ASSEMBLING THE PRODUCTION TEAM

The question of the title sparked a controversy that the critics were well aware of before the play had opened. The advance publicity no doubt counteracted any negative effect the title might have had on ticket sales. As for the cast, Alan Hewitt, who played Howard, has written that none of the actors in the company had any doubt about the power of the play, or its prospects for success. The title did not disturb them at all.¹⁸

Since they had first come together for the production of All My Sons, Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan had recognized their close artistic and personal affinity. As Kazan has put it:

We were immediately compatible in the sense that his background was very much like my own. His father was a salesman like mine, he came out of the lower middle-class like me, he was also from New York. We understood each other immediately. I was for a time the perfect director for him and this showed most in Death of a Salesman, which is a play that dealt with experiences I knew well in my own life.²²

As All My Sons passed its two-hundredth performance in the spring of 1948, Arthur Miller was at work on two scripts. Death of a Salesman was one, but further along was a play he and Kazan had been tinkering with throughout the winter, a comedy called Plenty Good Times, about an Italian-American worker, "his wife and his girl," which took place on Manhattan’s lower East Side in the twenties. Kazan was quoted as saying "it’s a light play and has no specific social theme."²³  Salesman quickly displaced all thoughts of Plenty Good Times when Kazan read it in the summer of 1948.

As the son of an Anatolian Greek carper dealer who had expected him to go into the business, Kazan understood Miller’s play from within, a strong asset for the Method director that he was. Kazan had been educated at Williams College and the Yale School of Drama, and had spent his twenties in the Group Theatre, working as stage manager, actor, and finally director, and studying the principles of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, and Meyerhold as interpreted by Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. After ten years of directing plays and films on his own, in 1948 Kazan was one of Broadway’s most sought-after directors, having directed both the Oscar-winning Gentleman’s Agreement and the Pulitzer and Drama Critics Circle Award-winning All My Sons in the previous year. Death of a Salesman proved to be the perfect play for Miller and Kazan to collaborate on at this time in their lives and careers.

Once the problem of securing a producer was out of the way, the first artistic function for Kazan was casting. For a Method director like Kazan, choosing the cast was perhaps the most important decision he would make. He once told Miller that "casting is ninety-five percent of " directing [T 272]. As he described it:

The problem is that the basic channel of the role must flow through the actor. He has to have the role in him somewhere. He must have experienced it to some extent. That's why I don't cast by reading. I take the actor for a walk or I take him to dinner or I watch him when he doesn't notice it and I try to find what is inside him. I am known for casting "on instinct," which is not the correct word because I have studied the actor carefully, even if quickly. Sometimes I make very rapid decisions but I never cast by looks because looks are false.²⁴

In his typical fashion, Kazan cast many of the parts in Salesman with actors he had worked with before, so that he felt he knew the roles were in them. Arthur Kennedy, who played Biff, had played the son, Chris, in All My Sons, a character who differed a great deal on the surface from Biff, but in whom were many of the same motives and desires. Thomas Chalmers, who played Ben, and Hope Cameron, who played Letta, had also been in the All My Sons cast. Don Keefer, who played Bernard, was a member of Kazan’s newly formed Actors Studio and had been in his production of Harriet.

The most important casting, of course, was for the roles of Willy and Linda. Since his conception of Willy was deeply tied to the character’s small size, Miller at first thought it vital to have a small actor, certainly not, as Kazan has put it, "great lumbering Leo Jacob Cobb" [K 356]. Miller remembers that they auditioned actors who fitted his image of Willy, but that "Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body" [T 186]. Miller had seen Lee J. Cobb only as "a mountainous hulk covered with a towel in a Turkish bath in an Irwin Shaw play, with the hilarious ‘oy vey’ delivery of a forever persecuted businessman" [T 186]. He had his doubts as the big, thirty-seven-year-old Cobb announced to him, "This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man" [T 186]. But Miller’s doubts were eased as he watched Cobb over the next few days, smiling winsomely at a young waitress in a coffee shop "as though he had to win her loving embrace before she could be seduced into bringing him his turkey sandwich and coffee" [T 186], and laughing at something Miller's young son had said: "The sorrow in his laughter flew our at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously greedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving" [T 187].

Kazan knew Cobb well. They had been in the Group Theatre together and on a road tour of Odets’ Golden Boy. They had been close friends as young men. Cobb had recently been in Kazan’s film Boomerang. Kazan reports:

I knew him for a mass of contradictions: loving and hateful, anxious yet still supremely pleased with himself, smug but full of doubt, guilty and arrogant, fiercely competitive but very withdrawn, publicly private, suspicious but always reaching for trust, boastful with a modest air, begging for total acceptance no matter what he did to others. In other words, the part was him; I knew that Willy was in Cobb, there to be pulled out [K 362].

Despite his size and the fact that he was more than twenty-five years younger than Willy, Cobb was cast.

Linda's size was nearly as important in Miller's script as Willy’s. Willy was small and battered; Linda was large and protective. The contrast was significant. Mildred Dunnock, a diminutive and cultivated woman who had taught speech in a women’s college, was chiefly known for her portrayal of delicate, fluttery characters such as Lavinia Hubbard in Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest and a spinster school teacher in The Corn Is Green. She looked like anything but Miller’s image of Linda: "A woman who looked as though she had lived in a house dress all her life, even somewhat coarse and certainly less than brilliant."²⁵  But Dunnock was convinced she could play the part. After being told at her audition that she simply was nor right for Linda, she returned the next day to audition again, padded from neck to hemline. Her appearance was so altered that the production team did not recognize her until she read her first line. Everyone agreed that her reading was a fine one, but still thought she was not the right person to play Linda. Dunnock returned again and again, altering her appearance and giving a new reading each time until she convinced the production team that Linda was indeed within her. Kazan was so impressed with her work that he eventually cast her again "against type" as Big Mama in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and as Aunt Rose Comfort in the film Baby Doll.

15  Clipping, New York Sun, 3 September 1948, Arthur Miller Scrapbook, [HRHRC].

16  Robert Sylvester, "Brooklyn Boy Makes Good," Saturday Evening Post 222 (16 July 1949). Reprinted in Roudan�, Conversations, 16.

17  Clipping from Variety, 29 December 1948, Arthur Miller Scrapbook, [HRHRC].

18  "The Original Death of a Salesman – Myths, Icons, and a Few Facts," Manuscript [MS], New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection [NYPL], 3.

19  Sylvester, "Brooklyn Boy," reprinted in Roudan�, Conversations, 26. See also Murray Schumach, "Miller Still a ‘Salesman’ for a Changing Theater," New York Times, 26 June 1975:32.

20  "Death of a Salesman," Life 26 (21 February 1949): 115. See also Mielziner, Designing, 62.

21  "Noted in Passing," House and Garden 95 (May 1949): 218.

22  Quoted in Michael Ciment, Kazan on Kazan (London: Secker & Warburg, 1974), 32.

23  Unidentified newspaper clipping dated 24 November 1947 and clipping from the New York Tribune, 29 May 1948, Scrapbook, [HRHRC].

24  Ciment, Kazan, 41.

25  Arthur Miller, "The American Theater," Holiday 17 (January 1955). Reprinted in Martin, The Theater Essays, 46.