by
Elia Kazan
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I had my childhood answer: distance. I withdrew. I was silent. Never as firm as Molly, I always saw two sides to every issue and every judgment. And so, in the body of my conviction, there appeared the worm of doubt. I still believed what I’d done was correct, but no matter that my reasons had been sincerely founded and carefully thought out, there was something indecent—that’s how I felt it, as shame—in what I’d done and something murky in my motivations. What I’d done was correct, but was it right? What self-concerns were hidden in the fine talk, how powerful a role had my love of filmmaking, which I’d been discounting, played in what I’d done? I felt unresolved, alternately humiliated then resentful of those who criticized me. Which is why I remained reserved and silent for so long. My refuge was what it had always been, to drown unhappy feelings in work.
No one who did what I did, whatever his reasons, came out of it undamaged. I did not. Here I am, thirty-five years later, still worrying over it. I knew what it would cost me. Do I now feel ashamed of what I did? When a friend who read the manuscript for this book recently asked if I had met with the others I would name as I had with Clifford and Paula and Lee Strasberg, I answered I had not. For a moment I wished I had. But to wish that now, after all these years, is meaningless. The truth is that within a year I stopped feeling guilty or even embarrassed about what I’d done, and the reason for that is a series of events in the year that followed, which I will now come to.
THE HOUSE COMMITTEE on Un-American Activities was not publicity shy. They rushed my statement to The New York Times the day after I’d given it and, suddenly, there it was on the front page of the world’s greatest newspaper. I started to read it but couldn’t. I felt embarrassed and ashamed. The statement didn’t represent my true feelings, which were not that clear but confused and contradictory. Here is a piece of diary, written the next day: “Stayed home all day. Miserably depressed. Can’t get my mind off it. I know I’ve done something wrong. Still convinced I would have done something worse if I’d done the opposite. I spend every minute making rationalizations for my act. Only one thing in my life before filled me with such shame and guilt: leaving Constance the way I did. This now seems sneaky too because no one had reason from my past conduct to anticipate I would do what I did. I couldn’t go to the Actors Studio or anywhere else. Molly keeps looking at me. Why?”
I thought it would let up, but it became a dogfight and I was the bone of contention. There were many phone calls, “unsigned” and hateful. I changed my phone number. When I began to move among people again, I found I was notorious, an “informer,” a “squealer,” a “rat.” I’d become the star villain for “progressives”; just as they’d expected me to be the staunchest defender of their position, they now labeled me the most treacherous of traitors. Others who’d done what I did, perhaps because less was expected of them, were not attacked as I was—not Burl Ives, not Jerry Robbins, not even Budd Schulberg. What made people especially furious with me was that I’d bought space in The New York Times for a statement (written by Molly) that urged others in my position to do what I’d done. Very soon I heard of meetings organized by the Communist Party (“Called by all Right-Thinking people”) to isolate me for attack. I’d become the primary target.
i mean this is crazy
I had become the target of opportunity for people seeking to promote themselves at my expense and an easy mark for every self-righteous prick in New York and Hollywood. I was especially scornful of the wealthy “liberals” in southern California who’d never lived without servants, never been involved in any action except a divorce action, and only seen the life of the streets through the windows of an expensive car.
right so everyone's unworthy then
He and I would have a schnapps together, the dwarf at my side, and Freddie would tell me his latest dirty jokes—an endless supply. When we got back to Munich for the interior shots, he turned into a boy; he played. Living with me in the magnificent Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, Freddie got into trouble with a chambermaid, and late one night I had to rush to the police station and intercede for him. He was being threatened by the chambermaid’s husband; this unreasonable man was out to become famous by killing a movie star. Freddie was a child who couldn’t keep his fingers out of the cookie jar.
the way he talks about the men he likes is so revealing
Months later, when I came back from Bavaria, I’d undergone an essential change. I was no longer defensive but was determined to reclaim my self-esteem and fear no cabal of old friends turned to enemies. I landed in New York, and the first person I sought was Budd. Despite the fact that Molly had sent me in Munich Bob Anderson’s beautiful new play, Tea and Sympathy, which he wanted me to direct, a stroke of good fortune indeed; despite the fact that I had long since agreed to direct Tennessee’s Camino Real, a lovely dramatic poem which I could immediately and most happily put on the stage, the project with Budd on the waterfront answered a need that was deeper. It was my reply to the beating I’d taken. The emotion I brought back from Bavaria was not a pretty one; it was a desire for revenge. I would turn the tables on those who’d said I’d lost whatever talent I had, that I would never again do anything bold and worthy, that I would now turn conventional and cautious. I was more determined than ever to make a film about the New York harbor and what went on there, thus to show everyone, including myself, that I hadn’t backed away from my convictions and wasn’t to be insulted or bullied again. I was also determined to show my old “comrades,” those who’d attacked me so viciously, that there was an anti-Communist left, and that we were the true progressives as they were not. I’d come back to fight.
lol
I PASSED from a film that dealt with the broadest possible scene, a panorama of human suffering, to a play that penetrated into the most intimate area of all, the soul of an artist. Camino Real is as private as a nightmare. No playwright except Eugene O’Neill in his last plays was as personal as Tennessee Williams. His collected dramatic works might be read as a massive autobiography, one far more truthful than the book he wrote and titled Memoirs. The plays, with a little discernment, prove to be as naked as the best confessions. They—and this play perhaps more than the others—are about great fears of the author, of distrust and betrayal: distrust of his own fate and of other humans and the betrayal he was certain would come, both from other men, even those close to him, and, because of its anarchy and cataclysmic speed, from time itself.
Already world famous in 1953, Tennessee lived like a fugitive from justice, always changing his whereabouts, ever moving. He traveled along an archipelago of culture islands that were congenial to him, places where he might feel, for a time, at liberty to be unobserved and totally himself—London, Paris, Rome, Sicily, North Africa, Key West. Only a few people knew where to find him. Their communications frequently reached him after he’d departed for a “destination unknown.” I was one of the privileged; we were in continuous touch by mail. The centers of civilization that he found agreeable were, of course, those populated by his own kind: artists, romantics, freaks of one kind or another, castoffs, those rejected by respectable society. He settled into these nests of outsiders to feel at ease. But it was never for long; he’d soon be off again. “I usually work best,” he explained, “when I’ve just come to a new place.”
The artist has his solution; Tennessee exemplified it. It was his way of self-restoration. In a letter I received from Williams, there was this: “For the past five years I have been haunted by a fear which has made it necessary for me to work like somebody running out of a house on fire.” Once when I asked him what his play was about, he answered, “It’s the story of everyone’s life after he has gone through the razzle-dazzle of his youth. Time is short, baby, it betrays us as we betray each other. Work, that’s all there is!” Then he went on: “There is terror and mystery on one side, honor and tenderness on the other.” Once, in a fruity mood, he described the play as “an encomium, despite all else, to the enduring gallantry of the human spirit.” I didn’t think it necessarily described the play, but it did the author.
I doubt that Budd was affected as personally as I was by the parallel of Tony Mike’s story. His reaction to the loss of certain friends was not as bitter as my own; he had not experienced their blackballing as frequently and intensely as I had in the neighborhood known as Broadway. I believe Budd regarded our waterfront story with greater objectivity, an objectivity I appreciated. But I did see Tony Mike’s story as my own, and that connection did lend the tone of irrefutable anger to the scenes I photographed and to my work with actors. When Brando, at the end, yells at Lee Cobb, the mob boss, “I’m glad what I done—you hear me?—glad what I done!” that was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I’d testified as I had. I’d been snubbed by friends each and every day for many months in my old show business haunts, and I’d not forgotten nor would I forgive the men, old friends some of them, who’d snubbed me, so the scene in the film where Brando goes back to the waterfront to “shape up” again for employment and is rejected by men with whom he’d worked day after day—that, too, was my story, now told to all the world. So when critics say that I put my story and my feelings on the screen, to justify my informing, they are right. That transference of emotion from my own experience to the screen is the merit of those scenes.
It was with this play that I began to learn not to try to pin a play’s meaning down to a didactic theme. We used to do that in the Group; it was the essence of our work as directors. We were “teaching” the audience with each play. Clifford Odets felt it necessary in his third acts to grab the audience by their shoulders, shake them, and say, “Don’t you see what all this means? No? Well, I’ll tell you.” And he did. Now I preferred an opposite effort: to tell a story that was as human and, therefore, as ambivalent and as unresolved as life itself, so that the audience would leave the theatre asking, “I wonder what the hell all that means.” Which is the same experience one has in life, isn’t it? Or when reading a great novel. You can’t boil either down to a homily, motto, or slogan. Life is a puzzle, and you are generally left feeling: “How do people get through it?” and “If they’re both right, then who’s right?” and “God almighty, isn’t life awesome!” The emotion of wonder is better in the theatre than the emotion of recognition. Even Brecht in his so-called learning plays preserved an element of doubt unresolved. The audience should keep puzzling about a play long after they’ve left the theatre; when the play is worthy and the performance fine, an audience will ponder it for days. But if you sum it all up for them, they won’t. It’s precisely what happens after a dramatic experience in life—it unsettles you for a long time. You keep trying to puzzle it out.