In time I had to confront some facts. I am a mediocre director except when a play or a film touches a part of my life’s experience. Other times my cleverness and facility will not overcome my inadequacies. When I rely on mechanics, I do only what a good stage manager should be able to do. I am not catholic in my tastes. I dislike Beckett—his work. I am not an intellectual. I don’t have great range. I am no good with music or with spectacles. The classics are beyond me. I enjoy humor and the great clowns, but I can’t make up jokes or amusing bits of byplay and visual humor. What I need I steal. I have no ear for poetry. I have a pretty good eye but not a great eye. I do have courage, even some daring. I am able to talk to actors; I don’t fear them and their questions. I’ve been able to arouse them to better work. I have strong, even violent, feelings, and they are assets. I am not shy about ripping the cover-guard off my own experiences; this encourages actors to overcome their inhibitions. I enjoy working with performers; they sense this and have been happy as well as successful with me. This is useful.

Molly used to say that I was too hard on myself. But I don’t feel the above is inaccurate. I prefer this measure to the pumped-up state of fame I had after Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. It took me some years to face what I was as a director; in fact, it took a painful defeat at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. At the time I’m writing about, I was mired in media mud; I’m afraid that for a time I believed what I read. When I see my photographs from that period, I don’t like what I see. For three years I was on the very top, then life twisted, as it will; by surviving a great deal of pain and trouble, I became a different person. But that’s looking too far ahead.

THE PERSON most affected by the success of Death of a Salesman was the author. It did fine things for him, altering his life in more ways than he realized then or perhaps—excuse the presumption—knows now. Nothing was the same for him after that play opened in New York. It even made Art reckless—albeit in a cautious way—with certain constraints on his personal life and curious about experiences that lay outside the bounds of his behavior up until that time. His eyes, to speak of externals, acquired a new flash and his carriage and movement a hint of something swashbuckling. He was at his best during this time, still searching, still unsure of himself, not yet Lincolnesque. Always an amusing man, with a lively sense of humor and a “country” gift for storytelling, he released these talents broadside and enjoyed their effect—which was seductive. It was at this time that I had a first premonition of danger coming, that particularly domestic peril which results when certain ties of restraint that a middle-class man has always lived within are snapped. Art was entering a period of personal drama, and my secret opinion was that it could do him nothing but good. I watched and waited. A writer is a spy.

One weekend during a gathering of intellectuals for political deliberation, Art did something his wife Mary thought he should not have done. Considering the boredom that hangs like a fog over these events, perhaps his wife might have excused his “sin.” But he told me Mary was unyielding. What astonished me was that Art appeared to agree with his wife. He paid for his “lapse” without resentment strong enough to cause a rebellion. If we are to judge solely from his next play, The Crucible, we would have to say that Art did think of himself as a sinner; the central character in it expresses contrition for a single act of infidelity. I had to guess that Art was publicly apologizing to his wife for what he’d done.

The avalanche of praise and the absolute nature of the respect Art received everywhere had another result. He’s still a companionable and amusing man when you’re alone with him, but it began to develop and to be noticed that when he was in his public-behavior, on-view phase, he sounded a bit pompous. I can only guess that like so many other “left of center” heroes, he’d been invited to stand on too many platforms of honor and asked to answer too many reverential questions. Perhaps, like many others, he began to try to live up to what people were saying about him, trying to be the “Arthur Miller” they were writing about, an ideologue to be trusted, a trailblazer, and so on. That kind of reverence and praise is hard to resist, a danger for us all. Art began to relish the joys of being right. A supposed rebel, he lived the life of an establishment god, and he liked it. There is a danger for an artist of becoming a man who sees his role to be teaching others and pronouncing judgment on one and all.

I believe Mary looked on me as a “womanizer.” It is a word I dislike, a prim, stuffy, frightened, middle-class word, and it demeans women. What it means to the people who use it is inaccurate in my case. I have been with a number of women outside my marriages. That number has been exaggerated. Was I “promiscuous”? Hell, no! The relationships I remember have been mostly with actresses with whom I had a strong bond of interest—the production of a film or a play. It was in most cases, believe it or not, a natural part of the work—so it seemed to me—happening as the problems of the production brought us closer. I became emotionally, then physically, involved with an actress because, for the span of a production, we had the same concerns and hopes. We relied on each other: I depended on her, she on me; that bond is as close as any imaginable. I became, for the time of that production, her all-powerful father figure, believing in her, supporting her through her bad hours, adoring her for her gifts. She was to depend on me for her security—who else is as close during those days?

I believe it is inevitable for a director and his actresses to connect in this way, the affairs arising out of interdependence and a need for each other. These “affairs” are not casual; they often amount to a kind of temporary marriage. They rarely endure past the course of the production, and in this sense, they don’t endanger other, more lasting, human bonds.

As the years pass—and I’m braving the wrath of my women friends—men always begin to look elsewhere for rejuvenation, poor things. Their penises, barometers of their continuing vitality, become less cooperative. This awakes anxiety. Men also search elsewhere for fresh entertainment—we have our geishas too. And for spiritual reassurance—remember wife number one, the oldest queen, in Anna and the King of Siam? But perhaps what they come to need most of all is hope. Desire, Tennessee Williams said, is the opposite of death. In desperation we do what we can.

It’s more difficult for women. They have the same needs—rejuvenation, entertainment, reassurance, hope—that men have. Most women have not been able to find relief and help as readily or as easily. I’ve noticed the faces of wives who, impelled by their notion of duty and even more by their fear of being abandoned (so many middle-class wives have confessed to me that they fear their husbands will find out what they really think—an unguarded mumble in their sleep—and quit them), do their duty all their lives through, preserving their real thoughts in silence and their deepest desires unfulfilled. The faces of these good creatures acquire a wistful aspect, a dreamy look, as they fade back permanently from life and the hope of solution. They live in a fog of neglect and longing. An experienced hunter can always tell when women like that are on the slippery edge and ready to tumble off. They are equally ambivalent with men. In time their children become more important to them than their husbands, but the day comes when the children leave home too. Then they face the final fact: They are alone.

There I was in 1950—I’d never be that high again—but in the next two years I was to know every kind of reversal: condemned by the right, damned by the left, and constantly having my plans and my hopes destroyed by malignant forces I could not place or describe. I knew that the higher you get, the more visible you are, and targets that are most visible draw the most fire. As a great cultural hero in 1950, the only man who then excelled in both theatre and film, I was, for a short time, beyond criticism. Or so I thought. Two years later, I ended up beat (you might say “punchy”) and disrespected by all decent liberals—the people among whom I’d been living my life. But perhaps because I’d not trusted my eminence, I survived my defeats. I tried to keep my balance and stay on my feet, because I knew that if I fell to the ground I’d be an easy mark for malice and revenge. I kept my footing, and I found that the middle ground, between the extremes, was my place, the middle “held” for me; it was where I could live and work. It was what I liked about this country and what made it mine.

What I did was eccentric. I hitchhiked into the Southwest, into open country. It was not the same as a sound stage. I saw the people who lived there; they were not like actors. I’m good at stirring up conversations; I listen well. I carried a notebook and wrote down whatever struck me. I particularly remember the harbor of Galveston, Texas, and its fishing fleet. It was a breezy day, and the wind could be heard flapping the sails and rustling through the trees. “There’s no wind on a stage,” I said to myself. The harbor’s water rippled, catching the light and throwing it back. How could an art director’s construction of plywood, canvas, and paint catch that? A boat was unloading fish. The salt of the sea was in the air and I could smell its creatures. The sounds were poetry, the scale enormous, the effect exotic. This is what movies are, I thought: environment, scope, size. Out of doors!

I learned why Jack Ford surrounded himself with roughnecks when he made a film. You can ask them to do anything or to cause anything you might dream of to be done. It uninhibits you; you stop worrying about the actors’ comfort or even their safety. Remember in The Sea of Grass how the property man, awed by his star, flicked a little water on the fine-cut coat of the “lord of the prairie” who was supposed to have just come in out of a blizzard? In Panic in the Streets, we had to fish a man out of the river for a scene, a dead man, presumably, who’d been in the water overnight. How did we do it? There was only one way; throw someone in. You can’t throw Spencer Tracy into a river. “Who’ll do the bit in the ‘drink’ for me?” I asked. I had volunteers. When our man was good and wet, his clothes soaked through, and when the camera was ready, we photographed him floating in the garbage and the dead fish along the edge of the dock, and he looked dead. The actor got an extra check. I got my shot.

I NEVER got to explain to Joe why the meeting I hadn’t attended meant so much to me. It was because I saw that what my guild brothers were defending was the middle road. The men who beat De Mille, an extremist of the right, were not from the left. Many were “reactionaries” like John Farrow or Jack Ford. But all were for the way of fairness and decency. What they were defending was classic Americanism, our basic way of living with each other in this country. And they’d succeeded.

But if part of me believed that forces of good had won a lasting victory, some Old World instinct warned me that despite the guild’s triumph, I should now be especially wary, that my enemies were not scattered in defeat but regrouping in the shadows, and that their next show of strength might come from a totally different direction. It was not over; it was beginning.