I consider myself rigorously moral—moral enough, in fact, to admit this: There is one thing I’ve lied about consistently, and that is my relationships to women out of wedlock. I have again and again lied to my wives about this. I don’t know how else to handle this problem, and I don’t think you or anyone else does.

People have often accused me of being selfish and self-centered. They’re quite right. All artists are. They protect like all hell what’s most precious for them—the privilege to exploit the full range of their curiosity. On the other hand, in my case, brought up as I was, I also wanted a steady home, a good, strong roof over my head. I’ve tried all my life long to hold on to both ways of life, despite the fact that I know they are finally incompatible.

Or are they? Because of my cleverness and something slippery in my soul, I found that they need not be mutually exclusive. Later in life, I maintained a succession of girlfriends while, at the same time, “worshipping” in a middle-class home. Flaubert has said that an artist must be, au fond, a bourgeois. That is only half right, but it is half right.

We’d take turns cooking. On my day, I’d prepare my specialty, a great pot of bulgar flavored with tomatoes, onions, and lamb-kidney bits, in the Anatolian manner. Lee preferred boiled chicken; Paula boiled chickens. Cliff, also broke, was writing a play in a large kitchen closet, aptly called I Got the Blues. The atmosphere of the apartment was saturated with disappointment. People wouldn’t greet one another when they entered. Bedroom doors remained closed all day, shutting everyone apart. We might as well have been living alone. Lee stayed in his room and read; when he came out he was silent, an owl by daylight. I got into a fight with another actor, kept slamming his head on the floor until I was pulled off. I’ve forgotten what the fight was about; it didn’t matter. It had been a disappointing season and there was no new play for the coming season.

THAT SPRING was when it began. I’ve found a notebook from that time, and it’s full of a new passion. There are jottings about steelworkers walking off a job, tools held high (I’d read about that), about a job in a cement factory in the dead of winter and its hardships (I’d not suffered this cold), about construction workers on payday shooting craps in a half-finished building (I’d seen this but from a students distance), about “hobo jungles” (I’d never seen one), and there’s a long, ardent defense of the Bonus Army: “Those men came to Washington because they had nowhere else to go and were as willing to starve on the road as in the streets of the cities they call home.” (I’d never been hungry.) Then: “You’re breaking my heart, fellow, go starve somewhere else!”—dialogue to be attributed to the villains of the Hoover government or someone on General MacArthur’s staff.

[...]

But that spring it was all romance. By the time I went to Green Mansions in June, I was ready for the Communist Party.

I wrote in my diary: “I know the source of his sickness. The capitalist system. The fascism which keeps the gambler gambling long after he wants to or has the money—or blood—to pay with. [Certainly a lurid description of my father’s modest trading.] The revolution I want is a society where everybody works to produce enough for everybody but not for profit.” And then: “My father’s neck is marked by the weasel teeth of Morgan and Mitchell. [Mitchell was president of the National City Bank, whose stock had given Father a big ride up, then plunged to the bottom.] He worked all his life for these men. Now he rattles in the wind, sick and miserable, walking up and down in his store, hoping something he cannot imagine will come to the rescue and save him.”

Then this, which still astonishes me: “From now on I will be kind to him and—[I underlined the phrases italicized here] I will revenge him. Now is the time, as my strength is building. I will make the revolution. That is all I want.”

Who the hell did I think I was?

That fall, after Men in White opened, I became a member of the Communist Party of America.

So we went forth from the Group Theatre like the apostles of Jesus, teaching, instead of brotherly love and the Ten Commandments, the art of Stanislavski as filtered through Strasberg. South of Fourteenth Street was our Corinth and Antioch and Caesarea. We assumed it as our duty to enlighten the unenlightened. After my personal lessons in the morning and early afternoon, I would rush downtown to teach a course in directing at the New Theatre League, a Communist-front organization, preparing my notes for each talk on the twenty-minute subway ride. At the age of twenty-five, I carried on about the art of direction without the least doubt. Now I’d hesitate a long time before engaging to teach such a course and take months to prepare it. The more you know, the less you believe you know.

With that, Joe Bromberg came forward; he played Agate Keller, a man who’d lost one eye in an industrial accident. Clifford gave Agate a rousing summation. “Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughterhouse of our lives. Let freedom really ring.” Then on to attack the union’s leadership: “These slick slobs stand here telling us about bogeymen, the Reds is bogeymen. But the man who got me food in 1932, he calls me COMRADE! The man who picked me up where I bled, he called me COMRADE too! What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for LEFTY! He might never come—” Whereupon he’s interrupted by a man—me—rushing down the theatre aisle and up on stage to announce: “They found Lefty—behind the car barns with a bullet in his head.”

To my astonishment when I read this play recently, I responded as I had when I first read it. I was thrilled to the verge of tears. In the passing of that half century of time, I’d turned violently anti-Communist. But the yearning for meaning, for dignity, for security in life, stirred me now as it had then. The Communists got their influence and their power by speaking up for these universal human desires. It seemed that I hadn’t changed; they had. How did they get their hold on the need for militancy? By being militant before the rest of our society knew it should. Something still alive in me reenlisted.

And the actors? We couldn’t sleep that night. We straggled north through the silent streets—Harold Clurman among us—found a Child’s that was open all night, and lingered over our suppers, not talking too much, stunned by what had occurred. None of us was ever to be the same again, and I suppose we all knew it. But we had no idea how far and how fast this change would go. Cliff was to become a god. The next morning, I’d arrived. The review that would appear in the New Masses called me the “Proletariat Thunderbolt.” (Who was ever less working class, more middle class, than I? But it never occurred to me to privately challenge this description. I was proud of it.) The company as a whole became a model for what a left theatre should and must be.

For a time he maintained his show of indifference; as far as he was concerned, the season was over. But the actors were no longer the docile, worshipful “children” he’d been training for more than five years. Lefty had changed them. One of their number had written it; they’d mounted it despite Lee’s indifference and Harold’s lassitude. Now, in a charged atmosphere, the actors were not to be denied.

So, in every way, Clifford’s life was made simultaneously easier and more complicated. His pleasures were multiplied, while he had less and less time for himself. The flattery never stopped and he couldn’t help eating it up, while at the same time he believed what was said about him less and less and finally not at all.

Here’s the tragic heart of the problem—as I understood it. When the irritations, the problems, and the conflicts that existed before the big success are eased and removed, when the struggle is (apparently) over and one lives behind a permanent Don’t Disturb sign, it soon becomes evident that these troubles, now put behind, were the source and the genesis of the talent that brought on the success. Fame and money were insulating Clifford from the discomforts and challenges of his earlier years but, at the same time, “saving” him from those abrasions that were the source of his “genius.”

There’s a price for everything.

Now came the classic questions: “Suddenly I can do anything I want, so what do I do? I can go any which way; which way will I choose? What do I ask of life? What do I want to do with my years and energy? If I do have the talent they say I have, to what shall I turn it? Now that I have what appear to be unlimited choices, which choices shall I make?”