The Sheila Variations

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

This is truly bizarre. Today happens to be Arthur Miller’s birthday. His is the next book on the shelf. So happy birthday, Arthur Miller.

When Timebends came out, in 1987, I remember there being mixed reviews. I think mainly folks were expecting salacious revelations about Marilyn Monroe – and the book decidedly does not deliver on that score. But why does it not deliver? Because Marilyn Monroe was not some unearthly sexual goddess to Arthur Miller. She was a real girl, sweet, troubled, innocent, lovely – and she was his wife. He does not take us into their bedroom, and he does not “explain” her. She can’t be “explained” by one person alone, and it is not up to Miller to interpret her for us. The Marilyn sections of the book are very lovely – I loved the picture of her that emerged … but it’s certainly not the whole book, it is not even the context in which the entire book is placed. It is an event, like any other … something that made up a good deal of his emotional life for some time, as well as his creative life (as he tried to write material that would show the world she was a “real actress”). (Once upon a time I put together a giant post called “The Making of The Misfits” – filled with photos and book excerpts about that troubled film-shoot. The whole thing really had began as Miller’s desire to write something he felt Marilyn could do, something worthy of her.) But in general, the Marilyn in the book is revealed as a real person, maybe more beautiful than most, certainly more famous … but a woman with anxieties, quirks, and a lovely sense of humor and intellect that he found captivating.

Additionally, there is a lot of politics in the book (which is also not surprising) – and in many ways it gives a grand sweeping look at the journey of the American Left from the 30s to the 50s … well, and yes, into the 60s – but by then many of the definitions had changed. Miller was from New York, and had grown up going to see productions at the Group Theatre, that bastion of the American Left, and had been gobsmacked by Clifford Odets’ fiery language, and the vision that theatre could be somehow relevant and revolutionary. His compassion for the downtrodden, the persecuted, the forgotten masses could be seen as radical (and it certainly was at the time) – yet at the same time he had great contempt for the Soviet system of oppression and censorship, and worked hard through his life to support the persecuted writers in the Soviet bloc. And while he had seen the downside to American capitalism in his own family misfortunes, he was also amazed during the groundbreaking production of Salesman in Beijing in 1983 – which took China by storm. I actually remember some of the news reports about that production trickling down to me in junior high. I had read Salesman by then, so I knew of it … but that production can be seen, in certain lights, as a watershed moment in China’s cultural history. People went NUTS for Salesman in China. They had gone NUTS for Salesman in America in the 1940s and there, 50 years later, in a Communist country, they went nuts again. Even more nuts. Miller was amazed by the response. The curtain would go down at the end of the production, and Chinese men in suits would be hugging one another in the aisles, weeping. Amazing. It had spoken to them, to their experience, their hopes and dreams – another culture, another political system – none of that mattered. The message of Salesman, of the inherent dignity of man, despite his financial success, had a deep deep resonance for the Chinese. Salesman traveled, in other words. John Updike shares an interesting anecdote about Miller, which, I think, might surprise some people who just brush Miller off as a radical:

I went to the Soviet Union [in 1964] for a month as part of a cultural exchange program … I came way from that month … with a hardened antipathy to communism …

There was something bullying egocentric about my admirable Soviet friends, a preoccupation with their own tortured situations that shut out all light from beyond. They were like residents of a planet so heavy that even their gazes were sucked back into its dark center. Arthur Miller, no reactionary, said it best when, a few years later, he and I and some other Americans riding the cultural-exchange bandwagon had entertained, in New York or Connecticut, several visiting Soviet colleagues. The encounter was handsomely catered, the dialogue loud and lively, the will toward friendship was earnest and in its way intoxicating, but upon our ebullient guests’ departure Miller looked at me and said sighingly, “Jesus, don’t they make you glad you’re an American?”

Miller’s family lost everything in the stock market crash, and so their situation was quite reduced. I believe they moved to Brooklyn, a huge downward step, off the island, so to speak, and Miller was a young child, but very much remembers the stress and fear of that time. Much of his memory would be put to use later on when writing Death of a Salesman – the tenement buildings, the change of Brooklyn from a more rural area to something crowded and fetid … Not to mention the fact that he did have an uncle who was a salesman, a brash funny and vaguely pathetic man – an early prototype for Willy Loman.

I did not go into Timebends with any specific expectation like some people did. I didn’t think, “He had BETTER talk about Marilyn Monroe for 300 pages straight!” Or “He had BETTER dish on how he felt about Kazan and the HUAC – if he doesn’t? I will HATE the book” … or etc. etc. I found some of it didactic and rather humorless, and much of his political sections were boring and preachy … but you move through them and then get on to the business of theatre. To Miller, it all was one. You can tell that in his plays as well. His plays always have a “message”, some social, political, or cultural message … and it is that reason that they can sometimes seem didactic in a way that Tennessee Williams’ plays never do. It’s interesting: they were contemporaries, the two giant stars of the American stage, the two men (with O’Neill and Odets in the generations before paving the way) who brought an American voice and an American perspective where before there had been none. Much of the Broadway fare in the early years of the 20th century, up into the 1920s, was written by Americans, sure, but they took as their inspiration the works of Noel Coward, or Shaw, or other Europeans. It was not a truly American art-form. Vaudeville was, but not the mainstage of the Broadway theatres. That began to change with O’Neill – and Odets … two wildly different playwrights with different perspectives … but they cleared the space for what would happen in the 40s, and 50s – when out came playwrights like Miller, and Williams, and Inge, and Saroyan. These playwrights are American to the core. It is a voice I am talking about, a sensibility – it is its own thing, and these guys helped put American on the map, at least in a theatrical sense.

Miller’s book details his own part of that historic moment in our cultural life.

It has since come to light that Miller and his last wife – Inge Morath, a photographer – had a child who had Down’s Syndrome, and Miller was so horrified and embarrassed that he put the child in an institution and never saw him again. He never even acknowledged the child’s existence. For decades. Inge Morath would go to visit her son, but it was a horrible situation. The child is now a man, and many of Miller’s old friends have reached out to him – but Miller himself never did. And there’s not a word of this in Timebends, which is truly chilling. The daughter he had with Morath – Rebecca – is now a director, actress, writer – and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis – and Miller showers her with praise and love in Timebends. The story about the Down’s Syndrome child came out this past year – so reading Timebends in the 80s, you’d never ever know that this giant THING was missing. Miller had some major demons going on, obviously, and I do wonder what price he paid (psychologically, I mean) in keeping this huge thing a secret. His last play was Finishing the Picture (2004) and it was (obviously, if you know Miller’s life) the story of the making of The Misfits, with its star actress going deeper and deeper into madness and incomprehensibility, as the hard-drinking macho cast and crew wait for her to appear, so that they can “finish the picture”. Miller was 90 years old, and there he is … going back in time to a moment when maybe he thought he could “save” someone … going over it and over it (as he had done before, in his play After the Fall) … maybe in doing so he thought he could change his own past. He died before the revelation came out about his abandoned son, so naturally there has been MUCH chatter on the airwaves about it. For my part, it makes me look at his work in a different way: the evocations of fathers and sons, so common in his work … the passing on of the torch, so important in all matters of family and mortality … what do we pass on? What have we, as men, as fathers, made of ourselves? What can I give to my son? What do I have to give? There is a whole new way to look at these existential questions now. It’s awful, but I wonder if a lot of his torment and didacticism came from the fact that he had done this awful thing and he felt the need to hide it.

The excerpt I share below is giant, so sit back, and get ready. It is the story of the making of Death of a Salesman, and it is not only my favorite section in the book – but perhaps my favorite section of ANY book. He’s an elegant writer, not too emotional, but his memories of that time in his life are intense and you really get the sense that he was pushing himself THROUGH something, he was dreaming himself into a space where he could find his voice and share it. Not an easy thing to do. He had already had one success – All My Sons … but with Salesman he went deeper. It was profound for him. I will not re-cap his thoughts here – they are all below.

But the elements of this story resonate for me, and have for years, ever since I first read it:

— his experience of seeing Streetcar Named Desire for the first time, and what it said to him, what it did to him … It basically gave him permission. To go big, to go huge, to be relevant and important … not to imitate Williams, that could not be done, they were different men … but to stop being microscopic and go into the macro-level. (His giving-of-the-props to Williams here is incredibly generous. Because he could very easily have taken the credit himself for what happened to American theatre in the 1940s … Salesman was as huge a phenomenon as Streetcar … but he doesn’t. He hands that to Williams.)

— his feeling that he needed to build a shack with his own hands to write the play (he didn’t know why he had to, but he knew he did …) Here he is in front of the shack, many years later.

— the fact that he would finish work on the play after a long day, and find that he had been crying all day … without even realizing it

— Kazan signing on to direct – a huge deal. (And Kazan’s response to reading the play for the first time … gulp …)

— finding their Willy Loman. The story of Lee J. Cobb – who was really too young for the part, he was the contemporary of Arthur Kennedy who played his own son … but how Cobb basically insisted that the part was his and his alone.

— then – the UNBELIEVABLE story of the moment in rehearsal when Lee J. Cobb “got it”. I have goosebumps right now just thinking about it.

— and then: opening night … and what happened in that theatre that night.

It is a magnificent story, from beginning to end, and one I treasure. It feels, in a weird way, like it belongs to me. In the same way that I feel that the signing of the Declaration of Independence belongs to me, or that Walt Whitman belongs to me, or that the first walk on the moon belongs to me. These are stories that make up our culture, our history … and they are part of me, mine.

At the end of Death of a Salesman, Willy’s wife Linda says what are probably the most famous lines in the entire play:

Don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

And so it has.

EXCERPT FROM Timebends: A Life, by Arthur Miller

Already in the sixties I was surprised by the common tendency to think of the late forties and early fifties as some sort of renaissance in the New York theatre. If that was so, I was unaware of it. I thought the theatre a temple being rotted out with commercialized junk, where mostly by accident an occasional good piece of work appeared, usually under some disguise of popular cultural coloration such as a movie star in a leading role.

That said, it now needs correction; it was also a time when the audience was basically the same for musicals and light entertainment as for the ambitious stuff and had not yet been atomized, as it would be by the mid-fifties, into young and old, hip and square, or even political left and middle and right. So the playwright’s challenge was to please not a small sensitized supporting clique but an audience representing, more or less, all of America. With ticket prices within reason, this meant that an author was writing for his peers, and if such was really not the case statistically, it was sufficiently so to support an illusion that had a basis in reality. After all, it was not thought particularly daring to present T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party on Broadway, or Laurence Olivier in a Greek tragedy, or Giraudoux’s The Madwomen of Chaillot, or any number of other ambitious works. To be sure, such shows had much shorter lives than the trash, but that was to be expected, for most people would much rather laugh than cry, rather watch an actor being hit on the head by a pig bladder than by some painful truth.

The net of it all was that serious writers could reasonably assume they were addressing the whole American mix, and so their plays, whether successfully or not, stretched toward a wholeness of experience that would not require specialists or a coterie to be understood. As alienated a spirit as he was, O’Neill tried for the big audience, and Clifford Odets no less so, along with every other writer longing to prophesy to America, from Whitman and Melville to Dreiser and Hemingway and so on.

For Europe’s playwrights the situation was profoundly different, with society already being split beyond healing between the working class and its allies, who were committed to a socialist destiny, and the bourgeois mentality that sought an art of reassurance and the pleasures of forgetting what was happening in the streets. (The first American plays I saw left me wondering where the characters came from. The people I knew were fanatics about surviving, but onstage everyone seemed to have mysteriously guaranteed incomes, and though every play had to have something about “love”, there was nothing about sex, which was all there was in Brooklyn, at least that I ever noticed.) An American avant-garde, therefore, if only because the domination of society by the middle class was profoundly unchallenged, could not simply steal from Brecht or even Shaw and expect its voice to reach beyond the small alienated minority that had arrived in their seats already converted to its aims. That was not the way to change the world.

For a play to do that it had to reach precisely those who accepted everything as it was; great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known. I knew only one other writer with the same approach, even if he surrounded his work with a far different aura. This was Tennessee Williams.

If only because he came up at a time when homosexuality was absolutely unacknowledgeable in a public figure, Williams had to belong to a minority culture and understood in his bones what a brutal menace the majority could be if aroused against him. I lived with much the same sense of alienation, albeit for other reasons. Certainly I never regarded him as the sealed-off aesthete he was thought to be. There is a radical politics of the soul as well as of the ballot box and the picket line. If he was not an activist, it was not for lack of a desire for justice, nor did he consider a theatre profoundly involved in society and politics, the venerable tradition reaching back to the Greeks, somehow unaesthetic or beyond his interest.

The real theatre – as opposed to the sequestered academic one – is always straining at the inbuilt inertia of a society that always wants to deny change and the pain it necessarily involves. But it is in this effort that the musculature of important work is developed. In a different age, perhaps even only fifteen years later, in the sixties, Williams might have had a more comfortably alienated audience to deal with, one that would have relieved the pressure upon him to extend himself beyond a supportive cult environment, and I think this might well have narrowed the breadth of his work and its intensity. In short, there was no renaissance in the American forties, but there was a certain balance within the audience – a balance, one might call it, between the alienated and the conformists – that gave sufficient support to the naked cry of the heart and, simultaneously, enough resistance to force it into a rhetoric that at one stroke could be broadly understandable and yet faithful to the pain that had pressed the author to speak.

When Kazan invited me up to New Haven to see the new Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire – it seemed to me a rather too garishly attention-getting title – I was already feeling a certain amount of envious curiosity since I was still unable to commit myself to the salesman play, around which I kept suspiciously circling and sniffing. But at the same time I hoped that Streetcar would be good; it was not that I was high-minded but simply that I shared the common assumption of the time that the greater the number of exciting plays there were on Broadway the better for each of us., At least in our minds there was still something approximating a theatre culture to which we more or less pridefully belonged, and the higher its achievement the greater the glory we all shared. The playwright was then king of the hill, not the star actor or director, and certainly not the producer or theatre owner, as would later by the case. (At a recently televised Tony Awards ceremony, recognizing achievement in the theatre, not a single playwright was presented to the public, while two lawyers who operated a chain of theatres were showered with the gratitude of all. It reminded me of Caligula making his horse a senator.)

Streetcar – especially when it was still so fresh and the actors almost as amazed as the audience at the vitality of this theatrical experience – opened one specific door for me. Not the story or the characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge to Europe for me, to Jouvet’s performance in Ondine, to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or, as with Maxwell Anderson, only used archaically, as though eloquence could only be justified by cloaking it in sentimental romanticism.

Returning to New York, I felt speeded up, in motion now. With Streetcar, Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words, and better yet, a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself and the world’s wonders. I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form, and now it was clear to me that this must be primarily verbal. The language would of course have to be recognizably his to begin with, but it seemed possible now to infiltrate it with a kind of superconsciousness. The play, after all, involved the attempts of his son and his wife and Willy himself to understand what was killing him. And to understand meant to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the “natural”. If the structure had to mirror the psychology as directly as could be done, it was still a psychology hammered into its strange shape by society, the business life Willy had lived and believed in. The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two.

By April of 1948 I felt I could find such a form, but it would have to be done, I thought, in a single sitting, in a night or a day, I did not know why. I stopped making my notes in our Grace Court house in Brooklyn Heights and drove up alone one morning to the country house we had bought the previous year. We had spent one summer there in that old farmhouse, which had been modernized by its former owner, a greeting card manufacturer named Philip Jaffe, who as a sideline published a thin magazine for China specialists called Amerasia. Mary worked as one of his secretaries and so had the first news that he wanted to sell the place. In a year or two he would be on trial for publishing without authorization State Department reports from John Stewart Service, among a number of other China experts who recognized a Mao victory as inevitable and warned of the futility of America continuing to back her favorite, Chiang Kai-shek. Amerasia had been a vanity publication, in part born of Jaffe’s desire for a place in history, but it nevertheless braved the mounting fury of the China lobby against any opinion questioning the virtues of the Chiang forces. At his trial, the government produced texts of conversations that Jaffe claimed could only have been picked up by long-range microphone as he and his friends walked the isolated backcountry roads near this house. Service was one of many who were purged from the State Department, leaving it blinded to Chinese reality but ideologically pure.

But all that was far from my mind this day; what I was looking for on my land was a spot for a little shack I wanted to build, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. I found a knoll in the nearby woods and returned to the city, where instead of working on the play I drew plans for the framing, of which I really had very vague knowledge and no experience. A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in two days at most, but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself. In reality, all I had was the first two lines and a death – “Will!” and “It’s all right. I came back.” Further than that I dared not, would not, venture until I could sit in the completed studio, four walls, two windows, a floor, a roof, and a door.

“It’s all right. I came back” rolled over and over in my head as I tried to figure out how to join the roof rafters in air unaided, until I finally put them together on the ground and swung them into position all nailed together. When I closed in the roof it was a miracle, as though I had mastered the rain and cooled the sun. And all the while afraid I would never be able to penetrate past those first two lines. I started writing one morning – the tiny studio was still unpainted and smelled of raw wood and sawdust, and the bags of nails were still stashed in a corner with my tools. The sun of April had found my windows to pour through, and the apple buds were moving on the wild trees, showing their first pale blue petals. I wrote all day until dark, and then I had dinner and went back and wrote until some hour in the darkness between midnight and four. I had skipped a few areas that I knew would give me no trouble in the writing and gone for the parts that had to be muscled into position. By the next morning I had done the first half, the first act of two. When I lay down to sleep I realized I had been weeping – my eyes still burned and my throat was sore from talking it all out and shouting and laughing. I would be stiff when I woke, aching as if I had played four hours of football or tennis and now had to face the start of another game. It would take some six more weeks to complete Act II.

My laughter during the writing came mostly at Willy’s contradicting himself so arrantly, and out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden quartet – always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, a clown, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too. yes, and in some far corner of my mind possibly something political; there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making, if only because, as I had witnessed, Europe was dying or dead, and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer. On the play’s opening night a woman who shall not be named was outraged, calling it “a time bomb under American capitalism”; I hoped it was, or at least under the bullshit of American capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.

But some thirty-five years later, the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more obvious over the decades in the play’s hundreds of productions throughout the world: Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of his lies and his self-deluding exaggeration as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what he wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count. When he roared out, “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!” it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of leveling. (The play was the same age as the Chinese revolution.) I did not know in 1948 in Connecticut that I was sending a message of resurgent individualism to the China of 1983 – especially when the revolution it had signified, it seemed at the time, the long-awaited rule of reason and the historic ending of chaotic egocentricity and selfish aggrandizement. Ah. yes. I had not reckoned on a young Chinese student saying to a CBS interviewer in the theatre lobby, “We are moved by it because we also want to be number one, and to be rich and successful.” What else is this but human unpredictability, which goes on escaping the nets of unfreedom?

I did not move far from the phone for two days after sending the script to Kazan. By the end of the second silent day I would have accepted his calling to tell me that it was a scrambled egg, an impenetrable, unstageable piece of wreckage. And his tone when he finally did call was alarmingly sober.

“I’ve read your play.” He sounded at a loss as to how to give me the bad news. “My God, it’s so sad.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

“I just put it down. I don’t know what to say. My father…” He broke off, the first of a great many men – and women – who would tell me that Willy was their father. I still thought he was letting me down easy. “It’s a great play, Artie. I want to do it in the fall or winter. I’ll start thinking about casting.” He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. Such is art.

For the first time in months, as I hung up the phone, I could see my family clearly again. As was her way, Mary accepted the great news with a quiet pride, as though something more expressive would spoil me, but I too thought I should remain an ordinary citizen, even an anonymous one (although I did have a look at the new Studebaker convertible, the Raymond Lowery design that was the most beautiful American car of the time, and bought one as soon as the play opened). But Mary’s mother, who was staying the week with us, was astonished. “Another play?” she said, as though the success of All My Sons had been enough for one lifetime. She had unknowingly triggered that play when she gossiped about a young girl somewhere in central Ohio who had turned her father in to the FBI for having manufactured faulty aircraft parts during the war.

But who should produce Salesman? Kazan and I walked down Broadway from the park where we had been strolling and talking about the kind of style the production would need. Kazan’s partnership with Harold Clurman had recently broken up, and I had no idea about a producer. He mentioned Cheryl Crawford, whom I hardly knew, and then Kermit Bloomgarden, an accountant turned producer, whom I had last seen poring over Herman Shumlin’s account books a couple of years before when Shumlin turned down All My Sons. I had never seen Bloomgarden smile, but he had worked for the Group Theatre and Kazan knew him, and as much because we happened to have come to a halt a few yards from his office building as for any other reason, he said, “Well, let’s go up and say hello.” When we stood across the desk from him and Kazan said he had a play of mine for him to read, Bloomgarden squeezed up his morose version of a smile, or at least a suggestion of one he planned to have next week.

This whimsical transforming of another person’s life reminds me of a similar walk with Kazan uptown from a garage on Twenty-sixth Street where he had left his old Pontiac to be repaired. He began wondering aloud whom he should ask to head a new acting school to be called the Actors Studio, which he and Clurman and Robert Lewis and Cheryl Crawford were organizing. None of these founders was prepared to run the place, Kazan, Clurman, and Lewis being too busy with their flourishing directing careers, and Crawford with her work as a producer. “Lee Strasberg is probably the best guy for it. He’d certainly be able to put in the time.” In due course Strasberg became not only the head of the Actors Studio but also its heart and soul, and for the general public its organizer. So his work there was made possibly by his having been unemployable at the right moment. But that, come to think of it, is as good a way as any to be catapulted into world fame.

Willy had to be small, I thought, but we soon realized that Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body. The script had been sent to Lee Cobb, an actor I remembered mainly as a mountainous hulk covered with a towel in a Turkish bath in an Irwin Shaw play, with the hilarious oy vey delivery of a forever persecuted businessman. Having flown himself across the country in his own two-engine airplane, he sat facing me in Bloomgarden’s office and announced, “This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man.” And he did indeed seem to be the man when a bit later in a coffee shop downstairs he looked up at the young waitress and smiled winsomely as though he had to win her loving embrace before she could be seduced into bringing him his turkey sandwich and coffee – ahead of all the other men’s orders, and only after bestowing on his unique slice of pickle her longing kiss.

But while I trusted his and Kazan’s experience, I lacked any conviction of my own about him until one evening in our Grace Court living room Lee looked down at my son, Bob, on the floor and I heard him laugh at something funny the child had said. The sorrow in his laughter flew out at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously reedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving.

“You know – or do you? -,” Lee said to me one day in Bloomgarden’s office a week or so before rehearsals were about to begin, “that this play is a watershed. The American theatre will never be the same.” I could only gulp and nod in silence at his portentousness – which I feared might augur a stately performance – and hope that he would make Willy come alive anyway.

But as rehearsals proceeded in the small, periodically abandoned theatre on the ratty roof of the New Amsterdam on Forty-second street, where Ziegfeld in the twenties had staged some intimate revues, Lee seemed to move about in a buffalo’s stupefied trance, muttering his lines, plodding with deathly slowness from position to position, and behaving like a man who had been punched in the head. “He’s just learning it,” Kazan shakily reassured me after three or four days. I waited as a week went by, and then ten days, and all that was emerging from Lee Cobb’s throat was a bumpy hum. The other actors were nearing performance levels, but when they had to get a response from Lee all their rhythms slowed to near collapse. Kazan was no longer so sure and kept huddling with Lee, trying to pump him up. Nor did Lee offer any explanation, and I wondered whether he thought to actually play the part like a man with a foot in the grave. Between us, Kazan and I began referring to him as “the Walrus”.

On about the twelfth day, in the afternoon, with Eddie Kook, our lighting supplier, and Jimmy Proctor, our pressman, and Kazan and myself in the seats, Lee stood up as usual from the bedroom chair and turned to Mildred Dunnock and bawled, “No, there’s more people now … There’s more people!” and, gesturing toward the empty upstage where the window was supposed to be, caused a block of apartment houses to spring up in my brain, and the air became sour with the smell of kitchens where once there had been only the odors of earth, and he began to move frighteningly, with such ominous reality that my chest felt pressed down by an immense weight. After the scene had gone on for a few minutes, I glanced around to see if the others had my reaction. Jim Proctor had his head bent into his hands and was weeping, Eddie Kook was looking shocked, almost appalled, and tears were pouring over his cheeks, and Kazan behind me was grinning like a fiend, gripping his temples with both hands, and we knew we had it – there was an unmistakable wave of life moving across the air of the empty theatre, a wave of Willy’s pain and protest. I began to weep myself at some point that was not particularly sad, but it was as much, I think, out of pride in our art, in Lee’s magical capacity to imagine, to collect within himself every mote of life since Genesis and to let it pour forth. He stood up there like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position.

At the end of the act, Del Hughes, our sweet but hardheaded, absolutely devoted, competent stage manager, came out from a wing and looked out at us. His stunned eyes started us all laughing. I ran up and kissed Lee, who pretended to be surprised. “But what did you expect, Arthur?” he said, his eyes full of his playful vanity. My God, I thought – he really is Willy! On the subway going home to Brooklyn I felt once again the aching pain in my muscles that the performance had tensed up so tightly, just as in the writing time. And when I thought of it later, it seemed as though Lee’s sniffing around the role for so long recapitulated what I had done in the months before daring to begin to write.

The whole production was, I think, unusual for the openness with which every artist involved sought out his truths. It was all a daily, almost moment-to-moment testing of ideas. There was much about the play that had never been done before, and this gave an uncustomary excitement to our discussions about what would or would not be understood by an audience. The setting I had envisioned was three bare platforms and only the minimum necessary furniture for a kitchen and two bedrooms, with the Boston hotel room as well as Howard’s office to be played in open space. Jo Mielziner took those platforms and designed an environment around them that was romantic and dreamlike yet at the same time lower-middle-class. His set, in a word, was an emblem of Willy’s intense longing for the promises of the past, with which indeed the present state of his mind is always conflicting, and it was thus both a lyrical design and a dramatic one. The only notable mistake in his early concept was to put the gas hot-water heater in the middle of the kitchen, a symbol of menace that I thought obvious and Kazan finally eliminated as a hazard to his staging. But by balancing on the edges of the ordinary bounds of verisimilitude, Jo was stretching reality in parallel with the script, just as Kazan did by syncopating the speech rhythms of the actors. He made Mildred Dunnock deliver her long first-act speeches to the boys at double her normal speed, then he doubled that, and finally she – until recently a speech teacher – was standing there drumming out words as fast as her very capable tongue could manage. Gradually he slacked her off, but the drill straightened her spine, and her Linda filled up with outrage and protest rather than self-pity and mere perplexity. Similarly, to express the plays’ inner life, the speech rate in some scenes or sections was unnaturally speeded or slowed.

My one scary hour came with the climactic restaurant fight between Willy and the boys, when it all threatened to come apart. I had written a scene in which Biff resolves to tell Willy that the former boss from whom Biff had planned to borrow money to start a business has refused to so much as see him and does not even remember his working for the firm years ago. But on meeting his brother and father in the restaurant, he realizes that Willy’s psychological stress will not permit the whole catastrophic truth to be told, and he begins to trim the bad news. From moment to moment the scene as originally written had so many shadings of veracity that Arthur Kennedy, a very intelligent citizen indeed, had trouble shifting from a truth to a half-truth to a fragment of truth and back to the whole truth, all of it expressed in quickly delivered, very short lines. The three actors, with Kazan standing beside them, must have repeated the scene through a whole working day, and it still wobbled. “I don’t see how we can make it happen,” Kazan said as we left the theatre that evening. “Maybe you ought to try simplifying it for them.” I went home and worked through the night and brought in a new scene, which played much better and became the scene as finally performed.

The other changes were very small and a pleasure to make because they involved adding lines rather than cutting or rewriting. In Act I, Willy is alone in the kitchen muttering to himself, and as his memories overtake him the lighting brightens, the exterior of the house becomes covered with leaf shadows as of old, and in a moment the boys are calling to him in their youthful voices, entering the stage as they were in their teens. There was not sufficient time, however, for them to descend from their beds in the dark on the specially designed elevators and finish stripping out of their pajamas into sweaters and trousers and sneakers, so I had to add time to Willy’s monologue. But that was easy since he loved talking to himself about his boys and his vision of them.

The moving in and out of the present had to be not simply indicative but a tactile transformation that the audience could feel as well as comprehend, and indeed come to dread as returning memory threatens to bring Willy closer to his end. Lighting was thus decisively important, and Mielziner, who also lit the show, with Eddie Kook by his side, once worked an entire afternoon lighting a chair.

Willy, in his boss’s office, has exploded once too often, and Howard has gone out, leaving him alone. He turns to the office chair, which in the old days was occupied by Frank, Howard’s father, who had promised Willy shares in the firm as a reward for all his good work, and as he does so the chair must become alive, quite as though his old boss were in it as he addresses him: “Frank, Frank, don’t you remember what you told me? …” Rather than being lit, the chair subtly seemed to begin emanating light. But this was not merely an exercise in theatre magic; it confirmed that we had moved inside Willy’s system of loss, that we were seeing the world as he saw it even as we kept a critical distance and saw it for ourselves.

To set the chair off and make the light change work, all surrounding lights had to dim imperceptibly. That was when Eddie Kook, who had become so addicted to the work on this play that his office at his Century Lighting Company had all but ceased operations, turned to me and said, “You’ve been asking me why we need so many lights. [We were using more than most musicals.] The reason is right there in front of you – it takes more lights to make it dark.” With fewer lights each one would have to be dimmed more noticeably than if there were many, each one fractionally reduced in intensity to create the change without apparent source or contrivance.

Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and Kazan thought Cobb ought to hear some of it, wanting, I suppose, to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended. The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy’s part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat at either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past.

As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it.