Timebends (67 page)

Once a week I would fly into Los Angeles, a technical illegality since my period of residence in Nevada had to be unbroken, but the risk seemed negligible when the whole business was a fantasy
of formality anyway, patently devised to draw divorce-hungry visitors to the state and fees to the lawyers.

Marilyn's tension concerning
Bus Stop
was relentless, but she seemed to be growing less hostile to Logan, slightly more willing to see the possibility of being good in the film. Selfishly, I could not imagine her being anything but fantastic on film and thought her worries exaggerated. Her coach, Lee Strasberg's wife, Paula, had the next room in the Chateau Marmont and was acting as Lee's proxy, with daily phone calls to him in New York on Marilyn's problems.

I tended to find Paula comical, if vaguely threatening around the edges, a Molièrian character who apparently believed that whether an actor had sat in on one or two of Lee's classes out of curiosity or had committed himself over a training period of years, he somehow belonged to the Strasbergs as a Cambridge man belongs forever to his college. “Our people are now all over the world,” she told me one day, mentioning actors filming in various countries, some of whom I happened to know had spent the briefest of moments at the Studio. She once even referred to the famous film dress designer Jean Louis as “one of our best designers,” suggesting the possibility that he had learned the needle trade from Lee.

On one of my visits she grabbed me by the arm and said I had to sit down right now and listen to a tape of Lee's lecture on Eleonora Duse, which he had recently given on the anniversary of the legendary Italian actress's birth or death. Paula stood by, hands clasped together in divalike formality, chin raised, and a far-off look in her eye as Lee's voice came through the tape machine.

“Now, most people think that we revere Duse because she was a great actress,” he began suspensefully. “But that is not why we revere her.” A lengthy pause. Why, I began to wonder,
do
we revere Duse? “It is not that at all,” he continued. “There are many great actresses, living and dead, American and foreign. Many who created spectacular theatrical images and stage life over the generations. Some are English, some Swedish, some German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, French, men and women of every country and in all generations.” My mind began to wander as I waited for him to say why we revere Duse. But the parenthesis continued, expanded, ran over in all directions, and the question itself began to fade into the background until I was able recall Duse as the principal subject only with the most muscular effort. The lecture went on for at least twenty minutes.

Marilyn sat there pathetically attentive, her reverent gaze
mixed with some mystification. How could I tell her that I was definitely wondering if her inspiring mentor did not harbor some disconcerting Willy Lomanism, a tendency to spitball, to improvise facts. But the dependency on him was far too profound for any such direct contradiction of his authority; if this crutch was kicked out now, she might fall. And who was I to make such a judgment when quite good actors of high intelligence had great faith in him? I could only sit there listening to the bubble he was inflating on tape and trying to keep from kidding Paula for holding her near salute while we were not told why we revere Duse. And since I was also being idealized at the time, uncomfortable as the unreality of it occasionally was, I said nothing, at least not yet. Anyway, I still imagined, just as Marilyn did, that I would not be involving myself with her career—unnecessary, we thought, what with Greene managing her business affairs while Lee helped to deepen her confidence as an actor. By now her relationship with Greene had been straightened out, their percentages in Marilyn Monroe Productions having been reversed to fifty-one for her and forty-nine for him, thus restoring her to control. Meanwhile, he would be generating new projects for the company in order to establish its separateness from her work, a necessity for the Internal Revenue Service if she was to begin, as she hoped, saving some of her income by paying corporate rather than individual taxes. For she had more doubts than belief that her popularity would last into the long future.

In the new company's first production Laurence Olivier was to direct and act with her in Terence Rattigan's
The Prince and the Showgirl,
a very light comedy based on his play
The Sleeping Prince.
Shooting was to begin in England shortly after we married in June. Happily, Binkie Beaumont, the most successful producer in the thriving if then mostly trivialized British theatre, had decided to do a new production of
A View from the Bridge
under Peter Brook's direction, to be rehearsed at the very same time. I was planning on expanding the one-act play to full length. My vision had been of each of us doing our own work side by side, drawing strength from one another, and it seemed to be coming true.

A packed New York press conference with Olivier standing beside her announced their collaboration, the most unlikely combination in movie history according to most commentators, he representing high art and she little more than near pornographic photogenia from the rear. Suddenly her gown's shoulder strap
broke, sending up excited gasps at the prospect of further revelations. But she blithely asked if anyone had a safety pin instead of demurely blushing and fleeing from the platform.
Time,
characteristically, had no doubt the whole thing had been prearranged. It was then that she was asked if it was true she wanted to do
The Brothers Karamazov,
and if so, which part, a brilliant provocation that brought down the house, quite as though she were planning to wear a beard and play one of the brothers. She replied that she wanted to play Grushenka, adding, “She's a girl,” and stopped there rather than openly suggest that a fair number of the reporters who were the loudest to laugh had probably been too busy going to journalism school to read the book. One of the geniuses in the room asked if she could spell “Grushenka,” and of course Marilyn got the message; even with Sir Laurence crossing the Atlantic to stand beside her at a press conference she could not be accorded the simple dignity of a performer announcing a new project. Of course sex and seriousness could not exist in the same woman, and this American illness was not about to end, or so it seemed. The fact was that it was she who had originated the idea of working with Olivier, but not at all because it would give her a new public persona; her present one was quite good enough. It was the very preposterousness of the pairing that struck her as amusing and even possibly enlightening, given the right script. And if it led to some additional decency toward her in the press, all the better.

As the end of my Nevada residence period approached, I began to be anxious about the publicity our marriage would break over our heads, and realized one morning how much I had underestimated it when a camera truck appeared on the lake road in front of my cottage and a crew got out with an interviewer prepared to fire off a dozen questions about our plans. It had not yet dawned on me that one can become public property in the most literal sense under such circumstances. My only excuse as I look back is that I had probably seen a half-dozen television programs in my life—I didn't even own a set, and in 1956 a lot of people could still say the same. It was a painful business, but for more than the obvious intrusion; I quickly realized that something in me was proud of identification with Marilyn—and aware, too, that our seeming so ill assorted was part of what made us such news.

But I was sure the media would tire of us and latch onto something new in a few weeks. Early on the forty-second day of my residency I packed the few things I had brought in a valise, put my typewriter in its case, said goodbye to Saul, and at ten o'clock
entered the Reno office of a lawyer, Edwin Hills, whom John Wharton had selected in far-off New York to shepherd my divorce through the courthouse routine. On the drive to Reno in the motel owner's pickup, I stared out at the bony hills that I was sure I would never see again and found a kind of remorse in myself for the lost silence I had come to depend on each morning when I woke, and their changing colors at dusk and dawn. Noise awaited me—was it all a mistake? I wiped out the thought, condemning my own vice of self-sufficiency.

The lawyer's large waiting room was reassuringly plain, without the usual pretensions. Its windows overlooked the Mapes Hotel across the street, its walls of low-grade imitation mahogany plywood buzzed in resonating complicity with the window air-conditioner. The inverted bottle on the water cooler was still full at this early hour. One man, a client, I assumed, sat on a shiny black plastic-covered couch staring into space and smoking. I had hardly set down my valise and typewriter when lawyer Hills hurried out of his inner office, asked me to wait for just a few minutes, and before I could get a proper look at his face, returned to his office and shut the door.

Over that door hung a steer's head bearing horns as thick as a flue pipe and spanning at least ten feet, the tips pointing downward toward my face. A couple of dozen plaques, diplomas, and citations covered one sector of wall Mr. Hills had been honored not only by the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Catholic War Veterans, but also by the National Rifle Association and an organization of pistol fanciers, the Grange, the Rotarians, the Knights of Columbus, the Order of Fire Fighters, and the Sons of the White Rose; he had a Cutting Horse Breeders Commendation as well as personal letters of gratitude for patriotic services from Nevada's Senator Pat McCarran (co-sponsor, with the present chairman of HUAC, of the McCarran-Walter Act to keep “subversives” out of the country), Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Representative Richard M. Nixon, who had all been impressed by Mr. Hills's fervid defense of American values at various times and locations. I had come to exactly the right place for a quiet morning of divorce. It gave me a certain perverse happiness that a couple of the organizations that had honored my new lawyer had picketed plays of mine from time to time. But a desiccated irony by now was bread and wine, the daily diet of the American hour.

Taking a chair a dozen feet away from the lone other client, I wondered if Hills's air of preoccupation was perhaps a way of showing his patriotic distaste at having to represent me. On the other hand, John Wharton must surely have chosen him because he was a reliable technician in this sort of action, and he was probably just overworked. After all, he was also making the other client wait, and this guy was not from my side of the political tracks but had the look of a rich cowboy.

In fact, now that I studied him, he had a remarkable resemblance to John Wayne, with that same densely aggressive pout. In a dove gray Western outfit, he looked to be at least six foot six, and his muscles were thick as a cobra under the fine, pressed cloth of shirt and trousers. His boots cost at least five hundred dollars the pair, I figured, and the gray Stetson resting on the cushion beside him seemed to look at me without approval. Surprisingly, when our eyes happened to meet, I imagined I saw an agreeable softening there, but I could not drop my guard, not in this castle of blind nationalism.

Hills hurried in again and gestured toward me with one finger raised. We converged at a window overlooking a Reno street as empty as a dream street, roasting in the ferocious ninety-degree sunshine. He was clearly in a state of tension as we came together, a man in his sixties with a few strands of hair across his rosy scalp from a part on the left, wearing thick rimless lenses, a blue pinstriped suit, and a slim, shiny tie of some silvery material that he might have worn on horseback in a patriotic parade. His eyes looked up at me with the opaque innocence of an angelfish passing a swimmer's face mask. Gripping my elbow tightly between thumb and forefinger, he asked so intimately that I could barely hear, “Has he found you?”

“Who?”

“He hasn't found you?” he asked with a surge of hope.

“Who do you mean?”

Light kept flashing across his dense lenses as he tightened his fingers on my elbow. “An investigator from the House Un-American Committee has been here looking for you with a subpoena.” He waited, motionless, watching me with slightly open mouth, floating beside me in the silent sea.

Anticlimax relaxed me, the arrival of fate at last, the raised axe finally falling.

“Is there anything to it?” he asked with touching naivete.

The dove gray cowboy had turned his head toward us. The question
had changed from getting divorced to getting lynched. “I can't imagine why they'd be after me now,” I said, but broke off before a tangle of history he would never understand; the Committee had been on the wane for some time, and if they had not bothered me in years past when I had been far more politically noticeable, it seemed senseless now when I had trouble keeping interested in politics at all. I suppose that historically we were in the narrow trough between the grandiose anti-Communist domestic crusade and the next ennobling cause, the war in Vietnam that awaited us some seven years on.

“He said he'd be back later this morning; he knows you were due here today.”

“Well, I guess there's nothing I can do about it.”

“Do you want to accept the subpoena?”

“What do you mean?” I realized with some small shock that Hills regarded this country as so much his own that he need not necessarily accept all directives from its hand.

“Well, there's a back door to this building. You can stay inside in my office, and I'll get the judge to come over here instead of you having to show up in the courthouse. ‘Cause I think this fellow is probably going to be waiting for you over there.”

This unexpected conspiracy moved a flood of gratitude through me, and in a flash I realized that the framed citations on his wall were in fact testimonials to his thoroughly American anarchism, for which, over the past few years, I had developed a lot of respect as our last stand against fascist decorum.