voice. I reread the first act of
Hamlet
in my hotel room, and in the business of his seeming insanity I suddenly saw not madness but a silliness, the way one gets when a dilemma is at once obvious and absolutely insoluble; he must avenge his father, but at the same time he feels joy at the thought of taking his place. What can you do but laugh? He is sure everyone around him is lying even as he feels himself false too. He has no way of cleanly and loosely expressing affection without fear of betraying—what, he no longer even remembers. All he knows is that he is more truthful than anybody else, but once alone he knows his own duplicity. More and more estranged from my family, I nodded at his self-condemnation and resentment, his grinding hatred for his guilt, his repeated failure to step outside it.

Marty Ritt took me to the racetrack several afternoons and explained the dope sheets, which I couldn't begin to understand, and we won a few dollars. His mother had been a professional gambler. He could always come away at least a little ahead. I had never realized how light, almost toylike, racehorses are.

He was modest about directing, somewhat like Kazan in this,
totally the opposite of Jed and his bragging. Marty, I thought, saw the director as an essential force but basically an assistant to God rather than the Boss himself. The first job, he said, was to discover what the script was saying, not what it reminded you of. He had few cultural pretensions—too few, in fact, since he read considerably—and he did his work with his shoulders as much as his head; he feared making actors think too much at the expense of instinctively sniffing out the role and situation. Again, this was a lot like Kazan's approach. I thought it might have been their acting background that made them so earthy.

Thirty years later, Dustin Hoffman would say it—“You always win by the skin of your teeth”—but in that first production of
View
we were unable to make the ultimate demand on ourselves and tended to let “pretty good” stand. In 1965 Ulu Grosbard's off-Broadway production would magically catch this play's spirit, helped by a combination of good judgment in the casting and amazing luck. Two unknown young actors, Robert Duvall and Jon Voight, played Eddie and Rodolpho. I could not imagine how a type right off the Brooklyn piers like Duvall could give such a profound performance. Backstage afterwards, he introduced me to his parents, his father an admiral standing there in his stiff white uniform, and Duvall himself speaking perfectly cultivated English. There was also an adenoidal young assistant stage manager popping in and out whom Grosbard, incredibly, told me I should keep in mind to play Willy Loman in a few years. My estimate of Grosbard all but collapsed as, observing Dustin Hoffman's awkwardness and his big nose that never seemed to get unstuffed, I wondered how the poor fellow imagined himself a candidate for any kind of acting career. Grosbard, however, was looking not at Hoffman but at an actor, at a spirit, and this kind of naked skin-on-skin contact with essentials was what his production had in every role.

After the play had been running a while the actors noticed a man who kept showing up night after night in one of the front rows a few feet from the stage. He was always deeply moved and among the last of the audience to leave. One night an actor came down and talked to him. “I knew that family,” he said, wiping his eyes. “They lived in the Bronx. The whole story is true, except the end was changed.” How had it ended in real life? “The girl came in when Eddie was having his nap and stabbed him in the heart.” Of course, I knew nothing of this Bronx family, but what an ending!

Marilyn came up to Boston for the day. No one recognized her in her heavy cable-knit sweater, a deep white knitted hat that
came down over her forehead, a black-and-white-checked woolen skirt, and moccasins. At twenty-nine, she could have been a high school girl. Her sunglasses attracted a few glances on the street since the weather was so dark and overcast. We took a long walk, saw a new movie,
Marty,
in a neighborhood theatre, and ate in a diner where the waitress, mysteriously drawn to her, kept talking at her, instinctively smelling out something unique about her even in those unexceptional clothes.

A podiatrists' association, she said, wanted to take casts of her feet because they were so perfectly formed, and a dental school wanted one of her mouth and teeth, which were also flawless. Not without fear we sat looking at each other waiting for the future to come closer.

“I keep trying,” I said, “to teach myself how to lose you, but I can't learn yet.”

Her face filled with an unspoken anxiety. “Why must you lose me?” And she removed her glasses with a compassionate smile.

The waitress, a middle-aged woman with bleached hair, happened to pass our table just then and overheard Marilyn. Her mouth dropped open in recognition, and she turned fully to me with a mixture of amazement and resentment, perhaps even outrage, that I would be so stupid or cruel as to cause her idol the slightest unhappiness. In that second her proprietary sheltering of Marilyn, whom she knew only as an image, sprang forth. In a moment she was back with a piece of paper to be autographed.

As we walked back to the hotel, Marilyn sensed an amorphous weight on me. “What is it?”

“It's as though you belong to her.” I left out the rest of it.

“It doesn't mean anything.”

But on that empty sidewalk we were no longer alone.

Pyramid Lake, Nevada, was a piece of the moon in 1956, long before the marina, the hotdog stands, and the roar of outboards blasted away its uninhabited, enigmatic enchantment. It was a gray, salty lake miles long, surrounded by a Paiute Indian reservation, a forbidding but beautiful place occasionally favored by movie companies shooting scenes of weird monsters in outer space. I had come here to live out the six-week residency required for the otherwise easy Nevada divorce, the New York State law still requiring a finding of adultery. Saul Bellow, with whom I shared an editor, Pascal Covici of Viking Press, was in Nevada for the same reason, and Covici had asked his help in finding me a place to stay. Bellow had taken one of the two cottages facing the lake. I took the other. He was then working on his novel
Henderson the Rain King.
I was trying to make some personal contact with the terrain where I had landed after exploding my life.

Fittingly, this being Nevada, home of the rootless, the wanderers, and the misfits, the only phone between our cottages and Reno, some forty miles away, was in a lone booth standing beside the highway, a road traveled by perhaps three vehicles a day and none at night. Nearby were the empty cottages of an abandoned motel for people waiting out their divorces. Only its owners lived there now, a troubled couple, the man a fairly scrupulous horse breeder whose half-dozen thoroughbreds grazed untied along the lake-shore. He, his wife, or their hired man would drive over to summon one or the other of us to the phone booth for one of our rare calls from what had come to seem an increasingly remote United States.
Surrounding us was a range of low, iron-stained mountains perpetually changing their magenta colors through the unbroken silence of the days. Saul would sometimes spend half an hour up behind a hill a half-mile from the cottages emptying his lungs roaring at the stillness, an exercise in self-contact, I supposed, and the day's biggest event. He had already accumulated a library here large enough for a small college.

A mile across the lake an island—full of rattlers, we were told—could be seen as though it were a hundred yards away, so clear was the air. The Indians kept removing the federal warning signs from an area of quicksand at the shoreline, hoping to do in any Reno fishermen who might venture out too far in their hip boots, but visitors were rare and only a few were said to have been sucked under, their bodies sinking for miles into the gorge that the lake had filled, to rise periodically over months or years and sink again, borne by a clockwise current. Strange broad-mouthed fish lived in the lake, whiskery and forbidding, of an unevolved kind found only here, it was said, and in a lake in India. I had a vision of an Indian eagle flying the ocean and dropping one of its unique eggs here. Once a week we would drive to Reno in Saul's Chevrolet to buy groceries and get our laundry done. No car ever passed us during the forty-mile trip, and we overtook none. It was a fine place to think, if you dared, plenty of space in which to hope and privacy to despair. I had moved into the unknown, physically as well as spiritually, and the color of the unknown is darkness until it opens into the light.

But there were only glimmers so far. Divorce, I suppose, is to some degree an optimistic reaching for authenticity, a rebellion against waste. But we are mostly what we were, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve. I had to wonder sometimes if I had managed to evade rather than to declare the reality of myself. Marilyn was shooting
Bus Stop,
directed by Joshua Logan, and in her scrawled notes to me she sounded harried too. The play had been a great hit, and the role seemed made for her. Despite her usual trepidation, she had looked forward to working with Logan, the respected director of a great many Broadway hits, among them
South Pacific
and
Mister Roberts.
That nothing I could say seemed to cheer her up was bewildering, although the promise of our coming new life, she said, made her look ahead with a kind of hope for herself that she had never felt before.