Odets was the first man I called on when I made a trip to California. We always had dinner alone and always in his house. He would welcome me as if I was a lifeline to the shore where he longed to be and the sea stormy between. He had five plays all laid out, he’d tell me, and waiting for the day. His plan, he said, was to spend only nine months more in southern California, then come back to New York and get these plays on. They’d be, he assured me, the best plays of his life, even told me the story of three of them in considerable detail, and I believe they would have been fine plays, for they were deeply conceived and personally felt. Cliff wasn’t “shot.” Something was wrong, but the mind and talent were alive in the man. He’d had terrible difficulties, marital and political, and gone west to find the strength to again affirm the purpose of his life.