Timebends (48 page)

It was a situation not dissimilar to Untermeyer's, and the brutal coldness with which she had been thrown down, as it were, to hit the concrete frightened her so deeply that she always thereafter seemed to have a reserve of furtiveness, even though she continued rather successfully in the theatre and in films long after the blacklisting madness had died away. In 19461 do not think we could have believed that such a blacklist was possible, that the current of one's life and career could simply be switched off and the wires left dead.

As I mentioned, I had also sent the play to glamorous Leland Hayward, my agent at least in name. There was no response at all. After a weekor so I went to his offices, only to be told that he hadn't read it, was in California, and could not be reached. To his anxious secretary I announced that I wanted all my old scripts back then and there and that I was leaving the agency. I mention this at all because it tells me that I had somewhere found a certain confidence that I could no longer be stopped. It may merely have been the pride of desperation, but I actually gathered up the scripts of my earlier plays and off I went. Not, however, before the secretary convinced me to leave the new play for a Miss Brown to read.

Kay Brown would be my agent for very nearly forty years. She phoned me next day in Port Jefferson to tell me that the play was terrific and that she would be honored to handle it and had some ideas about where to send it now that Shumlin had turned it down. Mary and Jane and I were moving back to New York that very day. I pushed the pedal down on the old Nash-Lafayette two-door, which was crammed with Jane's crib and toys and our stuff, and blew a tire as we came off the Southern State Parkway. Like a sign of good things to come, there was a tire store twenty yards away
where I bought a new one for twelve dollars, an expense I really could not afford.

I had heard of Elia Kazan and of course of Harold Clurman, who had been one of the heads of the Group Theatre and its most literate figure. The Group had vanished five years before, and they had recently started up a partnership to produce plays commercially. Kay thought they might be interested, as well as the Theatre Guild. In a day or two both organizations wanted to option
All My Sons.

The Guild's head, Theresa Helburn, had a claim on my loyalties because it was she who had been the chief officer of the Bureau of New Plays when it had selected me for a national award back in 1937. And the Guild had been O'Neill's initial producer, although in recent years its reputation was rather more glamorously “theatrical” than I felt comfortable with.

Kazan and Clurman, in contrast, had been among the creators of that thirties mixture of Stanislavsky and social protest which was the real glamour to me. The choice of their new organization did not take me long to make, but I was not prepared to be asked which of them I wanted as director. Clurman, it was my impression, had been the Group's chief thinker; he had directed all of Odets in the thirties and was already a legendary figure to outsiders like me. Kazan, however, was said to be the more aggressive and vital director although he was younger than Clurman, his mentor, and had fewer credits. By this time I knew many actors, and the picture they were giving out was of a Clurman who might be inspired but could often fumble, and a Kazan who was wily and could punch directly to the point with actors.

Naturally, to meet both of them in their offices with the purpose of choosing between them was heady stuff. If such a thing as a directorial expert existed, here were two of the greatest. I suppose I loved them both after the first five awkward minutes. They were heaping compliments on the play and were grateful I had chosen them over the Guild, already a triumph for their new company. The energy in the air was fierce. Kazan grinned under his enormous nose, his head tilted down like a fighter's, and Clurman leaned back rubbing his hands together as though about to sit down to a roast turkey. The place was simply happy. And it was eager. This was a time when it was still imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.

It was just about ten years since I had asked Jim Doll across the
hall how long an act normally lasted. In those Depression times Harold Clurman had come forward as a priest of a new kind of theatre that would cry down injustice and heal the sick nation's spirit. Kazan had played in
Waiting for Lefty,
and I had seen him in
Golden Boy
as Fuseli, the gangster who appears in the doorway of the gym and, watching Luther Adler punch a bag, leans menacingly far forward without raising his heels and says, “I want a piece of that boy.” Ah, what glamour, what hard and clear strokes of theatrical characterization! And here were both of them fairly lusting after my play. I had arrived.

I had led a nearly isolated life, still turning out the occasional radio play to pay the bills and working every day on
All My Sons
until it seemed as tight as a drum. It was exhilarating, as it usually is the first time around, merely to come to the production office on East Fifty-seventh Street every morning to watch Clurman and Kazan interviewing actors. Of course none seemed to resemble “real” people like the ones I had modeled the characters on, the young women being too beautiful and the young men too handsome; even when they looked ordinary they had the performer's charge of energy that normal people lacked. I feared artificiality taking over. And I suppose I learned more about the theatre in that five or six weeks of casting than I ever would again.

Kazan's capacity to objectify actors' personalities was really an exercise in clinical psychology. At one and the same instant he could seem intimately and lovingly involved with an actor while standing back to gauge the impression he might make in the role. Those we ended up with he had known or observed onstage before, so there was no real question of acting ability. Clurman, smelling like a barbershop, took charge of interviewing the ladies, a daily toil that filled him with a zest and happiness that all but foamed. He seemed never to notice a woman's flaws, only her good points—she might have two pairs of ears, but then again she had terrific legs or fantastic eyes or an engaging laugh. Walter Fried, their cigar-smoking business manager, himself not immune to the parade of females passing his desk, added his lisping anticipation of a hit to the prayers of Clurman, who, as soon as the office was empty, would have his young secretary, another of his adoring worshipers, on her knees buffing his shoes while he rubbed his hands gleefully together, laughed unscrupulously, and commanded God, “I want a hit, a hit!”

This diktat had its own historic significance in 1947, for it was flung at the memory of the always impoverished Group Theatre
years, which with this commercial production were officially declared over and done with. Now each part would go to the most fitting and attractive actor rather than being cast out of the Group itself, which had sometimes been more necessary than desirable. Clurman was also acknowledging a new realism about theatre; this play would ask for no allowances from a clique audience willing to overlook some dull stretches for the sake of artistic or social points. Despite his apparent—at least to me—disappointment at not having been chosen to direct it, Clurman, in one of his uncontrollable seizures of enthusiasm, would suddenly bang the flat of his hand down on a desk and stand up and yell, “Goddamit, this play is
built
!”

Kazan, who had been Clurman's stage manager in the Group and still saw him as the father-master, was no less hot about the possibilities of success but was far more calculating, remorselessly grasping an objectifying view at whatever cost. What counted was what came over to the audience, no excuses and no mercy to be expected. Clurman's mind implicitly appealed to some high court of culture at whose feet he lay his offerings of artistry; if he failed in the real theatre, he could find solace in a transcendent judgment of his work's higher, if mundanely unappreciated, value. Kazan looked to the sky only for weather, not supportive judgments, and it was more training than directing that his actors got from him. He pointed an actor and then walked along beside him with an arm over his shoulder in a gentle embrace of steel. “Casting is ninety-five percent of it,” he would say, for the audience knows only what it sees and hears, not what author or director have tried to set before it. He drove the actors relentlessly in
All My Sons,
as I had driven myself in the writing. At one rehearsal he pressed Karl Maiden—as the outraged lawyer son of the unjustly imprisoned partner of Joe Keller—closer and closer to such an actual explosion of emotions that he burst onto the stage and stood facing the actress playing his sister, Lois Wheeler, unable to speak at all, swaying dizzily and nearly collapsing. Kazan was thereupon satisfied that he had hit Maiden's outer limits of indignation.

Likewise with Arthur Kennedy, whose sweet idealism in the first act must turn to murderous anger at the climax of the second, a scene Kazan knew would make or break the play. He had staged it so that Ed Begley, the guilty father, was sitting remorsefully with head in hands just as Kennedy brought his fist down on his back. After much rehearsal Begley's back was very painful and he had to strap a rubber pad on under his jacket to protect himself, such was the closeness to reality of the emotions in that production.

Approaching the height of his powers, Kazan was eating fire in those days, working with great certainty and discretion. He had asked for one important excision, of a long speech by the doctor-neighbor lamenting the closing down of his youthful idealism—advice I resisted until I began to hear it, as Kazan had, as an authorial exercise rather than an authentic outgrowth of the play's essential structure. He relied, although by no means as totally as was rumored, on his wife Molly's analytic capacities in this. In my experience, she was very good at tracing the lines of force of a play's story and character structures but sometimes tended to crop excrescences dangerously close to a play's nerve. Kazan was far more the poet but was sometimes uncertain whether to unleash a play's fancifulness or scramble back for safety to its main plot lines. In a sense, nevertheless, and not only in the theatre, Molly was his conscience, a figure he had both to rely on and to slyly evade on occasion.

Life in a Kazan production had that hushed air of conspiracy I've described before, a conspiracy not only against the existing theatre but society, capitalism—in fact, everybody who was not part of the production. People kept coming up to whisper in his ear, and they were whispering in each other's ears too, with sideways glances. It was all new to me and immensely challenging, even if I could hardly guess what it was all about. What I did feel was a love for this man in his insatiable rooting out of the least weakness. You knew you were on the first team and that the idea was to win, and no margin of safety was too great. The audience was an enemy that had to be overwhelmed and dominated like a woman, and only then loved. The path to victory was opened up by clarity about the play's mission, its reason for existing, as well as about the actor's motives and the shape of his personality and talent. But Kazan's was no mere technical virtuosity; from the Group and its Russian and European antecedents, he had learned that a theatrical production is, or should be, a slice through the thickness of the culture from which it emerges, and that it is speaking not only to its audience but to other plays, to painting and dance, to music and to all forms of human expression by which at any moment we read our time. And so he would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to read a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, and another he would simply kiss. And more, though he never mentioned political people or ideas, it was assumed that he identified himself with the idealism of the left and that his emotional and intellectual loyalties lay with the workers and the simple and the poor. Like Odets, he wore the fading colors of the thirties into
the forties and fifties, the resonances of the culture of antifascism that had once united artists everywhere in the world.

Even in 1947, however, one undersood that Kazan stood alone in this implicitly principled ambience. His old friend and co-director Clurman, who had pretty much the same outlook on life and the theatre, never offered either his personal comradeship beyond the theatre's walls or any kind of political example. Harold tacitly let you know that he was on the train for as long as he could bear it but that his interests might prompt him to get off a stop or two before yours. Oddly, while Kazan on the whole was warm but quiet onstage, Harold could rant and shriek and literally howl to the flies, but his enthusiasms would never make him forget a dinner date. At the same time, without mentioning it to anyone, he would visit a sick or unstable actor and hold his hand for a couple of hours. But work for him was work, and he was careful not to promise any more of himself than he could deliver—perhaps a little less. Clurman's selfishness, in short, he wore on his sleeve along with his loving heart.

I learned from Kazan's production the beauty that lay in the expressive integration of means. When the set was first brought in, I was puzzled by a low hump in the middle of the grassy backyard, around which the actors were forced to make their way lest they trip. The women were especially inconvenienced because their heels caught on it, and I asked Kazan why it was there. Suppressing a persecuted grin, he quietly confided, “It's a grave.”

“A grave! This is their backyard!”

“But the set signifies a graveyard. I'm not sure, maybe Max is right. Why don't you ask him to explain it, and tell me what he says.”

Mordecai Gorelik, known as Max, was another Group veteran, a choleric genius who designed sets that might seem to be a dentist's office or a gym or whatever but were organized, at least in his mind, around a metaphoric statement condensing the central image of the play at hand. I went to Max with the worry that the actors were going to fall over his bump and destroy my play. He was a beardless Abraham, a ramrod-straight fanatic with the self-certainty of a terrorist and the smile—when he demolished an opponent in argument it just managed to flicker over his mouth—of a blood-covered avenging angel.