Timebends (72 page)

Staggering with weariness on our first English night, we slept like the stunned, and now I dreamed that I was hearing an angelic chorale, male voices singing in all the octaves and colorations, blending into a rounded hush of pure, unearthly sound. I seemed to float on it, immensely moved as one is when aware of dreaming superbly. But the gorgeous persistence slowly began to alarm me, and as my brain gradually surfaced and the sound did not cease to pour through the quiet air, I opened my eyes thinking I had gone mad, for even now that I was fully awake it surged through the room. Sitting up in darkness, terrified of lost sanity, I traced the swelling refrains to the vicinity of the heavily draped window, got out of bed, carefully parted the drapes, and over the railing of a small balcony saw spread out in ranks in the bright moonlight some hundred unsmiling boys and young men in blazers, standing at attention and singing reverentially up toward our window. I quickly woke Marilyn, and she, barely conscious, came and peeked out with me.

With no lights on behind us, we could not be seen from outside and stood listening with the cold night air numbing our flesh. The music and knightly lyrics sounded wet with schoolboy innocence.

“What do we do?” she asked.

Still cobwebbed in a half-real, half-dream state, my mind declined to operate at all; we might step out on the balcony and wave, but with no clothes on it could be awkward. Ought we get dressed? That seemed too much to ask. Besides, wasn't there something absurd in waving down from a balcony like some royal pair? Or was it ungenerous not to?

“Maybe you put on a robe and just wave down to them.”

“Me?”

“Well, they're not singing to me, darling.”

She sighed in her exhaustion, and I began to feel undefended now that reality was flowing in; a Scotland Yard plainclothes officer accompanying us from the airport had warned that there were all kinds of crazies in England and that she must not under any circumstances confront a crowd without security around her. A hundred maddened choirboys could be trouble.

“Maybe just stand pat,” I said, instantly realizing that I had never used this expression in my life before, and inevitably thinking of Groucho Marx replying, “I can't stand Pat, never could.” And so we stood there planless, she swaying in half-sleep, while a hundred devoted voices, rising to a pitch of divine glorification, continued to float up toward us through the cool damp of the English night.

Before we could decide anything, the final major chord trailed softly to a stop, and peeking out through the drapes, I saw the chorus in totally silent deference stepping carefully over hedge and fence, vanishing into the night like the Little People returning to the shade of their mushrooms, apparently satisfied that they had infiltrated Marilyn Monroe's dreams. But I had also feared something in them—as sweet and wholesome and worshipful as they were, they were also a crowd.

Once I dreamed of a gigantic chrome machine in a fairgrounds with a crowd around it waiting to be served hamburgers it was emitting at one end, and Marilyn was suddenly caught and drawn into the machine's gears, and I frantically ran around to the open end to rescue her and saw a hamburger emerging as the crowd scrambled for it, and one man pulled it free and ate, blood dripping from his lips. I was forever saving her from crowds, crowds she could handle as easily and joyfully as a minister moving among his congregation. Sometimes it was as though the crowd had given her birth; I never saw her unhappy in a crowd, even some that ripped pieces of her clothes off as souvenirs.

Olivier came to visit on our first morning, a courtesy call on a fine English day that seemed full of hope, with the sun pouring through the windows and a mildness in the air. He was clearly enchanted with Marilyn and eager to show her the Edwardian costumes designed for her by Edith Head, the best in the business then, and photos of the sets. But she was leaving everything to him and wanted most of all to rest thoroughly before shooting started in a week or so. She seemed preoccupied and more deeply tired than I had realized.

He asked what plays I was interested in seeing, offering to get tickets for us, and handed me the morning paper, which he had kept folded in his jacket pocket. There must have been sixty or seventy plays listed, an amazing profusion compared to the twenty or so normally open in New York, but running my eye down the page, I could not find any I'd ever heard of, or their authors either. Many of the titles sounded rather silly.

“What's good?” I asked.

“No, no, you pick, I don't want to influence you.”

“But I don't know anything about any of them,” I protested. He still declined to give advice. There was one title that purely as a title was striking. “How about this?
Look Back in Anger.”

His reaction was quick and surprisingly negative, even angry. “No, no, you don't want to bother with that, find something else.”

“Why? What's wrong with it?”

“Oh, it's just a travesty on England, a lot of bitter rattling on about conditions, although some people think it's fairly good satire.” He seemed to have been offended by the play, his patriotism apparently wounded.

“It sounds interesting. Frankly, I haven't felt any connection with British theatre since Shaw and Wilde, and they were both Irishmen.”

He gave up. “All right, I'll have a seat there for you tomorrow evening.” Marilyn had decided to stay home and rest.

Next evening, after the hour's drive to London with the chauffeur assigned us by the studio, I stepped out of the hired Jaguar and to my surprise found Larry Olivier facing me. “I've decided to see it again!” he said, laughing. Entering the lobby, I saw for the first time how admirably adept the British were in their ability to notice a star like Olivier without intruding upon him by so much as a lingering stare. By this time, people in public places, Americans anyway, had become a very ambiguous promise-threat that left me bewildered as to how to behave toward them. Something in me groaned at their approach even if, against my will, I couldn't deny the animal fun of being noticed. The English seemed to accept Olivier with a certain prideful, looking-away warmth that did not imply that they owned him. It was a fine and gentle thing to experience for the first time, altogether different from the crowd aggressiveness back home and its humiliating assumptions.

I loved the play's roughness and self-indulgences, its flinging high in the air so many pomposities of Britishism, its unbridled irritation with life, and its verbal energy. Kenneth Haigh, Mary
Ure, Alan Bates, Helena Hughes, and John Welsh moved around on the set in an abandonment of self-preoccupation that suggested a very American kind of realism and turned London inside out for me, making it seem a familiar place. And the writing reminded me of Clifford Odets in his youth, when he was so lyrically bitter at Depression New York and the life of failure it seemed to have consigned him to.
Look Back in Anger
gave me my first look at an England of outsiders like myself who ironed their own shirts and knew about the great only from newspapers.

At the interval Olivier asked what I thought, and I said it was wonderful. At the end of the play he asked again, and I said there were a lot of hanging threads, but who cared? It had real life, a rare achievement.

George Devine, the modest, cheerful little fanatic who ran the Royal Court Theatre, hurried over to ask if we would mind coming upstairs to meet the author, who was eagerly awaiting us. In a moment we were all seated at two tiny tables next to a bar, I facing Devine, and Olivier, the institution, confronting the rebellious Osborne, who I assumed was his artistic and ideological adversary. Devine was beloved of the then disorganized and uncertain British modernizing movement in theatre, for which he was trying to create a home in the Royal Court. He had just done
The Crucible,
and I was listening with pleasure as he reported on its reception by his eager young audience when a few inches to my right I overheard, with some incredulity, Olivier asking the pallid Osborne—then a young guy with a shock of uncombed hair and a look on his face of having awakened twenty minutes earlier—“Do you suppose you could write something for me?” in his most smiling tones, which could have convinced you to buy a car with no wheels for twenty thousand dollars.

I was sure that Olivier represented for Osborne the bourgeois decadence of the British theatre, but his eyes were shining now, and he would indeed write something for Olivier soon—
The Entertainer.
As Olivier later said, that evening marked the end of a long and painfully sterile chapter of his career. It was then that he began to turn away from a trivial, voguish theatre slanted to please the upper middle class, and entered the mainstream of his country's theatrical evolution. Later, heading the new National Theatre, he strove to make it a reflection not of a comfortable society but of the alienation and fumbling search for a future that were beginning to find voice in Britain. Olivier had many reincarnations, and this was perhaps his most significant one; at the
point of vanishing as an artist, he drew himself up and miraculously fought for his maturity.

The Prince and the Showgirl,
however, was still part of his past, and Marilyn soon verged on the belief that he had cast her only because he needed the money her presence would bring. I wanted to believe that this was only half the truth; I was sure he saw the legitimate dramatic contrast between their social and cultural types, and if his motives were indeed partly cynical, that did not cancel his valid artistic judgment in casting her. The theatre is always part beast. But as she had done with so many people, she had idealized Olivier, who as the great and serious artist must be above mortal considerations of the kind so common among the Hollywood fleshmongers she thought she had escaped with this, her own company's first filmmaking partnership. The Hollywood she knew was so vile that the legitimate theatre had to be sublimely pure. Inevitably, the time soon came when in order to keep reality from slipping away I occasionally had to defend Olivier or else reinforce the naiveté of her illusions; the result was that she began to question the absoluteness of my partisanship on her side of the deepening struggle.

Paula Strasberg was with her on the set every day and in the early weeks of shooting tried, I thought, to reassure Marilyn, who increasingly perceived a menace in Olivier. Finally she came to believe that he was trying to compete with her like another woman, a coquette drawing the audience's sexual attention away from herself. Nothing could dissuade her from this perilous vision of her director and co-star. How much of it was true I could not know, since everybody was on his best behavior during my visits to the set at Shepperton. And I had to admit that I couldn't set aside Olivier's greatness; in New York I had seen his
Oedipus Rex,
which he had played on the same bill with Sheridan's
The Critic,
as inspiring a theatrical experience as I could conceive of. It was simply impossible to agree that he could be the cheap scene-stealer she was talking about.

I had to face the fact that she was right in one respect—I did feel a cultural bond with him—but she was mistaken in imagining that she was being condescended to from some high aesthetic altitude. What gradually began to dawn on me through all this friction was her expectation of abandonment all over again; it was the blood of this terror that engorged what might have been a mere conflict of
opinions. We were trying to hear each other through the echoes between two arguments—one about Olivier, and the deeper subterranean struggle against what she saw as her fate. I did not understand at first. She could not bear contradiction in any detail on this question of Olivier's knowing betrayal of her expectations, but far worse than that, she was laboring with how I fit into the pattern of disappointment. I could hardly help my alarmed protests for my own sake and the truth as I saw it. She was felled by my stubbornness, everything was over; if she was so opposed she could not be loved. I was unable to grasp until much too late the imminence of humiliation in the very position of the actor vis-á-vis director, author, cameraman. Unlike them, he had no métier with which to armor himself; he stood naked and easily mocked, if not in reality, then in his own imagination, and Marilyn was by no means alone in viewing herself this way.

Still, on the afternoons when I showed up at the studio, her face lit up as it always had; so it was all a challenge, I thought, to both of us. We had to learn how to live very close to our real feelings without burning up. Too much truth can kill. But what more exhilarating way to risk one's life when to win out meant, as I visualized it, a nearly miraculous joining of body and mind and feeling. In a matter of days we were closer than ever and also more cautious. And there were times when quite suddenly she seemed to have healed toward Olivier, her suspicions downed. Perhaps my insistence had opened an eye. For periods she worked more easily and dared to take satisfaction from some moment here or there that she could not deny having done brilliantly. Seizing on anything positive, I probably overdid my praise, sending new uncertainty stealing across her gaze like a thief. Absolute truthfulness, pure as light—nothing less was the aim. But underneath yawned the old terror of abandonment, the deafness in the stranger's stare . . .

Meanwhile, I had to get on with my work and was sure things would straighten themselves out with a director as experienced as Olivier. As I had promised Peter Brook, I was revising
A View from the Bridge,
making it into a full-length play principally by opening up the viewpoint of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone's wife, toward his gathering tragedy. It was also necessary to spend days in London looking at actors for the secondary parts, and I had all I could handle.

But the situation worsened. Paula, no doubt without design, was forced into a double game, having to maintain her authority with
Marilyn by not contradicting her too openly or often, while keeping her hand in with Olivier. Thus she became a go-between, the interpreter to him of Marilyn's acting intentions, and to Marilyn of his direction. At best this would have been an almost impossible task even for a selfless person, but for one as vain and ambitious as Paula it quickly curdled into a nightmare, like a marriage of three people; at what point are two of them to be left alone, and will the one who is left out resent it? Bad faith was inevitable, and it began to spread its rot everywhere.