by
Elia Kazan
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I did truly admire the second act—the one so many people resented. It was about Art’s obsessive romance with Marilyn Monroe. He had denied, foolishly, that the story of that relationship in the play was based on his personal history, denied that his character, Maggie, was based on Marilyn. But he put into the mouth of Maggie precisely what Marilyn had thought of him, and particularly her scorn for him at the end of their marriage. This character is true and has an interesting dramatic development from adoration to contempt. Art is rough on himself, giving us all that Marilyn said in her disappointment and resentment. The play’s summation—summations are by definition boring—is insufferably self-favoring and “noble.” Audiences should be able to make up their own minds what the events shown have meant, but Art knew what he wanted the audience to think, and he told them.
after the fall!!! need to read/see it
We flew to Rome together, she to catch a plane for the States, I for Athens. The night before, I’d seen the performance of her play and its companion piece by Ed Albee. Watching them, any fool would know that Molly was a nice person and Ed perhaps less nice, but his play had heat and punch, and hers did not. After the show, I saw that everybody in and around the theatre—the actors, the stagehands, and the management—loved Molly, recognizing that she was a person of rare class. I also saw that this wasn’t what she wanted. When we kissed goodbye, I told her that she, along with my mother, was the best person I’d ever known, but I’m afraid that wasn’t what she wanted to hear either. During our three days together, we’d not made love.
oof
I’VE TRIED to tell the truth in this account of my life. There must be inaccuracies of dates, places, and what people did or failed to do; that’s inevitable in a narration of what happened so many years before. But I have told the truth as far as I know it—except for one sentence a page back. The truth, which I know very well but avoided saying, was that I hadn’t made love to my wife in three years—not only over those three days in Spoleto. We weren’t intimate that way through the last years of her life. In a Western civilization, with a “Western” woman, I was making the grand experiment of the Oriental male, to separate love and sex. In every other essential, I was faithful to Molly; I’d devoted my energies without reserve to supporting and, when she needed it, protecting her. I was her husband truly, and my thoughts and my energies were always with her. Friendship, at the end, was our truest bond. Was this enough? For her? For me? Could it be? Not by American standards. And perhaps not in fact.
For my personal needs, I was provided with a “service flat”—four rooms and a housekeeper, who had dinner waiting for me when I came back at night. To attend to other needs, I acquired a mini-harem built around two actresses whom I could call on whenever I chose. They were good girls, lovely as well, who wanted to get ahead in their profession and made the mistake of believing I would help; one was exceptionally bright in the ways of the theatre and the other a beauty-prize winner, “Miss Greece.” Both of them introduced me to their fathers, who apparently accepted the relationship for what it was and thought nothing wrong with it for their daughters. But for me there was one drawback: None of the girls had anything difficult about them. Or challenging. After I came, I would wonder how quickly I could clear them out of the place so I could sleep in peace. I remember the farewell words of one of them. Looking particularly flushed and pretty, she said as she left, “Did I please you?” Can you imagine an American girl asking that before going home alone?
god
“Good,” she said, “relax. Give in. I’m going to make us an old-fashioned.”
She was gone. I heard the apartment house’s elevator through the walls. I recalled our brownstone on Seventy-second Street and its porch directly off the bedroom, where I used to sleep nights under the summer sky. Then I found I was controlling myself. May my children forgive me, I didn’t like the place. I hated those big windows; they were bullies. The room under them looked cavernous. I like softly illuminated rooms. I knew I’d never print any pictures. Who has time for that in my line of work? As for unwinding, how the hell was I going to unwind when I had a long, unevenly shot film of dubious worth to edit, a most uncertain leading man to make look good, a composer, Manos Hadjidakis, whom I didn’t know well, on his way to New York to score the film, and—and the whole damned Repertory Theatre program, with its mess of unanswered questions and the choices I’d have to make with Bob.
Men called geniuses have been the joy of my existence—but I didn’t know them as geniuses. All those I’ve known and worked with—Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Harold Clurman, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando—have a joyous intensity in work and have passed it on to me. They are blessed. Along with all the other sparks, they all have great laughs. Laughing comes easy for them because life is what they want it to be; they are what they want to be, doing what they want to do. They don’t question their worth. They no longer respond to disapproval. Manos never, not once, showed any hesitation about what he wanted or what I’d think of it. He did wonderful things for my film at a time when the film most needed that contribution.
ahh the masculine ideal of genius [is it ever attainable by the feminine]
However, the main reason for my devotion to the cause was my concern for Molly. She’d invested her soul, nothing less, in her hopes for a pleasant life of work together, side by side, in the “perfect” home she’d made. Pleasant! I grew to hate that word. I don’t know exactly why; perhaps she used it too often. By the end of that summer, I’d begun to feel that her hopes were doomed. I was behaving “badly” again; after controlling myself all day, I came home frazzled and on edge and not at all pleasant. I was edgy too, “antsy,” for implicit in her “perfect” life was the condition of celibacy for me. I could see that wasn’t going to work, and it didn’t.
The tragedy of our time in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets. Not that I share the sentiment expressed in his obituaries that he’d failed in his career. Clifford influenced a generation of playwrights—Art Miller, who’s sitting here; Tennessee Williams, who told me that his first arousing experience in the New York theatre was Awake and Sing!; and a roomful of other writers. Like all true creators, he influenced men who’ll never know it.
Cliff spent the last dozen years of his life writing films to pay bills that were too large for a man who hoped to continue working in the theatre. He made his home in a Beverly Hills “Spanish mansion.” He drove a Lincoln Continental and had what he claimed to be the outstanding collection of Paul Klee in the country. He worked frequently and was well paid by New York theatre standards. But he was always broke or near it, and I believe he died broke or near it.
Odets was the first man I called on when I made a trip to California. We always had dinner alone and always in his house. He would welcome me as if I was a lifeline to the shore where he longed to be and the sea stormy between. He had five plays all laid out, he’d tell me, and waiting for the day. His plan, he said, was to spend only nine months more in southern California, then come back to New York and get these plays on. They’d be, he assured me, the best plays of his life, even told me the story of three of them in considerable detail, and I believe they would have been fine plays, for they were deeply conceived and personally felt. Cliff wasn’t “shot.” Something was wrong, but the mind and talent were alive in the man. He’d had terrible difficulties, marital and political, and gone west to find the strength to again affirm the purpose of his life.
I said, “Clifford, what frightens me is the possibility that you will finally not write those five plays, that they will be found as notes in your files at the end. I fear there’s very little time left. For any of us. You say the date on your plane ticket east is nine months from now. Do you really believe that? Tell yourself the truth before it’s too late. Because suddenly the race will be run, the victors posted, and it’s part of history. Here we are sitting calmly on a warm evening, enjoying the exceptional wine you’re pouring, but time is running by at the same headlong pace and—Cliff, are you listening? I mean don’t count on its mercy. Hurry!”
He was hurt. He shook me off. And I gave up. Despite what I’d said, neither of us knew how late it was. In six months, the disease that eats you had eaten him. He lay on a bed on the sixth floor of the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital when I saw him for the last time. At one moment during that long day, he raised his fist for the last time in his characteristic, self-dramatizing way and said, “Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” Then he looked at me, slyly, and said, “You know, I may fool you, Gadg. I may not die.” He contemplated that for an instant, then he was elsewhere, thinking of something unspoken. His mind was wandering. He gave me his hand to hold and looked around as if he wasn’t really where he was. Then, again changing abruptly, he glowered at his nurse, a fine, patient woman, and declared, “I want to shout, I want to sing. I want to yell!” The nurse, who’d heard it all before, said, “Go on, shout, yell, sing if you want to!” Then he tried, I remember he did try. But his shouting days were over. He was a mighty sick rooster. So he lay there and glowered angrily at the world in general and whatever it was that was cornering him now. No longer able to avoid the tragedy he’d lived or the tragedy that he was or the thought of what he might have been, he beckoned to me to lean closer, and he whispered—I remember the words well—“Gadg! Imagine! Clifford Odets dying!”
this always gets me