Fine Hours

Television last week tautened its slack season with some of its finest hours, a reprise of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and a pastoral homily by Lyndon Johnson.

Soul & Heels. When Miller's drama was first performed in 1949, the public pronounced it pretty strong stuff. But the jet age and the Great Society have intervened, and the traveling salesman may some day go the way of rent control and the propeller-driven plane. Many viewers who tuned in to CBS's Xerox special were just curious to see whether the play had gone out of style since its premiere.

It hadn't. Salesman was never meant to be a documentary, and its X-ray examination of a man who is going under has kept it from becoming a period piece. Willy Loman, the salesman whose soul is as worn as his heels from his mindless pursuit of the American dream, is as pathetic today as he was 17 years ago. As his faithlessness to his wife and himself backfires and eventually destroys him, the play takes on the proportions of Greek drama, and Miller's point drives itself home: the common man can suffer a king-size tragedy.

For the leading roles, the producers cast the two Broadway originals: Lee J. Cobb as Willy and Mildred Dunnock as his wife Linda. They knew their parts by heart--and by body. Since her debut in the part, Dunnock's hair had turned grey and she had become a grandmother; the lines on her face were real; her poignancy and power were all the more effective for her age. Cobb, now 54, had played the part so memorably (330 times) on Broadway that he and Willy have become nearly indistinguishable. Even on TV's western series, The Virginian, he seemed to be a peddler in the saddle, itching to dismount and begin pushing his products.

Salesman had its flaws. The scenes between the agonized Loman sons--alternately hating and loving the man who had filled them full of ballooning, worthless dreams--were edgy rather than sharp. And television's code blunted many of the play's sharpest lines (even "By God, I was rich" became "By George, I was rich"), needlessly sacrificing Miller's most formidable faculty: language.

Despite shortcomings, the program deserved the unreserved raves it gathered from critics all across the country. In the field of television, marked with the molehills of situation comedies and look-alike-sound-alike adventure shows, Salesman loomed as nothing less than Olympian.

Texas Gothic. Equally worth seeing was The Hill Country: Lyndon Johnson's Texas. The President of the U.S. is glimpsed most often in formal circumstances, at press conferences or speechmaking. NBC set the balance straight with a beautifully photographed color documentary that placed the man in the context of his own countryside. The fabulous hills and by now mythical Pedernales River were reduced to their actual proportions, to sere ranch land and meandering stream. Next to them, the President suddenly appeared lifesize, and shucking both his White House mantle and "jes' folks" delivery, he reminisced about his beginnings with pride, enthusiasm, wit and spontaneity.

Johnson is never very far from his past; his recollections of his grandparents' pioneer trials are obviously as close to him as the everyday burdens of the presidency, and he can retell them with spirit: "The Indians came in and stole the horses and ransacked the place . . . and left late that day, almost dark. My grandfather came in looking for his wife and his baby. He couldn't find them . . . and he started calling my grandmother. After she was sure it was her husband's voice, she opened the trapdoor and came out of the basement, safe and sound, but with the diaper still in the baby's mouth [to keep it from crying aloud]."

His memories of the Twenties, when he worked on road gangs and taught Mexican children, and his courtship of an anonymous "very pretty girl" were no less vivid: "I got a job for $125 a month . . . and she got a job that paid her $150. That counted much to my humiliation that a girl could make more money than I could . . . She tried to tell me how to say buenas tardes or amigos or something, and I would try to tell her the difference between the Governor and the President. And then we would transact a little business in between." Johnson stood out in sharpest relief twice--once during a schoolroom soliloquy by one of his old pupils, who affectionately imitated the young schoolteacher's loose gait and swinging arms, and again when the camera moved slowly around the little town of Johnson City (pop. 611) to show the leathery, drawling townspeople--a group of Texas Gothic faces who, after all, are the people from whom Lyndon Johnson came and to whom he returns whenever he can: "You would be surprised how they can clear up a lot of things that seem pretty foggy to you when you get here."

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