by
Elia Kazan
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Do I regret any of that which happened? Do I regret what has made this city so rich for me? How could I? Yes, I did hurt some people, several who were dear to me, particularly my first wife when I was least controlled and most driven. But have you tried getting through life without hurting anyone? What did you answer to that question? It can’t be done. Besides, how can you regret the memory of a human touch, a loving voice, a tender glance, a grateful body’s embrace, a time of devotion, the help you received and the help you gave?
That’s another kind of wealth, the wealth I prize most, the wealth of my experiences. I wouldn’t have missed any of it. Or the memories. What did the poet say? I loved them all in my own fashion—and I have no regrets. I wanted my album full.
Well, it is. How was I able to do it, and still live a “respectable” life?
The answer is—and here’s the bad part—duplicity. That’s the solution I arrived at in the suite below Al Capone’s in that South Michigan Avenue hotel almost fifty years ago. What I decided in that season in Chicago was to cut myself loose from the plague of guilt, from society’s approved restrictions and morality. Secretly, quietly, I scorned them and went my way, pulling out of life the pleasure and adventures I craved.
Has any society at any time solved the problem of the relation between the sexes honestly? Europeans tend to face the facts. French men and women take lovers and live happily with their legal mates. Mexicans have their casa chicas. No two people have the same desires or the same needs, and no single individual has the same ones at all periods of his or her life. Certainly novelty is part of it, why not admit that? An extensive sex life expands your knowledge. The album adds pages and each memory is a treasure. And a stimulus. Promiscuity for an artist is an education, a great source of confidence, and a spur to work. Ironically, it can also promote true marital fidelity. It’s healthier than licentious dreams and unrealized yearnings. And guilt. These lead to secret resentment and hatred; they sour a life.
I didn’t come to any conscious decisions that night in the suite just below Al Capone’s—or on any other night of the four weeks I enjoyed the favors of the “boys” in Chicago’s South Side. I didn’t see Constance for many weeks, but when I returned to New York City I did call her. So, in effect, I had made a decision, though it was not a conscious decision. What I accepted was that my life was going to be in constant turmoil from then on. I was ready to allow whatever came to happen, rather than choking it down. I would not resist my desires and impulses, no matter what resulted. I would not confine myself further for practical, professional, emotional, or moral reasons.
I admitted what most people have to admit at some point in their lives—that life is insoluble, that there are problems one is never able to solve, that every question doesn’t have an answer.
What I decided, without knowing it, was that I would live in conflict and confusion. I knew what that would mean; I’d have to sneak, cheat, lie, fake, dissemble—all shameful, all humiliating, all necessary if you want to have what I’ve called “both.” I’d decided to take that step. But if I’d told this to myself in so many words that night in Chicago, I wouldn’t have admitted it was true. I would have denied it. I’d have said, “Nothing happened. Life just goes on.”
I had a reason I was moved so forcibly, one I didn’t reveal to Molly. Such a possession would be a token of enduring faith, a symbol of continuance to bind us together in the bad times I feared were coming. The money it would cost would be a penance for my sins. I was again behaving like a damned fool, as if I wished what was going on between Constance and me to be found out. Did I? Want that? The possibility frightened me. But the way I was behaving made it inevitable that I’d be discovered. More and more people were seeing us close together, sitting side against side in a movie theatre or slumped in the dark corner of a bar. I’d taken the final foolish step, rented a small room on a monthly basis in a Forty-eighth Street hotel, the Alpine, and we’d moved in some things. I now had two bedrooms. Sooner or later someone with a loose mouth was bound to come on us together in the lobby or leaving by the front door. Was I ready to face the consequences? Not when I thought about it.
I WAS in Carly Wharton’s office, going over our casting problems, when a secretary came in and said, “Turn on the radio.” It was December 7, 1941, and that was how I heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. A couple of weeks later, after I’d waited for some kind of call to arms, I went to my draft board and asked where I stood. I was eager to go, not because I was burning with patriotism but because entering the service would free me from the terrible tangle of my personal life. I believe many men who quickly entered the ranks had similar reasons. My draft board informed me that I was 3-A, by reason of my age, my marriage, and my two kids. I would have to deal with my personal problems personally.
lmao
She had good reason for concern. I’d done the most foolish in a series of foolish acts. Molly had urged me to direct a play she’d found by Paul Vincent Carroll, and although I didn’t favor the play, in an effort to please her and make up for my recent neglect of her as a wife, as well as to deflect any possible suspicion before there was a suspicion, I’d agreed to take it on. Then I scooted off the end of the pier of good sense. The other reason I’d been moved to direct the play was that it had a part for Constance, the best part she was ever to play in the theatre.
It is customary, in our world, that when a man of some power in the performing arts attaches a young woman to himself, he will see to it that his darling is, in good time, offered certain professional benefits. Which is what I did. I gave her a part in the play, the play that my wife was still working on with the producer and the author. I was doing the play for Molly; I was doing it for Constance. In an act of personal and professional idiocy, I was trying to hold on to two women who were competing with each other, one of whom had no idea that she was competing, the other of whom was daily gaining confidence.
It was inevitable that people less innocent and pure in heart than Molly would soon realize what was happening, if for no other reason than by the look on my face when I was talking to Constance about her role. Gossip began to inundate rehearsals and leak through the theatre community. I knew that was happening and belatedly tried to control the manifestations of my fervor. But in our world, once “talk” starts there’s no way to stop it. People are hungry for this kind of report about one another; it eases everyone else’s conscience.
In a few days she wanted a divorce. This was a relief, a kind of solution. Then she changed her mind, apparently after a conversation with a close friend, another wife, the gist of which, as I heard it later, was: “If you want him, you’ll have to take him as he is. What’s happened to you happens to us all; just wait a little.” Molly called off the action. What she did was move out of our apartment. I came home one afternoon and found that she and our kids were gone—to my parents’ home in New Rochelle. My mother loved Molly, and she was my mother.
We were now separated; Constance and Molly were in open, deadly conflict; and I was where I deserved to be, alone in the wreckage, shamefaced.
BACK at the Belvedere by midnight, I wrote in my diary:
Constance was not at the restaurant at eight when I said. I should have understood this because I’d given her only a few hours notice and she might have left home before my wire arrived. I then called her home; no one answered. I had another drink. I began walking the streets, mid town, in the unconscious activity of searching for her. I looked into the Faisan d’Or, the restaurant where, she told me, she used to meet Bob Capa. Did I really expect Constance to remain constant (Get that!) while I was in Hollywood making Blues in the Night? She told me she’d done it with someone else that summer. While I was celibate! In the back seat of a Pontiac, she said. I wondered which dress she was wearing that night. I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else fingering her. The image of Constance on her back eagerly taking someone else in, legs up! And there between her legs, the flower with two petals. I never tasted that before. It’s always seemed gross. But not with her. Hers is delicate. Two pink petals and two hungry eyes. Now I understand jealousy. Don’t forget how you feel now when you next direct a scene of jealousy.
lolll why is this so relatable
In the morning she asked me to put her car in the barn; it looked as if it was going to rain. Looking through her bag for the car keys, I found a little notebook. Across the cover, she’d written “Mr. and Mrs. Elia Kazan.” It contained her plans for the decoration of the house we’d bought. On one page, the parlor curtains; on another, the furniture she intended to re-cover, and so on, even the dishes and towels, and opposite each, in the kids’ watercolors, the colors she wanted.
Molly looked in pieces when I left. “Ask yourself if you meant anything of what you said,” she said. Then: “Do you mind putting up a couple of towel racks before you go?” Right in the middle of breaking up her marriage, this girl thinks of towel racks! Is that what they call the “Eternal Feminine”?