So it went; there was always some crisis, and you never knew who was standing on the outskirts of the crowd, watching intently. Both Boris Kaufman and Charlie Maguire felt the tension, but they behaved magnificently; they knew that the rough circumstances within which we were making the film gave it the look it needed. I think Charlie minded the cold and whatever harassment he encountered on the set from the hoodlums less than what he had to take from our producer. Sam would call Charlie’s home, sometimes as late as two in the morning, most of the time from “21” or whatever other “in” place he patronized. Charlie felt that Sam must have had a girl with him, because he was trying to impress someone close by with the authoritative tone of his voice. (Sam’s young ladies were always kids—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—and easily impressed.) Sam would bawl Charlie out, demanding to know why he’d “let Kazan in scene number eight-four go for nine takes.” And why had Charlie let Kazan print three? This was Charlie’s first big picture, but he was learning fast; he’d say, “Well, if you don’t want him to do it, why don’t you call him and tell him yourself?”

My guess is that it’s the theme, that of a man who has sinned and is redeemed. But how can that be? After all, Terry’s act of self-redemption breaks the great childhood taboo: Don’t snitch on your friends. Don’t call for the cop! Our hero is a “rat,” or for intellectuals, an informer. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone in the audience, not given our villains, those whom Terry was fingering. Which is proof that Budd Schulberg struck a deep human craving there: redemption for a sinner, rescue from damnation. Redemption, isn’t that the promise of the Catholic Church? That a man can turn his fate around and by an act of good heart be saved at last? There are gut reasons like that for the success of the great hits. They touch a fundamental hunger in people. Yes, that a man can, no matter what he’s done, be redeemed—particularly if he has a sympathetic young woman as his confessor. She’s better than a priest, but does the same job. That is why Budd’s insistence on the prominence of the love story was so instinctively correct. It was during those most tender moments that Marlon enlisted the audience in his favor. Is it possible that many more people than we imagine have a feeling that they’ve done wrong and yearn for forgiveness and rescue? Wasn’t Brando playing out the hopes of the audience? Something like that must have gone on, because people have told me that they’ve seen this film a dozen times; every night it’s on TV, they make sure to see it. Apparently it’s more than entertainment. Something central has been touched. And it’s bigger than anything Budd and I had devised. We didn’t know what we had or what we’d done. For instance, try and repeat a great success, and you’ll surely fail.

Yes, I believe all directors tend to be a little two-faced, just as I believe all writers are spies. Notice one of those bastards sometime, how they shift gears in the middle of the conversation. You go along talking to one of them, and suddenly they’re not gabbing with you, not spontaneously, not exchanging views freely. They’ve pulled back; they’re listening and recording what you’re saying, to use later. You can hear the clickety-click in their skulls where nature’s tape recorder spins. Probably what you’ve just said fitted into a scene they’re writing. That’s what I mean by spying. They may even encourage you to go on, despite the fact that they totally disagree with what you’ve said and resent it. I’ve seen writers sit still at a party, listening to a discussion that I know offends them, but they don’t respond or counter or demonstrate what they feel. Later they will report that conversation to home base, their notebook.

That meant a good deal to me. I am preparing to write about that time in my life when I was squeezed between conflicting tendencies which tightened around me, pulling and pushing me in opposite directions at the same time. For instance, I wanted to be an independent producer and director of films, going my own way without restriction or reservations, but I also wanted the power, equipment, and prestige of a Major Studio behind me. With the huge success of On the Waterfront, this seemed possible then. I also wanted to write my own screenplays, while I still valued and heeded the insights and talents of better writers. I wanted to write my own story and that of my family, but I also wanted to write about the social history that I’d witnessed in my time. I wanted to be in with the big shots of the entertainment world, but I also wanted to lead a quiet, reflective life. I wanted money, plenty of it, but I certainly didn’t want to pay for that money with onerous services. I wanted to be a bourgeois with a townhouse and a country home, a cook and a housekeeper, two cars, a regular winter vacation in the Caribbean; but I also wanted to keep my expenses down so I would never feel compelled to do a film or a play about which I was not enthusiastic. I wanted to be a member of the rough gang, the street people, like those I’d gotten to know in Hoboken, plain old “Gadg.” I wanted to be a lefty, a radical, certainly a socialist—at least that—but I also wanted to be a Democrat, sitting squarely mid-America, loyal and loving to the U.S.A. I wanted to lead an irregular life, wandering here and there around the earth as the impulse moved me, keeping my own hours; I also wanted to be the head of a nuclear family, a firmly established and respected Anatolian paterfamilias, with all household events on time, clean sheets every third day, heavy “Turkish” towels, linen napkins, and a good dinner served each night at seven. I loved Molly, my smart, immaculate, completely honest and absolutely trustworthy wife, but I also wanted adventures and to be, every so often, irresponsible and out of control. I wanted it all. But how did I shape these contradictions into the unit of contradiction that the actor from the Berliner Ensemble spoke of? The answer is, I didn’t. I wasn’t able to. What I did was give in to them all, and when they warred with each other, I yielded alternately but completely to conflicting devotions. I swayed back and forth, all the way at each end; I was unresolved.

Molly’s work had a fault that is fatal in the theatre, one so deep in her character that it could not be corrected. There was no moment in that evening’s entertainment when it appeared that both sides might be right; only Molly, the author, was right. In the theatre, order, clarity, and goodness are not enough; to be correct is not a sufficient virtue. An audience wants to be shaken and for a time kept in doubt. That’s the fun of it. Molly, being absolute about her opinions, had no inner conflicts herself; she could therefore create conflicts only within a perimeter she’d set. The audience felt that she knew the solution to everything happening on stage and that she’d uncover these solutions when she chose to. This produced the one unforgivable dramatic fault: The conclusion was predictable. The conflicts were not genuine because they did not exist in the author, so were not felt as genuine conflicts by her. Her audience, good-natured and kind, may have agreed with her “positions,” but they were not interested in the confrontation—more like a school debate or a “fixed” fight—that she set up. In the theatre, there has to be a belly of chaos under the event. The audiences should be uncertain of the outcome until the end. Only then may a resolution be of dramatic interest.

I’d come to that point in life—I was forty-eight, that critical age—when I was asking myself, “Is that all there’s going to be? Is this, what I have now, it?” I set out to destroy what I found stifling and replace the predictable with the unpredictable. I courted what would be disruptive. I was more determined than ever to concentrate on my own projects and prepare my own scripts. For this program, I found an ally. When you want to hear something very much, you’ll soon find someone to tell it to you. In the last stages of work preparing A Face in the Crowd, I’d met a young actress who, many years later, was to be my second wife. I was immediately taken with her. At first our affair was nothing more than dog and bitch. There were others at the same time; neither of us expected the relationship to be anything beyond a temporary lusting. But I’d never encountered anyone like this girl, anyone who’d uncover what is generally kept discreet with such complete candor. Conceived in a field of daisies, Barbara Loden was born antirespectable; she observed none of the conventional middle-class boundaries, the perimeter walls within which Molly lived. A roulette wheel that didn’t stop turning, Barbara would keep me wondering when it would, and where. Life with Molly, to continue the figure, was a safe-deposit vault.

AS IV’E passed through the episodes of my life, I’ve tried to understand my behavior and explain it to you and so to myself. But at this point in my history, I cannot account for what I was doing. The explanation, if one can be found, is beyond my reach. From the time I found that Waterfront and East of Eden had made me one of the most respected men in my profession and that I could choose among unlimited opportunities, I began to behave in a manner I can only describe by saying that I was two men alternately within the same man, with two needs, two “souls”—one black, the other “normal.”

I was enjoying a double life, seemed to want respectability and general esteem while, sometimes on the same day, even within an hour, I was being driven by irrational emotional needs to behavior that was shameful. No, that isn’t true. The remarkable fact is that I felt no shame, did not believe that what I was doing was out of the ordinary or in any final sense reprehensible. I was not burdened with a sense of mortal sin, and what I was doing, since it defied understanding, needed no justification. Being determined at this time to deny myself nothing, I plunged on. I was lawless.

I said very little to Molly about the purpose of my trip—she would have tried to talk me out of it. All I told her was that I needed a vacation alone. In Athens I found what I wanted and rented it, the Stormie Seas, a forty-foot caïque, flying the Union Jack. It had a crew of two social rebels, a young married couple—navigator and captain, mate and cook. I told them the kind of islands I wanted to see and they understood. We cleared Piraeus’s channel on our five-horse motor, then shut it off and, relying on cloth, turned south toward those islands of the Cyclades that tourists don’t trample. Quiet at last, my load of tensions eased, I asked myself a question I’d asked before, but now in earnest: Could I disappear from the world where I’d trafficked all my life and become someone else? Could I start over again? You will certainly say that is the most foolish of questions, but in time—it did take time—that is what I did: disappear from the world I’d inhabited all my adult life, to become someone else.

Speak now, I said to myself, release your true feelings before it’s too late. Be yourself. Take your place in the world. You are not a cosmic orphan. You have no reason to be timid. Respond as you feel. Awkwardly, crudely, vulgarly—but respond. Leave your throat open. You can have anything the world has to offer, but the thing you need most and perhaps want most is to be yourself. Stop being anonymous. The anonymity you believed would protect you from pain and humiliation, shame and rejection, doesn’t work. Admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit pettiness, even that; admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to you, respond with your true, uncalculated response, your emotions. The best and most human parts of you are those that you have inhibited and hidden from the world.

So I resigned—my announcement to myself—from the elite club of sought-after Broadway directors, walked away at the peak of my success. By refusing the Williams play, I was, in effect, refusing all other plays by authors of similar stature. I was abdicating from the successful career I’d made. I vowed not to look back.