I said, “Clifford, what frightens me is the possibility that you will finally not write those five plays, that they will be found as notes in your files at the end. I fear there’s very little time left. For any of us. You say the date on your plane ticket east is nine months from now. Do you really believe that? Tell yourself the truth before it’s too late. Because suddenly the race will be run, the victors posted, and it’s part of history. Here we are sitting calmly on a warm evening, enjoying the exceptional wine you’re pouring, but time is running by at the same headlong pace and—Cliff, are you listening? I mean don’t count on its mercy. Hurry!”

He was hurt. He shook me off. And I gave up. Despite what I’d said, neither of us knew how late it was. In six months, the disease that eats you had eaten him. He lay on a bed on the sixth floor of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital when I saw him for the last time. At one moment during that long day, he raised his fist for the last time in his characteristic, self-dramatizing way and said, “Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” Then he looked at me, slyly, and said, “You know, I may fool you, Gadg. I may not die.” He contemplated that for an instant, then he was elsewhere, thinking of something unspoken. His mind was wandering. He gave me his hand to hold and looked around as if he wasn’t really where he was. Then, again changing abruptly, he glowered at his nurse, a fine, patient woman, and declared, “I want to shout, I want to sing. I want to yell!” The nurse, who’d heard it all before, said, “Go on, shout, yell, sing if you want to!” Then he tried, I remember he did try. But his shouting days were over. He was a mighty sick rooster. So he lay there and glowered angrily at the world in general and whatever it was that was cornering him now. No longer able to avoid the tragedy he’d lived or the tragedy that he was or the thought of what he might have been, he beckoned to me to lean closer, and he whispered—I remember the words well—“Gadg! Imagine! Clifford Odets dying!”