by
Elia Kazan
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The old lady of the island about to be covered by the man-made lake was played by one of the great character actresses of that day, Jo Van Fleet, aged thirty-seven, as difficult and dear a woman as a director in need of a performance could hope for. I’d worked with Jo in Camino Real and in East of Eden, knew her strong will and knew its purpose: to excel. Full of unconstrained violence, she’d eat Clift alive, and I was prepared to let her. No lump there. And what a professional Jo was! Whereas Clift, sleepy and shaky, had something wobbly about his appearance in the morning, Jo would barge into the makeup room at 4 a.m. and give five hours to transforming herself into an indomitable backriver matriarch. Even on days when I told her we wouldn’t be coming close to her with the camera, she’d spend an hour applying the liver spots of an old woman on the backs of her hands. “Jo,” I’d say, “we’re not going to photograph your hands today. Get another hour’s sleep.” “This is not for the camera,” she’d answer. “It’s for me.” Clift was a tenderhearted shell of a man, Jo as formidable and unyielding as the rock-ribbed country where we were working.
What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy. Perhaps this theme rings so true because Bill himself had come to a point where he had settled for less, a place not in the first rank of playwrights along with O’Neill, Williams, and Miller but on an honorable sub-platform where—damn the praise, damn their prizes—the work would be its own reward; he realized that he’d find peace only if he sought goals within the reach of what talent he had and didn’t hope for miracles.
I’ve been having throbbing headaches too, frightening because I don’t know what brings them on. So I’ve been beginning to feel the cold wind Time makes as it rushes by. Heeding those warnings, I’ve determined to live what is left of my life on the precipice—that is, recklessly. The word “reckless” can be defined as “without concern for the consequences.” I believe writing this book this way is reckless. Since I don’t ask for your forgiveness or even your understanding, I will not try to explain or excuse certain features of my conduct that are coming up. Here are only the facts.
I’ve had several times in my life, usually in the spring of the year, that I recall as perfect. One was the night in May of 1932 when I first came together with Molly. It was in a field along the edge of a lake, under a lopsided moon, and it was close to midnight. I can never forget that night and how, in a few minutes, it changed my life. Another such time was in the coldest weeks of winter, when I was first with my present wife, Frances; I used to walk from my house on West Sixty-eighth Street near the park to her apartment on Ninetieth Street and Riverside Drive. The wind off the North River cut me like a knife, but I didn’t mind. In the morning I’d walk back—it was even colder—and I remember saying to myself as I returned home from our hours together, “I’m in heaven!” If “heaven” has a meaning, that is it.
BARBARA told me she was pregnant.
There are certain common rules of human behavior I believe in and others I don’t. Barbara had been with me, devoted and loving, for a long time. She’d been the only one who’d encouraged me in my screenplay writing. She wanted a child desperately, had tried for years without success. She wanted the child that she’d begun to carry. Perhaps I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. I didn’t see whose business it finally was except ours, and I’ve never regretted having that “love” child. Having endured difficulties more trying than those of the ordinary boy, he’s now becoming an exceptional man.
Some people close to me have believed that Barbara “trapped” me. For what? A meal ticket? So what? Didn’t I owe something to the person who’d encouraged me and stood by me? What greater gift can we give each other than encouragement when it’s most needed? And support? If you truly examine your own life, you’ll doubtless find that the most enduring bonds are those of ties stronger than the legalities. I’ve never regretted telling Barbara that if she wanted the child it was all right with me. Knowing my nature, wouldn’t you say she was taking a riskier chance than I was? The difficulties we were to encounter, all three of us—were they more difficult than the usual difficulties of marriage and of life? Of childbirth and of rearing offspring?
But the morality of the matter? Don’t talk to me about that. I’ve seen too much not to doubt conventional standards of morality. I’m aware of the general hypocrisy in our society: one face, another reality.
In the last years of his life, my mother found the task of taking care of a four-story house beyond what was left of her strength, and she plotted with one of her sons to move elsewhere. Father resented the move, particularly because she had made the decision, not he. “She don’t talk to me on that subject,” he said. But they sold the old house at a price he thought much too low, gave away most of the furniture, and relocated to a small condo in Rye. He resented what she’d done so intensely that he couldn’t speak to her. “Your mother giving orders around here now,” he said to me bitterly. Becoming delusional and hateful, he began to suspect her, a woman of seventy-three, not in the best health herself, of infidelity. He’d imagine her lover at the other end of the room and point him out to me. “They waiting minute I don’t watch,” Father said, “then tak! They go upstairs.” He’d imagine he heard the noises of their lovemaking coming from her bedroom above. “I can’t hold her anymore,” he confided to me one day. “I only have eight hundred dollars in the bank now.”
I did truly admire the second act—the one so many people resented. It was about Art’s obsessive romance with Marilyn Monroe. He had denied, foolishly, that the story of that relationship in the play was based on his personal history, denied that his character, Maggie, was based on Marilyn. But he put into the mouth of Maggie precisely what Marilyn had thought of him, and particularly her scorn for him at the end of their marriage. This character is true and has an interesting dramatic development from adoration to contempt. Art is rough on himself, giving us all that Marilyn said in her disappointment and resentment. The play’s summation—summations are by definition boring—is insufferably self-favoring and “noble.” Audiences should be able to make up their own minds what the events shown have meant, but Art knew what he wanted the audience to think, and he told them.
after the fall!!! need to read/see it
We flew to Rome together, she to catch a plane for the States, I for Athens. The night before, I’d seen the performance of her play and its companion piece by Ed Albee. Watching them, any fool would know that Molly was a nice person and Ed perhaps less nice, but his play had heat and punch, and hers did not. After the show, I saw that everybody in and around the theatre—the actors, the stagehands, and the management—loved Molly, recognizing that she was a person of rare class. I also saw that this wasn’t what she wanted. When we kissed goodbye, I told her that she, along with my mother, was the best person I’d ever known, but I’m afraid that wasn’t what she wanted to hear either. During our three days together, we’d not made love.
oof
I’VE TRIED to tell the truth in this account of my life. There must be inaccuracies of dates, places, and what people did or failed to do; that’s inevitable in a narration of what happened so many years before. But I have told the truth as far as I know it—except for one sentence a page back. The truth, which I know very well but avoided saying, was that I hadn’t made love to my wife in three years—not only over those three days in Spoleto. We weren’t intimate that way through the last years of her life. In a Western civilization, with a “Western” woman, I was making the grand experiment of the Oriental male, to separate love and sex. In every other essential, I was faithful to Molly; I’d devoted my energies without reserve to supporting and, when she needed it, protecting her. I was her husband truly, and my thoughts and my energies were always with her. Friendship, at the end, was our truest bond. Was this enough? For her? For me? Could it be? Not by American standards. And perhaps not in fact.
For my personal needs, I was provided with a “service flat”—four rooms and a housekeeper, who had dinner waiting for me when I came back at night. To attend to other needs, I acquired a mini-harem built around two actresses whom I could call on whenever I chose. They were good girls, lovely as well, who wanted to get ahead in their profession and made the mistake of believing I would help; one was exceptionally bright in the ways of the theatre and the other a beauty-prize winner, “Miss Greece.” Both of them introduced me to their fathers, who apparently accepted the relationship for what it was and thought nothing wrong with it for their daughters. But for me there was one drawback: None of the girls had anything difficult about them. Or challenging. After I came, I would wonder how quickly I could clear them out of the place so I could sleep in peace. I remember the farewell words of one of them. Looking particularly flushed and pretty, she said as she left, “Did I please you?” Can you imagine an American girl asking that before going home alone?
god
“Good,” she said, “relax. Give in. I’m going to make us an old-fashioned.”
She was gone. I heard the apartment house’s elevator through the walls. I recalled our brownstone on Seventy-second Street and its porch directly off the bedroom, where I used to sleep nights under the summer sky. Then I found I was controlling myself. May my children forgive me, I didn’t like the place. I hated those big windows; they were bullies. The room under them looked cavernous. I like softly illuminated rooms. I knew I’d never print any pictures. Who has time for that in my line of work? As for unwinding, how the hell was I going to unwind when I had a long, unevenly shot film of dubious worth to edit, a most uncertain leading man to make look good, a composer, Manos Hadjidakis, whom I didn’t know well, on his way to New York to score the film, and—and the whole damned Repertory Theatre program, with its mess of unanswered questions and the choices I’d have to make with Bob.