FRESH YARN presents: Another Day, Another Dollar... by Barry Edelstein

FRESH YARN presents:

Another Day, Another Dollar
In memory of Arthur Miller
By Barry Edelstein

"Another day, another dollar" hardly has the ring of, "attention must be paid," or "a smile and a shoeshine," or "there's a universe of people out there and you're responsible to it," but it's the Arthur Miller line I like most.

Arthur (which I never could quite get used to calling him, but "Mr. Miller" didn't seem right, either) said it to me in the lobby of the Williamstown Theater Festival in the summer of 1996. I was directing a revival of All My Sons staged to mark the play's 50th anniversary. The first performance had just concluded and the audience was filing out of the auditorium. They were stunned, devastated. Tears streamed down cheeks and reddened the many pairs of eyes that struggled not to stare at the tall, bespectacled man -- you know, the one who was once married to Marilyn -- standing in the corner. They did stare, though, less in awe of his fame than in disbelief that this distinguished, patrician-looking fellow in khakis and a blazer could be responsible for the storm of emotion that had just broken over them. The whole scene was weirdly quiet. There was none of the usual post-play chatter about where to have dinner, or which actor was good and which wasn't. Breathing was the only sound, choked gasps, sad sighs. It was a kind of parade of stupor, a halting processional of shell shock. In over fifteen years of directing plays I've never seen its like.

In the midst of it, Arthur turned to me, shrugged, and said, in his throwback-to-the-'40s, gravelly Brooklynese, "Another day, another dollar."

It was the kind of comment made by a carpet installer looking at a fine deep-pile he'd just put down, or a mechanic slamming the hood on a set of plugs newly fastened into a V-8. It was something a short-order cook says at the end of a shift, not the somber pronunciamento of America's Greatest Living Playwright watching his first masterpiece triumph once again.

I had seen the play make the crew tear-up at a dress rehearsal the night before, and certainly it had overwhelmed me more than once during the time I worked on it, but none of that prepared me for the huge impact it had on a real audience. I would see it happen again and again, in Williamstown and when the play transferred to New York. Somehow this man, with his typewriter and some paper, had unleashed an astonishing power, seismic enough to reduce to rubble a random group of strangers, penetrating enough to reach inside every kind of person: Young and old, male and female, sophisticated and simple. Standing next to him in that lobby was like standing next to an aircraft carrier, or to the Enola Gay. His lines were, to use a phrase not yet current in the mid-nineties, weapons of mass destruction.

So I wanted to hear some that I could call my very own. I wanted something for the ages, something that would help explain how it was that when he was a young man Arthur Miller had conjured from the air a story strong and resonant enough to reach five decades into the future with its righteous anger and moral power intact. I wanted some sagacity, an observation whose gravity would match the power surging around us.

Nothing doing. Arthur just stood there grinning -- or, more accurately, twinkling -- his big arms folded across a still-muscular chest puffed proud with satisfaction. All I got was "Another day, another dollar." He'd done his job and he'd done it well. What more was there to say?

To Arthur, a job well done had worth. I think that's why his hobby was carpentry. Take some wood, a saw, nails, and a hammer, work for a few hours, and presto! You have a chair you can sit on. It's finite, it's concrete. Someone in Death of a Salesman says that Willy Loman was never happier than when he was laying new bricks in his front stoop. Critics have seen in this a certain romanticization of the working man, a kind of idealistic proto-Marxism. But really, that's a misinterpretation. Whatever his politics, Arthur didn't write about working men out of some agit-prop agenda. That was Clifford Odets. Arthur wrote about salt-of-the-earth Americans because he identified with them, because despite his Pulitzer Prize, his friendships with intellectuals around the world, his meetings with presidents and prime ministers, and even his marriage to the modern world's Helen of Troy, he was, in every essential way, salt-of-the-earth himself.

The very first time I met him, in the foyer of his surprisingly modest Upper East Side apartment building, he pointed to a crew of elevator repairmen hard at work on one of the cars. In tones of hushed respect he told me that just a few days before, a repairman had his legs crushed by the malfunctioning elevator. Later, over lunch, he told me about Lee J. Cobb and Elia Kazan, about JFK watching Salesman in Washington and Deng Xiaoping watching it in Beijing, about cigars with Fidel Castro and tennis with Dustin Hoffman, and about the time he saw All My Sons in Tel Aviv, and Yitzhak Rabin whispered to him that even though he knew Arthur wrote it, there was no way he would accept that this was an American play because to him it was irrefutably and fundamentally Israeli.

But those glittering stories were for my benefit, told because I had asked, or because, for all the accolades he'd collected in his lifetime, Arthur was not above passing up a new opportunity to be admired, even if only by a young director whose eyes had such big stars in them that he would have been ecstatically happy just to sit and beam, no stories necessary. The story about the elevator repairman was different. It felt weightier, as though it had lodged somewhere deep inside him, deeper than any anecdote about the A-listers he knew. It seemed to have worked its way into the starting blocks of his writer's imagination, into the place from where Eddie Carbone could view the bridge, and to where Biff Loman no doubt sprinted clutching the pen he'd nervously swiped from Bill Oliver's desk. He told it to me not because it was dazzling or fancy in any way, but because it was gnawing at him, stirring him, and it had to come out. The movers and shakers may well have impressed Arthur Miller, but the elevator repairman on disability, and his terrified wife, and his confused children -- these were the people who moved him.

Arthur's apartment, as I recall it, was decorated according to two schemes. The first, and the nicer, was the photography of Inge Morath, his third wife and one of the great, and greatly underappreciated, photographers of the twentieth century. At a memorial service shortly after she passed away, I heard Arthur tell a story about how she had once saved a drowning man by jumping in the water, taking off her bra, instructing him to hold it, and then using it as a tow rope as she swam him to shore. She was a force of nature, which made them an ideal couple. Who else but an Austrian refugee with a will of iron could have tamed the man whose innate force was enough to do that which most mere mortals would have thought beyond human power: Make Marilyn Monroe convert to Judaism?

The apartment's second decorating scheme was posters of Death of a Salesman. I could be misremembering, but it seemed like there were dozens, in almost every language. What made the sight so arresting was that, though maybe fifteen different alphabets were represented -- Cyrillic, Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew -- the image on every single poster was exactly the same: A silhouette of a stoop-shouldered man in an ill-fitting overcoat, lugging a pair of heavy sample cases into his dismal future. It was as though there had been some contractual stipulation binding every graphic designer on planet Earth to illustrate the play in precisely the same way. Muerte De Un Viajante -- A Spanish Willy Loman strains under his load. Tod Eines Handlungsreisenden -- A German Willy Loman schleps his. It was a United Nations of dying salesmen, with oversized coats and hulking cases.

This quirky art gallery reminded me of an interview with Arthur I found in some library while preparing to direct All My Sons. He had been asked to comment on the longevity of one of his plays. Here's what he said:

All these years later when I see a play of mine that I wrote [many] years ago, and I see that the audience is screwed into it in the way they were in the first place, I like to believe that the feeling they have is that man is worth something. That you care about him that much is a miracle, I mean considering the numbers of ourselves that we have destroyed in the last century. I think art imputes value to human beings and if I did that it would be the most pleasant thought I could depart with. … I guess the other thing is the wonder of it all, that I'm still here, that so much of it did work, that the people are so open to it, and that we sort of grasped hands somehow, in many places and many languages. It gives me a glimpse of the idea that there is one humanity. … And I think it's a sort of miracle.

For years, when I was running a theater in New York, I kept that quote pinned to the wall next to my desk. "Art imputes value to human beings" is an awfully lovely thought. And so is the idea of wonder, the notion that there are, every day and in all our lives, certain things that are quite simply ineffable. People in China cry at the end of All My Sons, just as they do in Massachusetts. That is, in its way, a miracle. A play written decades ago still means something. That too, is somehow rather remarkable.

Willy Loman likes that word. "Isn't that remarkable," he says, a half-dozen times, about Uncle Ben who walked into the jungle and "by God, came out rich;" about Bernard, who grew up to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court while Biff, to whom he used to give the answers, failed to hang onto even a dead-end job; about the voice of Howard Wagner's kid on his fancy new tape recorder, shrilly reciting the state capitals. "Isn't that remarkable."

Inge Morath took a picture of Arthur and me when she came to see my production. She signed the back, and Arthur inscribed the front. "Wishing you well in the work and all things," he wrote. Looking at that photo, and thinking about it in the fortnight since his death, I've come to understand that while he was of course sincere in his well-wishes for "all things" in my life, what Arthur really cared about, what mattered to him most, was "the work."

He wrote every day, his friends report, right up to the week he died. That tells me this: You've got to get up, go out, and do the work. You just have to. Every morning, every week, every year. Whether it's laying bricks or dancing, constructing buildings or spinning fantasies. "Another day, another dollar." That seems to me a pretty good inspiration to draw from the life of this giant, whom I had the great good fortune to have in my life, all too briefly.

There's something I always wanted to tell Arthur, but now that he's gone, I won't get the chance. I'll say it here instead.

My Grandpa Louis was a traveling salesman in Paterson, New Jersey. He died when I was three. I have no conscious memories of him at all, only one vague and faded image of who he might have been.

I see him standing on a street, bent over, a little sad. He's wearing a black coat that's too big for him. And in each hand, he's holding something. A large, heavy sample case.

Isn't that remarkable.