Timebends (69 page)

I now recalled my six months on the WPA Theatre Project after graduating from Michigan; there had been some forty or fifty playwrights who, in 1939, were drawing $22.77 a week to turn out plays, most of which I read and found execrable, totally incompetent—and indeed, not one of these people was heard from again once the project closed down as the war drew closer. Shrouding my secret dissociation from their untalented ranks, I had posed as a fellow victim of Broadway commercialism's contempt for real art, all the while believing that those with some modicum of talent were simply
too lazy to press it to its limits and preferred to go on blaming the system for the sloppy raggedness of their scenes. The truth was that I had always lived in the belief that a good man could still make it, capitalism or no capitalism.

But the subpoena in my pocket was too blunt an instrument to allow delicate nuances: in defense of honor I must confound the Committee, a stand that would inevitably force me not only to seem pro-Soviet when I had long since lost the last shred of faith in the Soviet system but also—more privately and painfully—to pose as one content with submergence in the community of the ineffectual and the artistically failed, the sentimental drones of the literary left from whose ranks I had forever been separating myself. There was no doubt in my mind, however, that I would never give the Committee the names of people, all of them writers, whom I had known to be Communists, and this had nothing to do with anything but myself; I might have every rational reason to conform to the fashion of the time except for a single overriding consideration: I simply could not believe that anything I knew or any individual I could name was in the remotest sense a danger to democracy in America. My real view of American Communists was of a sect that might as well be praying somewhere in the Himalayas for all the relevance they had to any motion in the American world. But I could not think they had particularly harmed me personally, and I had no need for either revenge or even some impassioned break when they were simply inconsequential, fellow loiterers on the platform waiting for the Redemption train to come through.

But how to make any of this comprehensible, especially to a booming and increasingly self-satisfied country, was beyond me. Indeed, I was sure that the failure of
A Memory of Two Mondays
and
A View from the Bridge
was in some part due to their images of privation and even desperation; as usual, America was denying its pain, and remembering was out. My inarticulateness would be repeated down the road when the people of the Vietnam War sixties found it impossible to pass on their cataclysmic visions to an indifferent new generation. MacLeish was right: America was promises—and it was not interested in recalling those that had failed.

On top of everything, the news about the coming marriage was out; clearly, Wheeler would hardly have come all the way to Nevada except to make sure that the imminent publicity would include the Committee, which badly needed it now in its threatening ebb time.

In certain situations one can get scared enough to grow calm. Since I was damned already, I felt worse for Marilyn than for myself. Besides, it was all unreal, something unserious about it kept panic away; Carl Royce in his beautiful dove gray cowboy outfit sat beside me now. He must be back on his Texas land by this time, but his simple manly skepticism, his blessed American anarchy of heart, was flying with me. From somewhere I had inherited a reliable tendency to slow down in the face of menace, maybe from our two thousand years of tenting on the lip of the abyss, and I lay back and let the earth's inertia take me. I was an American, after all, a citizen of the unexpected isle, the roller-coaster society. Who knew?—maybe something good was on its way. Or should I have confronted reality by fleeing to Texas?

To paraphrase Winston Churchill's characterization of the Germans, the press with Marilyn Monroe was either at her feet or at her throat. Papers like the New York
Daily News,
then in its far-right incarnation, were bound to resent my entry on the scene, but even apart from that ungrateful lapse, her breaking up what they had decided was the perfect American marriage, with Joe DiMaggio, had simply been unforgivable. Thus, on her return from making
Bus Stop,
they thought it vital that not only her persona be destroyed but her beauty defaced, the more so now that her dream of acting with Olivier was about to come true. Instead of joining in limbo the innumerable overreaching starlets with pretensions to art, she would be leaving for England shortly after our wedding to shoot
The Prince and the Showgirl.
Something had to be done about this.

We were temporarily living in a Sutton Place apartment house at whose entrance a crowd of photographers had begun to appear as early as eight o'clock each morning. A tribute to her amazing popularity, I first thought. But even after the two of us finally held an impromptu press conference on the sidewalk in hopes of getting them to leave, the documentarians of the
News
and
Post
(then in its liberal phase) returned each day at the crack of dawn. Why? we wondered. The answer came one morning when Marilyn, spotting them from within the lobby, backtracked and went down into the basement in an attempt to escape through the service entrance. She had no makeup on and was dressed in a sloppy oversized sweater, with a bandanna wrapped over her hair and knotted under her chin as though she had a toothache, a getup she often
used in order to make it across town to her analyst without attracting notice.

The working press came tearing down the alley, cornered her amid the trash cans, and got the shot they were fixing to get for days, the
News
giving it all of page one. And there she was, this so-called beauty, America's sweetheart, snarling, puffy-eyed, brandishing a hand at the reader like some crazy bag woman cursing out an innocent passerby, surrounded by garbage. The same newspapers, quite naturally, gave over practically entire editions to their editors' unbearable expressions of grief upon her death hardly six years later.

Once again Twentieth Century Fox mysteriously reached into my life; Spyros Skouras paid us a surprise visit the evening before I left for Washington, in a try at getting me to cooperate with the Committee. He had called from Hollywood to ask Marilyn if he could stop by as soon as he got to New York. I knew what this meant, of course, since the president of Twentieth Century Fox was not in the habit of making such flying visits, not to see Marilyn, at any rate, when the studio was still at odds with her. He would be trying to get me to avoid a possible jail term for contempt of Congress. Not that I mattered to him, but if the rumors that we were going to marry were true, the patriotic organizations might well decide to picket her films. Such were the times. If there was any surprise in his phoning, it was that he had not done so earlier. He was reputed to have worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.

When she returned to me from the phone, I must have looked disconcerted at her announcement that it was Skouras, for she quickly asked me not to refuse to see him. And this was curious.

By turns she resented him, hated him, and spoke of him warmly as a friend of last resort at the studio. Although she was furious at his denying her the ordinary perquisites of a great star, which she unquestionably was by this time—the best dressing room, her choice of cameraman and director, and the respect due her as by far the public's favorite performer—she could still be moved by his repeated reassurances, often accompanied by actual tears, that she was closer to him than even his own adored daughter. At the same time she was sure it was his obduracy that denied her recognition as the number one Fox draw.

The company insisted on binding her to her old contract, which paid her a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture, a fraction of her market value even at the time. This was a figure negotiated before her amazing cult had formed and the studio's profits from her pictures had commenced soaring. But despite everything, her resentment lost its steam when Skouras took her by the arm and said, “You are my daughter.” I was encouraged when she felt warmly toward him; we were to be married soon, and I found myself welcoming any of her feelings that were at all positive and unworried. In any case, it would be up to me how to respond to Skouras, and about that I had no uncertainty, although his coming increased my uneasiness that my public condemnation might harm her career.

Spyros Skouras, I estimated then, might be an eel but was not really a bad fellow because his deviousness was obvious enough to be almost reassuring. One never had the slightest doubt where he stood—right next to Power. If he indulged himself in passionate self-promoting speeches about honor, compassion, and truth, it was much in the Mediterranean or more specifically the Achillean tradition of rhetorical excess accompanying all of life's grand shifts, such as weddings and births—especially of boy babies—as well as the more stunning betrayals that Power periodically necessitates. I had met Skouras a few times before, but only once when I could watch him in full rhetorical flight, and I never forgot it.

One afternoon about five years earlier, I had happened to meet Kazan a few yards from the Fox building on Forty-sixth Street, where he had an appointment with Skouras. He invited me to join him, and having nothing better to do, I agreed. Kazan was still in the early stage of his movie directing career and was excited about the work; his fellow Greek Skouras was his friend, boss, and godfather.

Skouras's office was about the size of a squash court, with the entire wall at one end covered by a map of the world as a backdrop for the coffin-length executive desk in front of it. On the map, Latin America was some ten feet long and the other continents proportionately immense, all marked with many large red stars where Fox offices were located. Alone on the desk top of beige marble a low baroque statuette supported a golden pen and pencil.

On a hassock at the foot of this desk sat George Jessel, then in his fifties, who greeted Kazan and me with both his hands wrapped passionately around each of ours in turn. At a wave of Skouras's hand we sat on beige sofas from whose deep, downy cushions it was nearly impossible to rise again.

For no reason I could imagine, Skouras, from a standing start behind his desk, launched—in a hoarse, shouting voice that seemed to address several thousand people in his mind—into a tirade against Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was already six years dead. Slapping the stone desk top with the palm of his hand for emphasis, occasionally throwing his head back defiantly or shaking his finger at Kazan, apparently in reprimand, he portrayed the late president as a man without honor, decency, or courage.

“He was terrible!” Jessel suddenly piped up from his hassock in front of the desk.

“He was not terrible, he was goddam sonabitch!”

“That bastard,” Jessel concurred, shaking his head angrily with a glance over at Kazan and me as though something had to be done immediately about this vile person. “I could tell you things, Spyros, that you . . .”

“You don't know nóthin'! I know!”

“I know you know, Spyros, but I was in Des Moines once when he . . .”

“Don't tell me Des Moines!” Skouras commanded in outrage. “This man sold out million pipple to Stalin! He was agent of Stalin! He was absolutely agent!” And he slammed his desk.

“He was worse than an agent!” Jessel yelled, thrilling himself visibly.

Now, with not the slightest warning or tonal change or shift of emphasis, Skouras declared, his head thrown back pridefully, “Without Franklin Roosevelt the United States would have been revolution in spring of 1935. He saved America!”

“Goddamned right!” Jessel shouted, likewise without so much as an eyeblink at this abrupt reversal. “Chrissake,” he amplified in pity-filled tones, “people were starving, dying in the streets . . .”

Skouras now soared into praise of Roosevelt with encomia worthy of a graveside while tears of mourning bubbled up along the lower lids of Jessel's eyes, and shaking his head, he added his loving recollections of the dead president's fineness of character, his humor and generosity. It took me some weeks to realize that Skouras relished this performance as his way of informing Kazan, and perhaps me as well, that his power was so immense that he could blatantly contradict himself in front of us without losing one ounce of his domination. He was a bull walrus on the beach, just howling his joy of life to the sun.

When I opened our apartment door to let Skouras in, I saw that he was tired, a weary old man in a dinner jacket. He may also have had a drop too much. His handshake was limp, and he let his gaze
slide across my face without his usual electric greeting, as though he did not expect much of the evening. A bald man with a deep chest and a bull neck, he stood tilted slightly to the rear of his center of gravity, back straight and chin tucked in like a boxer's. He could smile warmly while his eyes darted about for signs of the enemy. Marilyn immediately came into the foyer, and they embraced, almost tearfully on his part, probably because of all the favors he had had to deny her. “Won'erful, won'erful,” he kept repeating with eyes closed, his nose in her hair.

She was moved, surprisingly so. But I did not know then how aged men often evoked in her so intense an awareness of her own power over them that it turned to pity within her and sometimes even love. Her nearness could make such men actually tremble, and in this was more security for her than in a vault full of money or a theatre echoing with applause. Holding her hand to his lips, Skouras took her to the couch and sat beside her, but she immediately sprang up and insisted on getting him a cognac, which he accepted despite his asthmatic protests and sipped. Beside him on the couch again with her knees drawn up, she faced him with her upper lip ever so slightly flicking like the lip of a bridled horse, a prideful tic of self-possession. He could not have helped being struck by her beauty in a beige satin blouse with high Byronic collar and a tight white skirt and sparkling white patent leather spike heels. It had been months since he had seen her, time enough to have forgotten the impact of the force wave that her beauty seemed to displace.