by
Elia Kazan
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Men called geniuses have been the joy of my existence—but I didn’t know them as geniuses. All those I’ve known and worked with—Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando—have a joyous intensity in work and have passed it on to me. They are blessed. Along with all the other sparks, they all have great laughs. Laughing comes easy for them because life is what they want it to be; they are what they want to be, doing what they want to do. They don’t question their worth. They no longer respond to disapproval. Manos never, not once, showed any hesitation about what he wanted or what I’d think of it. He did wonderful things for my film at a time when the film most needed that contribution.
ahh the masculine ideal of genius [is it ever attainable by the feminine]
However, the main reason for my devotion to the cause was my concern for Molly. She’d invested her soul, nothing less, in her hopes for a pleasant life of work together, side by side, in the “perfect” home she’d made. Pleasant! I grew to hate that word. I don’t know exactly why; perhaps she used it too often. By the end of that summer, I’d begun to feel that her hopes were doomed. I was behaving “badly” again; after controlling myself all day, I came home frazzled and on edge and not at all pleasant. I was edgy too, “antsy,” for implicit in her “perfect” life was the condition of celibacy for me. I could see that wasn’t going to work, and it didn’t.
The tragedy of our time in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets. Not that I share the sentiment expressed in his obituaries that he’d failed in his career. Clifford influenced a generation of playwrights—Art Miller, who’s sitting here; Tennessee Williams, who told me that his first arousing experience in the New York theatre was Awake and Sing!; and a roomful of other writers. Like all true creators, he influenced men who’ll never know it.
Cliff spent the last dozen years of his life writing films to pay bills that were too large for a man who hoped to continue working in the theatre. He made his home in a Beverly Hills “Spanish mansion.” He drove a Lincoln Continental and had what he claimed to be the outstanding collection of Paul Klee in the country. He worked frequently and was well paid by New York theatre standards. But he was always broke or near it, and I believe he died broke or near it.
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.
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!”
this always gets me
What I’m saying to you through this true story is that the chance we have here won’t happen again. The series of accidents and aspirations, along with real estate deals, civic concern, and guilt feelings, and the desire of rich men to have their names remembered after they die, all those piled together produced this surprising opportunity for us. It won’t happen again. Not for many years! So let’s not lose it.
The tragedy of the American theatre and of our lives is what could have been. Forces dispersed instead of gathered. Talents unused or used at a fraction of their worth. Potential unrealized. We all know our problems. We are not kids, we are not students. We know we are here on short leases. It is now time to stand up for ourselves before we disappear from the scene.
The man who, in the forties, promised to be the Hamlet of our time has yet to play Hamlet, or anything like. The man who could have been the Lear of this generation is playing a sheriff on a TV series. I don’t think he plays sheriffs very well. He could have been a great Lear. The man who could have been the greatest actor in the history of American theatre is sulking on a grubby hilltop over Beverly Hills or on a beach on the island of Tahiti. What happened to them? They don’t know. Don’t look down on them. They are not weaklings. They were idealists too. Nor are they corrupt, confused, or sicker than most. They are your brothers.
What is so terrible in our society is that people like ourselves are only rarely in control of their own lives and destinies. We don’t do what we want to do. We do what we think we have to do. Or what’s worse, what other people want us to do, what “they”—whoever “they” are—want us to do. We settle for costarring roles on a TV series we despise, for the approval of our agents and a better contract this year than last. When we go from flop to flop we are terrified. When we find ourselves in a hit, we are bored to death.
Now we are going to try to do something we respect for a change. It is hazardous. When you say something is difficult, you are saying it might not work. We are here to attempt a birth. All births are difficult. Look at a baby’s head. Don’t you wonder how it managed to get through? Like everything else worth doing, it is impossible.
Yet in a long and lively life, I haven’t found anything worth doing except the impossible. Theatre historians have often called the Group Theatre a failure. By what standards? I just made a movie that every wise producer in the film industry believes must be a failure. It probably will be, in their books, but I’m especially proud of it. All I gave was time, and all I’ll probably get is pleasure. But what could I ask for that’s dearer? We are here at the first meeting of a group of theatre people who are, as I see it, attempting the impossible. In a money-oriented, marketplace society, we are embarking on something because we believe in its goals and because we anticipate being exhilarated by its challenges. Don’t look for common sense here or for practicality. You won’t get rich here; go elsewhere for that. Only remember that this day I said the word “impossible.”
IT SEEMED to me that during those last weeks we’d finally found a way of living together, one that made us both content. It was not conventional in this society and time, but not unusual either, and apparently it was what we both wanted, since we settled into it easily and it did work. I had lived on an either/or basis and had been constantly on edge. Now I’d come to another solution, one with which I felt satisfied because I had both relationships I wanted. My “experiment” seemed to have worked; a stable work life, a wife I loved, a mistress I found stimulating, each offering me different benefits. Wasn’t this the way many men lived, though they didn’t admit it? Even if it was in their imagination? I didn’t know what else would work for me, not after all that Molly and I had been through together. Or work for Molly either. She didn’t require of me now what I could not give her, and apparently what she did get from me was enough. She seemed to have finally come to some sort of resolution of her feelings, an acceptance of my nature, that I had different needs from hers, just as she had different needs from mine. So I was careful and she was contented.
I wondered why people make such a fuss about infidelity; sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps a marriage together.
boy