Timebends (77 page)

One stormy afternoon I offered to drive over to the Strasbergs' to pick Marilyn up after her lesson, cabs being almost impossible to find in such heavy rain. When I entered the foyer of the immense Central Park West apartment, I was surprised by what sounded like Stravinsky played on a saxophone and jazz trumpets. Lee came out to greet me, and I immediately asked what this wonderful record was. His reply was an incomprehensibly secret grin as he said that it was a very special recording. “But what is it? Who's playing?” I asked. Once again there was no answer but his slightly private, superior grin and a repeat of his initial description of the record as something unique.

In the next room Marilyn was putting on her coat, a beige camel's hair that I loved, and the record was just coming to an end on the turntable near her. I started to reach for it, but Lee suddenly gestured to keep hands off and lifted it up with infinite care. Holding it vertically before him, he prevented me from reading the label, but I could see that it was gray, the Columbia color.

“It's Woody Herman,” he said now.

“Really! I didn't know he played classical music.”

Marilyn was watching him reverently. “Oh, yes, of course. He gave this to me.”

“What's the title? I'd like to get it.”

“No, no, you see this number?” He now held the record flat and indicated a long serial number of the kind stamped on all classical records. “This is a special number. It means that it can't be bought normally, the way you just go out and buy a record.”

“But it's got a standard label. And I think all my records have numbers engraved into them.”

“Oh, no,” he persisted, but now with a tinge of embarrassment, I thought.

“How do you get it, then?”

“I told you. Woody gave it to me.”

I looked into his eyes. Marilyn stood there with a certain pride in his being on such terms with the famous musician. I felt a wave of despair at this silly charade. Perhaps he was growing worried that he had taken things dangerously far, for he now broke the silence.

“Of course, if you really wanted to buy one, you could copy down this number and order it.” And so it was a private sort of record and a sort of publicly available one, both at the same time. Willy Loman, I thought, rides again.

It was all so very strange. She seemed more and more to be surrounded by something like untruth, and neither I nor anyone else could expose it to her. She was spinning a web that hung from temporary rafters, and I feared it would simply have to be dismantled one day. I could only hope that she would be stronger soon. Lee was so crucial to her and therefore to me that I prayed I was wrong, that he was not the mountebank I thought him then. I saw that I did not understand actors. If he was able to instill faith in them, it was a great thing, and I kept reminding myself that I knew many bright and able actors who swore by him. On the other hand, there were actors of similar caliber who thought him a fraud. Kazan had said of Strasberg once that his great fault was to make his actors more and more rather than less and less dependent on him. But the actor's capital is his faith in himself, and if Lee could deepen hers it would be a blessing, whatever the means.

It was also strange how with each week she seemed to be gaining power all over the world while the swamp of doubt within her showed no sign of drying up. She seemed sometimes like one of those leaders Tolstoy describes in
War and Peace
—people who are given a power over others by some mysterious common consent, no one is sure exactly why, and who come to half believe and half mistrust it as an expression of their authentic nature. But deep within them is the usual vulnerable and mystified human being, in her case a mere child, an abused little girl. She never stopped probing the world and the people around her for the least sign of hostility, and everyone sensed her desperation for reassurance, witty and quick to laugh and winning as she was, and so they reassured her, and truth moved further and further away. But she would be strong enough for it one day, the day she could accept that she was beloved . . .

One day, she would be like the unhappily disturbed woman in Rilke's poem who walks to the window of her room and looks down into the courtyard and sees an immense tree that she has seen a hundred times before—
“Und plötzlich ist alles gut.”
It would arrive, the balance, the healing, inflowing silence, possibly through me, possibly not, but suddenly she would know that everything was good.

There had been scores of such trials during the past five or six years of the great American Red-hunt, and none of them had taken more than an hour or two to complete. The routine was simple: the questions that the accused had declined to answer before the Committee of Congress were read; an “expert on Communism” testified that in his opinion the defendant was under “Communist discipline”; and a conviction and sentence for contempt were handed down by the judge. Some, like the Hollywood Ten—screenwriters and directors caught up ten years earlier in the virulence of the first hearings on the movie industry—had gone to jail for a year, but in more recent times a certain therapeutic boredom on the part of the public had tempered the proceedings, and the penalty was more likely to be a fine and suspended sentence, although not by any means in every case. Given the intense publicity about my case, I had reason to fear harsher rather than more lenient treatment, for the Committee would probably want to justify itself by punishing me.

Federal District Court Judge Charles McLaughlin sat behind the high tribunal looking like President Warren Gamaliel Harding, whose handsome face I had memorized so long ago in Far Rockaway when his black-draped photograph was displayed in all the store windows the week of his death. McLaughlin, with his silvery, neatly combed hair, glanced down at his fellow Democrat, my lawyer Joe Rauh, and at Prosecutor Hitz, and amiably contemplated aloud that give or take a few minutes the trial would doubtless be over by noon, about an hour and a half hence. Just as amiably Hitz assured him that the government's case would not require much time at all, and with equal cheerfulness Joe Rauh, giving his little baritone chuckle and touching his finger to his polka-dot bow tie, announced that
his
case would require a minimum of four and possibly five
days
to present.

The shock in Hitz's face I recall aurally rather than visually, as the kind of clicking sound made by a windup toy when it is lifted off the carpet and allowed to spin itself out. The judge was likewise
absolutely astonished, having grasped, like Hitz, what Rauh's declaration meant—for the first time a lawyer intended to win a contempt case rather than hopelessly conceding it. As for me, I was too stupid to understand any of this until Joe explained it later; all I knew was that from then on a negative electricity began flowing toward me from the bench and the government table, whereas I had hardly been noticed before the incredible announcement was made. A defendant planning actually to win such a case was evidently an unconscionable affront to all decency and venerable tradition.

One reason for Rauh's imagining that he might if not win then make a record that would reverse the decision on appeal was the Watkins case. In that one he had established a precedent that forbade the Committee to ask questions of a witness unless the answers would serve a legislative purpose. A committee of Congress, in other words, could no longer simply reach out and pick people off the street, as HUAC had been delightedly doing for years, but had to show that their testimony was relevant to some piece of legislation the committee was actively contemplating for submission to Congress. In questioning me, the Committee had made a couple of passes at asking me about my passport in order, as was now amply demonstrated by the prosecution, to line themselves up with the requirement of Watkins. Indeed, my hearing had actually been labeled an inquiry into “the misuse of United States passports.”

Naturally, there was not the slightest connection between my refusal to name a writer at a meeting I had attended years earlier and my passport, used or misused. But to my growing amazement—and, as the days passed, my sinking despair—Mr. Hitz opened each of his orations with one or another variation of “Now, when Mr. Miller went into Czechoslovakia, he knew he was forbidden by the stamp on his passport to enter that country …” Which indeed would have been a misuse of a passport, but since I had never been in or near Czechoslovakia in my life, it was hard to fathom how they expected to prove anything by this false assertion. Yet every time he took to his feet we had a repetition of it. And when, each time, Rauh rose on a point of order to wearily repeat that I had never been in that country, the judge simply turned back to Hitz and asked him to continue.

After each hard day in court—during which I drew many fine sketches of all the personnel in order to stay awake, while agonizing, like all amateurs, at the snail's pace of the proceedings—we normally returned to Joe's house, where we rushed to the bar and
sat drinking as I, for one, had never drunk before. On about the third such evening, our first scotches under our belts, Rauh suddenly screwed his broad face up, pointed at me, and said, “Hey!”

“Yes, sir. Hey what?”

“Hitz keeps putting you in Czechoslovakia in 1947—isn't it ‘47?”

“Yes, ‘47.”

“But Czechoslovakia was still a democratic country in ‘47. It was Eduard Benes who was president then, wasn't it? They weren't Communist yet!”

“My God! I almost visited a free country and did something good! But I wasn't there anyway.”

Next morning Rauh sat waiting for Hitz to start his daily prayer for vengeance on me for having gone to the forbidden land. And now it came. “When Mr. Miller went into Czechoslovakia knowing he was forbidden to do so by the terms of his passport…” Rauh was on his feet with his basketball shooting arm raised high in the air. “Your honor …”

Once recognized by the now wearying Warren Gamaliel Harding on high, Joe paused as before a double-thick lamb chop lying centered on his plate with a piece of parsley on either side and a baked potato with sour cream nudging it, and repeated that Mr. Miller was never in his life in Czechoslovakia, but that even if he had been, Czechoslovakia at the time was a democratic state whose President Benes” was our friend. This, he said, was a matter of history.

Well, now. A pause. Warren Harding looked down at Hitz, and Hitz looked up at Warren Harding, and Rauh sat down and straightened his bow tie with both hands and gave it an additional pat.

And now the judge spoke, saying, “I think it falls under the four corners of the indictment. Proceed, Mr. Hitz.”

I leaned urgently toward Rauh and whispered, “What does that mean, ‘four corners of the indictment'?” I had the image of a four-cornered tent under which I was suffocating.

Rauh bent to me now and beckoned my ear to his mouth. “Nothing,” he said, and laughed. His enjoyment was so infectious that I found myself laughing too, about what, however, only God knew.

Time's fade-outs and fade-ins and cross-fades. More than a quarter-century after my hearing before the Un-American Activities Committee I was seated at a festive table with my wife, Inge Morath, and my guests, Joe Rauh and his wife, Olie, in a dining room in the Cannon office building, improvised for the occasion of the Kennedy Honors opening banquet because the State Department
dining room was then under reconstruction. A hundred or more people, many of great distinction, were present, with Secretary of State George Shultz the official host. As we had entered within a mob of celebrants, I'd had no chance to look at our surroundings, but I noticed now that the walls and ceiling were newly painted in decorator colors rather than the usual federal drab. Joe Rauh suddenly turned fully around in his chair to study the room and then leaned past Olie and told me that I was being honored in the same room where my HUAC hearing had been held so many years before.

Of course the layout was all different now, with a score of banquet tables covering the floor, but even after mentally reconstructing the old layout I could not connect to the place. Irony was all I seemed able to feel, and it seemed so coldly metallic a thing when I recalled the hot gases that had poured over me in this very room. I looked around at the happy guests and the healthily smiling secretary of state and the famous faces of my fellow honorees, and again I felt on the outside looking in, and more, that it all lacked reality. I had supposed that after the kind of merciless rejection I had known it would never be easy to accept the smooth self-congratulation of such ceremonies. Still, I could enjoy this good-spirited occasion—sort of. Maybe I had the illusion of having lost my fear of power, having been close enough to it to know there was nothing power had that I wanted. But a lot of my former faith in the system's enduring beneficence had been burned out of me, too. All that was the same on both occasions was the flag, which now as then hung from a staff near a wall. It might even have been the same one that had hung behind Congressman Walter's head so long ago, and I recalled now how it had reassured me then, although I knew that to many in the world it signified cruel wealth and arrogant blindness. But how to put all this together in a coherent sense of my life? Or maybe I ought to settle for it all having been a dream, a dream of perpetual exile and perpetual returns.

The most interesting talk I recall having in that barren week of my trial was with former senator Harry P. Cain, whom Rauh had brought up from his semi-retirement in Florida to testify as my “expert witness on Communism.” He had read my plays and did not believe I had been “under the discipline of the Communist Party.” Normally in such trials it was the government alone that produced “expert testimony,” usually from ex-Communist officials,
to prove that the defendant showed all the necessary hoof-marks of the Communist Lucifer. This routine, incidentally, was an all but exact duplication of the use of clergy as experts on witchcraft in the Salem of 1692; one of them, Reverend Hale of Beverly, is a character in
The Crucible.
Hale in my play, like his original in history, defected from the prosecution's side on realizing that he had been had by the “afflicted girls” and, filled with remorse, tried unsuccessfully to save the people his earlier “expertise” had helped condemn to hang. Harry Cain's story, I now learned, was amazingly similar.