The method, p.36
The Method, page 36
Monroe sometimes strains to breathe life into Roslyn, but her performance is for the most part convincing. The film’s more pressing problem is that none of the characters populating Miller’s screenplay have any real validity. They are stand-ins for value systems: not people, but kinds of people. Monroe is doubly burdened within the film, not only with the artificiality of her character, but with Roslyn Taber’s vagueness. Taber is a cipher who lacks any clear idea of what she wants, and she spends much of the movie bearing witness to the drives and needs of the men around her.
The one moment that is firmly about Roslyn—and, it seems, Monroe—comes toward the end of the film. At this point, Clark Gable’s Gay Langland has revealed that he makes his living trapping mustangs and selling them to be made into dog food, shattering Roslyn’s romantic vision of the American West. After an extended sequence in which Gay and his crew capture a small group of wild mustangs, Roslyn runs away from the men, screaming. The first words she says are unintelligible, but then we hear, “Murderers! You liars! All of you liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die! Why don’t you kill yourself and be happy! You and your God! Country! Freedom! I hate you!”
Yet even here, at the emotional climax of a film written for its female star, The Misfits remains firmly with the men. The sequence is shot from their point of view with Marilyn far away, at the center of the frame, dwarfed by the landscape behind her. Huston’s camera imitates our culture itself, always watching Marilyn and her troubles from a great distance, observing her as one would a pinned butterfly, unsure how much empathy or understanding to extend to her as she screams and begs for us to take her seriously.
After The Misfits, and her divorce from Arthur Miller, Marilyn drew even closer to the Strasbergs. When in New York, she’d stay with Lee and Paula at a house they rented on Fire Island and sink into deep depressions; Lee would try to revive her spirits by telling stories about Jacob Ben-Ami and Boris Aronson. Lee wanted to direct her in a television production of Somerset Maugham’s Rain, but the project came to nothing. Before she died, Lee apparently “extracted a promise” from her that she would talk to him if she was thinking of killing herself. He insisted afterward that her overdose must have been accidental. The two of them had been making plans for her career, and “when she took pills,” Strasberg said, “she would be out of control and forget how many she took.” Had it been intentional, she would have told him. She told him everything, after all. The Strasbergs were the closest thing she had to family; when she died, she left them the bulk of her estate, including all of her personal effects. A small additional bequest went to Marianne Kris, her psychoanalyst.
To its detractors, careers like Kim Stanley’s, Montgomery Clift’s, and Marilyn Monroe’s made it clear that the Method was ruining the American actor. Yet little could dislodge the Method from its place of prominence. It was, as Strasberg’s devotees never tired of reminding people, a uniquely American acting style, and thus a mark of America’s artistic seriousness, a way of differentiating acting in the United States from acting in the rest of the English-speaking world. “Although we have no formal national theatre as such,” declared the New York Times on May 14, 1960, “in a way the Actors Studio has become that, for it has been demonstrating since its inception that there is indeed an American style of acting.” In the 1950s, the Method was the domain of outcasts, rebels, square pegs. Some of these iconoclasts were conventionally beautiful, like Brando, Clift, and Dean, but many of them were ethnic-looking, like John Garfield or Eli Wallach, or “ugly little men” like Rod Steiger. All of that began to change as the Method became the establishment—and America had its first widely televised presidential election.
From Thomas Jefferson up until Woodrow Wilson, the president rarely gave public speeches, even delivering his addresses to Congress in writing. In the early twentieth century, presidents pioneered the use of the new medium of radio to woo the nation. With the advent of television, politics moved even more into the public eye. The rise of the public president and the rise of television occurred simultaneously. Television’s first major cultural breakthrough came in 1948, when networks preempted their regular programming to cover the Philadelphia conventions of both parties gavel to gavel. By 1960, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon were no longer running for president but auditioning for the role of president, who in turn was no longer merely the head of the executive branch but the protagonist in our national drama. Even though Nixon, as Eisenhower’s running mate, had deftly used television to overcome charges of corruption in his famous “Checkers speech,” Kennedy understood how profoundly television had changed presidential elections in a way Nixon couldn’t grasp. In “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” his Esquire essay on the Democratic National Convention, Norman Mailer wrote that Kennedy was “a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” Mailer, a member of the Actors Studio Playwrights Unit, saw America the same way Strasberg would a character in a play, divided between text (the “concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull” parts of her daily life) and subext (which was a “river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires”). Only a great box-office actor candidate could cause these two parts of our character to collide, much as Brando had in A Streetcare Named Desire. And sure enough, it was Brando whom Mailer pictured when he thought of Kennedy because both men projected “the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience … which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.” Like Brando, Kennedy had also befuddled reporters by being “too much a contemporary, and yet too difficult to understand.”
From the vantage point of today, Brando seems an odd point of comparison for Kennedy. There was something of the Method style to John F. Kennedy, and as the Method had spent the prior decade establishing its dominance on America’s stages and screens, this was key to his appeal. But Kennedy was no tormented schnook. He wasn’t a bum like Terry Malloy or a gnome like Marty. Those words best described Kennedy’s opponent, the sweating, neurotic Richard Nixon, who looked as if he were being consumed by private torments. Kennedy’s victory signaled a shift not only in the nation’s politics but in its taste. The public didn’t want “ugly little guys” anymore. It wanted confident, sexually charismatic leading men like Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, and Steve McQueen.
The previous crop of actors—the ones who had used self-loathing to such great effect—struggled. Montgomery Clift drifted away on narcotic clouds, becoming less employable with each passing year. After the debacle of Marlon Brando’s 1961 directorial debut One-Eyed Jacks, the Greatest Actor Alive became increasingly disdainful of acting and mostly took jobs for the money. Rod Steiger, unable to find roles he wanted, worked primarily in Europe.
For a few years, Method acting on film lost its tortured aspect and embraced a new self-assurance. With the fifties now over, the individual could be complete unto himself, a standard-bearer of his own moral code. For Poitier, this was in part the result of the limits on what Black characters were allowed to do onscreen. Poitier could be a criminal, as he was in The Defiant Ones, or a rebel, as he was in Blackboard Jungle, but he could not be neurotic. Over the course of the 1960s, Poitier’s fame and self-consciousness about his image grew in equal measure, and many accused him of straightjacketing himself, playing near-saints in films like Pressure Point and A Patch of Blue. Paul Newman had tackled 1950s-style self-loathing quite well in Paris Blues and quite poorly in the woebegone film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But in 1963’s Hud, Newman was so sure of himself that he appeared hewn from stone. Instead of self-loathing, the power of his performances came from rage, and an utter disinterest in ingratiating himself to anyone, including the audience.
Mirroring Kennedy’s ascent in the popular consciousness was Warren Beatty, 1961’s breakout star. Kennedy even wanted Beatty to play him in a biopic about his war service (Beatty declined, and Cliff Robertson stepped into the role). By the time Beatty emerged, it had been five years since James Dean’s death. After the Korean War, and the post–U.S. v. Paramount destruction of its star factories, Hollywood had struggled to find new young leading men. Newman and Poitier were both at least a decade older, and one was a Jew and the other Black. Steve McQueen’s range was limited, and there wasn’t a boyish bone in his body. There was a void, and Beatty filled it with Splendor in the Grass, his first film. Like Brando, Beatty had studied with Stella Adler before being discovered by Elia Kazan. Like Brando and Clift, he had an androgynous beauty and undeniable sex appeal. Beatty carried himself with a graceful swagger, emphasized by his gleaming white teeth and full lips. He could bewitch seemingly anyone, including William Inge, the writer of Splendor. It was Inge who persuaded Kazan to give this newcomer the role of Bud Stamper, a high school football player whose life is nearly destroyed by his small town’s attitudes toward premarital sex.
But Beatty wasn’t a Brando clone. Brando was an impulsive trickster, and conflicted about his chosen profession, sabotaging himself at every turn. Beatty was a relentless perfectionist and, in Kazan’s words, “wanted it all and wanted it his way. Why not? He had the energy, a very keen intelligence, and more chutzpah than any Jew I’ve ever known.” So confident was Beatty—at least as Kazan told it—that he “never had to advertise himself” to women; they simply threw themselves at him. He was also confident enough to start staging his own scenes during his screen test with Natalie Wood, which nearly cost him the role.
Splendor in the Grass—a textbook Method script of middle-class pieties outliving their usefulness—made Beatty a star. Had he wished, he could have gone on playing Bud Stampers for the next decade, but instead Beatty spent the rest of his career rebelling against his public image as a sincere, well-meaning hunk. He followed Splendor with several peculiar films, none of which found much of an audience. Through these box office failures, Beatty discovered the kind of role at which he excelled: a beautiful man who is too self-assured, one whose reach exceeds his grasp, and who will wind up, over the course of the film, humiliated in some way. Beatty’s willingness to appear abject before the audience is the key to his appeal in much the same way that great soul singers beg their lovers to return to them in song. But in order for this dynamic to work—in order for the impossible male beauty to be made to beg—Beatty’s characters needed to have a place within society to begin with. Bud Stamper belongs. He’s a star football player. He has a gorgeous girlfriend. His dad is rich. In On the Waterfront’s most famous speech, Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy says he’s a bum. In the Method films of the Kennedy years, the era of the bum was over.
This moment of confident dynamism in the Method would turn out to be vestigial—by the end of the decade, the bums would have their comeback. But first, the Studio would finally try to realize its dream of becoming a nationally prominent theater.
CHAPTER 21
It’s Been a Terrible Evening
Strasberg had long dreamed of running a national theater—a publicly funded, art-minded institution that set the agenda for America’s stages. While the New York Times might have said the Studio came close to being such an organization, it hadn’t produced a play in years. Perhaps burned by his time in the Group, Lee was reluctant to allow the Actors Studio to transition into regular production, even though doing so would have gone a long way to bridging the troublesome gap between theory and application that dogged the Method. But the time was never right for Strasberg, and the few furtive attempts the Studio had made over the years often ended in acrimony.
Something had to be done. Many of the members who had made the Studio so vibrant in the early 1950s had begun to leave, tired of watching new inductees circle the same handful of acting problems again and again. The Studio risked stasis; whether they produced or not, they had to find a path forward. Kazan found someone to help push the Studio when a mutual friend introduced him to a young director, dramaturg, and critic named Gordon Rogoff in 1959. Rogoff had made a name for himself in England when he founded the theater magazine Encore while studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama. “It was meant to just be the school magazine, but it became kind of notorious for a time,” Rogoff said. “It actually lasted a decade, and it brought me into focus for a lot of people.” Kazan asked him to become the school’s administrative director.
That same year, a possibility opened up for the Studio to realize its major theatrical ambitions when Lincoln Center for the Arts broke ground in Manhattan. Lincoln Center had been in the works for a decade. When finished, it would combine the best of the performing arts in the city—the Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet—with a new resident theater, called the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center. This theater would produce work on a Broadway scale, first at the ANTA Washington Square Theatre downtown, and then, when construction was complete, at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. While privately run, Lincoln Center was the closest New York would get to a national theater. It would employ a full-time repertory company, a cohesively trained group of theater artists working together on a mixture of new plays and classics. It would enjoy the blessing and financial backing of John D. Rockefeller III, and it would be run by two men: Robert Whitehead, a Broadway producer with dozens of credits to his name, and Elia Kazan.
Strasberg believed—and many at the Studio agreed with him—that he should serve as some form of co-artistic-director with Kazan. After all, was he not an internationally famous and respected authority on the theater? Had he not already run the Group, a transformative Broadway producing company? Did he not, with the Studio, have at his disposal a ready-made repertory company comprised of some of the most highly respected, gifted, and famous actors alive? But it was never to be. From the start, Robert Whitehead opposed Strasberg’s involvement. “I didn’t simply want it to be a theater born out of the Actors Studio,” he said. “I felt we had new ground that we had to uncover, and that we should try to make the Repertory at Lincoln Center a theater that embraced its own character and its own style.” Whitehead disliked Strasberg’s approach and his theories, feeling that Lee focused too much on “the psycho-sexual interpretation of the subtext.” He even declared that “at Lincoln Center … we will be anti-psychoanalytic. We want to establish a new character for our performers, as well as [for] the theatre.”
Rather than push Strasberg and Kazan to make something of the Studio, Gordon Rogoff became their go-between. “Nobody knows this,” Rogoff said, but “Kazan was a devout coward, and he could not deal with Strasberg as a possible adversary. He couldn’t face that.” According to Rogoff, Strasberg wondered “why should he have to work his ass off to qualify when the Studio was already it,” while Kazan “didn’t think Lee had the stuff anymore.”
No matter how Kazan felt about Strasberg, he repeatedly tried to integrate Lee and the Studio into Lincoln Center. First, he arranged a summit between Strasberg, Rockefeller, and the Lincoln Center brain trust. The meeting was doomed from the start. Strasberg felt he was being “treated … as if I were an applicant for a doctorate,” and he retreated behind his blank-faced imperiousness. Next, Kazan tried to wrest control of Lincoln Center’s proposed drama school from Juilliard so that Strasberg could take it over. This idea went nowhere. Finally, Kazan persuaded Whitehead to offer Lee and the Studio control over a smaller, Off-Broadway space and co-directorship of the proposed Juilliard drama school. Strasberg refused even to consider the proposal, killing off any hope of a partnership between Lincoln Center and the Studio. Strasberg was furious, and remained embittered about being passed over for years. As Gordon Rogoff described it, “There was a faction … that looked at Lee Strasberg as having been victimized by the Group and felt Kazan was getting recognition as a director that Lee had been denied.” As a result, “we at the Studio were to make it up to him. We championed him with a zeal you find only in religion … Kazan felt this veneration would boomerang—a warning that was prophetic.”
Meanwhile, the Studio’s membership had grown impatient with all of the Clurmanesque indecision the three directors had shown toward production. In 1960, Carroll Baker, a member of the Studio, told the Herald Tribune that “lots of people who went to it are disillusioned because much of what they hoped would happen just didn’t … We are all striving toward some sort of permanent theater and a lot of us gave up professional work to be in Studio projects which just petered out because of the lack of a strong driving force.” A financial crisis at the Studio finally gave the actors the leverage they needed to procure seats on its board and have a say in its operations. As a result, in 1962, the Studio began pursuing a Production Unit in earnest.
By then, Strasberg may well have been excited about the possibility of a theater that would allow him to direct again. Although it had been a decade since Peer Gynt, he had remained interested in the problems of directing, co-running a Directors Unit at the Studio with Kazan beginning in 1960. The Directors Unit familiarized its members with the Method approach to text and rehearsal and created a forum where directors could receive feedback on their work. Alums of the Directors Unit had a profound impact on American film and theatrical culture. They included William Ball, founder of the American Conservatory Theatre and author of A Sense of Direction, an important directing textbook; Michael Bennett, the choreographer and director who created A Chorus Line; Michael Kahn, the future head of both the Juilliard Drama Division and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.; the film director John Frankenheimer; Lloyd Richards, who ran the Yale Drama School from 1979 to 1991 and discovered August Wilson; the experimental director and Wallace Shawn collaborator André Gregory; and Arthur Penn, future director of Bonnie and Clyde. Ulu Grosbard, a member of the Unit, cut his teeth working on films with connections to the Studio: Splendor in the Grass (directed by Elia Kazan), West Side Story (co-directed by Jerome Robbins), The Hustler (starring Paul Newman), The Miracle Worker (directed by Arthur Penn), and The Pawnbroker (directed by Sidney Lumet), before directing for both stage and screen.
