by
Elia Kazan
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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”?
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