by
Elia Kazan
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There I was in 1950—I’d never be that high again—but in the next two years I was to know every kind of reversal: condemned by the right, damned by the left, and constantly having my plans and my hopes destroyed by malignant forces I could not place or describe. I knew that the higher you get, the more visible you are, and targets that are most visible draw the most fire. As a great cultural hero in 1950, the only man who then excelled in both theatre and film, I was, for a short time, beyond criticism. Or so I thought. Two years later, I ended up beat (you might say “punchy”) and disrespected by all decent liberals—the people among whom I’d been living my life. But perhaps because I’d not trusted my eminence, I survived my defeats. I tried to keep my balance and stay on my feet, because I knew that if I fell to the ground I’d be an easy mark for malice and revenge. I kept my footing, and I found that the middle ground, between the extremes, was my place, the middle “held” for me; it was where I could live and work. It was what I liked about this country and what made it mine.
lollll
What I did was eccentric. I hitchhiked into the Southwest, into open country. It was not the same as a sound stage. I saw the people who lived there; they were not like actors. I’m good at stirring up conversations; I listen well. I carried a notebook and wrote down whatever struck me. I particularly remember the harbor of Galveston, Texas, and its fishing fleet. It was a breezy day, and the wind could be heard flapping the sails and rustling through the trees. “There’s no wind on a stage,” I said to myself. The harbor’s water rippled, catching the light and throwing it back. How could an art director’s construction of plywood, canvas, and paint catch that? A boat was unloading fish. The salt of the sea was in the air and I could smell its creatures. The sounds were poetry, the scale enormous, the effect exotic. This is what movies are, I thought: environment, scope, size. Out of doors!
I learned why Jack Ford surrounded himself with roughnecks when he made a film. You can ask them to do anything or to cause anything you might dream of to be done. It uninhibits you; you stop worrying about the actors’ comfort or even their safety. Remember in The Sea of Grass how the property man, awed by his star, flicked a little water on the fine-cut coat of the “lord of the prairie” who was supposed to have just come in out of a blizzard? In Panic in the Streets, we had to fish a man out of the river for a scene, a dead man, presumably, who’d been in the water overnight. How did we do it? There was only one way; throw someone in. You can’t throw Spencer Tracy into a river. “Who’ll do the bit in the ‘drink’ for me?” I asked. I had volunteers. When our man was good and wet, his clothes soaked through, and when the camera was ready, we photographed him floating in the garbage and the dead fish along the edge of the dock, and he looked dead. The actor got an extra check. I got my shot.
lol
WHILE I was directing A Streetcar Named Desire, all hell broke loose at the Screen Directors Guild of America, my guild. I’d kept myself at the far edge of that organization for two reasons, the simplest being that meetings bore me. But an issue had come up that would involve me, like it or not. Cecil B. De Mille was going for throats, including mine. He’d gathered the most conservative directors on the guild’s national board to work with him to uncover and discredit left-wingers in the membership and make their continuing to work as directors impossible. He would do this by drawing up a list of those who refused to sign a loyalty oath, then delivering this list of undesirables, inside a guild-franked envelope, to the head of every studio in town. On this list would also appear the names of those about to be called to Washington for testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I suspected I’d be one of the chosen, but I wasn’t sure.
This concern was the other reason I’d been trying to stay out of the industry’s politics. Even though I’d quit the Party more than sixteen years before, the men in Washington wanted names and they wanted publicity. For these purposes I might be thought useful. Those organizing the right-wing movement in the guild suspected anyone who was reported to have left the Party but continued to make the same kind of movies and had never, as evidence of patriotic good faith, spoken up against communism in their work. These men believed that the films I’d made and the plays I’d directed after I’d quit the Party in 1935 were “Communistic,” if not in literal content, by reason of their influence. Among these films were Pinky and Gentleman’s Agreement, but Zanuck was not vulnerable; I was. I knew what they’d think of The Hook and Zapata, and I prepared to fight them; no one was going to tell me what films or plays I could or could not do. I still felt safe in New York, but I knew I’d be an undefendable target in any investigation that “C.B.” and his posse of patriots made in California. (Darryl Zanuck, in a burst of friendly candor, had told me there was a general suspicion—and I couldn’t tell if he shared it—that I’d resigned from the Party only to throw people off my track, that I was in fact still a Communist.) If I was cornered, I decided, I would take a defiant position; I’d never bow to De Mille—or to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“Then the meeting got savage. Jack Ford was there, for a change, and he said, ‘My closest friend is Merian Cooper’—remember Merian Cooper: he made the original King Kong?—‘and he happens to be a brigadier general in the United States Army, and last night, as we were having dinner, Coop said he wouldn’t sign any goddamn loyalty oath and he said what we were making was a blacklist, and if a brigadier general in the army tells me it’s a blacklist, then it’s a goddamn blacklist!’ And George Stevens came down to De Mille’s chair and he said, ‘By the way, C.B., when I was up to my ass in mud at Bastogne, how were the capital gains doing back home?’ It went on in that spirit, and after a while I’d made up my mind, and I went ahead and ordered Herbert Leeds, our secretary, to call a general meeting of our members for the very next Sunday night. Whereupon De Mille walked out of the place, slamming the door behind him.
this is a little cheesy but i like that line lol
I NEVER got to explain to Joe why the meeting I hadn’t attended meant so much to me. It was because I saw that what my guild brothers were defending was the middle road. The men who beat De Mille, an extremist of the right, were not from the left. Many were “reactionaries” like John Farrow or Jack Ford. But all were for the way of fairness and decency. What they were defending was classic Americanism, our basic way of living with each other in this country. And they’d succeeded.
But if part of me believed that forces of good had won a lasting victory, some Old World instinct warned me that despite the guild’s triumph, I should now be especially wary, that my enemies were not scattered in defeat but regrouping in the shadows, and that their next show of strength might come from a totally different direction. It was not over; it was beginning.
lol
“What was so funny?” I asked. “I’ve forgotten how Mexicans are,” John said. “Well, what did he say?” I asked.” ‘On any other subject,’ he said, ‘there would be no limit to what we could do to help you here. But Emiliano is the hero of every forward-looking patriot here. For instance, imagine if we went to your state of Illinois with a Mexican actor and director and made the story of Abraham Lincoln, what would you think?’ That was when I said, ‘That’s a good idea! Why don’t you?’ That was when I laughed! Well, I guess all we can do now,” John went on, “is have a beer. I like their beer, maybe a couple, no?” “How no?” I said.
i mean honestly yeah this is american hubris at its worst
In the next weeks, I had a fascinating time observing my producer and through him the men in this community. Charlie was exceptionally well dressed—he bought his ties by half-dozen lots of each color or design—and rather handsome in a soft, yielding way, his body suited to bed and armchair. He ran a successful agency, and this gave him prestige in the community and power over young actresses. Still he was full of complaints about his love life—if you can call it that. “Now it’s Uncle Charlie,” he griped, referring to the response young women were increasingly giving him. “I say, ‘How about me?’ and they laugh. There just aren’t any real women anymore. High school girls!” He would spend long hours on the telephone, holding a little black book in his hand, trying number after number. I remember a scene in the “game room” late one afternoon, when three men of recognized glamour, Pat De Cicco, Raoul Hakim, and Charlie, all constant presences in gossip columns that celebrated their successes with women, each with a telephone and each with his little black book, were calling girls one after another, razzing the ones who wouldn’t or couldn’t and razzing the ones who did accept. Either way, the frequent response as they hung up was: “Why do I bother?”
awful
Often Charlie would have a date, and they were quite pretty girls, usually recent arrivals in the community. Charlie would ask them to come to his house in their own cars, so he wouldn’t have to drive them home later, and they’d go out together to Romanoff’s or Chasen’s, always one or the other, and when they came back I had to assume they went into Charlie’s bedroom. The next morning I’d say to my host at breakfast, “How was she, Charlie?” And his answer was invariably one word: “Nothing.” He once had taken out Greta Garbo; he dropped this to me one day, and of course I asked him, “How was she, Charlie?” “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing!” And he shrugged. I couldn’t imagine what the hell he was used to, and I never heard him take any responsibility for his sexual partners’ lack of ardor. It didn’t occur to him that the fault might be his. On the other hand, as an admirer of Miss Garbo’s genius, I had to face the possibility that one night, for a few hours, she’d desired Charlie Feldman; I must say this upset me.
lol
Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person. When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to. Like many girls out of that kind of experience, she sought her self-respect through the men she was able to attract. Johnny Hyde had been, at least for the time, perfect protection.
People talk of the technique of seduction as if it’s an art. In my experience it consisted of listening, paying attention, affording true sympathy, and letting some time pass; that is to say, being human and not pressing. All young actresses in that time and place were thought of as prey, to be overwhelmed and topped by the male. A genuine interest, which I did have, would produce results. I’m still surprised at how quickly women will empty the most intimate secrets of their lives into a sympathetic ear. I was good at listening, and the stories she told me, with neither malice nor regret, were amazing.
She’d married Jim, her first husband, so that she wouldn’t have to go back to the orphanage where she’d been put after the dissolution of her parents’ home. She was sixteen. She didn’t like “anything Jim did to me—except when he kissed me here” (she touched her breasts). After he was finished, Jim would fall asleep, leaving her awake and unsatisfied. She remembered taking long walks at night along the tracks where they lived in Sawtelle. A lover found her available. Fred was a musician, scrawny but able in love. She came as many as three times with him in one go. He was vulgar and coarse and scornful with her. He said she was no good for anything except fucking. He found her dress “cheap.” He told her her breasts were too big. He didn’t like to sleep in the same bed with her. He thought her beneath conversation, said she was stupid and only good for one thing, which he didn’t regard too highly. He boasted that he never had to make a pass at a woman—they all came after him.
(marilyn monroe)