by
Elia Kazan
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What I’m saying to you through this true story is that the chance we have here won’t happen again. The series of accidents and aspirations, along with real estate deals, civic concern, and guilt feelings, and the desire of rich men to have their names remembered after they die, all those piled together produced this surprising opportunity for us. It won’t happen again. Not for many years! So let’s not lose it.
The tragedy of the American theatre and of our lives is what could have been. Forces dispersed instead of gathered. Talents unused or used at a fraction of their worth. Potential unrealized. We all know our problems. We are not kids, we are not students. We know we are here on short leases. It is now time to stand up for ourselves before we disappear from the scene.
The man who, in the forties, promised to be the Hamlet of our time has yet to play Hamlet, or anything like. The man who could have been the Lear of this generation is playing a sheriff on a TV series. I don’t think he plays sheriffs very well. He could have been a great Lear. The man who could have been the greatest actor in the history of American theatre is sulking on a grubby hilltop over Beverly Hills or on a beach on the island of Tahiti. What happened to them? They don’t know. Don’t look down on them. They are not weaklings. They were idealists too. Nor are they corrupt, confused, or sicker than most. They are your brothers.
What is so terrible in our society is that people like ourselves are only rarely in control of their own lives and destinies. We don’t do what we want to do. We do what we think we have to do. Or what’s worse, what other people want us to do, what “they”—whoever “they” are—want us to do. We settle for costarring roles on a TV series we despise, for the approval of our agents and a better contract this year than last. When we go from flop to flop we are terrified. When we find ourselves in a hit, we are bored to death.
Now we are going to try to do something we respect for a change. It is hazardous. When you say something is difficult, you are saying it might not work. We are here to attempt a birth. All births are difficult. Look at a baby’s head. Don’t you wonder how it managed to get through? Like everything else worth doing, it is impossible.
Yet in a long and lively life, I haven’t found anything worth doing except the impossible. Theatre historians have often called the Group Theatre a failure. By what standards? I just made a movie that every wise producer in the film industry believes must be a failure. It probably will be, in their books, but I’m especially proud of it. All I gave was time, and all I’ll probably get is pleasure. But what could I ask for that’s dearer? We are here at the first meeting of a group of theatre people who are, as I see it, attempting the impossible. In a money-oriented, marketplace society, we are embarking on something because we believe in its goals and because we anticipate being exhilarated by its challenges. Don’t look for common sense here or for practicality. You won’t get rich here; go elsewhere for that. Only remember that this day I said the word “impossible.”
IT SEEMED to me that during those last weeks we’d finally found a way of living together, one that made us both content. It was not conventional in this society and time, but not unusual either, and apparently it was what we both wanted, since we settled into it easily and it did work. I had lived on an either/or basis and had been constantly on edge. Now I’d come to another solution, one with which I felt satisfied because I had both relationships I wanted. My “experiment” seemed to have worked; a stable work life, a wife I loved, a mistress I found stimulating, each offering me different benefits. Wasn’t this the way many men lived, though they didn’t admit it? Even if it was in their imagination? I didn’t know what else would work for me, not after all that Molly and I had been through together. Or work for Molly either. She didn’t require of me now what I could not give her, and apparently what she did get from me was enough. She seemed to have finally come to some sort of resolution of her feelings, an acceptance of my nature, that I had different needs from hers, just as she had different needs from mine. So I was careful and she was contented.
I wondered why people make such a fuss about infidelity; sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps a marriage together.
boy
For many years I lived this life of dissembling, and the one I deceived was a person who had a brilliant mind, who’d made me a family, who’d been unfailingly loyal, and whose actions were never anything but in my interests. She was my champion, with devotion beyond measure. She never spoke anything but the truth, her truth! Even when I was most against her, when I believed her narrow, rigid, intolerant, destructive, and above all restrictive of the full possibilities of life, I was devoted to her.
Then she died, and I found myself in a situation I’d never known. I didn’t have to explain anything to anyone. I didn’t need Molly’s approval for anything I wanted to do. I found myself standing on a mound of years from which I could survey without shame everything that had happened, and from this vantage point of time and space I could try to understand myself. With this new curiosity, I looked at myself hard and found myself wishing a wish that mankind has had from the beginning, a hope that, as I was becoming a different person, I might start over again and live another life. I began to see that this was possible. Molly’s death had unlocked the door. My old life—personal, professional, and emotional—had died; it was done with; it was gone. I’d discredited all the needs I’d once thought vital, those over which Molly had dominion. Now, as I grew free and became myself, I developed new needs and new goals, which were my own. I was liberated.
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Of everybody who wrote about the book, I thought Jimmy Baldwin got it best. “The tone of the book,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books, “does not seem to depend on anything that we think of as a literary tradition but on something older than that: the tale told by a member of the tribe to the tribe. It has the urgency of a confession and the stammering authority of a plea. Kazan is talking, trying to tell us something and not only for his sake … but also for ours. ‘I don’t like my life! How have I become what I have become?…These men who cried, America America!, as the century died, had come here looking for freedom and all they found was the freedom to make as much money as possible.’ This is not the official version of American history but that it very nearly sums it up can scarcely be doubted by anyone with the courage to look into the faces one encounters all over this land, who listens to the voices, hearing the buried uneasiness, translating itself hourly into a hatred of all that is strange or vivid, into a hatred, at last, of life.”
The very next day—that’s how it happened—Sam Spiegel asked if I’d go to California with him to direct a film he was making from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon; Harold Pinter had written the screenplay, Sam boasted. “Is that the film Mike Nichols was going to direct?” I asked. “He’s out of it now,” Sam said quickly. His face was a mask; I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or relieved. I’d heard that Sam had offered the job to still another director, who’d walked away from it. Did that matter? Why should it? I asked Sam a few questions and got up to go. As he gave me Pinter’s screenplay, he said, “You’ll get back to me soon, won’t you?” “Tomorrow,” I said. Which was a mistake. Sam had looked so sincere and affectionate that I’d been accommodating and not given myself time to think carefully. I’d forgotten that even sincerity and affection can be tactics with Sam. Did that matter? No—I wasn’t marrying the man! But I wasn’t eager to work with him. I’d enjoyed his company socially—his parties had it all, and he gave many kinds of parties—but I hadn’t enjoyed working with him when we’d made On the Waterfront. On the other hand, he’d been good on script, and that did matter. Furthermore, this film was going to be made entirely in southern California, where it was warm in the winter. That was the point. He’d provide me with a comfortable house in the sun, high above the smog-line, and Barbara would look after Mother during the day and—No! I’d take Ruby! I’d ask Sam to pay for Ruby. I’d have breakfast and supper with Mother and Ruby every day. But wait! What about the script? Read the damned script, read it carefully, for chrissake! Hell, I didn’t have to read the script. I’d read the book. Twice. With Pinter, it had to be good! Sam had promised we’d go to London together and work with Harold, who was having marital problems and couldn’t come to the U.S.
When I got home, I asked myself what was important. Mother’s health, of course. But hadn’t I sworn, after two unhappy experiences, one of which was The Arrangement, that I would stick to the novel now and never make another film? “Stop,” I said to myself. “Hesitate! Consider! Why are you plunging into this? Give yourself time to think. Remember The Arrangement. It was a catastrophe. You’re talking about a year of your life. Rent Mother a house in Florida, maybe in Tarpon Springs, which is full of Greeks. You can afford that.” But it would be difficult to visit her and watch over her in Florida. That wouldn’t work. Stop. Think!
ahhhh this man traps himself into corners
I’ve studied friends at the end of their lives. Who that I’ve known has shown me something of how to die? On the other hand, who claimed my sympathy but not my admiration? I can still hear Clifford’s operatic outcry—this at fifty-seven—“Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” And, his last, “Imagine! Clifford Odets dying!” I can recall the laughter of Orson Welles, like an explosion of impatience and pain, a laugh that seemed to be mocking everyone, above all himself. What could the genius who’d made Citizen Kane have thought as he studied his bloated image on a studio relay monitor, assuring the nation of what he had no way of knowing himself? How had he maintained the dignity he deserved in Paris as he strained to amuse Darryl Zanuck at dinner so Darryl would pick up the check, then loan Orson enough dollars to travel to wherever it was he wished to go next? What had Orson felt then? Perhaps Tennessee Williams, who knew that feeling, had a name for it, something like self-disgust.
S. N. Behrman, one of our fine writers of the comedy of ideas, used to bemoan not the loss of his talent—right to the end, his mind was prickly—but what he called vitality. How much of what’s called talent, he used to say, derives from that astonishing foolhardiness that comes with energy! For nearly all of us that kind of fervor is an experience we know only in youth: insatiable appetite, spread-eagle curiosity, no end of time, a mind and a heart open to any experience, fearlessness in general.
Later in life we take naps in the afternoon.
Is it helpful for us to be kind to ourselves? To others, of course. But when we’re alone, which is most of the time, isn’t it better to face the facts of life as it moves on, and death as it comes, without self-favoring, to acknowledge simply: That’s the way it is.