The excitement in the theater was palpable. Several times in the course of the evening the audience erupted in applause. They laughed at all the right moments and there was a standing ovation at the end. Hedda Hopper called The Seven Year Itch Marilyn’s “first great picture.” Under ordinary circumstances, Charlie Feldman and Darryl Zanuck would have fêted Marilyn afterward. As it was, DiMaggio took her to Toots Shor’s. When Joe and Marilyn came around the large, circular bar, Toots led the crowd in shouting “Happy birthday!” Joe, eager to please, had arranged a surprise party.
But Marilyn couldn’t enjoy herself. Despite Joe’s efforts, the evening seemed to tear her up inside. It was obvious that everyone had adored her in the picture, and Marilyn knew that Billy Wilder had helped her to give her best performance to date. But she could take no pleasure in her achievement. Her encounters with Strasberg had caused her to turn violently on all that she had accomplished in Hollywood—including The Seven Year Itch. Anyone might have expected Marilyn to be proud of herself tonight, but the premiere had very much the opposite effect. The success of the “Marilyn Monroe” character—a character the whole world seemed to have fallen in love with—brought her only self-loathing and disgust.
Before the evening was over, she had an argument with Joe, who seemed hardly to comprehend what was going on, and walked out of her own party. Sam Shaw saw her home.
On several occasions after that, DiMaggio was observed in the shadows outside the Waldorf Towers, hiding in dark doorways. He stood apart from the fans and photographers, but he, too, watched and waited. “He loved her beyond anybody’s comprehension,” said Sam Shaw. Ann Shaw worked very hard to get Joe and Marilyn back together. Marilyn asked Ann to stop, insisting that she liked things the way they were.
Finally, DiMaggio appeared to have had enough. When Sam went to France to document circus life, Joe followed. At night, he would dine with the Shaws and a Paris-Match crew. He wanted to go to Italy to visit the places where his parents had been born. He gave the impression that he hoped somehow “to find himself.” He never spoke of Marilyn, or discussed what he was going through. “He felt, but he didn’t talk,” Shaw recalled.
At this point, few people knew that Marilyn was seeing Arthur Miller. Because photographers followed her everywhere, she and Arthur spent most of their time together in her apartment. Arthur, then at work on the production of A View from the Bridge, would stop off to see Marilyn on his way home. When Truman Capote, Miller’s neighbor in Brooklyn Heights, guessed the identity of Marilyn’s “masked marvel,” she jestingly threatened to have Capote bumped off if he told anyone. Arthur was married with two children. He had a reputation as a man of conscience. He had to be discreet.
At a moment when Miller was preparing to stage a public indictment of the betrayer, he secretly betrayed his wife. His meditations on the topic of infidelity in his notebooks and in The Crucible suggest that it cannot have been easy. His joy with Marilyn, combined with fears for his marriage, left him unable to focus on casting and other production matters. For the moment, he seemed to live most intensely on the twenty-seventh floor at the Waldorf Towers.
Miller was confused, conflicted. He told himself he didn’t want his union with Mary to end. He valued stability and routine. The anchor of a home life permitted him to write. He adored his children. Yet he couldn’t bear to give up Marilyn. Eventually, Arthur’s older brother sensed that he was weighing something. Kermit Miller, concerned but by no means judgmental, finally reached out. But Arthur didn’t want to talk about his affair. At the same time, Arthur did appear to want Kermit and other family members to know. Why else would he drive out to Kermit’s house in Marilyn’s car?
There was no question that Arthur seemed different. He had a face that might have been chiseled on Mount Rushmore. Marilyn loosened him up. She made him grin. He seemed suddenly more tender-eyed and accessible. He seemed never to have been more in love with anyone. Arthur, it would be said in the Miller family, had had his train wreck rather late in life.
Miller did not think much of Lee Strasberg, but he shared and sometimes out did the latter’s high hopes for Marilyn. He gushed (uncharacteristically) about her talent as much as DiMaggio had minimized it. He told Kermit Bloomgarden that when Marilyn finally appeared on stage she would devastate audiences. He predicted she would be one of the theater’s great stars. Marilyn, to her immense delight, found herself with two saviors: Strasberg and Miller, the great teacher and the great author. She called them the smartest men on earth. She spoke of each as though he were the Wizard of Oz, capable of making her wish come true. In both cases, she failed to perceive the needy, imperfect human being behind the curtain.
Miller had one other thing in common with Strasberg. At the moment, both men were strongly affected by Kazan. Miller, like Strasberg, had been propelled into a state of crisis by On the Waterfront. Indeed, Kazan’s triumph may have been even harder for Miller to swallow than it was for Strasberg. In 1951, Miller had gone to Hollywood with Kazan in search of the success that On the Waterfront eventually brought; the film was received as precisely the kind of major breakthrough in the art of cinema that Miller had aimed to achieve in The Hook. To make matters worse, On the Waterfront, in both theme and atmosphere, bore an unmistakable resemblance to Arthur Miller’s waterfront screenplay. It was as though Kazan had extracted the essence of that earlier, unrealized work and made it his own.
On the Waterfront was linked to Miller in another significant way. On the day Kazan had told Miller of his intention to name names, Miller, in turn, had disclosed his own plan to research the Salem witch trials. Kazan and his wife had instantly perceived that Miller planned to write a parable of the HUAC hearings. On the Waterfront, with a script by Budd Schulberg, was Kazan’s answer to The Crucible. It was the story of an ex-prizefighter who finds the courage to testify in court against the mob. The world may call him a stool pigeon, but in his heart he knows he’s done the right thing. “I’m glad what I done—you hear me—glad what I done!” he shouts at the end, echoing what Kazan claimed were his own feelings about having testified.
While Kazan was preparing On the Waterfront, he had been warned by Miller’s lawyer John Wharton that if he went forward, he’d never direct another Miller play again. At length, when Kazan collected his Oscar as Best Director for On the Waterfront, he found himself thinking of that lawyer, and of Miller himself. Kazan had never forgiven Miller for snubbing him with Kermit Bloomgarden. The night On the Waterfront received eight Oscars, including the awards for Best Picture and Best Screenplay, was Kazan’s revenge.
As chance would have it, Marilyn had turned up in New York at a moment when The Hook—the screenplay Miller had been trying to sell when he met her—was again very much on Arthur’s mind. Thrown back to that time four years previously when he had abandoned both his script and Marilyn, Miller proceeded to rewrite history in two important ways. In February, he wrote a stage play that reclaimed the waterfront atmosphere of The Hook as his own. Soon after, Miller picked up where he had left off with Marilyn—except that this time he was not about to walk away.
A View from the Bridge was Miller’s answer to Kazan’s defense of the informer in On the Waterfront. In Miller’s play, a man’s decision to name names leads inevitably to his destruction. Miller longed for a world where, he said, “actions had consequences again.” It’s not hard to see why he would have felt that way. On Broadway, The Crucible had been a critical and commercial failure. Miller, in speaking out against the HUAC witch-hunt, had reaffirmed his credentials as a man of conscience. He had acted bravely at a time when it was dangerous to speak one’s mind. He had gone on record against the prevailing insanity, a gesture that seems all the more impressive when one considers that Miller was innately cautious. Miller, unlike Kazan, had done the right thing. But as a playwright, he had disappointed. Meanwhile, with On the Waterfront, Kazan had climbed back to the top. No wonder Miller was drawn to what he called the “inexorability” of his story. At least in ar
t, if not in life, the rat paid a price for his actions.
In A View from the Bridge, Miller returned to a play, “An Italian Tragedy,” that he had tried to write following his first encounter with Marilyn in Los Angeles. In 1951, Miller, troubled by his own feelings for Marilyn, had been attracted to the wayward husband’s tale. Filled with guilt, he could identify with the betrayer. And at a moment when, in Miller’s absence, his friend Kazan was sleeping with Marilyn, the playwright had been naturally drawn to the idea of a sexual triangle. Then there was the protagonist’s decision to inform on the illegal immigrant, an element that would have held little personal interest at the time unless Miller fantasized (unconsciously?) about destroying his rival in love.
In 1955, however, there can be no doubt that the informer theme was of prime concern to Miller. Add the author’s wish to see betrayal punished, and one can see why the play jelled as it had not in 1951, when Kazan’s HUAC testimony had yet to come between them. In one significant way, Miller, in A View from the Bridge, altered the anecdote he had heard long ago on the Brooklyn waterfront; he added an accusation that Rodolpho, the illegal immigrant, is secretly a homosexual. Eddie, the longshoreman, makes much of the fact that Rodolpho is a singer, a curious detail as Miller himself once aspired to sing professionally. As a teenager, Miller had practiced at home, crooning in a tenor-baritone voice with a lamp for a microphone.
Whereas in 1951 Miller would have identified with Eddie, four years later Kazan was, literally, the informer. Thus, in the later version, Miller and Kazan exchanged places in the triangle. Miller, always cautious and a bit fearful with women, appears to have glimpsed some aspect of himself in Rodolpho. That, no doubt, was part of the story’s appeal: working with emotionally-charged material Miller did not fully comprehend. In the play’s most disturbing scene, Eddie kisses his niece. Then he forcibly kisses Rodolpho on the mouth to show that that’s what the young man really wants. Was Miller trying to make sense of his own powerful emotional connection to Kazan? Was he trying to understand why, the first time around, he had chosen to leave Marilyn?
A View from the Bridge was not the only Miller work that seems to have been created in reaction to On the Waterfront. Not long after Kazan’s film dominated the Academy Awards, Miller, in New York, began work on a new screenplay, his first since The Hook. Significantly, Miller and Kazan, in cooperation with Kermit Bloomgarden, had once hoped to set up an independent film production company on the east coast. On the Waterfront had been shot independently in the east, and that was Miller’s plan for his own screenplay-in-progress, “Bridge to a Savage World.”
In an echo of Kazan’s treatment of alienated youth in East of Eden, Miller’s script dealt with the gangs of violent, rebellious teenagers that terrorized American cities in the mid-1950s. They “rumbled” with rival gangs; they fought with chains, zip guns, switchblade knives, and broken bottles. Combined Artists, a small independent production company, had commissioned Miller to write a feature film. It would be made with an “important” cast in association with the New York City Youth Board. In exchange for 5 per cent of the profits, the municipal agency would give the filmmakers access to police and social workers.
For several weeks, Miller interviewed gang members in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He saw the boys as savages. He compared them to “the hordes that roamed the virgin forests.” He wrote: “These are children who have never known life excepting as a worthless thing. They have been told from birth that they are nothing, that their parents are nothing, and that their hopes are nothing.”
Their fight for self-respect reminded Miller of Marilyn. The script, as it evolved, focused on a Youth Board worker who tries to get through to one of the boys. “To save one of these,” said Miller, “is obviously a great piece of work.” By his own account, Miller saw himself as engaged in an effort to “save” Marilyn. Thus, as so often with Miller, in his own feelings about Marilyn he discovered the emotional connection he needed to write.
By July, Miller had completed an outline and the Youth Board had approved it. Before the project went forward, however, it had to be approved by the city government. Suddenly, Miller found himself caught in a political firestorm. Since The Crucible, it had been inevitable that the political right would come after Miller in revenge for what Eric Bentley called “Broadway’s principal challenge to McCarthyism.”
In 1954, Miller had had the first hint of what was to come, when he was denied a U.S. passport to attend a Belgian production of The Crucible. The right had put him on notice that they intended to punish him. One year later, the attempt to enlist the Youth Board’s help for the gang film provided Miller’s enemies with a pretext to go after him again. On July 22, 1955, the New York World Telegram and Sun, a prominent right-wing newspaper, ran an article headlined “Youth Board Filmster Has a Pink Record: Miller Hit Kazan for Telling All.” The article questioned whether a city agency ought to underwrite Miller, “a veteran backer of Communist causes.”
As proof of Miller’s Communist sympathies, the newspaper offered his attitude to Kazan: “But three years ago, he broke up a long, deep-rooted and profitable friendship with Elia Kazan, after the latter testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The playwright, the World Telegram and Sun disclosed at the time, would not tolerate Mr. Kazan’s identification of Communists in the party unit to which he once belonged. He expressed strong disapproval of the testimony to Broadway intimates and cut all communication with his theatrical teammate, asserting he no longer wanted the director to profit from his writings.”
HUAC planned four days of entertainment business hearings in New York in August. The committee, sensing that there were no more big names to go after in Hollywood, decided to set up shop temporarily on Broadway. The theatrical figures they pursued, however, were largely obscure and unsuccessful. A notable exception was Arthur Miller. One of the committee’s tactics of harassment was to suggest unofficially that certain individuals might soon be called; Dolores Scotti, a HUAC investigator, notified city officials that Miller was about to be subpoenaed. The merest suspicion of subversive activity was often enough to infect one’s ability earn a living.
Miller’s prestige made him a particularly desirable target for a committee that found itself increasingly starved of the publicity that was its lifeblood. The political climate in the United States was quite different from what it had been when Kazan testified in 1952. A number of factors had contributed to a lessening of public interest in the hunt for Communists, including the end of the Korean War and the 1954 Senate vote to “condemn” Senator Joseph McCarthy. HUAC in 1955 was like a great wounded bear, all the more threatening and dangerous in its weakened condition.
Mrs. Scotti warned that Miller was likely to be an unfriendly witness and that that would embarrass the Youth Board. She noted that Miller had a “heavy front” record. She declared that he had participated in various “Communist-dominated and-controlled organizations.” She mentioned his ties to the National Council of American–Soviet Friendship and the Committee of the Arts and Sciences and Professions. She pointed out that his dossier was already one and a half inches thick.
The city government deferred its decision until after Miller had appeared before HUAC. Initially, it was anticipated that he would be called in mid-August. Almost as soon as the Board had decided to postpone the decision, Mrs. Scotti announced the launch of a full-scale investigation of Miller in hopes of finding someone to “place him in the Party.” They would not call Miller in August after all. The new plan was to delay the subpoena until November. Mrs. Scotti said it was a shame they had to wait so long, but if Miller were called individually the liberals would complain that HUAC was persecuting him. HUAC planned to round up some other people and throw Miller in with the group.
With this political cloud over his future, Miller began rehearsals for A View from the Bridge in August. Each day, as he entered the New Amsterdam roof theater—the same theater where Miller and Kazan had once prepared De
ath of a Salesman—Miller walked past a life-sized cutout of Marilyn, her skirt flying up in the air, advertising The Seven Year Itch. Her image was everywhere in Manhattan. The whole city, indeed much of the nation, seemed to be fantasizing unrepentantly about Marilyn. But it was Miller alone who had actually realized the fantasy of the male character in The Seven Year Itch. He was having an affair with Marilyn while his wife and children were away in the country. The author of a famous play, set in a Puritan colony, about the perils of sex had fallen in love with “the girl.” That summer, no one seemed more eager to believe he’d been wrong about sex than he.
Interestingly, even as Miller was working to bring to life his version of the Miller–Kazan–Monroe triangle, elsewhere in the city that triangle seemed to be on Kazan’s mind as well. Marilyn’s love affair was no longer entirely a secret; during weekends on Fire Island with the Strasbergs, she poured out her heart to Paula, who could hardly resist the temptation to spread the news. Kazan also had reason to think of Miller when his own name came up in the newspaper coverage of Miller’s political problems. And of course, by this time the script of A View from the Bridge was in circulation among theater people in New York. So it comes as no surprise that, whether consciously or not, Kazan’s feelings about the triangle would surface in a project of his own.
That summer, Tennessee Williams, in Rome, had been sending off bits and pieces of his Baby Doll screenplay for Kazan to work on. Marilyn was Williams’s first choice for Baby Doll Meighan as the playwright then conceived her: a witless, fat, sexy, languid, thumb-sucking woman who sleeps in a crib. In late July, at almost the precise moment that the Miller story broke in the New York World Telegram and Sun, Williams sent Kazan his ideas for the third act. The letter elicited a curious response; Kazan, admitting that his own concept was quite weird, asked Williams to consider the very different third act he had in mind. Though at length Williams rejected the proposal in every detail, it provides a fascinating glimpse into Kazan’s mind.
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