by
Elia Kazan
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I’d come to that point in life—I was forty-eight, that critical age—when I was asking myself, “Is that all there’s going to be? Is this, what I have now, it?” I set out to destroy what I found stifling and replace the predictable with the unpredictable. I courted what would be disruptive. I was more determined than ever to concentrate on my own projects and prepare my own scripts. For this program, I found an ally. When you want to hear something very much, you’ll soon find someone to tell it to you. In the last stages of work preparing A Face in the Crowd, I’d met a young actress who, many years later, was to be my second wife. I was immediately taken with her. At first our affair was nothing more than dog and bitch. There were others at the same time; neither of us expected the relationship to be anything beyond a temporary lusting. But I’d never encountered anyone like this girl, anyone who’d uncover what is generally kept discreet with such complete candor. Conceived in a field of daisies, Barbara Loden was born antirespectable; she observed none of the conventional middle-class boundaries, the perimeter walls within which Molly lived. A roulette wheel that didn’t stop turning, Barbara would keep me wondering when it would, and where. Life with Molly, to continue the figure, was a safe-deposit vault.
AS IV’E passed through the episodes of my life, I’ve tried to understand my behavior and explain it to you and so to myself. But at this point in my history, I cannot account for what I was doing. The explanation, if one can be found, is beyond my reach. From the time I found that Waterfront and East of Eden had made me one of the most respected men in my profession and that I could choose among unlimited opportunities, I began to behave in a manner I can only describe by saying that I was two men alternately within the same man, with two needs, two “souls”—one black, the other “normal.”
I was enjoying a double life, seemed to want respectability and general esteem while, sometimes on the same day, even within an hour, I was being driven by irrational emotional needs to behavior that was shameful. No, that isn’t true. The remarkable fact is that I felt no shame, did not believe that what I was doing was out of the ordinary or in any final sense reprehensible. I was not burdened with a sense of mortal sin, and what I was doing, since it defied understanding, needed no justification. Being determined at this time to deny myself nothing, I plunged on. I was lawless.
I said very little to Molly about the purpose of my trip—she would have tried to talk me out of it. All I told her was that I needed a vacation alone. In Athens I found what I wanted and rented it, the Stormie Seas, a forty-foot caïque, flying the Union Jack. It had a crew of two social rebels, a young married couple—navigator and captain, mate and cook. I told them the kind of islands I wanted to see and they understood. We cleared Piraeus’s channel on our five-horse motor, then shut it off and, relying on cloth, turned south toward those islands of the Cyclades that tourists don’t trample. Quiet at last, my load of tensions eased, I asked myself a question I’d asked before, but now in earnest: Could I disappear from the world where I’d trafficked all my life and become someone else? Could I start over again? You will certainly say that is the most foolish of questions, but in time—it did take time—that is what I did: disappear from the world I’d inhabited all my adult life, to become someone else.
Speak now, I said to myself, release your true feelings before it’s too late. Be yourself. Take your place in the world. You are not a cosmic orphan. You have no reason to be timid. Respond as you feel. Awkwardly, crudely, vulgarly—but respond. Leave your throat open. You can have anything the world has to offer, but the thing you need most and perhaps want most is to be yourself. Stop being anonymous. The anonymity you believed would protect you from pain and humiliation, shame and rejection, doesn’t work. Admit rejection, admit pain, admit frustration, admit pettiness, even that; admit shame, admit outrage, admit anything and everything that happens to you, respond with your true, uncalculated response, your emotions. The best and most human parts of you are those that you have inhibited and hidden from the world.
So I resigned—my announcement to myself—from the elite club of sought-after Broadway directors, walked away at the peak of my success. By refusing the Williams play, I was, in effect, refusing all other plays by authors of similar stature. I was abdicating from the successful career I’d made. I vowed not to look back.
the play is period of adjustment
The old lady of the island about to be covered by the man-made lake was played by one of the great character actresses of that day, Jo Van Fleet, aged thirty-seven, as difficult and dear a woman as a director in need of a performance could hope for. I’d worked with Jo in Camino Real and in East of Eden, knew her strong will and knew its purpose: to excel. Full of unconstrained violence, she’d eat Clift alive, and I was prepared to let her. No lump there. And what a professional Jo was! Whereas Clift, sleepy and shaky, had something wobbly about his appearance in the morning, Jo would barge into the makeup room at 4 a.m. and give five hours to transforming herself into an indomitable backriver matriarch. Even on days when I told her we wouldn’t be coming close to her with the camera, she’d spend an hour applying the liver spots of an old woman on the backs of her hands. “Jo,” I’d say, “we’re not going to photograph your hands today. Get another hour’s sleep.” “This is not for the camera,” she’d answer. “It’s for me.” Clift was a tenderhearted shell of a man, Jo as formidable and unyielding as the rock-ribbed country where we were working.
What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with the joy. Perhaps this theme rings so true because Bill himself had come to a point where he had settled for less, a place not in the first rank of playwrights along with O’Neill, Williams, and Miller but on an honorable sub-platform where—damn the praise, damn their prizes—the work would be its own reward; he realized that he’d find peace only if he sought goals within the reach of what talent he had and didn’t hope for miracles.
I’ve been having throbbing headaches too, frightening because I don’t know what brings them on. So I’ve been beginning to feel the cold wind Time makes as it rushes by. Heeding those warnings, I’ve determined to live what is left of my life on the precipice—that is, recklessly. The word “reckless” can be defined as “without concern for the consequences.” I believe writing this book this way is reckless. Since I don’t ask for your forgiveness or even your understanding, I will not try to explain or excuse certain features of my conduct that are coming up. Here are only the facts.
I’ve had several times in my life, usually in the spring of the year, that I recall as perfect. One was the night in May of 1932 when I first came together with Molly. It was in a field along the edge of a lake, under a lopsided moon, and it was close to midnight. I can never forget that night and how, in a few minutes, it changed my life. Another such time was in the coldest weeks of winter, when I was first with my present wife, Frances; I used to walk from my house on West Sixty-eighth Street near the park to her apartment on Ninetieth Street and Riverside Drive. The wind off the North River cut me like a knife, but I didn’t mind. In the morning I’d walk back—it was even colder—and I remember saying to myself as I returned home from our hours together, “I’m in heaven!” If “heaven” has a meaning, that is it.
BARBARA told me she was pregnant.
There are certain common rules of human behavior I believe in and others I don’t. Barbara had been with me, devoted and loving, for a long time. She’d been the only one who’d encouraged me in my screenplay writing. She wanted a child desperately, had tried for years without success. She wanted the child that she’d begun to carry. Perhaps I could have stopped her, but I didn’t. I didn’t see whose business it finally was except ours, and I’ve never regretted having that “love” child. Having endured difficulties more trying than those of the ordinary boy, he’s now becoming an exceptional man.
Some people close to me have believed that Barbara “trapped” me. For what? A meal ticket? So what? Didn’t I owe something to the person who’d encouraged me and stood by me? What greater gift can we give each other than encouragement when it’s most needed? And support? If you truly examine your own life, you’ll doubtless find that the most enduring bonds are those of ties stronger than the legalities. I’ve never regretted telling Barbara that if she wanted the child it was all right with me. Knowing my nature, wouldn’t you say she was taking a riskier chance than I was? The difficulties we were to encounter, all three of us—were they more difficult than the usual difficulties of marriage and of life? Of childbirth and of rearing offspring?
But the morality of the matter? Don’t talk to me about that. I’ve seen too much not to doubt conventional standards of morality. I’m aware of the general hypocrisy in our society: one face, another reality.
In the last years of his life, my mother found the task of taking care of a four-story house beyond what was left of her strength, and she plotted with one of her sons to move elsewhere. Father resented the move, particularly because she had made the decision, not he. “She don’t talk to me on that subject,” he said. But they sold the old house at a price he thought much too low, gave away most of the furniture, and relocated to a small condo in Rye. He resented what she’d done so intensely that he couldn’t speak to her. “Your mother giving orders around here now,” he said to me bitterly. Becoming delusional and hateful, he began to suspect her, a woman of seventy-three, not in the best health herself, of infidelity. He’d imagine her lover at the other end of the room and point him out to me. “They waiting minute I don’t watch,” Father said, “then tak! They go upstairs.” He’d imagine he heard the noises of their lovemaking coming from her bedroom above. “I can’t hold her anymore,” he confided to me one day. “I only have eight hundred dollars in the bank now.”