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him to business meetings at Feldman’s, waiting contentedly beside the pool until the men were done. She drove up to Santa Barbara with Kazan on February 15 for the test preview
of Streetcar.
The following evening, after dinner at Feldman’s, she and Kazan went on to Joe Schenck’s. In poor health, Schenck had been recuperating in Hawaii when Johnny Hyde passed away. By the time he returned to Los Angeles, Marilyn, to his dismay, had already taken up with Kazan.
    A stack of letters from Miller was accumulating next to his photograph on the shelf above Marilyn’s bed. She read by the light of a small, goose-necked lamp. Arthur remained unhappy at home, where he and his wife were on very bad terms. Mary, a lapsed Catholic, was appalled that he might so much as think about sleeping with another woman. And in Los Angeles, he had certainly been tempted. He could say nothing to convince his wife to give him, and the marriage, another chance. She simply refused to believe anything he said.
    Yet he had no plans to return to Los Angeles. Roy Brewer demanded that Miller change the union racketeers in his script to Communists. If Miller refused, Brewer threatened to call a strike of projectionists in order to prevent
The Hook
from ever being screened in the United States. Miller abruptly withdrew his script, refusing to make changes that struck him as absurd. Communists, he argued, were virtually nonexistent on the Brooklyn waterfront. He may also have been motivated by his own sensitivity to being subpoenaed by HUAC, Brewer having threatened to launch an investigation of both Miller and Kazan. It seemed to Kazan that the prospect filled Miller with panic.
    Though Miller had never been a Communist Party member, he had attended several Communist writers’ meetings in 1947. As Miller later disclosed to his attorney, he worried that some of the people who saw him there might have assumed he actually belonged to the Party during that period. Thus, if Miller testified truthfully that he had not been a Party member, there were individuals who, in the belief they were telling the truth, might come forward to say he was lying. He could find himself jailed for perjury. On the other hand, if Miller spoke frankly of his association with the Communist writers, HUAC would require him to establish credibility as a patriot by identifying others who had attended the meetings. That, as a matter of conscience, Miller would not do. As an unfriendly witness—that is, one who declined to name names—he could find himself held in contempt of Congress and imprisoned.
    It may be that Kazan, accustomed as he was to being master of his own fate, had arrived in Hollywood with a politically provocative script like
The Hook
as a way of taking charge, of deliberately causing a subpoena to be issued. The gesture would have been very much in keeping with his insolent, abrasive character. As it was, he was furious when Miller withdrew his script. Kazan had turned down Tennessee Williams’s play in order to work on
The Hook.
He had already devoted a good deal of time and effort to the project. He expected Miller to put up a fight.
    Miller preferred to write a new drama. His moral crisis over Marilyn Monroe provided fresh material. As he once said, he could not write about anything he understood completely; if an experience was finished, he couldn’t write it. He worked in his smoke-filled, third-floor study from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Posters for
Death of a Salesman
and
All My Sons
adorned the walls. A small bookcase overflowed with books. Children’s voices—the Millers had a small son and daughter—drifted in from other rooms. Frequently, Miller went back to work at night.
    In the months after returning from California, he started two plays, both featuring a wayward husband. The first drew on a true story Miller had heard on the Brooklyn waterfront as he researched
The Hook.
It tells of a married longshoreman who permits two brothers, Italians who have entered