by
Elia Kazan
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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
I WILL describe Molly.
In the city of Zurich, along the river that flows into the Zurich See, there are several substantial churches. They all toll the time, keeping the twenty-four hours of the day in order. One particularly impressed me, the Grossmünster. It is a Protestant church, built of great, square-cut stone blocks, its style established by round Romanesque arches, which settle, don’t soar. When you push the heavy entrance door open, it closes quickly and of itself behind you. You see immediately that there is no altar, only a raised area at the end of the nave with stairs leading up to it, no barrier, no rail. All the windows at the sides of the church are of clear gray glass, and the impression of the body of the church is severe and old-fashioned, even rigid and cold, and so the totality would appear, except that in the depths, in the most intimate part, where in other times there may have been a holy place, there are three long high narrow windows of colored glass. These were designed and installed by a twentieth-century artist, and they are of the most intense and brilliant colors—blood red, night purple, deep sea blue, forest green—all richly saturated, passionate, and modern. Everything about the place is old-fashioned and uninviting, except when you look into the depths—there is the surprise! When you enter the depths—as I did—and see those passionate windows, they are the church.
Molly invited me to move into her house until I left for overseas.
wow
I’d read, before I went to visit the pilot, Tolstoi’s comment on Nicholas Rostov’s letter home: that it was impossible for a young man to write the truth; unconsciously he will always favor himself and reject events and details that do not fit into the way he preferred things to have happened. That’s where I’d stopped reading; the observation had reminded me of the letter I’d sent Constance while we were waiting in San Francisco for our orders to go overseas. I’d written her how much she’d meant to me, how much I missed her, and that I thought of her all the time—which was true—and that I was ashamed of what I’d done. I suppose it was an attempt to cautiously make it up with her—at least a friendship. She’d answered, as I deserved, curtly; it was the last message I would ever receive from her. “Why don’t you act like a man for a change,” she wrote. “Forget about me. C.” That was all. My letter had been foolish and self-favoring. Her answer, true to the situation.
What a narrow escape! I might have ended up a Fox staff director. My first film had been a great success, and Zanuck was hot after me. My long-term contract would have been eagerly “adjusted,” that is, enriched. I could have had a lovely, spacious home in Bel Air in any one of a number of styles—they were all there to pick from—or a beach house in Malibu, or both, and why not a ranch up north in the Ojai Valley (only an hour and a half away)? I could certainly have had a numbered bank account in Switzerland and a press agent to see to it that I was showered with praise often enough to quiet any and all doubts I had about myself. I could have had my name in the Hollywood Reporter once a week like so many others and, as a reward, have enjoyed any success-hungry young actress I wanted. I could have had every joy that a successful career in Hollywood could have given me. And here is the best of it: I was loved; not challenged, loved! The crews loved me, the designers loved me, the department heads loved me, the cameramen en masse loved me; they were all eager to work with me. “When? When?” they’d cried. “When are you going to do another picture?” The Fox lot, that year of ’45, was the happiest place I’d ever enjoyed. If I wasn’t a king—that was Darryl—I was a prince. Everybody greeted me whether they knew me or not; they couldn’t afford not to, for who could predict how far up in the world I’d rise? As for missing the New York crowd, they were all there or on the way west, ready to drink with me evenings or, on Sundays, picnic around swimming pools of emerald water, clear and clean enough to drink. And as for my contract to direct Sam Behrman’s Dunnigan’s Daughter—well, it wasn’t a contract, it was only a handshake; my agent would find a way to weasel me out of that. I didn’t want to do that damned play anyway.
Forty years is a long perspective, but perhaps it can afford a clear view. I look back at Clifford Odets—no one I’ve known was more talented. He couldn’t resist the money, the flattery, the apparent safety and security in the movie community. And he lost himself. Harold Clurman, one of the men I’ve most admired, was lucky: The people who ran the big studios did not want him, and he had to come east again; that saved him, for he seemed lost in southern California. But I’m not praising the East over the West. New York was simply my habitat, where my sources were. In Hollywood I’d have had to rely on my cleverness and my facility, which are technical, not artistic, qualities. The one time I met William Faulkner, I remember he wore rubber boots and they were covered with the mud of his Mississippi winter. He never left his home in Oxford for very long. John Steinbeck left northern California and looked a fool in New York theatre society and on the right bank of Paris. Saul Bellow is wise; he stays in Chicago. As for Nick Ray, who knew more about the back roads and so on, I saw him give himself over and be lost among the moguls of the film world. And Orson Welles, the most talented and inventive theatre man of my day: What an ass he seemed in the posh restaurants and hotels of Europe’s capitals, and how sad later, in financial desperation, making TV commercials. I was to watch with an awful pain how lost Tennessee Williams was as he shuttled around the bright spots of the world. The money his great success brought him allowed him to live in a way that squashed his talent. He would have been better off living in his native South, that part of the world where he was uncomfortable, even outraged, because he felt he was an outsider. Notice Picasso, how he stayed where his clay was, and Matisse and Renoir and Cézanne. It’s difficult to get Fellini out of Italy for any reason, or Bergman out of Sweden or Satyajit Ray out of Bengal. They know where their artistic roots are. I was with Kurosawa in New York City and he seemed like a child eager to return home—which he soon did. Read the letters of Gustave Flaubert and notice how rarely he made the trip—an hour? two?—to Paris, where his mistress was eagerly waiting to see him. He knew his material was in the province of Normandy. And Proust: He lived in what he wrote about—a life no one else could tolerate.
What if, in Deep Are the Roots, the returning black soldier coming back from an army that, as I’d seen, refused him weapons and further humiliated him by confining his services to driving trucks, digging ditches, cleaning latrines, and peeling potatoes, came back full of anger instead of being that fine, decent, patient, handsome black boy so purely in love with an equally pure white girl? What if he’d taken her to bed or to lie under a tree—she seemed willing enough, the way I’d directed the delectable Barbara Bel Geddes—instead of simply mooning over her? The real drama is revealed when the accusation is true. Black friends have said it to me plainly: We have a right to be sons of bitches too. As it was, all that remained for the authors to do was unravel the plot by proving the accusation was false.
The effect of treating a social problem in this way is that there is never any doubt in the audience’s mind as to what they’re expected to feel. They have the assurance from the beginning that they are on the side of the angels—the falsely accused. They have never been challenged to doubt. This, of course, does not prepare them for life as it’s lived. They are also often masochists—so it has seemed to me—enjoying the middle-class white man’s guilt about the black man. They’ve been told where to stand and what to think, and guaranteed safe passage to the final curtain. We are in a kind of conformity tide. That is a word liberals say they hate, and they do—except when it’s their own conformity.
Such a play is not drama that informs life; it is liberal corn.
The “Anatolian,” of course, was accurate. The “arrogant”? I was elated by this characterization. “At last,” I said to myself, “I’ve made it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to be.” I believe every artist is, as he has to be, arrogant. You may not go along with that; the word has unfortunate connotations. But whatever else an artist may be saying in his work, he is certainly saying, “I’m important!”
Arrogance, when it’s depicted on the screen or stage, is usually projected by boisterous behavior. Not so in life. The most arrogant people I’ve known—people whom I admire for this quality as well as for the work they do—are often quiet with the special ease that comes from being sure of themselves.