Marilyn Monroe (9 page)

Kazan had a great deal on his mind as he arrived in Los Angeles on March 19. When he picked up a copy of that day’s
Hollywood Reporter
, his worst fears were realized: “Elia Kazan, subpoenaed for the
Un-American Activities Committee session, confessed Commie membership but refused to supply any new evidence on his old pals from the Group Theater days.” Aware of the impact the item was likely to have, he telephoned Marilyn as a way of forgetting his troubles. She seemed to occupy another plane of existence, one that had nothing to do with HUAC. She was on her way out to a dinner date, she explained, but she would come to the Bel Air Hotel afterward. He left the door unlocked and fell asleep.

Marilyn spent the evening with Joe. Finally, she entered Kazan’s room at 3:30 a.m. and crept into bed. At this point, she knew nothing of the film he was supposed to be setting up with Warner. She was unaware that he had in his hands the project she longed for, with a lead role that would have been perfect for her. Excitedly Marilyn told him that after tonight she didn’t plan to see him again. She had found the man she wanted to marry. Naturally, Kazan assumed she meant Arthur Miller.

“He comes all the way down from San Francisco just to have dinner with me,” Marilyn added, “and we haven’t even done it yet!”

Kazan, puzzled, asked who she was talking about.

“Joe,” said Marilyn. “He wants to marry me, and I really like him. He’s not like these movie people. He’s dignified.”

Kazan listened to Marilyn chatter on about Joe DiMaggio; then he made love to her.

The next day, instead of the sweep Charlie Feldman and Jack Warner had predicted,
A Streetcar Named Desire
won four awards: Vivien Leigh for Best Actress, Karl Malden for Best Supporting Actor, Kim Hunter for Best Supporting Actress, and Richard Day and George James Hopkins for Best Art Direction and Set Decoration.
An American in Paris
was named Best Picture, and
A Place in the Sun
picked up the prizes for direction and writing. Humphrey Bogart, in
The African Queen
, won for Best Actor. Feldman was convinced they had been robbed. Worse, Hollywood’s attitude to Kazan appeared to have changed overnight. The item in the
Hollywood Reporter
had been devastating. Overnight, Jack Warner lost interest in
Baby Doll.
Overnight, the director everyone wanted to work with became a pariah.

Marilyn’s resolve not to see Kazan again proved short-lived. That evening she was his date at what was to have been a post-Academy Awards celebration at Charlie Feldman’s house. He needed comforting,
so once again Marilyn played the role of Kazan’s girl. Her willingness to accompany him suggested that she might have a harder time than she had anticipated keeping her vow to break off with him. Had he been given the green light on
Baby Doll
, one wonders whether she would have been able to stay away at all.

When Kazan left Hollywood, Tennessee Williams had the impression that he was going to continue to refuse to disclose the identities of fellow Communist Party members, whatever the cost. Williams admired Kazan’s courage and sense of honor. At home with Molly and the children, however, Kazan began to waver. One afternoon, Kermit Bloomgarden heard pebbles clattering against the window of his second-floor office overlooking Broadway. He glanced out and saw Kazan, who had an office in the same building, standing on the sidewalk, waving to him to come down. Over coffee at Dinty Moore’s nearby, Kazan indicated that he might be about to do as Spyros Skouras demanded. Kazan’s hair had started to go gray. Heavy lines had formed around his mouth.

Bloomgarden, who had known Kazan since the Group Theater and had produced
Death of a Salesman
, which Kazan had directed, was horrified by what he heard. He said little until the end, and then stated his position.

“We bring our children up not to tattle.”

Kazan made the rounds of the friends and associates he would be required to name. These included Paula Strasberg, who had nearly broken up Kazan’s marriage by telling Molly about his affair with Constance Dowling, so there can have been little love lost there. But there was also his great friend Clifford Odets. Powerful feelings flowed between the two men. They were always very physically affectionate with one another, leading a good many people to mistake them for lovers. Since 1939, Odets had lived in daily terror of being exposed as a Communist, but now he and Kazan agreed to name each other. Odets would testify privately on April 24, and publicly in May.

On a dark, rainy morning in early April, Arthur Miller drove from Roxbury to Kazan’s farmhouse at Newtown, Connecticut. Having already talked to Bloomgarden, he guessed what he was about to hear.

The rain stopped and the sun came out. As they walked together in the fragrant woods, Kazan told Miller of his decision to name names. Miller put his arm around Gadg and awkwardly pressed the side of his body against his friend. The gesture was familiar. It was the same tense, guilty gesture Miller performed when, called on to embrace a young woman, he did so while turning his body to the side.

Miller had been thinking a lot about guilt lately. His encounter with Marilyn Monroe continued to preoccupy him. In a thin, brown, wire-bound composition book, he had been taking notes on a contemporary play about adultery he hoped to write. The notebook contained ideas and snippets of dialogue. Possible titles included “The Men’s Conversation” and “Conversation of Men.” The protagonist, Quentin, has recently had an adventure that causes him to confront how much he despises married life, which he compares to a trap. His wife, refusing to forgive, declares that the man she knew could never transgress as Quentin has done. She insists that he crush his daimon—that is, his desire for sex outside the marriage. Quentin longs to free himself of the need for his wife’s acceptance and the respectability she represents. Only when it is possible to leave will his decision to stay have any meaning. Quentin seeks a way to remain in the marriage not simply because that is what his wife demands but because that is what he chooses. At the same time, he wonders whether he really wants to abandon the possibility of ever experiencing ecstasy again.

Miller did not progress beyond these notes. Though he customarily found his material in his own life, perhaps he was just too close to it here. He was still in the marriage he was trying to write about. In his notebook, he was working out his own problems rather than those of a fictional character. The wife was transparently Mary. Quentin’s dilemma was transparently Miller’s.

After hearing what Kazan had to tell him, Miller drove directly to Salem, Massachusetts, to research a new play. Since 1950, Miller had wanted to write something about the Red hysteria. He studied Marion Starkey’s
The Devil in Massachusetts
and saw a parallel between the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 and the hunt for Communists in America. At one point he had given a copy of the book to Kazan, with an eye to their doing a play together. Not until Miller actually went to Salem, however, did he see a way to personalize the material, to make it his.

Poring over old court records, he imagined there might have been an affair between John Proctor and a young servant girl named Abigail Williams, who went on to accuse Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft. In this story, Miller discovered an armature for the adultery play he wanted to write. The historical characters and setting provided the distance that his earlier effort lacked, and the adultery theme invigorated the political, witch-hunt material with a deeply-felt conflict of his own. In his notebook, the playwright skipped three pages and started to take notes on a scene in which Abigail attempts to seduce John Proctor. Those lines were the germ of
The Crucible.

On April 10, Kazan went to Washington, D.C. to reopen his HUAC hearing. Kazan, who took pride in his ability to conceal his feelings, made it clear that he had returned not because anyone had forced or threatened him, but because he wanted to—he was fully in control. He insisted on testifying in writing. That way he would say precisely what he chose to say and no more. The committee didn’t object, so long as he did as they asked and named names.

Kazan identified eight of his former colleagues at the Group Theater, including Paula Strasberg and Clifford Odets. He detailed his own association and disenchantment with the Communist Party. Then he underscored his reasons for breaking with the Party. “The last straw came when I was invited to go through a typical Communist scene of crawling and apologizing and admitting the error of my ways.” Kazan seemed unaware that this sentence was shot through with irony. Wasn’t crawling, apologizing, and admitting the error of his ways precisely what HUAC had required him to do? In a gesture that irked some people far more than his having named names, Kazan, unbidden, went on to catalogue play by play, film by film, his entire directorial output. He aimed to show that as an artist he had consistently upheld all-American values. It was one thing to have submitted under duress. It was quite another to have gone to such elaborate lengths to justify his own act of betrayal.

For all the talk of duty, the final, seemingly perfunctory and anti-climactic sentence of Kazan’s testimony pointed to a very different reason for his change of heart. “I have placed a copy of this affidavit with Mr. Spyros P. Skouras, president of Twentieth Century–Fox.”

On May 19 and 20, Clifford Odets gave a comparable performance, naming names and chronicling his own disenchantment with the
Communist Party. Of the elite Broadway trio, only Lillian Hellman declined to be intimidated. She faced HUAC on the 21st. A controlling, abrasive, outspoken character rather like Kazan, she, too, chose to read a carefully-crafted letter to the committee. Unlike Kazan, however, Hellman refused to name names, declaring memorably, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Tennessee Williams, insisting he wasn’t a political person, declined to take a position on what Kazan had done. Privately, Williams told his friend Maria Britneva that human venality was something he always expected and forgave. Kazan published an advertisement in the
New York Times
to defend what he had done and to urge others to do the same. It was rumored to have been paid for by Skouras. Williams, full of compassion, told Audrey Wood that the advertisement was a sad comment on the times. Some of Kazan’s other friends were less forgiving. A few months after his testimony, Kazan was on his way out of his office building when he encountered Miller and Bloomgarden. The playwright and the producer, on their way in, pointedly ignored him.

Kazan’s testimony also brought closure to his relationship with Marilyn. After the strain of the HUAC testimony and its aftermath, Kazan chose to shoot his next picture for Twentieth in Europe. It would be some time before he returned to Hollywood. As a result, Marilyn never had an opportunity to find out whether she really would have held to her decision not to see him again. Kazan’s prolonged absence cleared the field for Joe DiMaggio.

THREE

A
t last, Darryl Zanuck announced that he had found a second starring role for Marilyn. Ignoring the conversation he’d had with Howard Hawks, he put her in another drama, but this time, in keeping with the splash the calendar scandal had made, the film was to be a much larger, more expensive production than
Don’t Bother to Knock.
Marilyn was to play a murderess in Henry Hathaway’s
Niagara
, to be shot on location at Niagara Falls. She was very excited. Another big role meant that her career was really taking off. Expecting to begin pre-production at the end of May, Marilyn checked into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital as soon as she finished
Monkey Business.