Dropped Names (22 page)

ARTHUR MILLER

T
he look I saw in Arthur Miller's eyes was one I'd not once seen in the forty-two years I'd known him. We were dining at an Upper West Side restaurant in New York in early 2005. He had been in the hospital with pneumonia over the Christmas holiday, and this was his first time out in public. I arrived late, and as I bent over to give him a kiss, he looked up at me as he had done countless times in the past, and I expected to see that odd, wry, somewhat detached smile that seemed permanently fixed on his face and feel the hand that would come up, clasp mine weakly, and then return to tapping the table.

What I saw instead was a look of vulnerability and fear. He had lost a considerable amount of weight, and his eyes were sunk deep under the heavy-rimmed glasses he normally wore. His cheeks were hollow, his skin sallow, and his voice weak.

“Pneumonia all gone?” I asked.

“That's the least of it,” he said.

For the rest of the evening he was quiet and fragile. Seated next to him was his companion during those last years, Agnes Barley, some fifty years his junior. She occasionally squeezed his hand, but they rarely spoke. I knew that night might be the last time I would be in his presence. Arthur stayed at his sister Joan Copeland's apartment for a time and then retreated to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, where he died on February 10, 2005, at the age of eighty-nine.

M
y friendship with Arthur Miller, such as it was, revolved primarily around his failed play
After the Fall
, the story of his tormented relationship with the actress Marilyn Monroe. In the play he called her
Maggie
and named himself
Quentin
.

I met him first in 1962 when he was forty-six and I was twenty-four. I was asked by the director, Elia Kazan, to help audition young actresses for the play's debut. I read it the night before and found very little of the middle-aged hero's predicament anything to which I could relate. When I walked into the room, Arthur stood up, shook my hand, and sat back down.

I took my place in a straight-back chair slightly off to the side in front of him, and for the next three days did my job. When it was over he stood up, shook my hand, said thank you, and sat back down again.

After the Fall
was badly received. The critical community found the play self-indulgent melodrama dancing heavily on Marilyn's grave. Arthur, who claimed he had written and finished it before Monroe's death, reportedly was stung by the play's reception and couldn't understand the resentment toward it.

W
e would meet again in the summer of 1977. I was asked to play Quentin in a production at the Williamstown Theatre Festival that he would be directing. I was now thirty-nine and better able to understand Quentin. But once again the vast majority of the critics loathed it.

Arthur did not appear at rehearsals, but arrived in Williamstown, saw the show, and came backstage.

“It's a monster part,” he said as he walked into my dressing room. “There's a lot there to chew on.”

“I can't seem to find his soul, Arthur,” I said. He did not respond.

We walked to a boardinghouse in silence on the hot summer night and he joined the cast around a large wooden table in the kitchen where we normally gathered after performances. He was now sixty-one, still quite handsome, and causing palpitations among the women in the company.

Patting the chair next to him, he said to the young actress who was playing Maggie, “Come sit by me, dear.” All the seats were now full and at least a dozen more actors stood against the walls, hanging on his every word. The rest of the night, he held court in an easy, detached, but friendly manner. And no one left until he pulled back his chair and said good night.

“Keep at it,” he said to me, as he squeezed my hand, patted my back, and rubbed my shoulder.

I
would not see him again for six years when, in 1983 there being nothing of any interest on the horizon for me in the theatre, and just about to turn forty-six, the notion of taking another look at the role of Quentin appealed to me. So I picked up the phone and called the producer of the original production, Robert Whitehead.

“I want to revive
After the Fall
in New York. Do you think Arthur would give me the rights?”

“Ask him,” Bob said. “Here's the number.”

I prepared a detailed speech as to why I thought the play would be well received; a long time had passed since Marilyn's death, changing mores, etc., and nervously dialed the phone. He answered himself and listened patiently as I made my case.

“When do you want to do it?”

“Immediately,” I said.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

I secured the rights for a nominal fee and would produce it with partners that year at a theater on East 92nd Street in New York. Arthur was then sixty-eight and I was forty-six, exactly his age when I'd first met him.

We began pre-production in earnest. For several months Arthur came to my apartment at least four nights a week. I was married at the time with a son who was two and a newborn daughter. He never entered their rooms or asked to see them, was never anything but perfunctorily polite to my wife, usually just saying “Thank you, dear” after she gave us dinner and retreated with me to my office to work on cutting the play.
A View from the Bridge
was having a successful revival at the time, and Arthur was excited that
After the Fall
was going to be given a new life.

“Who knows,” he said, “maybe the tide is turning for me.”

If it was, Arthur was going to swim against it as hard as he could. He was completely agreeable to my cutting all the pontificating, sermonizing, and complicated plotlines involving the House Un-American Activities Committee, but totally unreceptive to any investigation into his hero's inner soul.

No matter how many ways I came at it, Arthur felt the character was not in need of any more investigation. He had been played originally by the great Jason Robards, a lifelong struggling alcoholic.

“You know these drunks,” Arthur said, “they're all crybabies. I don't want that. Jason made fun of the character because he was afraid to commit to it. Typical boozer.”

I asked if he would write me just one speech toward the end of the play in which Quentin might show some remorse, perhaps shame, even a touch of self-awareness.

“I'll think about it,” he said.

B
y now all the superfluous plotlines, extraneous characters, and Arthur's efforts to relate personal guilt to the world's guilt were gone from the play with his approval. It was a lean look into the character of Quentin and his relationship with his wife, Maggie. It was what I'd hoped it would be, a play primarily about Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe and their private pain.

One afternoon I went to his apartment on East 68th Street to work with him. It was a modest, small place, sparsely furnished, feeling like a struggling young writer's humble beginnings. He proudly showed me a wooden chair he'd made himself and brought in from Roxbury, Connecticut, his country home.

“So what's the anger about toward the play, do you think?” I asked.

“They can't forgive me. People can't bear to face their own aggression. But when you don't have resistance, you don't have the truth. If I don't blush from the truth, I know I'm writing badly. They accused me of being unkind, but they were very cruel to her while she was alive and idolized her after she died. No one wants to believe it but I began this play when Marilyn was alive and doing well. It's not a revenge play. And I'll tell you something, Frank, no matter what they wrote about her, they all sweat when she walked into the room. Every son-of-a-bitch sweat in her presence.”

Inge Morath, Arthur's wife whom he'd met while still married to Marilyn, came into the room. She'd been the still photographer on Arthur and Marilyn's last film,
The Misfits
. She gathered up her camera equipment and headed for the door, declaring cheerfully:

“I hope you do this play while we're far away in China.”

After she left Arthur said, “Just take the thing and run with it, Frank. I'll stay away.”

After a long silence, he leaned forward in his rocking chair, put his hand on my knee, and said:

“Frank, I know what you're trying to get out of me. And I've got a line I think might work. How's this: ‘They slept with the sword of guilt between them.' And it's true, you know, we did.”

I wasn't quite certain how to respond to that line, so I got up and went into the kitchen to make some tea. When I came back I said:

“Arthur, do you mind if I speak very personally?”

“No,” he said, “go right ahead.”

“Tell me what you would like the play to say to an audience.”

“Well, if you can pull it off, Frank, I think it can be a kind of warning. A help signal to people.”

“In what way?”

“The knowledge that there are some people who just can't be saved, and you have to get out from under them and save yourself.”

“But if we don't go deeper into the character of Quentin, and take a look at his responsibility, perhaps even his complicity, are we going to get that message across? It's very difficult for an audience to sympathize with a man who is so adored by everyone in the play; his mother, his wives, his friends, and a man who has had so much personal success. He'll just appear remotely curious about Maggie's plight and detached from his own emotions.”

“Do you think I'm not stumbling around in the dark just like everybody else?” he said. “Maybe I can't show my vulnerability. You don't.”

“But you can write about it, Arthur. You can give us something of who the man Quentin was before he met Maggie, and how her presence in his life might have changed him.”

He sat silent in the living room, looking straight ahead. And then said:

“How about we have the Mother come in there and talk about him?”

I couldn't help myself. I laughed. His resolute lack of introspection was, in an odd way, charming and naïve. I thought, he must know this quality in him is part of his power over people.

It was dark now and for the first time during our months together, I said:

“Tell me about Marilyn.”

I knew instinctively that he was not going to talk about their sex life, about which I and everyone else in America was curious. Nor did I think he would express any overt anger toward her. He was silent a long while. This is the story he decided to tell me:

“W
e were hiding out in a little place in Brooklyn. She had just tried to off herself and it had been a nightmare. The press was all over us. So we were secretly holed up in this apartment, and she did it again. I couldn't face another circus. So I looked for a doctor in the phone book in the neighborhood and called him. He didn't believe it was me, so I said I'd go down on the street and wait for him. He was only a couple of blocks away. When he got there, he recognized me and I brought him upstairs. He went into the bedroom and saved her life. When he came out, he told me she'd be okay.

“ ‘She's groggy now,' he said. He took out a prescription pad and a pen and handed them to me.

“ ‘Would you get her autograph for me?'

“I went in, held her hand, and she scribbled her name.

“He took it and said, ‘You don't owe me anything. Don't worry. I won't tell anyone where you are.' ”

A
rthur was not a man to show deep emotion. But this moment was the closest I ever saw him come to genuine pain and sadness. After a few moments, I asked him for a tagline to describe the play for our ad campaign. Without missing a beat, he said, “How about: ‘
After the Fall
—a play about the death of love with a lot of laughs.' ”

O
nce the production was locked in we began our search for a suitable Maggie. Jessica Lange turned us down. After a long reading Arthur rejected Michelle Pfeiffer. The next candidate, Kathleen Turner, was rejected by our director, John Tillinger. Next we offered the role to Judith Ivey, who was otherwise engaged.

Two days before rehearsals were supposed to begin we were without our leading lady. Into the room came a diminutive, dark-haired young actress. Tiny eyes, not much bosom, very thin, no obvious sex appeal. She read magnificently. Arthur said yes, Tillinger said yes, I said yes. We had our Maggie. This young actress was, at the time, seeing Arthur's agent, the legendary Sam Cohn. Her name was Dianne Wiest.

T
he first day of rehearsal, Arthur's only comment to John and me was “Don't lay anything on top of this play. Just do it.” And true to his word, he stayed away. He came to the first preview, with Inge, and was wildly enthusiastic about what he saw. Dianne's performance would be closer to Judy Garland than to Marilyn in both demeanor and appearance, and she played the role with stunning vulnerability and pain. Arthur walked into my dressing room, tousled my hair, which was for him an enormous show of affection, and said: “You know this is a pretty good play.”