The Genius and the Goddess (20 page)

Murray had a much more pleasant time with
Hope Lange, who
played Marilyn's confidante during their long bus ride and (though
a natural blonde) had to have her hair dyed darker so she wouldn't
outshine Marilyn. There were rumors on the set about Murray's
romance with Lange. But he'd known her since she was in high
school; they became engaged before the picture started and got married
while the film was being made.
¹²

In
Bus Stop
Murray plays an eager, energetic and innocent cowboy;
Marilyn – speaking with an unconvincing Southern accent and wearing
a hideous sea-green costume – is an exhausted, petulant and sexually
experienced nightclub singer. She confesses, "I've had a real wicked
life. I've been going with boys since I was twelve years old." She also
tells him, "I'd like to get married and have a family. . . . But maybe
I don't know what love is." Murray, hoping to redeem a fallen woman
with his love, declares "I like you the way you are." In the repetitive
script, she keeps trying to escape and he keeps recapturing her.
Following the tedious end-of-the-movie convention, she suddenly
falls in love with him and agrees to get married. She doesn't seem
to realize that she'll have a hard time adjusting to outdoor life on his
rough and remote Montana ranch.

Murray recalled that Logan, who also had to put up with Paula's
pretentious interference, was very, very patient with Marilyn. He kept
up the enthusiasm, like a football coach yelling "rah rah rah, go go
go," and managed to finish the picture, with only a half-day's rehearsal,
in twelve weeks. But even after
Bus Stop
was completed, the studio
still had problems with Marilyn. In a letter to Buddy Adler, who
succeeded Zanuck as head of production at Fox,
Spyros Skouras, as
if acting in a little Greek tragedy, complained that the picture would
be delayed:"Your wire concerning Marilyn Monroe was another blow
between the eyes that I received today. In my lifetime I have had
many days of bitter experience, but this is one of the worst."

When Logan saw Marilyn the following year on the set of
The
Prince and the Showgirl
, she was still furious with him for cutting part
of her confessional crying scene on the bus. In this long monologue
she confides to Hope Lange about her past experiences and current
problems, the men she's known, her disillusionment with life and her
desire to go to Hollywood. "Why the hell did you cut out that scene
in the bus?," she screamed at Logan. "I'll never forgive you as long
as I live. I was going to show it to Arthur and I couldn't. I was never
so angry in my entire life, and I'm just as angry now as I was then."
¹³
Marilyn did not allow Logan to explain that the studio felt the scene
was not essential to the story and had cut it despite all his protests.
The Strasbergs had taught her to focus on herself instead of cooperating
with colleagues, and she continued to believe that her performance
was the only one that mattered.

Miller's major plays of the 1950s,
The Crucible
(1953) and
A View
from the Bridge
(1956), had immediate social and political impact.
He created powerful situations that dramatized the moral issues and
human cost of the communist witch-hunts taking place in America
in the 1950s. He analyzed the psychology of the informers who
betrayed their friends and the struggle of ordinary men to tell the
truth. At the same time, both plays were deeply personal. They portrayed
Miller's own anguish and remorse about betraying Mary and his
struggle to resolve his conflict between marriage and passion. He
anatomized his characters' divided loyalties and forbidden desires, their
fear and guilt.

The
politics of the 1950s, and the extraordinary fear and anxiety
generated by the Cold War, provide the essential context for understanding
these plays. In the late 1930s
Communist Party cells, which
were not illegal, had been set up throughout America. Members
agonized over the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism in Europe,
and the visible suffering of hungry and homeless people during the
Depression, when a quarter of the work force was unemployed. A
small number of the more intellectual writers, directors and actors
felt that capitalism was bankrupt, that America needed a new social
system, and joined the Party for brief periods. Many of them soon
became disillusioned by the Party's autocratic policies, the Purge Trials
in Russia and the cynical Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939.
Like Miller himself, many left-wing sympathizers, who were not Party
members, attended political meetings to raise money and support
progressive causes.

World War II ended the Depression and swept Americans into a
common cause with their wartime ally, the Soviet Union. But by the
late 1940s the Soviets had become a menacing enemy who dominated
the whole of Eastern Europe, from Poland on the Baltic to
Bulgaria on the Black Sea. In 1949 Mao's Communists defeated Chiang
Kai-shek in China; Russia exploded its first atomic bomb; and rumors
spread about the Soviets' international spy rings. In America, the
Communist Party, once a minor political group that subscribed to
poorly understood social theories, was viewed as a seditious movement
that threatened to undermine America's democratic form of
government and destroy its political freedom. In the atomic age,
conservative politicians, eager to reverse the economic and social
programs set in motion by Roosevelt's New Deal, generated and
thrived in an atmosphere of fear.

The fifties began with three spectacular espionage trials which
revealed that the most secret centers of scientific research and the
highest echelons of government had been infiltrated by Soviet agents.
These spies had damaged American national security and decisively
helped the Russians to develop their own atomic bomb.
Klaus Fuchs,
a German-born British physicist, had worked on the bomb in America
during World War II. In 1950 in Britain, he was convicted of selling
nuclear secrets to Russia during and after the war, and sentenced to
fourteen years in prison. In America, the Ivy-League diplomat
Alger
Hiss, assistant secretary of state and President Roosevelt's advisor at
the Yalta Conference with Stalin and Churchill in 1945, was accused
by the former communist
Whittaker Chambers of giving him 200
secret state documents. Called before the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC), Hiss denied he was a communist.
Prosecuted by the young congressman
Richard Nixon, who first
gained national prominence in the communist witch hunts, Hiss was
convicted of perjury in 1950 and sent to jail for five years. The
following year
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had access to atomic
secrets through her brother, a scientist who worked at the top-secret
research center in Los Alamos, New Mexico, were accused of selling
vital information to the Russians during the war. They were convicted
in 1951 and executed by electric chair in Sing Sing prison in 1953.
¹
In the early 1950s Hiss and the Rosenbergs, by working for the Soviet
Union, seemed to threaten the very existence of the United States.
But these convicted spies always maintained they were innocent. Their
guilt is still hotly debated and remains in doubt.

In January 1953
Eisenhower became president; in March Stalin
died; and in July the Korean War, which had begun in 1950, came to
an end. Korea was divided in two, and communist North Korea was
allied with China. As the former colonies in Asia and Africa gained
independence, communism continued to spread throughout the Third
World.
John Foster Dulles, the confrontational secretary of state during
the volatile Cold War, seemed ready to start a hot war every week.
America exploded the first Hydrogen bomb in November 1952 and
Russia (again aided by espionage) followed with their own explosion
in August 1953. In May 1954 the Viet Cong defeated the French army
at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam, like Korea, was divided and North Vietnam
also became Communist. In 1956 Egypt nationalized the strategically
vital Suez Canal; and America broke with her traditional allies when
Britain and France launched an ill-fated invasion that drove Egypt
into the Soviet sphere of influence. That year, Russia brutally suppressed
the Hungarian revolution. In 1957 Russia astonished America by
suddenly launching Sputnik and surging ahead in the space race. In
1959 Fidel Castro's communist revolutionaries took over Cuba and,
despite fanatical American opposition, have remained in power ever
since.

A historian explained that in the 1950s, "In a postwar atmosphere
suffused with fear and suspicion, opportunities were rife . . . for political
persecution and intimidation." After Hiss was convicted, the
Republican senator Joe McCarthy, drawing on a deep vein of American
philistinism, began to attack intellectuals and universities in an unremitting
campaign of vicious smears and half-truths. His senate
investigations accused victims, with little or no evidence, and created
a paranoid sense of Red menace. He "recklessly assaulted people's
integrity, destroyed careers, and used character assassination to seize
control of the political process." Miller recalled McCarthy's apparently
unlimited powers: "The illusion of an unstoppable force
surrounded Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin at the height of
his influence, in the years from 1950 to 1954. He had paralyzed the
State Department, cowed President Eisenhower, and mesmerized
almost the entire American press."

Joseph Welch was one of the few people who dared to defy the
ruthless and rampaging senator. In 1954 the distinguished attorney
represented the U.S. Army during McCarthy's acrimonious investigation
of suspected communists in the military. He elegantly put down
his abrasive opponent by asking, "Have you no sense of decency, sir,
at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Eisenhower, who
did very little to stop McCarthy when he was destroying the lives of
so many innocent people, finally condemned him as the senator began
to lose his power. The witch hunts had swept the country on a wave
of hysteria and madness that was not understood at the time.
"McCarthyism took its toll on many individuals and on the nation,"
Eisenhower said. "No one was safe from charges recklessly made from
inside the walls of congressional immunity. Teachers, government
employees, and even ministers became vulnerable. . . . The cost was
often tragic."
²

Membership in the American Communist Party was and still is
legal – though generally covert – and its political influence was
extremely limited. But the members of HUAC, which had been established
in 1945 to investigate and root out communist influence in the
United States, believed communism was a national conspiracy. HUAC
had the same aims, though less authority and power, as McCarthy's
committee in the Senate. HUAC also feared artists and intellectuals,
and claimed that Hollywood was filled with subversives who used
the propagandistic power of movies to indoctrinate a gullible public.
In their attempt to eliminate all liberal content from movies, they
used the threat of blackmail, imposed ideological censorship, persecuted
people for their political beliefs and often convicted the accused
without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

The real aim of HUAC was not to root out communists, whom
they knew all about through covert FBI investigations, but to denigrate
celebrities and intimidate the Hollywood studios. The American
public adored the fantasy figures on the screen, and the hearings
became part of its obsession with celebrity. The attack on Hollywood,
a riveting public spectacle on radio and in newsreels, captured the
attention of the press, justified the committee's existence and advanced
many political careers. Leading writers and directors, accused of being
Reds or communist sympathizers, appeared before the cameras and
blinked in the bright lights. When they tried to defend their right to
free speech, they were shouted down by the chairman, who pounded
his gavel to silence them. After the hearings, present and former
members of the Party, who had not committed any crime, were
punished, without evidence or a trial, immediately blacklisted by the
studios (which caved into political pressure) and professionally ruined.

Several of Miller's friends and associates – Elia Kazan,
Lee J. Cobb
and Clifford Odets (as well as Sterling Hayden, who'd acted with
Marilyn in
The Asphalt Jungle
) – were desperate to save their careers
and willing to compromise their integrity. They appeared before
HUAC as cooperative, or "friendly," witnesses and named names of
people they knew to be former communists. Notable exceptions in
the rush to accuse others were the Hollywood Ten, a group of writers
and directors who refused to cooperate, were labeled "unfriendly"
witnesses and sent to prison. The historian
David Caute explained
Kazan's motives and the effect of his testimony:

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

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.