I WILL describe Molly.

In the city of Zurich, along the river that flows into the Zurich See, there are several substantial churches. They all toll the time, keeping the twenty-four hours of the day in order. One particularly impressed me, the Grossmünster. It is a Protestant church, built of great, square-cut stone blocks, its style established by round Romanesque arches, which settle, don’t soar. When you push the heavy entrance door open, it closes quickly and of itself behind you. You see immediately that there is no altar, only a raised area at the end of the nave with stairs leading up to it, no barrier, no rail. All the windows at the sides of the church are of clear gray glass, and the impression of the body of the church is severe and old-fashioned, even rigid and cold, and so the totality would appear, except that in the depths, in the most intimate part, where in other times there may have been a holy place, there are three long high narrow windows of colored glass. These were designed and installed by a twentieth-century artist, and they are of the most intense and brilliant colors—blood red, night purple, deep sea blue, forest green—all richly saturated, passionate, and modern. Everything about the place is old-fashioned and uninviting, except when you look into the depths—there is the surprise! When you enter the depths—as I did—and see those passionate windows, they are the church.

Molly invited me to move into her house until I left for overseas.

I’d read, before I went to visit the pilot, Tolstoi’s comment on Nicholas Rostov’s letter home: that it was impossible for a young man to write the truth; unconsciously he will always favor himself and reject events and details that do not fit into the way he preferred things to have happened. That’s where I’d stopped reading; the observation had reminded me of the letter I’d sent Constance while we were waiting in San Francisco for our orders to go overseas. I’d written her how much she’d meant to me, how much I missed her, and that I thought of her all the time—which was true—and that I was ashamed of what I’d done. I suppose it was an attempt to cautiously make it up with her—at least a friendship. She’d answered, as I deserved, curtly; it was the last message I would ever receive from her. “Why don’t you act like a man for a change,” she wrote. “Forget about me. C.” That was all. My letter had been foolish and self-favoring. Her answer, true to the situation.

What a narrow escape! I might have ended up a Fox staff director. My first film had been a great success, and Zanuck was hot after me. My long-term contract would have been eagerly “adjusted,” that is, enriched. I could have had a lovely, spacious home in Bel Air in any one of a number of styles—they were all there to pick from—or a beach house in Malibu, or both, and why not a ranch up north in the Ojai Valley (only an hour and a half away)? I could certainly have had a numbered bank account in Switzerland and a press agent to see to it that I was showered with praise often enough to quiet any and all doubts I had about myself. I could have had my name in the Hollywood Reporter once a week like so many others and, as a reward, have enjoyed any success-hungry young actress I wanted. I could have had every joy that a successful career in Hollywood could have given me. And here is the best of it: I was loved; not challenged, loved! The crews loved me, the designers loved me, the department heads loved me, the cameramen en masse loved me; they were all eager to work with me. “When? When?” they’d cried. “When are you going to do another picture?” The Fox lot, that year of ’45, was the happiest place I’d ever enjoyed. If I wasn’t a king—that was Darryl—I was a prince. Everybody greeted me whether they knew me or not; they couldn’t afford not to, for who could predict how far up in the world I’d rise? As for missing the New York crowd, they were all there or on the way west, ready to drink with me evenings or, on Sundays, picnic around swimming pools of emerald water, clear and clean enough to drink. And as for my contract to direct Sam Behrman’s Dunnigan’s Daughter—well, it wasn’t a contract, it was only a handshake; my agent would find a way to weasel me out of that. I didn’t want to do that damned play anyway.

Forty years is a long perspective, but perhaps it can afford a clear view. I look back at Clifford Odets—no one I’ve known was more talented. He couldn’t resist the money, the flattery, the apparent safety and security in the movie community. And he lost himself. Harold Clurman, one of the men I’ve most admired, was lucky: The people who ran the big studios did not want him, and he had to come east again; that saved him, for he seemed lost in southern California. But I’m not praising the East over the West. New York was simply my habitat, where my sources were. In Hollywood I’d have had to rely on my cleverness and my facility, which are technical, not artistic, qualities. The one time I met William Faulkner, I remember he wore rubber boots and they were covered with the mud of his Mississippi winter. He never left his home in Oxford for very long. John Steinbeck left northern California and looked a fool in New York theatre society and on the right bank of Paris. Saul Bellow is wise; he stays in Chicago. As for Nick Ray, who knew more about the back roads and so on, I saw him give himself over and be lost among the moguls of the film world. And Orson Welles, the most talented and inventive theatre man of my day: What an ass he seemed in the posh restaurants and hotels of Europe’s capitals, and how sad later, in financial desperation, making TV commercials. I was to watch with an awful pain how lost Tennessee Williams was as he shuttled around the bright spots of the world. The money his great success brought him allowed him to live in a way that squashed his talent. He would have been better off living in his native South, that part of the world where he was uncomfortable, even outraged, because he felt he was an outsider. Notice Picasso, how he stayed where his clay was, and Matisse and Renoir and Cézanne. It’s difficult to get Fellini out of Italy for any reason, or Bergman out of Sweden or Satyajit Ray out of Bengal. They know where their artistic roots are. I was with Kurosawa in New York City and he seemed like a child eager to return home—which he soon did. Read the letters of Gustave Flaubert and notice how rarely he made the trip—an hour? two?—to Paris, where his mistress was eagerly waiting to see him. He knew his material was in the province of Normandy. And Proust: He lived in what he wrote about—a life no one else could tolerate.

What if, in Deep Are the Roots, the returning black soldier coming back from an army that, as I’d seen, refused him weapons and further humiliated him by confining his services to driving trucks, digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and peeling potatoes, came back full of anger instead of being that fine, decent, patient, handsome black boy so purely in love with an equally pure white girl? What if he’d taken her to bed or to lie under a tree—she seemed willing enough, the way I’d directed the delectable Barbara Bel Geddes—instead of simply mooning over her? The real drama is revealed when the accusation is true. Black friends have said it to me plainly: We have a right to be sons of bitches too. As it was, all that remained for the authors to do was unravel the plot by proving the accusation was false.

The effect of treating a social problem in this way is that there is never any doubt in the audience’s mind as to what they’re expected to feel. They have the assurance from the beginning that they are on the side of the angels—the falsely accused. They have never been challenged to doubt. This, of course, does not prepare them for life as it’s lived. They are also often masochists—so it has seemed to me—enjoying the middle-class white man’s guilt about the black man. They’ve been told where to stand and what to think, and guaranteed safe passage to the final curtain. We are in a kind of conformity tide. That is a word liberals say they hate, and they do—except when it’s their own conformity.

Such a play is not drama that informs life; it is liberal corn.

The “Anatolian,” of course, was accurate. The “arrogant”? I was elated by this characterization. “At last,” I said to myself, “I’ve made it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.” I believe every artist is, as he has to be, arrogant. You may not go along with that; the word has unfortunate connotations. But whatever else an artist may be saying in his work, he is certainly saying, “I’m important!”

Arrogance, when it’s depicted on the screen or stage, is usually projected by boisterous behavior. Not so in life. The most arrogant people I’ve known—people whom I admire for this quality as well as for the work they do—are often quiet with the special ease that comes from being sure of themselves.

Which is when I certainly should have quit. Here’s a story Bud Lighton told me; I recalled it as I sat there in the flickering light. It’s about Victor Fleming, the director whom Lighton held up to me as a model. He’d agreed, Fleming had, to direct a film to be made from the novel The Yearling. He approached the job as he did every job, intensely; he knew the emotion he wanted to capture for the audience. He searched all over the South for the right locations, selected a fine cast (including Spencer Tracy), got the best technicians, and prepared to give the project the kind of devotion for which he was known, the kind that made him worry so painfully that sometimes he’d throw up his lunch. He shot scenes of the film for three days on that far-off location, then suddenly left and went back to Culver City. “How can I make a picture,” he explained to the outraged executives, “whose essence is that people love each other, when no one in the cast loves anyone or loves being down there or loves making the picture? They only love themselves. The kid wants to be a goddamn star and thinks of nothing except his vanity. Tracy is only thinking how he can get away for a few days to go up to New York and see Hepburn. And the mother part is always between a shit and a sweat about something, but never about the goddamn picture.” So Fleming said the hell with it and quit. He was fighting what it seemed to me I was up against, organized indifference—but he had more experience and more guts than I had; he walked away.

I stopped unreeling the ten thousand feet of the greatest stuff Pandro had ever seen and sat in the dark. This was it, yes or no, on or off, stay or go, now or never. But it took more courage than I had at that time to walk away. Molly was coming out in a couple of weeks with the kids; they were all looking forward to it, California, Malibu, the house on the beach, and so on. And so on!

Smart friends, however, made smart appraisals. One of them said that my stars looked as if they were dressed for a Beverly Hills costume party: “Come as Mr. and Mrs. Cattle Baron.” In New York, the New Republic critic wrote: “They wander through a lavish production like thoroughbred somnambulists.” It’s the only picture I’ve ever made that I’m ashamed of. Don’t see it.

WHEN I finished work on his play, I was full of admiration for Tennessee, especially because he’d found his story in his own life’s struggles; the man had used his personal contradictions and the memory of his pain to make it. When I considered him, I saw that the true artist must have the courage to reveal what the rest of mankind conceals. I’d not forgotten and would never forget his word “fidelity,” and that he thought it an artist’s duty to deny nothing and avoid self-favoring. He should not apologize for anything, never beg for pity, be pitiless with himself. After this experience, I saw every play and every film that I worked on as a confession, veiled or partly exposed, but always its author’s self-revelation.

In time I had to confront some facts. I am a mediocre director except when a play or a film touches a part of my life’s experience. Other times my cleverness and facility will not overcome my inadequacies. When I rely on mechanics, I do only what a good stage manager should be able to do. I am not catholic in my tastes. I dislike Beckett—his work. I am not an intellectual. I don’t have great range. I am no good with music or with spectacles. The classics are beyond me. I enjoy humor and the great clowns, but I can’t make up jokes or amusing bits of byplay and visual humor. What I need I steal. I have no ear for poetry. I have a pretty good eye but not a great eye. I do have courage, even some daring. I am able to talk to actors; I don’t fear them and their questions. I’ve been able to arouse them to better work. I have strong, even violent, feelings, and they are assets. I am not shy about ripping the cover-guard off my own experiences; this encourages actors to overcome their inhibitions. I enjoy working with performers; they sense this and have been happy as well as successful with me. This is useful.

Molly used to say that I was too hard on myself. But I don’t feel the above is inaccurate. I prefer this measure to the pumped-up state of fame I had after Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. It took me some years to face what I was as a director; in fact, it took a painful defeat at the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. At the time I’m writing about, I was mired in media mud; I’m afraid that for a time I believed what I read. When I see my photographs from that period, I don’t like what I see. For three years I was on the very top, then life twisted, as it will; by surviving a great deal of pain and trouble, I became a different person. But that’s looking too far ahead.