In other words, I continued to think like a Communist. The theatre is a weapon. A play must teach a lesson. The third-act climax must send the audience home with hope and courage born of a sweeping revolutionary insight. Only I and those like me had the answers. I continued to regard the society around me as hostile and repressive, yes, corrupt beyond redemption by peaceful change. Why? Because it was run by moneymen. Change is necessary; in fact, inevitable. What kind of change? Complete. Final. A shift of power. Trust the working class. Only. Defend the U.S.S.R. With all its faults. (This did change.) My duty as a theatre artist was to teach others the right way and lead them down the right path.

All of us who came out of the “movement” and all those who remained in the “movement” were marked with this intellectual arrogance. We were sure of our “positions,” and it was too damned bad for anyone who didn’t agree with us. We were sure we were right. After I resigned, I did not think any differently than I did when I was a member. In fact, I still believe a good part of what I believed then.

When I think of large talents that were beached by a crisis in their lives, I think first of Clifford Odets. There is one sorrow that must pain men so stranded most: that they were unable to live up to the image of themselves that once gave them their pride. Clifford was what Orson was not, a celebrated member of the Communist Party. In 1935, after his first two plays hit New York, he was the artist-revolutionary of the day, honored and respected by all good men. In 1952, he did what I’d done, named the Party members in the Group to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and whereas that act, unhappy as it was, gave me an identity I could carry, naming his old comrades deprived Odets of the heroic identity he needed most. I don’t believe he was ever again the same man.

I made a point of catching the commercial. Orson offered the nation his assurance of the product’s worth with a voice as resonant as ever—a beautiful instrument indeed—and his presence was, in some grotesque way, still imposing. I couldn’t help wondering—as I do with any sponsoring of a product where an artist is paid to say what he’s paid to say—did Orson, himself, believe what he professed? Of course, he must be broke, so he has to earn his living this way. What a tragedy, to put such a talent to this use.

I contrasted this puffy huckster with the dauntless, spirited fellow I’d worked with in the thirties. I remarked how he dressed now, entirely in black, a formless, unbound costume, the kind of garment old women choose to conceal the infirmities of an aging body. I thought of what he was wearing as a great tent inside which he was hiding. I also thought of him—remembering his glory years—as a great beached whale, driven onshore by a storm or, more likely, by some mysterious turbulence in its essence. Why this slow suicide among whales? No one has ever found out. Was there some compulsion of shame or spiritual defect here that made Orson “let himself go,” then degrade his huge gifts by making commercials? Did he have an impulse, like the one that beached the whales, to rush to the end?

There are others whom the waves of thought and art in the forties, when they retreated, left stranded. Brando, like Welles neurotically overweight, and by some mysterious choice out of things, respecting no one and least of all his own profession and his incomparable gifts, hides on a dirt hill over the film colony or in Tahiti. There are others too, many of whom make fat livings by boosting commercial enterprises—you’ve seen them on TV. These men in their private moments still present themselves as rebels—like old actors coming back again and again to play a favorite role, the one in which they scored their great successes. But in their hearts, I believe, they know the unhappy truth, that they are now deep in the system they once loathed and attacked. Many of them are affluent, with a Mercedes or the assurance of a stretch limo and an obedient chauffeur at their command. They are all good men, men of the “movement,” as it was called, not the Communist movement but the surge of hope and confidence and determination that took over from the Great Depression, the anti-monopoly-capital movement, the common-man movement, the anti-colonialist movement of the thirties and forties. These were and are worthy causes, causes with which I am in sympathy, and, as much as the others, I hold on to the postures of those days and the dreams we once all had. But now, in the cold light of a cold morning, those dreams are troubled when they exist at all, and on the beach lie the remains of that other time.

My own opinion is that they do because the actors—whether by technique or by accident—gave you pieces of their lives, which is certainly the ultimate generosity of the artist, and they did it unabashed. You were the witness to a final intimacy. These artists spoke to your secret self, the one you hide. They offered you more than cleverness or technique: they gave you the genuine thing, the thing that hurt you as it thrilled you.

What made these distilled experiences awesome and unforgettable is that in these cases, a kind of fear is aroused—not in them but in you as you watch—a fear that may be the ultimate respect you, the viewer, can give in return. You find yourself unsure of what is going to happen next—or in the end. Will they last it out, will they come through? As in life, there are likely to be surprises that discomfort you. All leading men and women should have something unpredictable and dangerous about them. You should be anxious about what they might do; it could get out of hand. Didn’t Bogart have this? And Bette Davis? Will the leading man make love to his leading lady or will he strike her—Cagney. Who can plumb the mystery of Greta Garbo? She doesn’t yield, she doesn’t make friends; she’s not after your approval, not ever. Yes, there should be a persisting menace, even in heroes. They should be the opposite of housebroken, only partly tamed, not quite civilized. Immoderate.

READ this photograph with me. Here is a gathering of old friends who’ve been through a lot together and earned a rest. We’d just arrived at the Pinebrook Country Club, reassembled for another summer of work. Look closer: It’s probably hindsight, but I’d say that the passion that had once made us so open to Harold’s exhortations about what our theatre might be if we willed it and worked for it, that fever had cooled. We weren’t “hungry” anymore. For the most part, we seem calmer, maybe nicer, certainly more relaxed, ready to talk and laugh together, listen to music, play tennis, and party, even work reasonably well without quarreling. But is that what’s required to hold a group like this together? Isn’t an edge of fanaticism needed? Does that level of desperation and desire accrue to none but the young? It would seem so. Only men of genius, once past a certain age, look as if they’d kill for their work. As for the rest of mankind, what more to ask of life than to gather on a sunny June day and enjoy the company of good friends?

More than any writer I’ve known, Clifford needed to be needed to write. He was like a high-powered automobile with an uncertain self-starter; our need turned him on. Luther and I began to hound him to write us a play, and we jibed at Harold, who, despite his sorry state at Wanger’s, seemed comfortable since he was close to Stella and eating in expensive restaurants where headwaiters greeted him by name. I remember observing with puritanical disapproval that Harold had grown plump and taken to flashy neckties. In prosperity, I concluded, this is not the same man. I recall another conclusion I reached, that idealism is possible only in conditions of penury; it is a unique man, I made up my mind, who can sustain the fever of his dreams when he has money to eat regularly. Perhaps this was a hangover from my old Communist-days motto: “Only trust the working class.” The main objective I had during those weeks was to return Harold to hard times so he could again be his true self.

Constance was nineteen and had every charm given to youth. She was a dancer, with those legs, had been in the chorus of a couple of musicals. She wanted to be a dramatic actress and was working as an usher at the Belasco, to watch our performances. Years later, when it was over between us, she became a film actress, rather a favorite in Europe, sort of a star.

There was a devil’s battle going on in me. The moral code by which I’d been brought up made me feel guilty. But I found that what had been happening was thrilling, adventurous, and—the only word for it—educational. I’d never before yielded myself so entirely to my emotions. My life was no longer under control.

Several of the company members were married. Had they noticed? If so, did they disapprove of me? They knew Molly, of course, and I wondered what they’d say to her. But I didn’t care. I was where I wanted to be, out in the open with the girl, as if I had no responsibility to anyone else. Besides, here was England in the prime of the year! So celebrate! When it was all over, I realized that because of knowing this girl, I’d learned more about English street and village life, the ways of the common man, of the “proletariat” we used to talk about in the Party, than I could have learned in any other way from any other source. Diggie, whom I never saw, wrote to, or spoke with again, is my keenest memory of that English engagement. Isn’t it astonishing—I think so—that what I remember most keenly about my visit to London in 1938 is someone Molly would have called a tramp.

Was I trying again to break up my life?

They are the windows of the room where some twenty-five years ago I used to meet a girl I shan’t name. The past is across the street from the present; the distance between, slight. Directly under those three windows a sort of daybed was placed, and there—with the shutters closed—we used to come together. This young woman was unremarkable in every way except one. When she was making love, her face became an extraordinary high pink. That is what I remember about her most; she looked like one of Renoir’s models. That pink was the evidence of a most loving and generous nature. If you had met her on the street, you’d certainly have thought she was a proper, even a prim girl. And she was—except in the exercises of love. Then she became another creature.

Do I regret all that happened across my street twenty-five years ago? How could I, when I remember with such tender feelings that young woman and how intent and pink her face became?