The Genius and the Goddess

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Kazan, after refusing to name names, changed his mind on the pretext that the American people needed to know the facts. . . . He appeared before HUAC in public session in April [1952] to name eleven former Communists, including Clifford Odets and the actors J. Edward Bromberg and [Marilyn's old teacher] Morris Carnovsky. . . . Kazan had been a Party member back in the days of the Group Theater, in 1934–35. . . . He had supported the Ten until he became "disgusted" by their "silence" and their "contemptuous attitude." . . .

  Kazan's performance before HUAC aroused a greater hostility, a more biting contempt, than that of any other Hollywood informer.

  Miller, furious at Kazan's betrayal of his old friends in order to save his skin and continue his career, believed that if he himself had been a communist, Kazan would have denounced him to HUAC. Kazan bitterly recalled that in New York, a few months after his testimony, he ran into Miller and Kermit Bloomgarden, the producer of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible: "They saw me but didn't acknowledge that they had, either by sound or by gesture. Although I was to work with Art again ten years later, I never really forgave him for that snub." Miller also subjected Kazan to an even greater insult. After he'd sent the typescript of The Crucible to Kazan and the director said that he'd be honored to stage such a powerful new work, Miller savagely replied, "I didn't send it to you because I wanted you to direct it. I sent it to you because I want you to know what I think of stool-pigeons."3

  II

  Miller based his historical drama, The Crucible, on the witch trials that took place in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, and provided a striking analogy to contemporary events. In that small community, men and women were hanged for crimes they could not possibly have committed: "twenty during the year of panic had been executed, nineteen hanged and one (the famous Giles Corey) pressed to death for refusing to plead. Two had died in prison. Eight were under condemnation when [the hysteria subsided and] they were released."

  The historian Edmund Morgan wrote that, like HUAC, the judges of Salem denied the legal process, used "phony confessions, inquisitional procedures, and admission of inadmissible evidence. . . . [They] convicted on the basis of spectral evidence alone, evidence offered by a supposed victim of witchcraft to the effect that the devil tormenting him appeared in the shape of the accused." Most important, and again like HUAC, "by releasing defendants who confessed and repented, they placed a terrible pressure on the accused to confess to crimes they had not committed." In the Salem witch trials, "men and women who lied were thus released, whereas those whose bravery and honesty forbade them to lie were hanged." With HUAC, people who testified against their friends were released, while those – like the Hollywood Ten – who refused to betray their friends were cited for contempt of Congress and sent to jail.

  Two earlier literary works portrayed the same themes as The Crucible and described a small, claustrophobic, narrow-minded community that turns on itself. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), which also takes place in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale seduces the married Hester Prynne, who nobly refuses to name the father of her illegitimate child. As punishment for her sin, and while the guilty Dimmesdale remains silent, she's forced to stand in the pillory and to wear the scarlet "A" that brands her as an adulteress. Seven years later, after preaching a brilliant sermon on sin and repentance, Dimmesdale mounts the same market-place scaffold where Hester once stood, and makes his long-sought and long-repressed confession. Both Dimmesdale and Miller's hero, John Proctor, are adulterers and both publicly confess their crime.

  In his historical account, The Devils of Loudon – published in 1952, the year before The Crucible – Aldous Huxley also drew analogies between the religious mania and demonic possession in seventeenth-century France and the modern method of demonizing victims to incite and justify political persecution."In medieval and early modern Christendom," Huxley observed, "the situation of sorcerers and their clients was almost perfectly analogous to that of Jews under Hitler, capitalists under Stalin, communists and fellow travelers in the United States. They were regarded as agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic at the best and, at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people."4

  In Huxley's book Sister Jeanne, provoked by a malicious mixture of sexual desire and jealousy, accuses Father Grandier of bewitching her. Similarly, in Miller's play, the young Abigail Williams, a servant in the Proctors' household, accuses John Proctor's wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft. By taking revenge on Elizabeth, who'd dismissed her, she hopes to recapture John, who'd ended their brief liaison. Proctor, known for his truthfulness, tries to save his wife by confessing his adultery and revealing Abigail's treacherous motives. But Elizabeth, lying to protect him, denies his guilt and condemns them both to death. Proctor is offered the chance to save his life by confessing to the crime of witchcraft, but saves his name and his soul by refusing to do so. Like Father Grandier, Proctor is innocent and shows exemplary courage in the face of death.

  The play's title is striking and vivid, but Miller later admitted that "nobody knew what a crucible was." Though the word suggests "crucifixion," it is actually a vessel for heating substances to high temperatures and thus, a severe and searching test. Miller used it to suggest the burning away of impurities, especially of sexual guilt. To emphasize this theme, he changed the ages of the historical figures – Proctor from sixty to his mid-thirties, Abigail from eleven to seventeen – and invented Proctor's adulterous relations with her. The play's dramatic center, he wrote, then became more personal and concerned "the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail Williams's determination to get Elizabeth murdered so that she could have John."

  In The Crucible, in which Proctor and Elizabeth (in one interpretation) represent Miller and his intransigent wife Mary, Elizabeth has been guilty of coldness toward John, which prompted his lechery, and has punished him for his sin by her emotional and sexual withdrawal. After discovering his infidelity, Elizabeth "has suddenly lost all faith in him." John both accuses her and pleads for mercy by exclaiming: "Spare me! You forget nothin' and forgive nothin'. Learn charity, woman."5 Miller's friends immediately recognized his confession of guilt in the work. Odets said, "No man would write this play unless his marriage is going to pieces." Kazan agreed that "the central character in it expresses contrition for a single act of infidelity. I had to guess that Art was publicly apologizing to his wife for what he'd done."

  Before Miller's affair with Marilyn became public, the contemporary political allegory (which merges with the autobiographical elements) attracted the most interest. The core of the play is Proctor's expiation of his sexual guilt. The characters who falsely confess in the play do so only to save themselves from death. But, as the critic Robert Warshow noted, Proctor's "tormentors will not be satisfied with his mere admission of guilt: he would be required to implicate others, thus betraying his innocent friends." Like his accused townsmen, Proctor must either confess to the imaginary crime of witchcraft or maintain his innocence and hang for it. Thinking of the witnesses who cooperated with HUAC and betrayed their friends, Miller explained Proctor's complex motives: "his pride, and a mixed sense of unworthiness, which is, I suppose, a very Christian idea. Literally, life wouldn't be worth living if he walked out of there having been instrumental in condemning people."6

  The analogy between the witch trials in Salem and the witch hunts of HUAC, though imperfect, is vivid and convincing. The argument of Miller's play is that those accused of being communists were just as innocent as those accused of being witches, that the American congressmen were as deluded and hysterical as the religious leaders of Salem. The Salem witnesses were eager to confess and incriminated others by telling lies to save their own lives; the HUAC witnesses were pressured to name names and incriminate others. They told the truth to save their own careers. If Proctor confesses he can live; if the communists confess they can work.

  Witches did not exist; communists were real, but (with very few exceptions) HUAC pers
ecuted people who had left the Party and were no longer communists. But both governments, driven by mass hysteria, believed the accused people actually were a menace to their security. In eighteenth-century Salem and twentieth-century America, the individual was forced to make a moral choice and decide his own fate. In Salem, confessions saved them from hanging; in contemporary America, naming names preserved their careers. But with HUAC, no one was ever acquitted. The victims either betrayed others or refused to testify, were blacklisted as communists and sent to jail.

  III

  Kazan responded to The Crucible, continued his moral debate with Miller and tried to defend his cooperation with HUAC by directing On the Waterfront (1955). The film was written by Budd Schulberg and co-starred Lee J. Cobb, both of whom had also named names. Though Miller condemned informing and Schulberg's screenplay justified it, Waterfront was strongly influenced by Miller's own screenplay, The Hook (1949), which was never produced. Miller wrote that The Hook – itself influenced by the solidarity and strike themes and by the rousing speeches to workers in Odets' Waiting for Lefty (1935) – "described the murderous corruption in the gangster-ridden Brooklyn longshoremen's union, whose leadership a group of rebel workers was trying to overthrow." The propagandistic theme of his script was "Give them a little organization and they'll come out fightin' . . . and they'll throw all these racketeers in the river."

  Though The Hook clearly preceded Waterfront, Kazan's extremely partisan biographer quoted Schulberg's dubious claim that he had "never read The Hook" nor discussed it with Kazan, and maintained that the charge of plagiarism "is absurd."7 In fact, the similarities of the two scripts are unmistakable. When Miller pulled out of the projected film of The Hook after Harry Cohn insisted that the gangsters be changed to communists, Kazan took the idea to his fellow informer, Budd Schulberg. In both Hook and Waterfront the villains are not communists, but gangsters. Both take place around the New York waterfront, describe the corruption of labor unions by criminals and portray the hero's struggle to lead the longshoremen against the racketeers who exploit them. Both have scenes of desperate dockers gathering for jobs in the cold mist of dawn, a rough crowd fighting for work tokens that are thrown among them, a fatal accident when a winch drops a heavy load on a worker in the hold of a ship, and a man on foot pursued and hunted down by a car. Both have a tender scene set in a park playground, in which the main character sits on a children's swing. Miller's hero, Marty Ferrara, sees his wife Therese (whom he calls Terry) in the park; Schulberg's hero, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) courts Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) on the swings of the playground. Both heroes rather bitterly lament that they've never been able to realize their potential and both hope to achieve something better in their lives. Another critic has pointed out that "Farragut, Rocky, and Jack Uptown in The Hook are essentially revived in On the Waterfront as Big Mac, Charley Malloy, and Johnny Friendly," and that "the ending of On the Waterfront owes much to the ending of The Hook, in which Miller has a final shot of 'Marty walking, silent, Old Dominick beside him, and the Gang near him. . . . Walking toward us, his face elated, determined, serious . . . and as he walks the crowd of men behind him thickens as they all pour out of the hall. And it keeps thickening, widening . . . FADE OUT.'"

  Martin Gottfried speculated that Miller and Kazan came to an understanding about The Hook and On the Waterfront before the director testified at HUAC. The bargain was that "Kazan would not inform on Miller and in return Miller would not object to his making a movie about labor unions on the waterfront." But this theory fails to note that Kazan was a Party member in 1934–35, when Miller was still a teenager and not yet involved with left-wing organizations. It also fails to explain why Miller never condemned the obvious plagiarism in Timebends, in his essays or in his numerous interviews. When questioned directly about this in the 1980s, Miller was unaccountably vague and apparently unconcerned:

  BIGSBY: [The Hook] sounds remarkably like a film that Kazan did eventually make, On the Waterfront.

  MILLER: Well, that was later, after his problem with the Un-American Activities Committee.

  BIGSBY: Is there a direct relationship between your script and that one?

  MILLER: I have no way of knowing. Of course they are both waterfront pictures. The one succeeded the other but they were quite different pictures.8

  In fact, Miller did have a way of knowing and could easily have compared the two pictures, which were very similar and not quite different. But he did not wish to criticize Kazan after patching up their friendship and working with him again on After the Fall.

  In On the Waterfront – as in Conrad's Under Western Eyes (1911) – the hero, after betraying a friend and causing his death, falls in love with the friend's sister and, risking the loss of her love, feels driven to confess his crime to her. In the film, Terry is torn between a refusal to rat on his friends and (influenced by the saintly Edie) a willingness to testify for a righteous cause and do his duty as a conscientious citizen. At first, Terry refuses to accuse his brother Charley (Rod Steiger), who works for the corrupt union officials. But after the mob kills Charley because he cannot guarantee Terry's silence, Terry redeems himself and tells the big boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), "I'm glad what I done. . . . I was rattin' on myself all them years and didn't know it, helpin' punks like you." In his autobiography, Kazan maintained that there was a clear analogy between Terry's testifying against the corrupt mobsters and his own testimony before HUAC. Terry's crucial line "was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I'd testified as I had."

  But the justification for naming names in On the Waterfront is specious and corrupt. Terry testifies against a criminal gang, Kazan and Schulberg against their own friends and associates. Terry testifies to send a murderer to jail, Kazan and Schulberg to advance their careers. Terry, at great risk to himself, testifies to help his colleagues, Kazan and Schulberg to destroy innocent people. Unwilling at first to work with the tainted Kazan, Brando was finally persuaded to take the role. He later felt he'd also been betrayed by the director and writer, who "made the film to justify finking on their friends."9

  A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956) – which reprises Miller's portrayal of the informer in The Crucible – continued his dialogue with both Mary and Kazan. Miller recalled that the play was inspired by the story "of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his very home, in order to break an engagement by one of them and his niece." In View the Italian longshoreman Eddie Carbone is obsessed by a quasi-incestuous passion for his orphaned niece, Catherine, who lives in his house. When the illegal immigrants, Rodolpho and his brother Marco, secretly move in, Catherine falls in love with Rodolpho. Carbone, who becomes increasingly deranged and cannot persuade Catherine to break with her fiancé, betrays them to the immigration officials and is killed by Marco.

  In the revised version, Miller deleted the pretentious passages and use of verse, and expanded the original one-act play to a full-length work "by opening up the viewpoint of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone's wife, toward his gathering tragedy." He noted that "both The Crucible and A View from the Bridge are about the awesomeness of a passion which, despite its contradicting the self-interest of the individual . . . despite every kind of warning, despite even the destruction of the moral beliefs of the individual, proceeds to magnify its power over him until it destroys him."

  A View from the Bridge is filled with tragic irony. Eddie, hinting that Rodolpho is homosexual, keeps repeating that he's "not right," but he himself is impotent. Eddie blindly demands a public apology from Marco, whom he's betrayed. Marco, whom Eddie likes, is threatened with deportation and will be jailed for murder. Rodolpho, whom Eddie hates, marries Catherine and remains in America. The play is a study in sexual frustration. Eddie has no sex life with Beatrice; Marco is separated from his wife, who remained in Italy; Eddie does everything in his power to prevent the love affair of Catherine and Rodolpho.

  In The
Crucible Proctor commits adultery because of Elizabeth's sexual coldness; in View Carbone's forbidden lust for Catherine (partly based on Miller's love for Marilyn) makes him both guilty and impotent, and he no longer sleeps with his wife (based on Mary). In The Crucible Proctor is hanged for refusing to inform on his friends; in View Carbone is murdered for betraying Beatrice's cousin. In both plays the revenge and betrayal by Abigail and Carbone are provoked by sexual, not political, motives. In The Crucible Proctor remains faithful to his principles; in View Carbone betrays not only Rodolpho, but also his wife, his niece and his personal code of honor.

  Arguing against the morality of The Crucible, On the Waterfront praised informers and portrayed them in a self-sacrificial light. A View From the Bridge, in turn, challenged that view and revealed the true motives of self-interest beneath the spurious displays of virtue. As Eric Bentley observed of View and Waterfront, "the climax of both movie and play is reached when the protagonist gives the police information which leads to the arrest of some of his associates. . . . In the movie the act of informing is virtuous, whereas, in the play, it is evil."10 After taking a passionate stand against those, like Kazan and Schulberg, who named names for HUAC, Miller would himself face that difficult test and make that moral choice when he was also summoned to testify before the committee.

  Ten

  Witch Hunt

  (1956–1958)

  I

  In 1954 Joe McCarthy was formally condemned by the senate, rashly attacked President Eisenhower and suddenly fell from power. In turn, the House Un-American Activities Committee felt the decline of its own influence and desperately sought public support to maintain its inquisitorial Red-baiting. Miller was not a prime candidate for their inquiries. He had never been a communist, did not work in Hollywood and could not be questioned about communist subversion in the movie industry. But after he and Marilyn resumed their romance in New York, rumors of their liaison became widely known and attracted the attention of HUAC. The committee summoned him to appear during their investigation of passport abuse. They suspected, given his association with left-wing and communist causes, that he might spread anti-American propaganda abroad. After many anxious months, Miller was finally called to testify before the committee on June 21, 1956, and continued his legal battle with HUAC for the next two years.