John Lahr: Show and tell: New Yorker profiles

By MICHELE HEWITSON

In John Lahr's profile of the playwright Arthur Miller, he writes of returning with Miller to the small cabin in Connecticut where Miller came one autumn weekend in 1948 to start writing a play. That play would become Death of a Salesman.

Miller, who had just had his first success with All My Sons, had to build the structure which would house him and a character called Willy Loman. The cabin existed only in a stack of wood, in tins of nails. Loman existed only in his notebooks.

Miller had never "built a building in my life". It took until spring.

Then he fashioned a desk out of an old door and sat down to write. Lahr writes that all Miller knew about his play was that it would be about a travelling salesman who would die at the end and that "two of the lines were, 'Willy?' 'It's all right. I came back'."

Miller started in the morning and worked until around 2am. "I was the stenographer. I could hear them. I could hear them, literally."

In one day, Lahr records, "he had produced, almost intact, the first act of Death of a Salesman".

What Lahr has produced is a profile of the making of the play, as much as it is a profile of Miller.

Lahr sits on Miller's shoulder as he wrings out Loman from the memories of his own salesman father.

Lahr's great gift is to make real people out of "show people whom the public thinks it knows". He is searching for "the pulse of the artist, [so that] you can find the pulse of the art".

His artists include Woody Allen, the prince of pessimism, in a piece which exposes him as a man with a great capacity for joy. Lahr also visits Roseanne on the set of her show, and shows how "rage is Roseanne's ozone", and revels in the contradictions.

He goes deep inside Ingmar Bergman's "shadowy interior"; he sits beside him in the Upper Circle at the Royal National Theatre in Sweden, where Bergman first saw actors on a stage.

He writes of his subjects as "cavorting hybrids" from a world which "also made me". This he gives as his reason for including two tender, funny, sad portraits of his parents: his father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, and his mother, Mildred Lahr, a former Ziegfeld girl. His mother "invented a world for her great blond beauty to inhabit - a world of happy times".

His father lived in "a thick fog of some ontological anxiety palpable, impenetrable". The Cowardly Lion's mantra is "I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do." Lahr writes that his father's spooks would now be summed up in symptoms, that he would have been described as manic depressive or bipolar.

Those clinical terms, he says, "can't convey the sensual, dramatic, almost reverent power of the moroseness that Dad could bring with him into a room, or of the crazy joy he could manufacture out of it onstage".

For these two pieces alone, Show and Tell is worth the hefty price of entry.

Lahr's gift is to render palpable, to make penetrable, the strange, fascinating and complex people in show business. You can hear them, literally.

Bloomsbury

$74.95

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.