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.