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Odets was the first man I called on when I made a trip to California. We always had dinner alone and always in his house. He would welcome me as if I was a lifeline to the shore where he longed to be and the sea stormy between. He had five plays all laid out, he’d tell me, and waiting for the day. …

The tragedy of our time in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets. Not that I share the sentiment expressed in his obituaries that he’d failed in his career. Clifford influenced a generation of playwrights—Art Miller, who’s sitting here; Tennessee Williams, who told me that his first arousing…

However, the main reason for my devotion to the cause was my concern for Molly. She’d invested her soul, nothing less, in her hopes for a pleasant life of work together, side by side, in the “perfect” home she’d made. Pleasant! I grew to hate that word. I don’t know exactly why; perhaps she used it…

Men called geniuses have been the joy of my existence—but I didn’t know them as geniuses. All those I’ve known and worked with—Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando—have a joyous intensity in work and have passed it on to me. They are blessed…

“Good,” she said, “relax. Give in. I’m going to make us an old-fashioned.”

She was gone. I heard the apartment house’s elevator through the walls. I recalled our brownstone on Seventy-second Street and its porch directly off the bedroom, where I used to sleep nights under the summer sky. Then I …