Arthur Penn: American Director

8. Four for the Seesaw

72 8 Four for the Seesaw William Gibson was twenty when he realized he’d married the wrong woman. It was 1934, he had dropped out of City College of New York, and he was trying to be a writer. Instead, he’d gotten married. “I was headlong, maddeningly in love with her,” he admits, “but a year or so later I just wanted to get out of it.” Then he met Margaret Brenman, a Brooklyn College psychology major who was reading Freud’s introductory lectures and was as stable as he was adrift. Gibson became enamored both of her and of what she was studying, and they started seeing each other. In 1939, after selling a story to Esquire, he felt confident enough to submit a play to the socially aware Group Theatre. Their reader, Molly Day Thatcher, Elia Kazan’s wife, saw promise in Gibson but not in his play, and suggested he take a job with another theater to learn how to write for the stage. His agent, Leah Salisbury, secured him a position at the Barter Theatre in Virginia that summer, where he wrote five additional works, none of which got produced. On December 6, 1940, Brenman and Gibson married and moved to Topeka, Kansas, where she interned at the Menninger Clinic while taking her doctorate at the University of Kansas. Her stipend supported both her and her husband, and when she earned her doctorate, Dr. Karl Menninger himself offered her a position. William joined the board of the Topeka Civic Theatre but caused a minor scandal when, to avoid the organization’s conflict-of-interest rules, he submitted a play he had written Four for the Seesaw 73 under his brother-in-law’s name and it was accepted for production . (The work, A Cry of Players, about young William Shakespeare , would not see a production until 1968.)1 The Gibsons had lived in Topeka for eight years when Dr. Brenman-Gibson got a job offer from the Riggs Center in Massachusetts,2 and the couple relocated. She continued to be the breadwinner of the couple , an arrangement with which her husband became increasingly uneasy. He left her for a year to live in New York, but Margaret was not alone for long. “Bill was in love with his work as well as with Margaret,” Peggy Penn, a friend to them both, clarifies. “I think she wanted all his attention on her, and when she didn’t get it, she had an affair with [psychoanalyst] Merton Gill.” Penn and Gibson connected fatefully during Gibson’s New York sojourn, when Penn was visiting the city from Black Mountain College. They both turned up at the boardinghouse where two actresses they were dating happened to be staying (this was before Arthur met Peggy). “It was out of that context that Arthur and I kept in touch,” says Gibson. “He wrote me a letter or two from Europe and I replied.” During that year, Gibson studied with Clifford Odets at the Actors Studio, then reconciled with his wife and took a job at Riggs teaching piano to the patients and staging occasional plays. “Much to my surprise,” Gibson says, “I found myself—while Margaret was pregnant with our son—writing a novel3 about Riggs. It not only was published and was sold to MGM, but I suddenly was making money. I talked myself into going out [to LA] and doing some rewriting for [producer John] Houseman and [director Vincente] Minnelli, and at the end they offered me a job on the next movie, and I said no because we had just bought, with MGM’s money, this house,4 and I had one act of a play that I wanted to get back to. The play was Two for the Seesaw , and Arthur and I were in touch all the time.” The road from page to stage was not smooth for Two for the Seesaw, and Gibson traced it with painful acuity in his 1968 chronicle, The Seesaw Log.5 The play is a reluctant romance between two people who are lonely but don’t want to admit it. Gittel Mosca (Anne Bancroft) is a struggling dancer living in New 74 Arthur Penn York. She meets Jerry Ryan (Henry Fonda), a Nebraska lawyer who has separated from his wife and has ventured to the city to reclaim his independence. He is alternately needy...