by
Elia Kazan
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Constance had one sure defense; she’d “see” (that all-purpose girl word) another man. Don’t forget, I told myself, how quickly she found Capa when you were on the road with Golden Boy. And just now, a weekend with Jack Houseman. And some others for sure. The back seat of a Pontiac, for chris-sake! If I left her now, she’d be out with another man tomorrow night. They all want to fuck her, and isn’t that the ultimate compliment to a woman like Constance? Isn’t it? One of her suitors will be attractive to her immediately. I’ll have to be with her, guarding her, all the time. I don’t trust her to be alone.
NOW, forty-five years after the production of The Skin of Our Teeth and my adventures with it, perhaps I see who and what I was—and am—more clearly. For instance, now I can freely acknowledge that I’ve always wanted a secure domestic life and, at the same time, the freedom of the bachelor’s existence. But it never works. Somebody gets hurt. The curse of my life has been the illusion that I could have both. Still I’ve wanted it all, and in a way, gentled by the passing years, I still do. You know what I’m talking about. You’re not altogether different, are you?
I’m not making reference to my sex life. I’m trying to deal with the whole thing.
For instance: I’ve preferred to believe that I’m an adventurous man, yet I remain bourgeois, even a bit stuffy, am now the head of a large, traditional family with nineteenth-century comforts in bed, bath, study, and at the dining table. My car is a Mercedes, not what I’ve sometimes envied, an Alfa Romeo.
I’ve dreamed of living, unencumbered by children, possessions, and pets, in a small apartment where I’d have only the essentials: my books, records, tapes, research, typewriter, paper in reams, razor-point pens by the box, and a full fridge. There, absolutely alone, I’d work every morning undisturbed by the emotional needs of others. At night I’d enjoy a flow of guests, never the same, no repeats.
But as I write this, I live happily and faithfully in a kind of zoo with an excellent young wife, her two children, a perfect secretary-assistant who runs my life, a devoted housekeeper, plus two dogs, two cats, and, at the other end of the phone line, five grown children and five grandchildren. Did I say unencumbered?
One night when Constance and I were making love, I suddenly thought of that damned analyst. I’d told this man about our lovemaking to make him see how perfect and precious it was, told him that we would often raise the top sheet up and over our heads so we’d be in a world where there was no one else, a perfect world. His response to this intimate confession annoyed me. He said we were a pair of prime neurotics, and when we raised the sheet up and over our heads—our “tent,” he called it—we were reaching for a perfection that did not and could not exist, a forgetfulness of all our problems through physical love. “You simply can’t get rid of your problems that way,” he’d said with that soft smile (which I thought patronizing), “because it’s all over in a couple of minutes, isn’t it, and there you are, right back where you started, in the same situation. Nothing’s changed, except that you’re tired and sleepy.” I got mad at him. “Yes, we may be neurotic as all hell,” I said, “and we may even be sick, but that is precisely what gives our physical relationship”—I used the plainer word—“its charge. You call it foolish and frantic; I call it wonderful!” I said this to him and he smiled that soft, patient smile as if he’d heard everything I’d said a thousand times from other equally foolish neurotics. But that night in California when I remembered what he’d said, I pulled the top sheet back down, and opened our “tent.” It was she who pulled the sheet up over our heads again, and that is when she said, “I wish there were only two people in the world—you and me.”
I’LL HAND her a surprise, I told myself. Was that my motive in not informing Constance I’d arrived? I wonder. I’d made a reservation at the Garden of Allah, a cluster of gloomy cabins around a swimming pool no one used. I’d heard that many famous writers had lived and drunk there. The name suggests romance, but my mattress was soggy and the wall behind the bed vibrated to the rhythm of the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. I was blue and did what people in the entertainment industry do when they’re melancholy: I called my agent. He sent over one of his lieutenants with a bag of optimism. “Bud Lighton’s wild about you,” he said as he drove me to Fox.
lol
BY THE TIME I got to Constance’s place and was making up my excuses, it was past eleven, and when I rang the bell, there was no answer. I sat on the stoop, waiting, but decided that was an embarrassing position to be found in, so I walked across the street, sat on the curb against the wheel of a parked car, and kept watch down Sycamore Drive. In an hour, I saw her coming, prancing on those dancer’s legs, and with her a man, older than I and bulky around the middle. He was doing the talking, she was listening diffidently, nodding her head as if to say, “Yes, yes, I see what you mean, of course, that’s very interesting!” I figured that her companion was some species of intellectual and that he was directing his persuasion pressure to where she was weakest, her uncertain schooling. What powers these intellectuals have over first-blooming young women, I thought, as they passed into the dark courtyard, he clattering at her and she looking up at him with trust. Turn your back on a delicious girl in Hollywood, and before you know it, some high-dome is at her with the solution for her troubled life. It’s not the good-looking young athletes you have to watch out for but these idea-peddlers, who get in there by filling the gaps where the young woman most needs reassurance.
Her sister moved out—to be with Billy Wilder, I assumed—and I moved in. We were now recognized as a couple. I gave her address as my own (but not to Molly). Every time we made love, with the excitement and all, I’d say, “I love you, baby, I truly do love you.” And she’d say—after she’d cooled off—“I don’t believe you. If you did we’d be married by now.” After which I’d back into silence or change the subject, and Constance would look at me, nod her head, show her teeth, and say, “All right then, all right then, all right!” I didn’t know what that meant but did recognize the tone. Threatening.
oof
Lighton made films one by one to satisfy himself. Each film he made contained the same themes, the same values. He had convictions, felt them strongly, talked about them constantly. They dealt with individual standards, never politics; with courage and decency, privileges and responsibility. He was against the New Deal of Roosevelt, believed that a real man would not accept relief, that it amounted to pity. He despised the East Coast, its ideology and the civilization there. He was for the frontiersman, who lived on a large tract of semiwilderness and asked no favors of his neighbor or of nature, the man who lived where he couldn’t hear his neighbor’s dog bark. Lighton despised communism but despised “liberals” even more.
This was the first time in my life that I disagreed with a man’s politics and loved the man. Suddenly political choice seemed less important. Bud aroused something more fundamental in me. Call it pride and individualism, speaking out on your own, asking no favors, fearing no one, enjoying courage in the face of adversity. When I listened to him, my left-wing positions seemed provincial, my convictions shallow. He appealed to that other, more conservative side of my ambivalent self. What a shock it was for me to like this man as much as I did! Had I really believed what I’d said I believed? Did I really give a damn about politics? I did, yes! Maybe less, but still. Then how could I like this man as much as I did?
I REALIZE now that work was my drug. It held me together. It kept me high. When I wasn’t working, I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do. This is general in the film world. You are so absorbed in making a film, you can’t think of anything else. It’s your identity, and when it’s done you are nobody. When Darryl quit Fox and went to live in Paris, he found that there he was nothing but an aging “sugar daddy,” sitting in an overpriced restaurant with a mistress whose respect for him was less than he was accustomed to. Darryl was D.F.Z. only when he was working on a film. When he wasn’t, he drank and gambled and gave his fucking a more frantic importance than he should have.
What the hell was there to say? I sat alone in my room in the Royalton Hotel, listened to the traffic below, and thought how worthless my life was. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d been the boy wonder of Broadway and the envy of everybody. Now, watching Molly, hearing about Chris’s anger, certainly directed at me, hearing about what she was contributing to the war effort, hearing about sweating Dick Harrity’s work on Yank, I felt like nothing. It had all collapsed. And now I made it worse.
I’d met a girl down the hall, in room 506—I can still remember that number. I heard her door open and close, and feeling alone and isolated and also being mad at Constance because my passion for her had cost me my family, I knocked on door 506 and found this lone girl in a similar mood—an actress out of work, with bills piling up. We tried to comfort each other. But I was impotent; I couldn’t. It seemed like the final wrong thing to do—my body was telling me that. My visit east ended on this sickening note. You’re getting what you deserve, I said to myself.
I MOVED back into the Garden of Allah. Constance’s mother had come west; the clan was gathering. Her sister was poisoning Constance against me by telling her the truth: that I was hesitating. Doris was the established girlfriend now of Billy Wilder, and I was waiting to see if she would prevail on him to marry her. Talk is cheap.
“I’m going to Reno,” I said to Constance. “Stop bothering me about it.”
“When?”
“As soon as I’m finished with the picture.”
“Did you sign what you said you were going to?”
“No, but they’re drawing up the papers, and I will.”
“When?” Then she was silent. “Oh, God, I hate this. The way you’ve got me. And the way I have to talk to you. I hate it.”
Later she said, “I wish we were alone in the world. That there was no one else on earth, anywhere. Anywhere.”
We were in our “tent,” of course, when she said that.
I didn’t say anything about the “no one else” line. That would truly drive me nuts.
ahhh this snake