Spyros Skouras by Arthur Miller

 

Once again Twentieth Century Fox mysteriously reached into my life; Spyros Skouras paid us a surprise visit the evening before I left for Washington, in a try at getting me to cooperate with the Committee. He had called from Hollywood to ask Marilyn if he could stop by as soon as he got to New York. I knew what this meant, of course, since the president of Twentieth Century Fox was not in the habit of making such flying visits, not to see Marilyn, at any rate, when the studio was still at odds with her. He would be trying to get me to avoid a possible jail term for contempt of Congress. Not that I mattered to him, but if rumors that we were going to marry were true, the patriotic organizations might well decide to picket her films. Such were the times. If there was any surprise in his phoning, it was that he had not done so earlier. He was reputed to have worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.

When she returned to me from the phone, I must have looked disconcerted at her announcement that it was Skouras, for she quickly asked me not to refuse to see him. And this was curious.

By turns she resented him, hated him, and spoke of him warmly as a friend of last resort at the studio. Although she was furious at his denying her the ordinary perquisites of a great star, which she was unquestionably at this time – the best dressing room, her choice of cameraman and director, and the respect due her as by far the public’s favorite performer- she could still be moved by his repeated reassurances, often accompanied by actual tears, that she was closer to him than even his own adored daughter. At the same time she was sure it was his obduracy that denied her recognition as the number one Fox draw.

The company insisted on binding her to her old contract, which paid her one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a picture, a fraction of her market value even at that time. This was a figure negotiated before her amazing cult had formed and the studio’s profits from her pictures had commenced soaring. But despite everything, her resentment lost its steam when Skouras took her by the arm and said, ‘You are my daughter.’ I was encouraged when she felt warmly toward him; we were to be married soon, and I found myself welcoming any of her feelings that were at all positive and unworried. In any case, it would be up to me how to respond to Skouras, and about that I had no uncertainty, although his coming increased my uneasiness that my public condemnation might harm her career.

Spyros Skouras, I estimated then, might bean eel but was not really a bad fellow because his deviousness was obvious enough to be almost reassuring. One never had the slightest doubt where he stood- right next to Power. If he indulged in passionate self-promoting speeches about honor, compassion, and truth, it was much in the Mediterranean or more specifically, the Achillean tradition of rhetorical excess accompanying all of life’s grand shifts, such as weddings and births –especially of boy babies – as well as the more stunning betrayals that Power periodically necessitates. I has met Skouras a few times before, but only once  when I could watch him in full rhetorical flight, and I never forgot it.

One afternoon five years earlier, I had happened to meet Kazan a few yards from the Fox building on Forty-sixth Street, where he had an appointment with Skouras. He invited me to join him, and having nothing better to do, I agreed. Kazan was still in the early stage of his movie directing career and was excited about the work; his fellow Greek Skouras was his friend, boss, and godfather.

Skouras’s office was about the size of a squash court, with the entire wall at one end covered by a map of the world as a backdrop for the coffin-like executive desk in front of it. On the map, Latin America was some ten feet long and the other continents proportionately immense, all marked wit many large red stars where Fox offices were located. Alone on the desk top of beige marble a low baroque statuette supported a golden pen and pencil.

On a  hassock at the foot of this desk sat George Jessel, then in his fifties, who greeted Kazan and me with both his hands wrapped around each of ours in turn. At a wave of Skouras’s hand we sat on beige sofas from whose deep, downy cushions  it was nearly impossible to rise again.

For no reason I could imagine, Skouras, from a standing star behind his desk, launched – in a hoarse, shouting voice that seemed to dress several thousand people in his mind – into a tirade against Franklin Roosevelt, who by then was already six years dead. Slapping the stone desk top with the palm of his hand for emphasis, occasionally throwing his head back defiantly or shaking his finger at Kazan, apparently in reprimand, he portrayed the late president as a man without honor, decency, or courage.

   ‘He was terrible!’ Jessel suddenly piped up from his hassock in front of the desk.

   ‘He was not terrible, he was a goddamned sonabitch!’

   ‘That bastard,” Jessel concurred, shaking his head angrily with a glance over at Kazan and me as though something had to be done immediately about this vile person. “I could tell you things, Spyros, that you .  .  .’

   ‘You don’t known nothing! I know!

   ‘I know you know, Spyros, but I was in Des Moines once when he .  . 

   ‘Don’t tell me Des Moines!’ Skouras commanded in outrage’

‘This man sold out million pipple to Stalin! He was agent of Stalin! He was absolutely agent!’ And he slammed his desk.

   ‘He was worse than an agent!’ Jessel yelled, thrilling himself visibly.

Now without the slightest warning or tonal change or shift of emphasis, Skouras declared, his head thrown back pridefully, ‘Without Franklin Roosevelt the United States would have been revolution in spring of 1935. He saved America!’

   ‘Goddamned right! Jessel shouted, likewise without so much as an eye-blink at this abrupt reversal. ‘Chrissake,’ he amplified in pity-filled tones, ‘people were starving, dying in the streets .  .  .’

Skouras now soared into praise of Roosevelt with encomia worthy of a graveside while tears of mourning bubbled up along the lower lids of Jessel’s eyes, and shaking his head, he added his loving recollections of the dead president’s fineness of character, his humor and generosity. It took me some weeks to realize that Skouras relished this performance as his way of informing Kazan, and perhaps me as well, that his power was so immense that he could blatantly contradict himself in front of us without losing one ounce of his domination. He was a bull walrus in the beach, just howling his joy of life to the sun.

When I opened our apartment door to let Skouras in, I saw that he was tired, a weary old man in a dinner jacket. He may also have had a drop too much. His handshake was limp, and he let his gaze slip across my face without his usual electric greeting, as though he did not expect much from the evening. A bald man with a deep chest and a bull neck, he stood titled slightly to the rear of his center of gravity, back straight and chin tucked in like a boxer’s. He could smile warmly while his eyes darted about for signs of the enemy. Marilyn immediately came into the foyer, and they embraced, almost tearfully on his part, probably because of all the favors he had had to deny her. ‘Won’erful, won’erful,’ he kept repeating with his eyes closed, his nose in her hair.

She was moved, surprisingly so. But I did not know then how aged men often evoked in her so intense an awareness of her own power over them that it turned to pity within her and sometimes even love. Her nearness could make such men actually tremble. And this was more security for her than in a vault full of money or a theater echoing with applause.  Holding her hand to his lips, Skouras took her to the couch and sat beside her, but she immediately sprang up and insisted on getting him a cognac, which he accepted despite his asthmatic protests and sipped. Beside him on the couch again with her knees drawn up, she faced him with her upper lip ever so slightly flicking like the lip of a bridled horse, a prideful tic of self-possession. He could not have helped being struck by her beauty in a beige satin blouse with high Byronic collar and a tight white skirt and sparkling patent leather spiked heels. It had been months since he had seen her, time enough to have forgotten the impact of the force wave that her beauty seemed to displace.

Sitting on one cheek like an awkward circus bear, he kept sliding off the couch cushion as with his rather adolescently charming hoarseness he touched on the illnesses and deaths of mutual Hollywood friends, problems with his Rye estate, and developments in his daughter’s life. Marilyn was charmed and happy as emotion alone could make her happy, almost without regard for its hostile of benevolent significance, for only in emotion was there truth. Incredibly now he began pleading with her to renounce her own company and return to the studio, something that had been settled by contract almost a year before, but she understood the diversion – he ha come with something  difficult for him to say, and this roundabout way of getting down to business, absurd as it was, showed a certain respectful deference that moved her to listen and react as though he were talking about something real.

‘Hones-to-Gah-dahlin, I worry about you personally. I can’t help what some of those people out there doin’ to you these years, I’m not Twentieth, I’m only the president. I am speakin’ to you from my heart. I promise you gonna be happy again with Twentieth. I’m absolutely serious, Mahlin dahlin’, you make such a mistake, come back with us we are your own family, you fadder and mudder. ‘ On he went, like certain fish who spray an alkali before laying their eggs in acidic waters. Now he talked of his cathedral, which he had built in Los Angeles for the Greek Orthodox Church, the pride of his life. You could hate Spyros, but you had to like him, if only for the naiveté of his disregard for the truth, which was at least not surgical and dry but had a certain ardor: he always meant what he said while he was saying it.

Out of the blue, he took Marilyn’s hand, and with an envelopment of privacy between them he asked, ‘You in love, switthar?’
She seemed to fill up, caught a breath, and nodded that she was.

  ‘You sure?’
Not without guilt she confronted him eye to eye, he who knew her story, and nodded again.
‘Gah-bless-you won’erful,’ he said, patting he hand with fatherly benediction; if it was really love and marriage, especially the latter, then God ha entered the case and the fooling around was over. Skouras sat there nodding in active calculation as he studied  her short black shoe on the carpet. Turning to me, he said, ‘Gah-bless-you Artr-won’erful. I know you a fine man, you goin’ take good care this girl, she’s like my own daughter, hones-to Gah.’

Now that he had to believe we were not merely shacking up, the Company was inevitably and menacingly involved. With two pictures still owing them before she was totally free, her marrying at all was bad enough for her image of sexual availability, but to marry me in my situation was disaster.

He sighed. ‘Artr, I hopin’ very much you not goin’ to make some terrible mistake with the Committee.’

I had every reason to think he would carry back to the Committee whatever I said, so I could only shrug and mutter something about doing what I thought was right.

He came wide awake now, watching for my reaction. ‘I know these congressmen very well, Artr, we are good friends. They are not bad men, they can be reasonable. I believe personally, Artr, that in your case they would take you privately in executive session, you understand? No necessity to be in public at all, I can arrange this if you tell me.’

In the code of the hour this meant that in exchange for ‘clearing’ myself by naming names and engaging in the formula of obeisance to the Committee, such as publicly thanking the members for helping me find my way back to America, I would be questioned in camera, spared an open hearing.

‘I’m against the Committee, Spyros. How can I come out and thank them for anything?’

Mixed into my response I heard ‘Socrates,’ and when I finished he said, ‘You must read this man’s book.’

“Socrates! Spyros, Socrates was condemned by the same kind of committee .  .  . .?

“Yes, but he had the courage to say what he thinks, Artr.’

For a moment this had me puzzles, until I realized  that he meant I should use the hearing to declare my differences with the left and the liberals, an ‘attack’ on my part that would take the sting out of my caving in to the Committee. It was more or less what Odets had been beguiled into doing, and something he never ceased regretting to he last day of his life.

‘I don’t need a congressional committee to give me a platform to attack the left, Spyros, I can do that on my own time.’ Privately I thanked my stars that I worked in the theater, where there was no blacklist; a as a film writer, I would now be kissing my career goodbye.

Getting up with his finger pointed to the ceiling, he tried to seem propelled by burning conviction, but repetition, I judged, had emptied his speech of real feeling. “Stalin’, he began, ‘crucified the Grik pipple, Artr. I know what I’m talking about! The Grik Communist Party made civil war, torture, and shootin’ pipple.’

.  .  .  And he poured out a knowledgeable capsulized  history of the post-war Greek political catastrophe between the right and the left, naturally with all of the blame on the latter and all of the good with the former. But even if I had known or been able to acknowledge the truth of the left’s brutality at the time, it would not have changed what I saw as the issue in 1956, and that was the manifestly anti-democratic contempt for basic American rights on the part of the Committee, something impossible to support.

“It’s out of the question, Spyros, I can’t do it. I don’t like those people.

How the rage hit me or what exactly triggered it I could never recall later, but in his persistence I felt myself cornered, it was as though he was trying to exercise control over my work, and it was intolerable. I got off only a sentence or two, but he quickly caught the idea and held up both his hands and went to his coat, which was lying over the back of a chair, and incredibly enough, I was sure I heard him mutter, ‘You are Socrates.’ He embraced Marilyn again ,but now with real sadness, and I walked him out to the elevator. By the time it arrived he was his earlier sleepy self, and his last glance towards me as he disappeared behind the closing door was forgetful, as though I was a complete stranger he had met in the building corridor, for he was not a man to waste emotions.

Marilyn was sipping scotch when I got back, in a mood of uncertainty; I felt he had moved her, not by his argument but by his feeling, for in some crazy way he did care about her. A few years later, Skouras would invite her to sit at the main table when Nikita Khrushchev visited the studio, presenting her to him as a great star. The Soviet chairman was very obviously smitten with her, and she in turn like him for his plainness. Spyros then declaimed, for the thousandth time, the epic story of how he and his brother had arrived in America with a few carpets on their backs as their only capital  and now he was president of Twentieth Century Fox, such was the reality of opportunity in America. Khrushchev got up and countered that he was the son of a poor coal miner and was now the headman of the whole Soviet Union. Marilyn thought that a fantastic reply; like her, Khrushchev was odd man out.