The method, p.34
The Method, page 34
Nowhere is this clearer than in the self-help literature of the time, which portrayed humankind as limited from birth by “his original potentialities.” We did not have one self, but rather many selves—a “domestic self, the business self, the religious self, the political self,” etc.—needing to be integrated into a cohesive whole. If this integration succeeded, we could become, as Henry Allen Overstreet’s bestseller The Mature Mind promised, fully formed adults. Adulthood entailed “the development of a sense of function” in society, and its highest form—the “capstone of maturity”—was parenthood. Helping to mature our minds were the newly popular and respected fields of therapy and psychoanalysis. In 1946, Harry Truman signed the National Mental Health Act, which, along with Defense Department research spending, created a boom in mental health services. As psychoanalysis rose to prominence during the decade, “ego psychology” became its most prevalent form, teaching that rebellion against social roles was a cause of psychological problems.
The Method could not help but push back against this new conformity. One of the dominant thematic concerns of naturalistic drama from Ibsen to today is the protagonist’s discovery that the code by which she lives has reached its expiration date. In America, as Arthur Miller described it, midcentury drama “revolv[ed] around the story of the victimization of the hero by the inhuman forces of society. There is no effective reply to the geologic forces and pressures of society. He is being backed into a corner.” Works like Death of a Salesman served as a stark reminder that social obligation isn’t always good for us.
The idea that individuals are free only insofar as they are enmeshed in a network of obligations mirrors the place of an actor in the rehearsal process. Actors are individuals, but their job exists only in relationship to other artists within the larger apparatus of a production. If they focus solely on themselves and their individual needs, the whole machine could easily break down. To the Method’s critics its approach fomented insurrection against a production’s proper social order. An actor who won’t commit to a choice is neither particularly professional nor a good collaborator. Actors who need to “really feel” what they are doing before they can do it could hold up a production for endless amounts of time. Jessica Tandy had foreseen this problem when she worked with Marlon Brando. But Brando, at least, was a genius.
In the 1950s, a joke spread throughout Broadway involving a confrontation between a Method actor and the writer/producer/director George Abbott, best known for The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. One day in rehearsal, Abbott tells the actor to cross the stage. The actor says, “But what’s my motivation?” Abbott replies, “Your job!” The implication is clear: These Method-heads are so self-involved they either can’t or won’t deliver.
The Actors Studio seemed to be churning out a new batch of malcontents every couple of years, actors who sneered at conformity in society, in the Hollywood Studios, and in the rehearsal hall. From Rod Steiger’s uncontrollable emotionality, to Marlon Brando’s furious improvisations and sexual profligacy, to Kim Stanley’s and Montgomery Clift’s drinking, it seemed this new style of American acting either tolerated or required a lack of self-control. Once Brando appeared in The Wild One—a 1953 film in which he famously answered the question “What are you rebelling against?” with “Wha’ddya got?”—the Actors Studio, and the Method, became emblematic of the rebellions brewing among white America’s disaffected young men. The persuasiveness of Brando’s performances led to a rash of copycats. As Gene Hackman described it, “When I first got to New York, everyone was imitating Brando. We thought that was what acting was. Making these very serious faces and things. It was kind of pitiful, actually.” Some came to the Studio, others simply called themselves “Method” as a way of connecting themselves to their idol. “Marlon was Marlon,” as Martin Balsam put it. “But then came all those Xeroxed copies calling themselves Actors Studio Brandos. Bull!”
Dean may have been one of these Xeroxes, but he had a profound effect on American culture and its view of the Method nonetheless. His performances, his “own personal rebellions,” shifted the Method subject from adulthood to late adolescence. In all three of Dean’s films, he rebels against a father figure who is incapable of loving him properly. From the vantage point of today, all three are odd symbols of nonconformity. Cal in East of Eden wants to fit in but is incapable of doing so. Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause states his cause explicitly within the film: He wants his father to be a traditional, firm-handed patriarch. Jim is the enforcer of cultural norms, not their destroyer. In Giant, Dean’s best film and performance, he’s a side character, and he spends much of the film as the drunken butt of everyone’s jokes.
But Dean became an icon of rebellion anyway. His raw-nerved presence reminded teenagers of all they were told to repress, his androgynous beauty summoned up their forbidden desires, and his death in a car accident immediately before Rebel Without a Cause’s premiere lent him a tragic glamor. Dean’s posthumous canonization swept the Actors Studio up into the whirlwind of youth culture, despite its being an institution founded by a man in his late forties, run by a man in his midfifties, and built on the theories of a Russian born in the 1860s. For young actors looking to get discovered while discovering themselves, the Actors Studio was the place to be; to more respectable society gatekeepers like Hollywood gossip columnist Luella Parsons, the Actors Studio was “the professionally unwashed, unmannered, unconventional actors’ group.”
The furor over the Method might have died down of its own accord were it not for Marilyn Monroe, who, after studying with Strasberg for a year, became a fixture at the Studio around the time of Dean’s death. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson on the outskirts of Los Angeles in 1926, Monroe’s dreams of Hollywood stardom had helped her survive a nightmarish childhood of foster homes, orphanages, and sexual assault. Those dreams were fed by Grace McKee, who worked at a film laboratory alongside Monroe’s mentally ill mother; McKee eventually became Monroe’s guardian. At her urging, Monroe married at the age of sixteen. Two years later, when her husband shipped out for World War II, she began working in a defense factory and was discovered by an army photographer. Soon she was modeling and then trying, with little success, to become a film actress. For women in the studio system of the 1940s, this often entailed sleeping with powerful men and, if you were lucky, securing one of them as your protector. Monroe was almost literally passed around by various men on the Hollywood party circuit before Johnny Hyde, the vice president of the William Morris Agency and discoverer of Lana Turner, fell in love with her. Hyde landed Monroe breakthrough roles in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve and secured her a coveted seven-year contract with Twentieth Century–Fox, but he dropped dead of a heart attack in 1950. Without Hyde backing her, there was no guarantee that Fox wouldn’t cancel her contract at the end of the year. She began an affair with Elia Kazan, at that point one of the hottest directors in town, and he introduced her to Arthur Miller, with whom she fell in love. Soon she was working regularly in comedies like Monkey Business, dramas like Clash by Night, and noirs like Niagara, all while becoming the definitive sex symbol of the 1950s. But she didn’t want to be a sex symbol. She wanted to be a serious actress. She wanted control over her image and career. She wanted Art, both in the form of great acting and in the form of Arthur Miller, whom she would finally wed in 1956.
By 1954, Monroe’s career had reached a crisis point. She was one of the most famous women on earth, but she chafed against the limits of “the girl”—the ditsy wide-eyed sexpot she’d played in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, and the recently completed The Seven Year Itch. As a result of both her relentless perfectionism and her burgeoning substance abuse issues, she had gained a reputation for causing problems in production. Her attempts to wrest control of her image and career from Twentieth Century–Fox had instead left her nearly penniless and possibly in violation of a contract that could keep her from working for most of the decade.
Fortuitously, she met Cheryl Crawford at a party in New York. Crawford took a liking to Monroe and brought her to the Actors Studio. Soon Monroe began studying with Strasberg at Malin Studios—she wrote Lee a check for ninety dollars for her first class, which he never cashed—and observing regularly at the Studio. She adopted the Studio’s style, taking up residence in New York, eschewing makeup, and having a brief affair with Marlon Brando. With Lee, she worked on monologues and scenes, including excerpts from Golden Boy and a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Lee’s son John. At the Studio, however, she presented work only once, and then only after canceling the presentation multiple times on account of nerves.
Marilyn soon hired Paula Strasberg as her acting coach. Paula clashed with Monroe’s directors, coughing during takes if she disliked them, inserting herself into the director-actor relationship, and pushing Monroe to demand extra takes to get line readings right. Marilyn began seeing an analyst who lived in the Strasbergs’ building, and regularly spent the night at their apartment. As her addictions and emotional struggles worsened over the late 1950s, she overshadowed the Strasberg children within their own home and kept Paula on call twenty-four hours a day. Paula shopped for Monroe, coached her in both life and art, helped her with her sleeping problems, and tried, with limited success, to regulate her pill intake. Monroe responded by lavishing the Strasbergs with gifts. She bought John Strasberg a Thunderbird for his eighteenth birthday, gave Paula a pearl necklace, and opened accounts for Lee at bookstores.
At the Studio, Lee’s attention to Monroe consternated the membership. Even before she began coming to sessions, some members felt that Strasberg was bewitched by celebrity, favoring the Studio’s most famous members at the expense of its hardest workers. As one member put it, “Working actors were shunted into the background while any celebrity who did a sneeze was rated great. The gymnasium idea was ruined after that.”
Meritocracy was supposed to rule at the Actors Studio. Everyone had to audition, and the Studio’s process for choosing new members was notoriously grueling and selective. Many members auditioned multiple times before getting in. One year, out of two thousand aspirants, the Studio took two people, Martin Landau and Steve McQueen. But Lee had begun allowing celebrities to “observe” at the Studio, and he granted some people membership by virtue of their service to the organization or their prominence in the field.
Many people also worried that Monroe would be damaged by the Method’s interior focus. As Michael Kahn, who studied directing with Strasberg, described it, “You had to go to the darkest places of yourself to act [with Strasberg] … she had enough bad things to think about. Every time she had to act she had to think about how many blowjobs she gave.” Boris Aronson, the Group Theatre’s set designer, told Marilyn at one point, “Why are you doing this with him? Stop with this poison you’re putting into yourself.”
Aronson was one of many people furious at Strasberg for “instill[ing] in her that she’d someday be a tremendous actress.” Some suspected Lee of using Marilyn to establish his reputation as the world’s greatest acting teacher. But others felt his belief in Monroe was genuine, as was his devotion to her. Lee’s daughter, Susan, said that Marilyn “was so seductive … she convinced you that you were the only person that could save her. I was sixteen years old, and I felt responsible for her life. That was something that she elicited in people, and it was something that my father succumbed to.”
People could only watch, aghast, as Lee made ever larger pronouncements about Marilyn’s gifts. Ben Gazzara recalled Lee once telling him over lunch that he and Marilyn Monroe should do Macbeth together. Gazzara “had a tuna fish sandwich in my mouth and I almost choked … Marilyn was sitting [next to me] and I couldn’t hear her say ‘good morning.’ How this woman was going to play Lady Macbeth was beyond me.” But Lee felt that he “had a sense of her talent before it developed.” He could see she “had a wide range but didn’t know what to do to expedite it,” and that she was hobbled by insecurities that he and Paula could help her move past. “I made Marilyn Monroe an actress,” he claimed, “even though she was already a star. I worked out her problems for her too.”
Both of these assertions are dubious. Monroe had extensive training prior to working with the Strasbergs, including stints with Morris Carnovsky and Phoebe Brand at the Actors’ Lab and study with Michael Chekhov, opposite whose Lear she played Cordelia. Her comedic performances required great technical skill, and a little-seen and little-loved 1952 film called Don’t Bother to Knock proved her more than capable of tackling a complex dramatic role. In Don’t Bother to Knock, which also features Studio member Anne Bancroft, Monroe played Nell Forbes, a woman struggling with mental illness who is hired to babysit for the daughter of two guests at a hotel. Left alone with the child and the couple’s belongings, Nell creates a fantasy version of her life and gets lost inside it, turning violent once confronted with reality. Playing Nell required both emotional fearlessness and, in view of the ludicrous plot, a fundamental believability. Monroe did fine work in the role; her only weakness was the pianissimo whisper of her voice. While watching Don’t Bother to Knock, it is hard to shake the idea that what Monroe needed was not the Method, but speech lessons to unlock her voice, therapy to boost her confidence, and drug rehab to keep her from killing herself.
The best argument for the Strasbergs’ impact on Monroe’s acting comes in Joshua Logan’s film of William Inge’s Bus Stop. The film is awful—shrill and broad where the source material is sweet and nuanced—and Monroe is its lone bright spot. Somehow she takes the impossible job of playing Chérie, a waitress who decides to marry Beauregard Decker, a small-town cowboy who has kidnapped her, and makes it work. Chérie’s confusion at her own kidnapping in the early parts of the film is delightful, and her anguished realization that she loves Decker is convincing despite being preposterous. In one of the film’s final scenes, Decker leans over Chérie, explaining how they could make a life together, while she rests her head on a bar. It’s an odd shot, held for over a minute. Monroe’s face is squashed against her forearm, about as unglamorous as she could be. But Monroe stays there, Chérie’s every conflicted thought rippling over her face. It’s acting in the true Method mold: idiosyncratic, emotionally driven, and somewhat cryptic.
Whether Monroe benefited from her relationship with Paula and Lee or not, she thought she needed them, and her colossal fame blasted both the Studio and the Method into the stratosphere. As Harold Clurman put it, “Everybody wanted to know what the Actors Studio was that the phosphorescent Marilyn should be concerned with it.” That “everybody” included the press, and not all the attention was positive. Hedda Hopper, a gossip columnist for the Los Angeles Times who could literally make or break careers, called the Method “the dirty shirt school of acting.” Even the more positive articles fixated on the membership’s clothes: torn white shirts and blue jeans for men, and a back-to-basics, no-makeup look favored by women. Carroll Baker maintained that this so-called uniform was adopted because “we were all broke … we had to scrounge. Who had clothes?” But to opponents of the Method, the Studio’s uniform was another mark against it, a sign that its members were holier-than-thou, fetishizing an ersatz authenticity. As the director Tyrone Guthrie put it in a venomous New York Times takedown of the Method in 1957, “in blue jeans, with dirty nails and wild hair, they are busy proclaiming themselves Proletarian—but members of a vintage Proletariat.”
The clothes weren’t all that bothered Tyrone Guthrie about the Method. In his view, Method actors had poor diction, were unprepared to do the classics, and had made such a fetish out of truth that they had failed to “develop the[ir] Means of Communication,” by which he meant their body and voice. Method acting was “mere Behaviorism,” he argued—tacitly linking the Method to Pavlov, and thus the Soviet Union—which “will not take an actor far on the way to King Lear, Andromache, or Faust.” The Methodists “express youthful revolt against a social and political environment which has now ceased to exist,” because they merely reproduced the rebellions of the Group Theatre, who responded to a Great Depression now more than fifteen years in the past.
The British theatrical establishment—of which Guthrie was a part—was outspoken in its opposition to the Method. Even Michael Redgrave, a Stanislavski devotee who was a bit kinder in his assessment than Guthrie, felt that while “Americans have found an acting style of their own … full of vitality and violence, the diversity, the warmth and richness as well as the starkness of their civilization,” it was good for acting only in American plays. “Not all plays,” he said, “can be indigenous.” The hostility was partly a matter of national pride. When the critic Kenneth Tynan organized a television program that included a clip of an English actor complimenting the Method and disparaging English acting, Rex Harrison cornered him afterward. “You bastard!” he exclaimed. “You wrote that script for that young actor to make those nasty remarks about us and the English theater.”
Tynan’s program, which featured out-of-context clips of Strasberg at work at the Studio, confused more than it enlightened, as did Strasberg’s own public pronouncements about the Method. In attempting to properly credit the influence of Stanislavski—whose name Strasberg had begun mentioning again starting in 1955—he wound up leading people to believe his teachings and Stanislavski’s were identical. In a puzzling article written for the New York Times in September 1956, Strasberg claimed that some of the best “examples of Stanislavski’s ideas” were old-fashioned Hollywood persona actors like Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Spencer Tracy, because they “try not to act [but] to be themselves, to respond, or react.” He held up Shelley Winters, who had recently starred on Broadway in A Hatful of Rain, as an example of the Studio’s success. Winters, it turned out, had been coached by Stella Adler in preparation for the role.
