GOLDEN BOY - Lincoln Center Theater Review

Winter 2012 Issue No. 59

Golden Boy

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2012, Issue Number 59 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is not only a companion to Golden Boy but a celebration of Clifford Odets and a testament to Lincoln Center Theater’s commitment to bringing Clifford Odets’s work back to Broadway—a commitment that began in 2006, when Bartlett Sher directed Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Awake and Sing!

This issue features John Lahr, senior drama critic for The New Yorker, writing about the pitfalls of glory and its repercussion in Odets’s life and in the life of Golden Boy protagonist Joe Bonaparte; © SuperStock/Corbis.

Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary Linda LeRoy Janklow John B. Beinecke Jane Lisman Katz Dorothy Berwin Kewsong Lee Jessica M. Bibliowicz Memrie M. Lewis André Bishop Robert E. Linton Debra Black Ninah Lynne Allison M. Blinken Phyllis Mailman Mrs. Leonard Block Ellen R. Marram James-Keith Brown John Morning H. Rodgin Cohen Elyse Newhouse Jonathan Z. Cohen Elihu Rose Ida Cole Stephanie Shuman Donald G. Drapkin Josh Silverman Curtland E. Fields Howard Sloan Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. David F. Solomon Bernard Gersten Tracey Travis Marlene Hess Robert G. Wilmers Judith Hiltz William D. Zabel

Golden Boy Lush Life

by John Lahr

Adler about the issue of immigration in her generation as well as an interview with her daughter, Ellen Adler, reprinted from our Awake and Sing! issue. We also reprise a personal essay about Clifford Odets by Elia Kazan, the legendary director, as well as new portions of an intimate interview that Arthur

4

It Was Better That Way: A Conversation with Clifford Odets

by Arthur Wagner

6

With Music I am Never Alone When I’m Alone

by Walt Odets

11

Becoming American

by Stella Adler

13

17

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

A Different Kind of Success: An Interview with Ellen Adler

21

Go On, Shout!

by Elia Kazan

23

For further reading on Odets read the Awake and Sing! issue at www.lctreview.org. © 2012 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

(For further reading on Odets, see the Awake and Sing! issue at www.lctreview.org). acter Joe Bonaparte, traversed the issues of being an immigrant’s son, navigated the temptations of fame, and struggled to be true to his art. These pages offer incisive portraits of Odets—the son, the man, the father, and the artist. His life, like his work, was deeply compelling and unforgettable.

The Alchemy of Dress: Golden Boy Designer Catherine Zuber Speaks with Bartlett Sher

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—www.lctreview.org.

Wagner, a doctoral student at the time, conducted with Odets toward the end of the playwright’s life.

Clifford Odets is a mesmerizing figure—passionate, explosive, and conflicted. He, like his char-

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

interview with the gifted costume designer Catherine Zuber, who previously collaborated with director tumes and characters in Golden Boy. Here, too, are observations from the ever-fascinating actor Stella

14

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

essay from Walt Odets about his father’s passion for music, a passion that surfaces in the play; and an Bartlett Sher on Awake and Sing! We also include a glimpse of her illuminating renderings of the cos-

Broken Fighter Arrives

by A. J. Liebling

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

a vivid piece on the boxing world from another famed New Yorker writer, A. J. Liebling; a stunning

Front cover photograph photograph from

by Gjon © of Time & Life Back cover The Mili Ruins Detroit

by Pictures.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, published by Steidl /www.steidlville.com.

—The Editors

CLIFFORD ODETS CHRONOLOGY 1906 July 18, Clifford Odets born to Pearl Geisinger Odets and Louis Odets, Philadelphia.

1923 Leaves high school early.

1929 Possible first marriage to Roberta [last name unknown] ends with her suicide after she kills their infant daughter, Joan.

1931 Charter member of Group Theatre.

1932 Begins I Got the Blues (to become Awake and Sing!).

1935 January: Waiting for Lefty presented at benefit for New Theatre Magazine (Odets becomes an overnight sensation).

February: Awake and Sing! opens (Belasco Theatre).

March: Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die open as double bill (Longacre Theatre).

December: Paradise Lost opens (Longacre Theatre).

1936 First trip to Los Angeles (travels back and forth to New York City until 1943);

The General Died at Dawn.* 1949 The Big Knife opens 1937 Marries Luise Rainer; (National Theatre).

Golden Boy opens (Belasco Theatre).

1950 The Country Girl opens 1938 Golden Boy London opening; (Lyceum Theatre).

Rocket to the Moon opens (Belasco 1951 Bette Grayson divorces Odets.

Theatre); Time magazine cover story.

1952 Questioned by HUAC. 1940 Divorces Rainer; Night Music 1954 Bette Grayson dies; The Flowering opens (Broadhurst Theatre).

Peach opens (Belasco Theatre).

1941 Withdraws Clash by Night from 1955 Moves to Los Angeles with children, Group; Group Theatre dissolves.

Nora and Walt.

Clash by Night opens (Belasco 1956 Bigger Than Life*§ Theatre; produced by Billy Rose).

1957 Sweet Smell of Success* 1943 Marries Bette Grayson.

1959 Story on Page One*† Remains in Los Angeles until 1948.

1961 Wild in the Country;* receives † * 1944 None but the Lonely Heart Gold Medal Award from American 1945 Rhapsody in Blue;*§ Academy of Arts and Letters. daughter Nora born.

1962-3 Walk on the Wild Side;*§ revises 1946 Humoresque;* From This Day Golden Boy for a musical; story editor Forward;*§ Deadline at Dawn;* It’s for The Richard Boone Show (TV). a Wonderful Life;*§ Sister Kenny;*§ 1963 August 14, dies of cancer, Hollywood.

Notorious.*§ 1947 Son Walt born. Named by HUAC *Screenplay as “active in Communist work.” †Writer and director 1948 Returns to New York City. §Uncredited

Lincoln Center Theater Review A publication of Lincoln Center Theater Winter 2012, Issue Number 59 Alexis Gargagliano, Editor John Guare, Anne Cattaneo, Executive Editors Tamar Cohen, Art Direction, Design David Leopold, Picture Editor Carol Anderson, Copy Editor

This edition of the Lincoln Center Theater Review is not only a companion to Golden Boy but a celebration of Clifford Odets and a testament to Lincoln Center Theater’s commitment to bringing Clifford Odets’s work back to Broadway—a commitment that began in 2006, when Bartlett Sher directed Lincoln Center Theater’s revival of Awake and Sing!

This issue features John Lahr, senior drama critic for The New Yorker, writing about the pitfalls of glory and its repercussion in Odets’s life and in the life of Golden Boy protagonist Joe Bonaparte; © SuperStock/Corbis.

Lincoln Center Theater André Bishop Bernard Gersten Artistic Director Executive Producer The Vivian Beaumont Theater, Inc. Board of Directors J. Tomilson Hill, Chairman Eric M. Mindich, President Brooke Garber Neidich and Leonard Tow, Vice Chairmen Augustus K. Oliver, Chairman, Executive Committee John W. Rowe, Treasurer Elizabeth Peters, Secretary Linda LeRoy Janklow John B. Beinecke Jane Lisman Katz Dorothy Berwin Kewsong Lee Jessica M. Bibliowicz Memrie M. Lewis André Bishop Robert E. Linton Debra Black Ninah Lynne Allison M. Blinken Phyllis Mailman Mrs. Leonard Block Ellen R. Marram James-Keith Brown John Morning H. Rodgin Cohen Elyse Newhouse Jonathan Z. Cohen Elihu Rose Ida Cole Stephanie Shuman Donald G. Drapkin Josh Silverman Curtland E. Fields Howard Sloan Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. David F. Solomon Bernard Gersten Tracey Travis Marlene Hess Robert G. Wilmers Judith Hiltz William D. Zabel

Golden Boy Lush Life

by John Lahr

Adler about the issue of immigration in her generation as well as an interview with her daughter, Ellen Adler, reprinted from our Awake and Sing! issue. We also reprise a personal essay about Clifford Odets by Elia Kazan, the legendary director, as well as new portions of an intimate interview that Arthur

4

It Was Better That Way: A Conversation with Clifford Odets

by Arthur Wagner

6

With Music I am Never Alone When I’m Alone

by Walt Odets

11

Becoming American

by Stella Adler

13

17

John S. Chalsty, Constance L. Clapp, Anna E. Crouse, Ellen Katz, Ray Larsen, Susan Newhouse, Victor H. Palmieri, Daryl Roth, Lowell M. Schulman, John C. Whitehead Honorary Trustees

A Different Kind of Success: An Interview with Ellen Adler

21

Go On, Shout!

by Elia Kazan

23

For further reading on Odets read the Awake and Sing! issue at www.lctreview.org. © 2012 Lincoln Center Theater, a not-for-profit organization. All rights reserved.

(For further reading on Odets, see the Awake and Sing! issue at www.lctreview.org). acter Joe Bonaparte, traversed the issues of being an immigrant’s son, navigated the temptations of fame, and struggled to be true to his art. These pages offer incisive portraits of Odets—the son, the man, the father, and the artist. His life, like his work, was deeply compelling and unforgettable.

The Alchemy of Dress: Golden Boy Designer Catherine Zuber Speaks with Bartlett Sher

TO SUBSCRIBE to the magazine, please go to the Lincoln Center Theater Review website—www.lctreview.org.

Wagner, a doctoral student at the time, conducted with Odets toward the end of the playwright’s life.

Clifford Odets is a mesmerizing figure—passionate, explosive, and conflicted. He, like his char-

Hon. John V. Lindsay Founding Chairman

Special thanks to the Drue Heinz Trust for supporting the Lincoln Center Theater Review.

interview with the gifted costume designer Catherine Zuber, who previously collaborated with director tumes and characters in Golden Boy. Here, too, are observations from the ever-fascinating actor Stella

14

The Rosenthal Family Foundation is the Lincoln Center Theater Review’s founding and sustaining donor.

essay from Walt Odets about his father’s passion for music, a passion that surfaces in the play; and an Bartlett Sher on Awake and Sing! We also include a glimpse of her illuminating renderings of the cos-

Broken Fighter Arrives

by A. J. Liebling

John B. Beinecke Linda LeRoy Janklow Chairmen Emeriti

a vivid piece on the boxing world from another famed New Yorker writer, A. J. Liebling; a stunning

Front cover photograph photograph from

by Gjon © of Time & Life Back cover The Mili Ruins Detroit

by Pictures.

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, published by Steidl /www.steidlville.com.

—The Editors

CLIFFORD ODETS CHRONOLOGY 1906 July 18, Clifford Odets born to Pearl Geisinger Odets and Louis Odets, Philadelphia.

1923 Leaves high school early.

1929 Possible first marriage to Roberta [last name unknown] ends with her suicide after she kills their infant daughter, Joan.

1931 Charter member of Group Theatre.

1932 Begins I Got the Blues (to become Awake and Sing!).

1935 January: Waiting for Lefty presented at benefit for New Theatre Magazine (Odets becomes an overnight sensation).

February: Awake and Sing! opens (Belasco Theatre).

March: Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die open as double bill (Longacre Theatre).

December: Paradise Lost opens (Longacre Theatre).

1936 First trip to Los Angeles (travels back and forth to New York City until 1943);

The General Died at Dawn.* 1949 The Big Knife opens 1937 Marries Luise Rainer; (National Theatre).

Golden Boy opens (Belasco Theatre).

1950 The Country Girl opens 1938 Golden Boy London opening; (Lyceum Theatre).

Rocket to the Moon opens (Belasco 1951 Bette Grayson divorces Odets.

Theatre); Time magazine cover story.

1952 Questioned by HUAC. 1940 Divorces Rainer; Night Music 1954 Bette Grayson dies; The Flowering opens (Broadhurst Theatre).

Peach opens (Belasco Theatre).

1941 Withdraws Clash by Night from 1955 Moves to Los Angeles with children, Group; Group Theatre dissolves.

Nora and Walt.

Clash by Night opens (Belasco 1956 Bigger Than Life*§ Theatre; produced by Billy Rose).

1957 Sweet Smell of Success* 1943 Marries Bette Grayson.

1959 Story on Page One*† Remains in Los Angeles until 1948.

1961 Wild in the Country;* receives † * 1944 None but the Lonely Heart Gold Medal Award from American 1945 Rhapsody in Blue;*§ Academy of Arts and Letters. daughter Nora born.

1962-3 Walk on the Wild Side;*§ revises 1946 Humoresque;* From This Day Golden Boy for a musical; story editor Forward;*§ Deadline at Dawn;* It’s for The Richard Boone Show (TV). a Wonderful Life;*§ Sister Kenny;*§ 1963 August 14, dies of cancer, Hollywood.

Notorious.*§ 1947 Son Walt born. Named by HUAC *Screenplay as “active in Communist work.” †Writer and director 1948 Returns to New York City. §Uncredited

Lush Life

which survives in folklore as Damon Runyon’s “Mindy’s,” was a watering hole where the high-flyers and low-riders of the Rialto rubbed shoulders and where Odets was sure to be the most observed of all observers. On the way into the restaurant, Odets was stopped by the well-known left-wing character actor Lionel Stander. “You are a firstclass man,” Stander said. “What are you doing with these nitwits?”

To his journal, after noting that he’d spent the best part of the evening hobnobbing with the New York Post’s gossip columnist Leonard Lyons, Odets complained, “Oh, bootless night! Oh, dull heart and empty whizzing head.” At a certain speed, all things disintegrate; if he wasn’t exactly coming apart, Odets was having trouble holding himself together, buffeted in the slipstream between high art and high life. In his journal, he counseled himself, “You have another responsibility, not to take everything that is offered to you—women, adulation, money, easy and good times. Go back to your narrow life before it’s too late.” In another entry, he asked his distracted self, “What do you want? Fireworks all the time? Yes, that is exactly what I want.” Odets wanted to be, as he wrote, a “poor poet and a powerful businessman, a sensational young man and a modest artist....

Photograph of Clifford Odets © Bettmann/CORBIS.

“There is no normal life out of velocity,” Clifford Odets wrote in The Time Is Ripe, his journal account of 1940, a year when he was at the apogee of his meteoric rise and what he called his “unbalanced riotous life.” “Your greedy senses will seduce you to death,” he wrote.

“You’re drowning!!!” Five years earlier, when he was twenty-nine, Odets had been unknown to all but the coterie of the Group Theatre, where he was an actor and erstwhile playwright. But, after the premiere of his play Awake and Sing! (1935), fame happened. Golden Boy (1937), which ran for two seasons on Broadway, trumped his first hit and sent him into orbit. He was “America’s No. 1 Revolutionary Boy,” according to a New Yorker profile of him, and the “White Hope,” according to Time, which put his face on its cover. Walter Winchell turned Odets’s name into a figure of speech (“Bravodets”); Cole Porter rhymed him in songs. He became part of America’s lingua franca.

Odets was swept up in the exhilarating momentum of fame only to find that it had taken over his life. He was as restless as “a bullfrog on a lily pad,” he said. On November 13, 1940, Odets got into his new Cadillac, left his nineteenth-floor apartment on University Place, and drove uptown to Lindy’s, on Broadway, to eat supper. Lindy’s,

by John Lahr

I want to conquer and be subdued at once...to live with tightened discipline, sharp, hard, and cold; [and] to go hotly and passionately to hell as fast and as fully as possible.”

“There is the side that yearns for a worldly voluptuous life and a side which tells you to sit at your desk,” Odets wrote. “Between both those whirling busy worlds you lie, apathetic, almost prostrated.”

Playwriting, he said, was “the only way I explain and interpret myself to myself.” By the time he sat down to write Golden Boy, in 1937, two years after the début of Awake and Sing!, he had acquired a famous wife (the two-time Academy Award–winning Luise Rainer, “the Thomas Mann of actresses,” who’d slipped him a note at the Brown Derby, saying, “Let’s show them that this is a world for poets!”); he’d spent a month working on his first Hollywood screenplay, for Lewis Milestone, for an eye-watering ten thousand dollars (“It was like putting steak before a starving man,” Milestone said); and the Group Theatre, which was on the verge of collapse, desperately needed him to write a hit. In other words, Odets’s external reality tapped deep into the internal battle that was devouring and exhausting him. His need both to be a “somebody” and to stay true to his creative instincts became the subject of Golden Boy—a play about a promising young man who gives up the violin for boxing and the sport’s big paydays—which Odets subtitled “a modern allegory,” in early drafts.

Joe Bonaparte, “the cockeyed wonder” who cripples himself in his pursuit of public glory, is a character whose heroic name marks him as both potentially great and deeply flawed (bon-a-parte: “part good” and “good apart”). Bonaparte feels like “a flop.” “I don’t like myself, past, present and future,” he declares, embodying the shame that Odets absorbed at his parents’ knees. Odets’s overwhelmed mother, Pearl, gave birth to him when she was only sixteen. Of her subsequent two children, one was crippled. Odets, as a child, felt powerless to help. “She wanted to be consoled,” Odets explained. “So did I. She was lonely, distressed, aggrieved, so was I.” Trapped, voiceless, and chronically exhausted, Pearl was a ghost married to a dynamo, the grandiose, cocksure blowhard and bully L. J. Odets—a “business hound” and “two-bit czar,” his son called him. L.J., a Russian émigré, who changed his name from Orodetsky, had drunk the Kool-Aid of the American dream and wanted to be, in his words, “a big man— number one.” Odets, who blamed his father for his three attempted suicides by the age of twenty-five, said, “I had to fight him every inch of the way not to be swamped and engulfed, to stay alive.”

As a young man, “wild to get my name in front of the public”— Odets printed business cards that read “Actor, Elocutionist, Drama Critic”—he set his sights rebelliously on a life of art, not business. L.J. tried to browbeat him into submission. When his avalanche of pep talks and put-downs didn’t work, he smashed his son’s typewriter, slapped him, and taunted him with the nickname Putty. Even fame didn’t stop L.J.’s belittling, persecuting voice, which felt to Odets like “driving nails into my head.” L.J., who envied his son and, later in life, tried his own hand at screenwriting under the name Stedo (and who, as an old man, contemplated writing an autobiography titled Clifford Odets: A Father Rears a Genius), insulted even as he de-

manded to be heard. When Odets was at work on Golden Boy, for instance, L.J. offered his services as his business manager: You start your letter with: “I’m in no mood or position for writing letters”—Well, I demand that you place yourself in a position, and get into the mood to read this letter three (3) times. I am still your father and I demand it. There is a God in Heaven that takes care of the blind and the dumb. With your eyes wide open you are blind, and with all your intelligence, you are dumb.

Joe Bonaparte shared with his creator a humiliated soul. “His father sits on the kid’s head like a bird’s nest,” a character in Golden Boy says. That overbearing father is dramatized as the crippling factor, the thing that holds Joe back from winning, from “making a killing” (a goal that Joe literally, as well as symbolically, achieves).

When he finally earns a chance at the title by knocking out another boxer—with a blow that turns out to be fatal, Joe wins the prize but loses his soul. “I murdered myself, too!” he says later. “I’ve been running in circles. Now, I’m smashed.” In the play, Mr. Bonaparte is the voice of the authentic self, who wants his son to have “a truthful success.” In life, for Odets, the reverse was true. Nonetheless, as ugly and as destructive as L.J. could be, Odets’s imagination was possessed by the father he could never please. (Between 1935 and 1939, Odets gave his father the enormous sum of twenty-eight thousand dollars, although L.J. “never gave me a happy day in thirty years,” he said.)

Golden Boy, which Odets saw as an allegory for the spiritual impasse of the American dream, was also a portrait of his own creative stalemate, in which sensitivity and victory went head to head. “Up, Odets!!” he wrote, rallying himself, in his journal. “Or is it down, down, sunk into the self?” In the five fecund years before he decamped for Hollywood, Odets wrote eight plays; in the twenty-three that remained to him after the collapse of the Group Theatre, he wrote four. Odets saw clearly how the creative and destructive forces clashed in his divided heart; Golden Boy is at once a map and a prophesy of that division. “You will never conquer the MORAL MAN within you,” he wrote in his journal. “You are trying to kill him but he will not permit it; he will murder you with regret and anguish first!” And so it came to pass. “I may not only be the foremost playwright manqué of our time but of all time,” he said on his deathbed. “I do not believe a dozen playwrights in history had my natural endowment.”

In his time, like Joe Bonaparte, Odets was a kind of “Monarch of the masses”; he was also, he half understood, a kind of totem of wasted talent. As Mr. Bonaparte says in his broken English upon hearing the news of his beloved son’s death, “What have-a you expect?”

John Lahr has been the senior drama critic of The New Yorker since 1992. Among his eighteen books are Notes on a Cowardly Lion and Prick Up Your Ears, which was made into the 1987 film directed by Stephen Frears. He is currently completing a biography of Tennessee Williams. Mr. Lahr is the first drama critic ever to win a Tony Award, for co-writing the 2002 Elaine Stritch at Liberty. He lives in London.

Lush Life

which survives in folklore as Damon Runyon’s “Mindy’s,” was a watering hole where the high-flyers and low-riders of the Rialto rubbed shoulders and where Odets was sure to be the most observed of all observers. On the way into the restaurant, Odets was stopped by the well-known left-wing character actor Lionel Stander. “You are a firstclass man,” Stander said. “What are you doing with these nitwits?”

To his journal, after noting that he’d spent the best part of the evening hobnobbing with the New York Post’s gossip columnist Leonard Lyons, Odets complained, “Oh, bootless night! Oh, dull heart and empty whizzing head.” At a certain speed, all things disintegrate; if he wasn’t exactly coming apart, Odets was having trouble holding himself together, buffeted in the slipstream between high art and high life. In his journal, he counseled himself, “You have another responsibility, not to take everything that is offered to you—women, adulation, money, easy and good times. Go back to your narrow life before it’s too late.” In another entry, he asked his distracted self, “What do you want? Fireworks all the time? Yes, that is exactly what I want.” Odets wanted to be, as he wrote, a “poor poet and a powerful businessman, a sensational young man and a modest artist....

Photograph of Clifford Odets © Bettmann/CORBIS.

“There is no normal life out of velocity,” Clifford Odets wrote in The Time Is Ripe, his journal account of 1940, a year when he was at the apogee of his meteoric rise and what he called his “unbalanced riotous life.” “Your greedy senses will seduce you to death,” he wrote.

“You’re drowning!!!” Five years earlier, when he was twenty-nine, Odets had been unknown to all but the coterie of the Group Theatre, where he was an actor and erstwhile playwright. But, after the premiere of his play Awake and Sing! (1935), fame happened. Golden Boy (1937), which ran for two seasons on Broadway, trumped his first hit and sent him into orbit. He was “America’s No. 1 Revolutionary Boy,” according to a New Yorker profile of him, and the “White Hope,” according to Time, which put his face on its cover. Walter Winchell turned Odets’s name into a figure of speech (“Bravodets”); Cole Porter rhymed him in songs. He became part of America’s lingua franca.

Odets was swept up in the exhilarating momentum of fame only to find that it had taken over his life. He was as restless as “a bullfrog on a lily pad,” he said. On November 13, 1940, Odets got into his new Cadillac, left his nineteenth-floor apartment on University Place, and drove uptown to Lindy’s, on Broadway, to eat supper. Lindy’s,

by John Lahr

I want to conquer and be subdued at once...to live with tightened discipline, sharp, hard, and cold; [and] to go hotly and passionately to hell as fast and as fully as possible.”

“There is the side that yearns for a worldly voluptuous life and a side which tells you to sit at your desk,” Odets wrote. “Between both those whirling busy worlds you lie, apathetic, almost prostrated.”

Playwriting, he said, was “the only way I explain and interpret myself to myself.” By the time he sat down to write Golden Boy, in 1937, two years after the début of Awake and Sing!, he had acquired a famous wife (the two-time Academy Award–winning Luise Rainer, “the Thomas Mann of actresses,” who’d slipped him a note at the Brown Derby, saying, “Let’s show them that this is a world for poets!”); he’d spent a month working on his first Hollywood screenplay, for Lewis Milestone, for an eye-watering ten thousand dollars (“It was like putting steak before a starving man,” Milestone said); and the Group Theatre, which was on the verge of collapse, desperately needed him to write a hit. In other words, Odets’s external reality tapped deep into the internal battle that was devouring and exhausting him. His need both to be a “somebody” and to stay true to his creative instincts became the subject of Golden Boy—a play about a promising young man who gives up the violin for boxing and the sport’s big paydays—which Odets subtitled “a modern allegory,” in early drafts.

Joe Bonaparte, “the cockeyed wonder” who cripples himself in his pursuit of public glory, is a character whose heroic name marks him as both potentially great and deeply flawed (bon-a-parte: “part good” and “good apart”). Bonaparte feels like “a flop.” “I don’t like myself, past, present and future,” he declares, embodying the shame that Odets absorbed at his parents’ knees. Odets’s overwhelmed mother, Pearl, gave birth to him when she was only sixteen. Of her subsequent two children, one was crippled. Odets, as a child, felt powerless to help. “She wanted to be consoled,” Odets explained. “So did I. She was lonely, distressed, aggrieved, so was I.” Trapped, voiceless, and chronically exhausted, Pearl was a ghost married to a dynamo, the grandiose, cocksure blowhard and bully L. J. Odets—a “business hound” and “two-bit czar,” his son called him. L.J., a Russian émigré, who changed his name from Orodetsky, had drunk the Kool-Aid of the American dream and wanted to be, in his words, “a big man— number one.” Odets, who blamed his father for his three attempted suicides by the age of twenty-five, said, “I had to fight him every inch of the way not to be swamped and engulfed, to stay alive.”

As a young man, “wild to get my name in front of the public”— Odets printed business cards that read “Actor, Elocutionist, Drama Critic”—he set his sights rebelliously on a life of art, not business. L.J. tried to browbeat him into submission. When his avalanche of pep talks and put-downs didn’t work, he smashed his son’s typewriter, slapped him, and taunted him with the nickname Putty. Even fame didn’t stop L.J.’s belittling, persecuting voice, which felt to Odets like “driving nails into my head.” L.J., who envied his son and, later in life, tried his own hand at screenwriting under the name Stedo (and who, as an old man, contemplated writing an autobiography titled Clifford Odets: A Father Rears a Genius), insulted even as he de-

manded to be heard. When Odets was at work on Golden Boy, for instance, L.J. offered his services as his business manager: You start your letter with: “I’m in no mood or position for writing letters”—Well, I demand that you place yourself in a position, and get into the mood to read this letter three (3) times. I am still your father and I demand it. There is a God in Heaven that takes care of the blind and the dumb. With your eyes wide open you are blind, and with all your intelligence, you are dumb.

Joe Bonaparte shared with his creator a humiliated soul. “His father sits on the kid’s head like a bird’s nest,” a character in Golden Boy says. That overbearing father is dramatized as the crippling factor, the thing that holds Joe back from winning, from “making a killing” (a goal that Joe literally, as well as symbolically, achieves).

When he finally earns a chance at the title by knocking out another boxer—with a blow that turns out to be fatal, Joe wins the prize but loses his soul. “I murdered myself, too!” he says later. “I’ve been running in circles. Now, I’m smashed.” In the play, Mr. Bonaparte is the voice of the authentic self, who wants his son to have “a truthful success.” In life, for Odets, the reverse was true. Nonetheless, as ugly and as destructive as L.J. could be, Odets’s imagination was possessed by the father he could never please. (Between 1935 and 1939, Odets gave his father the enormous sum of twenty-eight thousand dollars, although L.J. “never gave me a happy day in thirty years,” he said.)

Golden Boy, which Odets saw as an allegory for the spiritual impasse of the American dream, was also a portrait of his own creative stalemate, in which sensitivity and victory went head to head. “Up, Odets!!” he wrote, rallying himself, in his journal. “Or is it down, down, sunk into the self?” In the five fecund years before he decamped for Hollywood, Odets wrote eight plays; in the twenty-three that remained to him after the collapse of the Group Theatre, he wrote four. Odets saw clearly how the creative and destructive forces clashed in his divided heart; Golden Boy is at once a map and a prophesy of that division. “You will never conquer the MORAL MAN within you,” he wrote in his journal. “You are trying to kill him but he will not permit it; he will murder you with regret and anguish first!” And so it came to pass. “I may not only be the foremost playwright manqué of our time but of all time,” he said on his deathbed. “I do not believe a dozen playwrights in history had my natural endowment.”

In his time, like Joe Bonaparte, Odets was a kind of “Monarch of the masses”; he was also, he half understood, a kind of totem of wasted talent. As Mr. Bonaparte says in his broken English upon hearing the news of his beloved son’s death, “What have-a you expect?”

John Lahr has been the senior drama critic of The New Yorker since 1992. Among his eighteen books are Notes on a Cowardly Lion and Prick Up Your Ears, which was made into the 1987 film directed by Stephen Frears. He is currently completing a biography of Tennessee Williams. Mr. Lahr is the first drama critic ever to win a Tony Award, for co-writing the 2002 Elaine Stritch at Liberty. He lives in London.

It Was Better That Way: A Conversation with Clifford Odets

by Arthur Wagner

Frances Farmer, Luther Adler and Roman Bohnen in Golden Boy. Illustrations © Al Hirschfeld.

turned at about ten-thirty later that night.

He had read through half of my paper and was complimentary about what he had read. We talked till two in the morning On that last night that I saw him, I thought he looked in excellent health, certainly no different from the way he looked two years before. At that time, I had been impressed with his height (I had always thought of him as being short) and his trim, in-shape body. Before I left, he asked if he could keep the dissertation so that he might finish it and said he would mail it to me. I did not hear from him for about six weeks, and then a letter came, again most complimentary, and he mentioned that he was going into the hospital for what he called “the dreary routines.” I assumed that he meant a G.I. series and that he probably had ulcers. Two weeks later, I was watching TV and was shocked to hear of his death.

—Arthur Wagner

Golden Boy handbill courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In the fall of 1961, when I was working on my dissertation, I called Clifford Odets in Los Angeles and arranged to meet with him. Odets’s generosity in the matter was not to be believed. As far as he knew, I was just another graduate student working on another of those dull papers. Actually, at the time I was the head of the Theater Arts Department at Rollins College, but he had no way of knowing that.

Odets was a very late riser. He refused to see me before eleven-thirty in the morning. Both mornings, when I arrived, he had just awakened. Then began the ritual that somewhat confused me the first day, but to which I looked forward on the second.

First we both had enormous cups of coffee, then he put a loud piece of music on the phonograph. As he rifled through his mail, we listened to music for almost an hour in utter silence. From the loud music, we went to Bach and then to more romantic stuff. Every now and then he would make some learned remark about the piece of music playing, and then our silence continued. I must say that, once I got over my initial shock and discomfort, I welcomed this action as a sign of friendship on his part and found it most relaxing.

After a short warm-up of general talk about the theater, he asked me to set up my tape recorder and start the formal questions. He talked and talked, slowly, deliberately, thoughtfully and with great seriousness, never flip or superficial.

When I left, after the third day, I felt that we had established a meaningful relationship, and I was quite inspired by the whole experience. Two summers later, while in L.A., I phoned Odets at MGM Studios. He was warm and cordial, and seemed anxious to see the dissertation. I took it around to his house at six that evening and then re-

Arthur Wagner: How did you start writing plays?

Clifford Odets: As a kid I always wanted to be an actor and a writer. For a while I thought I would be a novelist, but then I became an actor and naturally my mind began to take the form of the play as a means of saying something. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say, because some of the things I wrote were quite dismal. I began to think in terms of three acts, and scenes within the acts. When I finally sat down to write seriously, I naturally found the play form. Whatever technique I have has been unconsciously absorbed—almost through my skin, with all the acting I’ve done.

AW: What did you write before you wrote your first play?

CO: I wrote a very bad novel, which I later tore up. I wrote a few short stories, which I tore up. I was lucky that the Group Theatre came along when it did, because without the Group Theatre I doubt I would have become a playwright. I might have become a novelist or a short-story writer. But the Group Theatre and the so-called “method” forced you to face yourself and function out of the kind of person you are, not function as you thought a person had to function or as another kind of person.

After attempting to write for many years—I should think at least eight or ten— I finally wrote a still unfinished short story that made me understand that writing was about personal affiliation to the material.

I was holed up in a cheap hotel in a fit of depression, and I wrote about some young kid violinist who didn’t have his violin. He looked back and remembered his mother and his hardworking sister. Although I was not that kid, and I didn’t have that kind of mother or that kind of hardworking sister, I did fill the skin and outline with my own personal feeling and made a triple identification with the marooned kid with the fiddle that the hotel owner keeps because the kid can’t pay his hotel bills. For the first time, I realized what creative writing was. There is no creative writing if it does not express the state of being of the writer himself, no matter what skins or masks he puts that state of being into.

AW: I can imagine a playwright who is a very skilled craftsman but who writes about things he is not connected to.

CO: Then he’s not a creative writer. He may be a very skilled writer and it all may be on a very high level of craft, but he’s not what I call an artist; he’s not a poet. Nowadays we use the words “creative arts” or “a creative man” or “a creative person” very loosely. Movie writers think of themselves as creative people who write TV shows. They say, “Oh, he’s a creative worker.” Well, in the sense I’m using the word he’s not creative at all. He’s just a craftsman. He’s a craftsman like a carpenter. He has so many hammers, so many nails, so many dimensions to fill, so much space to fill, and he can do it with enormous skill.

Anybody can teach the craft of playwriting. What cannot be taught, and what I was fortunate in being, was simply myself. I was able to bring my own problems and my own relationships to life. Every writer has a personal gallery of the four or five, or six or seven, persons he knows in different circumstances. And he can only write the members of his gallery, his psychological gallery.

I’m a father, but if I’m some lonely cranky bachelor I can’t write a father, really—unless there are impulses in me crying out to be a father, so I can project myself into a father figure on the stage as a character.

The creative writer always starts with a state of being. He doesn’t start with something outside of himself. He starts with something inside himself—with a sense of unease, depression, even elation, and only gradually finds some kind of form for that state of being. He doesn’t just pick a form and a subject and a theme and say this will be a hell of a show.

AW: Then the form comes out of this?

CO: The form is always dictated by the material. There’s nothing ready-made about it.

It uses certain dramatic laws because, after all, you have to relate this material to an

It Was Better That Way: A Conversation with Clifford Odets

by Arthur Wagner

Frances Farmer, Luther Adler and Roman Bohnen in Golden Boy. Illustrations © Al Hirschfeld.

turned at about ten-thirty later that night.

He had read through half of my paper and was complimentary about what he had read. We talked till two in the morning On that last night that I saw him, I thought he looked in excellent health, certainly no different from the way he looked two years before. At that time, I had been impressed with his height (I had always thought of him as being short) and his trim, in-shape body. Before I left, he asked if he could keep the dissertation so that he might finish it and said he would mail it to me. I did not hear from him for about six weeks, and then a letter came, again most complimentary, and he mentioned that he was going into the hospital for what he called “the dreary routines.” I assumed that he meant a G.I. series and that he probably had ulcers. Two weeks later, I was watching TV and was shocked to hear of his death.

—Arthur Wagner

Golden Boy handbill courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In the fall of 1961, when I was working on my dissertation, I called Clifford Odets in Los Angeles and arranged to meet with him. Odets’s generosity in the matter was not to be believed. As far as he knew, I was just another graduate student working on another of those dull papers. Actually, at the time I was the head of the Theater Arts Department at Rollins College, but he had no way of knowing that.

Odets was a very late riser. He refused to see me before eleven-thirty in the morning. Both mornings, when I arrived, he had just awakened. Then began the ritual that somewhat confused me the first day, but to which I looked forward on the second.

First we both had enormous cups of coffee, then he put a loud piece of music on the phonograph. As he rifled through his mail, we listened to music for almost an hour in utter silence. From the loud music, we went to Bach and then to more romantic stuff. Every now and then he would make some learned remark about the piece of music playing, and then our silence continued. I must say that, once I got over my initial shock and discomfort, I welcomed this action as a sign of friendship on his part and found it most relaxing.

After a short warm-up of general talk about the theater, he asked me to set up my tape recorder and start the formal questions. He talked and talked, slowly, deliberately, thoughtfully and with great seriousness, never flip or superficial.

When I left, after the third day, I felt that we had established a meaningful relationship, and I was quite inspired by the whole experience. Two summers later, while in L.A., I phoned Odets at MGM Studios. He was warm and cordial, and seemed anxious to see the dissertation. I took it around to his house at six that evening and then re-

Arthur Wagner: How did you start writing plays?

Clifford Odets: As a kid I always wanted to be an actor and a writer. For a while I thought I would be a novelist, but then I became an actor and naturally my mind began to take the form of the play as a means of saying something. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say, because some of the things I wrote were quite dismal. I began to think in terms of three acts, and scenes within the acts. When I finally sat down to write seriously, I naturally found the play form. Whatever technique I have has been unconsciously absorbed—almost through my skin, with all the acting I’ve done.

AW: What did you write before you wrote your first play?

CO: I wrote a very bad novel, which I later tore up. I wrote a few short stories, which I tore up. I was lucky that the Group Theatre came along when it did, because without the Group Theatre I doubt I would have become a playwright. I might have become a novelist or a short-story writer. But the Group Theatre and the so-called “method” forced you to face yourself and function out of the kind of person you are, not function as you thought a person had to function or as another kind of person.

After attempting to write for many years—I should think at least eight or ten— I finally wrote a still unfinished short story that made me understand that writing was about personal affiliation to the material.

I was holed up in a cheap hotel in a fit of depression, and I wrote about some young kid violinist who didn’t have his violin. He looked back and remembered his mother and his hardworking sister. Although I was not that kid, and I didn’t have that kind of mother or that kind of hardworking sister, I did fill the skin and outline with my own personal feeling and made a triple identification with the marooned kid with the fiddle that the hotel owner keeps because the kid can’t pay his hotel bills. For the first time, I realized what creative writing was. There is no creative writing if it does not express the state of being of the writer himself, no matter what skins or masks he puts that state of being into.

AW: I can imagine a playwright who is a very skilled craftsman but who writes about things he is not connected to.

CO: Then he’s not a creative writer. He may be a very skilled writer and it all may be on a very high level of craft, but he’s not what I call an artist; he’s not a poet. Nowadays we use the words “creative arts” or “a creative man” or “a creative person” very loosely. Movie writers think of themselves as creative people who write TV shows. They say, “Oh, he’s a creative worker.” Well, in the sense I’m using the word he’s not creative at all. He’s just a craftsman. He’s a craftsman like a carpenter. He has so many hammers, so many nails, so many dimensions to fill, so much space to fill, and he can do it with enormous skill.

Anybody can teach the craft of playwriting. What cannot be taught, and what I was fortunate in being, was simply myself. I was able to bring my own problems and my own relationships to life. Every writer has a personal gallery of the four or five, or six or seven, persons he knows in different circumstances. And he can only write the members of his gallery, his psychological gallery.

I’m a father, but if I’m some lonely cranky bachelor I can’t write a father, really—unless there are impulses in me crying out to be a father, so I can project myself into a father figure on the stage as a character.

The creative writer always starts with a state of being. He doesn’t start with something outside of himself. He starts with something inside himself—with a sense of unease, depression, even elation, and only gradually finds some kind of form for that state of being. He doesn’t just pick a form and a subject and a theme and say this will be a hell of a show.

AW: Then the form comes out of this?

CO: The form is always dictated by the material. There’s nothing ready-made about it.

It uses certain dramatic laws because, after all, you have to relate this material to an

Tommy Farr photograph courtesy of Walt Odets.

that we bring Waiting for Lefty uptown, and I said yes. I would write another play to go with it, which later became Till the Day I Die. It took me three or four nights. That’s how arrogant youth is. So, in a great wave of enthusiasm I wrote Till the Day I Die, and that was paired with Waiting for Lefty, and the whole town wanted to see them and Awake and Sing!

My three plays were running on Broadway at the same time, and all I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, and some records. And I got ‘em. Nothing more I wanted. I wanted to buy things for a girl, who disappeared. I wanted some of the things that were mentioned in the play.

A room of my own, a girl of my own.

Then I ran into a period, a nerve-racking period, where I thought I was—out of emotional exhaustion—going to pieces, having a breakdown. It used to frighten me. I understood, in this period of my life, how van Gogh felt. I understood the kind of insanity and frenzy of his painting. I almost couldn’t stop writing. The hand kept going.

It began to frighten me, because I said, You know, you’ll lose your mind. With all this set in the matrix of an American success, nothing is more noisy and clamorous than that. You’ve seen it happen to one playwright after another. There are enormous

Golden Boy Illustrations © Al Hirschfeld.

actors that the actors didn’t know whether they were acting and the audience didn’t know whether they were sitting and watching or had changed positions.

When the audience got up and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!,” I was thinking, Shhh, let the play continue. I found myself up on my feet, shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” In fact, I was part of the audience. I forgot I wrote the play; I forgot I was in the play, and many of the actors forgot. The proscenium arch disappeared. That’s the touchstone, the key phrase: the proscenium arch disappeared.

People have tried to do that in theater-inthe-round, but here, psychologically and emotionally, the proscenium arch dissolved away. When that happens, you have great theater. Not by technical innovation, but when that happens emotionally and humanly, then you will have great theater.

AW: And what happened after Waiting for Lefty?

CO: Awake and Sing! was put on. In the meantime, we were playing benefit performances of Waiting for Lefty and it was getting more famous by the minute. Then came the production of Awake and Sing! that opened up at the Belasco Theatre. The notices were legendary. Strasberg suggested

Pic magazine courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

audience, and a form is the quickest way to get your content to an audience. That’s all a form is. Form is viability. If you think in terms of entertainment, it’s entertainment viability.

AW: What drew you to the Group Theatre?

CO: What touched me as a playwright was the Group Theatre—its method of acting, its ensemble ideal and, indeed, its ensemble performance. I don’t think in our day you will see a company like that, and I don’t think, still, that in our day anyone could put together such a company but Lee Strasberg.

That was Lee Strasberg’s baby, and he was one hundred percent responsible for it.

AW: Did the directors choose the plays?

CO: Yes. Strasberg and Clurman wanted progressive material—they wanted yea-saying material rather than nay-saying material. The play would be picked and Clurman would call together the Group Theatre company and talk, with extraordinary brilliance, for two to five hours. Strasberg never said a word. Strasberg was then the man who, in action, directing, would bring out the things which Clurman had abstracted. The sense of the play, its characters, the meaning of the play, what it stood for. Clurman is most brilliant at this thing.

So that fall we were in Boston rehearsing Gold Eagle Guy and playing in Men in White and Success Story—that play showed me a great deal. It showed me the poetry that was inherent in the chaff of the street, the language. There was something quite elevated and poetic in very common scenes in the way people spoke. I got some of the actors down in the basement, which had a big rehearsal room in it, and started to rehearse Waiting for Lefty for the Sunday night benefit for the New Theatre Magazine.

I directed it and stage-managed it.

The opening night of Waiting for Lefty was one of the historic nights in the American theater. What happened was you were seeing theater at its most primitive. You were seeing it at its grandest and most meaningful. After each scene, the audience stopped the show, they got up, they began to cheer and weep. For the first time theater was a cultural force, as perhaps it has not been since. There have been many great opening nights in the American theater, but not where the stage and the theater were a cultural unit functioning back and forth, so that the identity was complete. There was such an at-oneness with audience and

tensions and strains within it. Because you don’t want to change, you want to hold on. You want to exclude people. You want time to digest. You’re just kind of swept off your feet. Wire services and interviews, and people telephoning you—some of it was gentle and sweet, like my mother. This was really all she ever lived for—to see her only son fulfilled. She lived another couple of months and died. My whole life changed in this period. Within three months I was not the same young man I used to be, but I was trying to hold on to him.

AW: Is this unavoidable? There must be an attraction.

CO: Well, who doesn’t want to be famous?

Who doesn’t want to be successful? But you’d like it on your own terms.

I began to work on and finish up Paradise Lost. It opened the end of the year 1935. But the play was by all means a practical failure, judging by the notices and the reception.

I was, by then, being offered all sorts of movie jobs. One man came and offered me five hundred dollars a week. I didn’t want to go to Hollywood at all—or let me say, I did and I didn’t. Because who wouldn’t want to go to Hollywood? When I finally did go to Hollywood, it was with a sense of disgrace almost, and yet I had to take myself there. I said to the Group Theatre, which was part lie and part truth, that I would go out to Hollywood and start working there and do a script and send back half my salary to keep Paradise Lost going.

So I signed with Paramount for twentyfive hundred dollars a week. I used to send back half to the Group Theatre. That was really not enough to keep the show going.

The show ran for another couple of weeks and then closed.

AW: How did you begin writing Golden Boy? CO: Harold Clurman came out here. I had married Luise Rainer. It looked like the Group Theatre was through. Strasberg had left, Cheryl Crawford had left, and Harold Clurman thought he could be the sole director of the Group. For a while it looked as if he could be, could take over. And, kind of voluntarily, everybody disbanded for six months, everybody went their own way.

Harold came out here. It was very difficult for him to take the Group Theatre breakup.

So I said, “I’ll tell you what, Harold, I have an idea. It’s just a small idea I have. You get the company together October first or

Tommy Farr photograph courtesy of Walt Odets.

that we bring Waiting for Lefty uptown, and I said yes. I would write another play to go with it, which later became Till the Day I Die. It took me three or four nights. That’s how arrogant youth is. So, in a great wave of enthusiasm I wrote Till the Day I Die, and that was paired with Waiting for Lefty, and the whole town wanted to see them and Awake and Sing!

My three plays were running on Broadway at the same time, and all I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, and some records. And I got ‘em. Nothing more I wanted. I wanted to buy things for a girl, who disappeared. I wanted some of the things that were mentioned in the play.

A room of my own, a girl of my own.

Then I ran into a period, a nerve-racking period, where I thought I was—out of emotional exhaustion—going to pieces, having a breakdown. It used to frighten me. I understood, in this period of my life, how van Gogh felt. I understood the kind of insanity and frenzy of his painting. I almost couldn’t stop writing. The hand kept going.

It began to frighten me, because I said, You know, you’ll lose your mind. With all this set in the matrix of an American success, nothing is more noisy and clamorous than that. You’ve seen it happen to one playwright after another. There are enormous

Golden Boy Illustrations © Al Hirschfeld.

actors that the actors didn’t know whether they were acting and the audience didn’t know whether they were sitting and watching or had changed positions.

When the audience got up and shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!,” I was thinking, Shhh, let the play continue. I found myself up on my feet, shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!” In fact, I was part of the audience. I forgot I wrote the play; I forgot I was in the play, and many of the actors forgot. The proscenium arch disappeared. That’s the touchstone, the key phrase: the proscenium arch disappeared.

People have tried to do that in theater-inthe-round, but here, psychologically and emotionally, the proscenium arch dissolved away. When that happens, you have great theater. Not by technical innovation, but when that happens emotionally and humanly, then you will have great theater.

AW: And what happened after Waiting for Lefty?

CO: Awake and Sing! was put on. In the meantime, we were playing benefit performances of Waiting for Lefty and it was getting more famous by the minute. Then came the production of Awake and Sing! that opened up at the Belasco Theatre. The notices were legendary. Strasberg suggested

Pic magazine courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

audience, and a form is the quickest way to get your content to an audience. That’s all a form is. Form is viability. If you think in terms of entertainment, it’s entertainment viability.

AW: What drew you to the Group Theatre?

CO: What touched me as a playwright was the Group Theatre—its method of acting, its ensemble ideal and, indeed, its ensemble performance. I don’t think in our day you will see a company like that, and I don’t think, still, that in our day anyone could put together such a company but Lee Strasberg.

That was Lee Strasberg’s baby, and he was one hundred percent responsible for it.

AW: Did the directors choose the plays?

CO: Yes. Strasberg and Clurman wanted progressive material—they wanted yea-saying material rather than nay-saying material. The play would be picked and Clurman would call together the Group Theatre company and talk, with extraordinary brilliance, for two to five hours. Strasberg never said a word. Strasberg was then the man who, in action, directing, would bring out the things which Clurman had abstracted. The sense of the play, its characters, the meaning of the play, what it stood for. Clurman is most brilliant at this thing.

So that fall we were in Boston rehearsing Gold Eagle Guy and playing in Men in White and Success Story—that play showed me a great deal. It showed me the poetry that was inherent in the chaff of the street, the language. There was something quite elevated and poetic in very common scenes in the way people spoke. I got some of the actors down in the basement, which had a big rehearsal room in it, and started to rehearse Waiting for Lefty for the Sunday night benefit for the New Theatre Magazine.

I directed it and stage-managed it.

The opening night of Waiting for Lefty was one of the historic nights in the American theater. What happened was you were seeing theater at its most primitive. You were seeing it at its grandest and most meaningful. After each scene, the audience stopped the show, they got up, they began to cheer and weep. For the first time theater was a cultural force, as perhaps it has not been since. There have been many great opening nights in the American theater, but not where the stage and the theater were a cultural unit functioning back and forth, so that the identity was complete. There was such an at-oneness with audience and

tensions and strains within it. Because you don’t want to change, you want to hold on. You want to exclude people. You want time to digest. You’re just kind of swept off your feet. Wire services and interviews, and people telephoning you—some of it was gentle and sweet, like my mother. This was really all she ever lived for—to see her only son fulfilled. She lived another couple of months and died. My whole life changed in this period. Within three months I was not the same young man I used to be, but I was trying to hold on to him.

AW: Is this unavoidable? There must be an attraction.

CO: Well, who doesn’t want to be famous?

Who doesn’t want to be successful? But you’d like it on your own terms.

I began to work on and finish up Paradise Lost. It opened the end of the year 1935. But the play was by all means a practical failure, judging by the notices and the reception.

I was, by then, being offered all sorts of movie jobs. One man came and offered me five hundred dollars a week. I didn’t want to go to Hollywood at all—or let me say, I did and I didn’t. Because who wouldn’t want to go to Hollywood? When I finally did go to Hollywood, it was with a sense of disgrace almost, and yet I had to take myself there. I said to the Group Theatre, which was part lie and part truth, that I would go out to Hollywood and start working there and do a script and send back half my salary to keep Paradise Lost going.

So I signed with Paramount for twentyfive hundred dollars a week. I used to send back half to the Group Theatre. That was really not enough to keep the show going.

The show ran for another couple of weeks and then closed.

AW: How did you begin writing Golden Boy? CO: Harold Clurman came out here. I had married Luise Rainer. It looked like the Group Theatre was through. Strasberg had left, Cheryl Crawford had left, and Harold Clurman thought he could be the sole director of the Group. For a while it looked as if he could be, could take over. And, kind of voluntarily, everybody disbanded for six months, everybody went their own way.

Harold came out here. It was very difficult for him to take the Group Theatre breakup.

So I said, “I’ll tell you what, Harold, I have an idea. It’s just a small idea I have. You get the company together October first or

October fifteenth, and I’ll have a new play.

So he said, “What is it about?” So I told him in about two sentences what the play was about. I just said that there was an Italian boy whose father wanted him to be a violinist and he has true gifts for that, but he wants to be a prizefighter. Well, my wife said then, my bride of maybe six or eight months, she said, “What is that about? It’s nothing. It sounds crazy.” Harold said, “Let him alone, Luise. He knows what he’s doing. That’s the way he always starts. With him that will be quite a play.” She couldn’t understand it and was rather bewildered.

But he understood that something could come out of that. He knew how I worked. I just had one page of notes. I went back to New York, to the apartment. Clurman made a kind of watch—a death watch. Set two or three actors to watch me, so I don’t run off.

And they would give him reports, and the idea was they were supposed to keep me on the track. Which was a little foolish. All that summer, I wrote on that play. Went away with Luise. Went to someone’s house for a week or two at the beach. And the play was ready, I think, before October first. And I really wrote that play to be a hit, to keep the Group Theatre together. And it was a hit. It was my first really big hit. It pleased me, which was foolish on my part. It pleased me because now I was being accepted as a Broadway playwright. Before that, I was kind of a nutty artist who had some kind of wild gift. Now, not only was I a man with a ten-million-dollar arm but I could really direct the ball now just where I wanted it to go. I must say, the circumstances under which I had written the play are what make me not like it. Just the way I feel about The Country Girl. I don’t really care for it.

It doesn’t mean anything to me. It seemed to me that Golden Boy was the same thing.

Just a theater piece. I felt that way about that play for years afterward. I never really liked it. Because it seemed to me to really be immoral to write a play for money. But I saw it once out here. Charlie Chaplin had never seen it. So the two wives and Charlie and I jumped in a car and went out to Pasadena here, and saw it at the Pasadena Playhouse. And I saw the play quite objectively, and I said, “Gee, this is really quite a good play.” There’s something written into it that I really had nothing to do with. Something about American folkways. It had a quality

10

of American folk legend. It was a much better play than I thought it was. So after that I made my peace with that play.

AW: Then you did a production of it in 1952?

CO: Yes. We revived it for ANTA, the American National Theater and Academy. John Garfield always wanted to play the part. Lee Cobb had played the father. By then, there were clichés, there was a set of stereotypes for playing that play. It was played so often that Garfield and Cobb fell right into the stereotypes. And it was very difficult to direct them out of those stereotypes. Every once in a while Cobb would slouch onto the stage, very successful, at ease. Nobody can be so at home on a stage as Cobb, you know. So relaxed, so slouched. And I said,

My three plays were running on Broadway at the same time, and all I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, and some records.

“What are you playing? Are you playing a successful actor or this rather humble but perceptive old Italian father?” And everyone was doing it. It was almost too much to do in four weeks—to try and break the stereotypes. Some of the stereotypes were taken over into the movies. The whole way of writing gangsters. Siggie and Anna made a whole way of writing about people at home, walking around in their pants and undershirts. I see it on TV every once in a while….Plenty of my ideas I had for a long time. Sometimes two, three, four years.

Find it germinated. On the other hand, sometimes I get an idea three days before, sit down, and write with no notes at all. As a matter of fact, I find that those things come out best for which I have very few notes. When I sit down at the typewriter, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

AW: Not even form?

CO: Well, I have a good sense of form that keeps guiding me all the time, anyway.

Most of the time I don’t know what I think until I say it. I don’t know who I am until I

write a play, I don’t know what I think.

AW: Did you consider Golden Boy to be somewhat of a personal saga?

CO: No. I could see how it related to my own life. The play certainly had personal implications, but it was also very objective. Deliberately kept objective.

AW: What influence did the Stanislavsky method have on you as a playwright?

CO: Very marked and decisive influence.

When I write, I’m right on the stage. I write as an actor and a director. I’m acting the play as I write it. I’m not a literary man; I’m a theater man. So that what comes out is something that is very natural and very easy for actors to speak.

The Group Theatre, as you know, acted in a certain way. And in simply knowing how they acted, how they handled themselves onstage, the fluidity and interpenetration of the parts, I just began to naturally and easily fall into writing that way. As I wrote, I could see them acting the parts. Sometimes I could see which actor it would be. Somehow, unconsciously, I had the ability to write the scenes in which the characters carried right through, from beginning to end.

Frequently, if the director doesn’t understand what I’m doing he doesn’t see how the scenes are going to play. Once a movie director out here—a very intelligent man named George Cukor—was going to test an actress. She was going to do the park-bench scene from my play Golden Boy. He said, “This scene won’t even hang together.” Next morning she said, “Yes, it will.” And he said, “I’ve been in the theater a long time. This scene won’t play. It won’t hold together. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not coherent.”

So she said, “Well, just let me play it, since we’ve been rehearsing it.” And he got the shock of his life, because the thing hung together, it made complete sense, but when he read it on the page he couldn’t see it.

Arthur Wagner was the founding chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California at San Diego and the head of the graduate professional actor-training program. He also founded actor-training programs at Tulane, Ohio, and Temple universities.

This interview first appeared in a longer version entitled “Listening to Odets’s Music,” in the Fall 1993 issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review (Issue No. 9) and is reprinted by permission of the author.

With Music I’m Never Alone When I’m Alone In Golden Boy, my father, Clifford Odets, gave Joe Bonaparte two possibilities. Joe could remain a violinist or he could follow the lure of money and public admiration to become a prizefighter. He could have an authentic, fulfilled life or an empty one. It is important that the authentic path offered is a life in music. For my father, music was much more than “cheer-up,” as Joe’s father describes it in Act I. Music was the relationship through which my father was able to exist in his deepest, most private feelings, and in which he felt understood with a correctness and a clarity that I do not believe he experienced in any human relationship. In music, he felt whole. In his personal notes and diaries, he often mentions “Ludwig” or “B.,” as if speaking of a contemporary, longtime companion. My father thought Beethoven an icon of artistic integrity, a man who sacrificed for his work everything a “normal” man might want in life: family, friendship, and happiness. B., he felt, understood him completely, because he understood B. through his music. In experiencing himself so deeply understood, and thus whole, my father could tolerate being alone, which, like Beethoven, he so often was. Joe tells Lorna in Act I of Golden Boy, “With music I am never alone when I’m alone.”

My father often told people that he wished he had been a composer, an assertion I heard a hundred times. As a very small child, I was told that he was a playwright, but I thought that his life was about music because of how he actually spent his observable time.

My father attributed the origins of his lifelong relationship to music to the childhood experience of listening to his father, L.J., playing the Pianola. This is a paper-roll, mechanical piano “for four hands.” (The

by Walt Odets

Pianola provided two of the hands, L.J. the others.) At the insistence of his mother, Pearl, my father also took piano lessons; however, finding the practice and memorization unendurable, he stopped.

Another, perhaps more important influence was the early model Victor Talking Machine that my grandfather brought home, the first in their Bronx neighborhood. In my father’s first full-length play, Awake and Sing!, that Talking Machine, with Caruso on the turntable, was to become pivotal. In Bessie’s violent, chilling destruction of her father Jacob’s phonograph records, we witness petty life nearly crush the humane aspirations of a family trying to crawl out from under the middle-class squalor of the Depression. Bessie’s own suffocation drives her to violence, and her destruction of Jacob’s music pushes him to suicide. Caruso had been Jacob’s only intimate companion, the only one in this troubled family who understood and shared his feelings and his humanistic aspirations. In Golden Boy, music—expressed by a violin rather than a talking machine—has the same meaning and plays the same role. The violin is Joe’s opportunity to be a whole human being rather than a successful money machine. In abandoning music, Joe loses first himself and then his life.

By the time I was a child—I was born nine years after Golden Boy opened on Broadway—the Victor Talking Machine had become in our house a sophisticated (for the 1950s) “hi-fi,” supported by a huge collection of phonograph records. Two corners of the living room held massive Klipschorn speakers; a pair of large cabinets housed two turntables and assorted vacuum-tube electronics. Most Fridays at 11 A.M., a man named Marvin arrived to tune things up. As a child, I thought everyone did that. According to Marvin, my father had an 11

October fifteenth, and I’ll have a new play.

So he said, “What is it about?” So I told him in about two sentences what the play was about. I just said that there was an Italian boy whose father wanted him to be a violinist and he has true gifts for that, but he wants to be a prizefighter. Well, my wife said then, my bride of maybe six or eight months, she said, “What is that about? It’s nothing. It sounds crazy.” Harold said, “Let him alone, Luise. He knows what he’s doing. That’s the way he always starts. With him that will be quite a play.” She couldn’t understand it and was rather bewildered.

But he understood that something could come out of that. He knew how I worked. I just had one page of notes. I went back to New York, to the apartment. Clurman made a kind of watch—a death watch. Set two or three actors to watch me, so I don’t run off.

And they would give him reports, and the idea was they were supposed to keep me on the track. Which was a little foolish. All that summer, I wrote on that play. Went away with Luise. Went to someone’s house for a week or two at the beach. And the play was ready, I think, before October first. And I really wrote that play to be a hit, to keep the Group Theatre together. And it was a hit. It was my first really big hit. It pleased me, which was foolish on my part. It pleased me because now I was being accepted as a Broadway playwright. Before that, I was kind of a nutty artist who had some kind of wild gift. Now, not only was I a man with a ten-million-dollar arm but I could really direct the ball now just where I wanted it to go. I must say, the circumstances under which I had written the play are what make me not like it. Just the way I feel about The Country Girl. I don’t really care for it.

It doesn’t mean anything to me. It seemed to me that Golden Boy was the same thing.

Just a theater piece. I felt that way about that play for years afterward. I never really liked it. Because it seemed to me to really be immoral to write a play for money. But I saw it once out here. Charlie Chaplin had never seen it. So the two wives and Charlie and I jumped in a car and went out to Pasadena here, and saw it at the Pasadena Playhouse. And I saw the play quite objectively, and I said, “Gee, this is really quite a good play.” There’s something written into it that I really had nothing to do with. Something about American folkways. It had a quality

10

of American folk legend. It was a much better play than I thought it was. So after that I made my peace with that play.

AW: Then you did a production of it in 1952?

CO: Yes. We revived it for ANTA, the American National Theater and Academy. John Garfield always wanted to play the part. Lee Cobb had played the father. By then, there were clichés, there was a set of stereotypes for playing that play. It was played so often that Garfield and Cobb fell right into the stereotypes. And it was very difficult to direct them out of those stereotypes. Every once in a while Cobb would slouch onto the stage, very successful, at ease. Nobody can be so at home on a stage as Cobb, you know. So relaxed, so slouched. And I said,

My three plays were running on Broadway at the same time, and all I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, and some records.

“What are you playing? Are you playing a successful actor or this rather humble but perceptive old Italian father?” And everyone was doing it. It was almost too much to do in four weeks—to try and break the stereotypes. Some of the stereotypes were taken over into the movies. The whole way of writing gangsters. Siggie and Anna made a whole way of writing about people at home, walking around in their pants and undershirts. I see it on TV every once in a while….Plenty of my ideas I had for a long time. Sometimes two, three, four years.

Find it germinated. On the other hand, sometimes I get an idea three days before, sit down, and write with no notes at all. As a matter of fact, I find that those things come out best for which I have very few notes. When I sit down at the typewriter, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

AW: Not even form?

CO: Well, I have a good sense of form that keeps guiding me all the time, anyway.

Most of the time I don’t know what I think until I say it. I don’t know who I am until I

write a play, I don’t know what I think.

AW: Did you consider Golden Boy to be somewhat of a personal saga?

CO: No. I could see how it related to my own life. The play certainly had personal implications, but it was also very objective. Deliberately kept objective.

AW: What influence did the Stanislavsky method have on you as a playwright?

CO: Very marked and decisive influence.

When I write, I’m right on the stage. I write as an actor and a director. I’m acting the play as I write it. I’m not a literary man; I’m a theater man. So that what comes out is something that is very natural and very easy for actors to speak.

The Group Theatre, as you know, acted in a certain way. And in simply knowing how they acted, how they handled themselves onstage, the fluidity and interpenetration of the parts, I just began to naturally and easily fall into writing that way. As I wrote, I could see them acting the parts. Sometimes I could see which actor it would be. Somehow, unconsciously, I had the ability to write the scenes in which the characters carried right through, from beginning to end.

Frequently, if the director doesn’t understand what I’m doing he doesn’t see how the scenes are going to play. Once a movie director out here—a very intelligent man named George Cukor—was going to test an actress. She was going to do the park-bench scene from my play Golden Boy. He said, “This scene won’t even hang together.” Next morning she said, “Yes, it will.” And he said, “I’ve been in the theater a long time. This scene won’t play. It won’t hold together. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not coherent.”

So she said, “Well, just let me play it, since we’ve been rehearsing it.” And he got the shock of his life, because the thing hung together, it made complete sense, but when he read it on the page he couldn’t see it.

Arthur Wagner was the founding chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California at San Diego and the head of the graduate professional actor-training program. He also founded actor-training programs at Tulane, Ohio, and Temple universities.

This interview first appeared in a longer version entitled “Listening to Odets’s Music,” in the Fall 1993 issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review (Issue No. 9) and is reprinted by permission of the author.

With Music I’m Never Alone When I’m Alone In Golden Boy, my father, Clifford Odets, gave Joe Bonaparte two possibilities. Joe could remain a violinist or he could follow the lure of money and public admiration to become a prizefighter. He could have an authentic, fulfilled life or an empty one. It is important that the authentic path offered is a life in music. For my father, music was much more than “cheer-up,” as Joe’s father describes it in Act I. Music was the relationship through which my father was able to exist in his deepest, most private feelings, and in which he felt understood with a correctness and a clarity that I do not believe he experienced in any human relationship. In music, he felt whole. In his personal notes and diaries, he often mentions “Ludwig” or “B.,” as if speaking of a contemporary, longtime companion. My father thought Beethoven an icon of artistic integrity, a man who sacrificed for his work everything a “normal” man might want in life: family, friendship, and happiness. B., he felt, understood him completely, because he understood B. through his music. In experiencing himself so deeply understood, and thus whole, my father could tolerate being alone, which, like Beethoven, he so often was. Joe tells Lorna in Act I of Golden Boy, “With music I am never alone when I’m alone.”

My father often told people that he wished he had been a composer, an assertion I heard a hundred times. As a very small child, I was told that he was a playwright, but I thought that his life was about music because of how he actually spent his observable time.

My father attributed the origins of his lifelong relationship to music to the childhood experience of listening to his father, L.J., playing the Pianola. This is a paper-roll, mechanical piano “for four hands.” (The

by Walt Odets

Pianola provided two of the hands, L.J. the others.) At the insistence of his mother, Pearl, my father also took piano lessons; however, finding the practice and memorization unendurable, he stopped.

Another, perhaps more important influence was the early model Victor Talking Machine that my grandfather brought home, the first in their Bronx neighborhood. In my father’s first full-length play, Awake and Sing!, that Talking Machine, with Caruso on the turntable, was to become pivotal. In Bessie’s violent, chilling destruction of her father Jacob’s phonograph records, we witness petty life nearly crush the humane aspirations of a family trying to crawl out from under the middle-class squalor of the Depression. Bessie’s own suffocation drives her to violence, and her destruction of Jacob’s music pushes him to suicide. Caruso had been Jacob’s only intimate companion, the only one in this troubled family who understood and shared his feelings and his humanistic aspirations. In Golden Boy, music—expressed by a violin rather than a talking machine—has the same meaning and plays the same role. The violin is Joe’s opportunity to be a whole human being rather than a successful money machine. In abandoning music, Joe loses first himself and then his life.

By the time I was a child—I was born nine years after Golden Boy opened on Broadway—the Victor Talking Machine had become in our house a sophisticated (for the 1950s) “hi-fi,” supported by a huge collection of phonograph records. Two corners of the living room held massive Klipschorn speakers; a pair of large cabinets housed two turntables and assorted vacuum-tube electronics. Most Fridays at 11 A.M., a man named Marvin arrived to tune things up. As a child, I thought everyone did that. According to Marvin, my father had an 11

dire good-night tales about artists in trouble, capped with a warning about bugs, were frightening, but otherwise of little interest. I was usually asleep by the fourth measure. My father, the other artist in the house who was in trouble, sat downstairs listening to the same piece on the big speakers, hoping that the inculcation was taking.

The hope was not simply that I be a composer; the hope was that I would find a better life than he had found, a life of personal—and perhaps only secondarily artistic—wholeness. For my father, “being a composer” had come to mean being whole.

Without Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and, particularly, his beloved companion B., it is conceivable that my father might not have survived even the fifty-seven difficult years he did manage. In 1962, a year before his death, he wrote a cautionary reminder to himself: “A man like myself, of a lesser breed than Beethoven, had and has similar problems. I was not strong enough to stand the loneliness, the opprobrium....In the creative sense I was never neurotic until I tried to live the ‘normal’ life, of other men.” My father never managed to have this normal life, and he never achieved a workable balance between his artistic and personal lives. He certainly never led the life of a composer in the narrow sense. To my ear, however, his relationship to music finds voice in both the structure and the language of his writing. This is particularly true of the “Odets rhythm” that so characterizes both his scene construction and his dialogue.

In Act I of Golden Boy, Joe tells Lorna, “Playing music...that’s like saying, ‘I am man. I belong here. How do you do, World—good evening!’” Such writing is musical composition of my father’s kind.

Walt Odets is a photographer and a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Berkeley, California. He has written extensively on HIV and AIDS issues, and on HIV prevention for gay men in the United States. He has played the clarinet since the age of nine.

Excerpted from Stella Alder on America’s Master Playwrights by Stella Adler, edited and with commentary

by Barry Paris. © 2012 by The Estate of Stella Adler. Recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.

extremely astute ear and was able to hear tiny changes in phonograph needles and vacuum tubes that most others could not detect.

So my father’s relationship to music took the form not of composing or performing but of listening to recordings. At the time of his death in 1963, he had about eight thousand LP and 78 recordings stored in our rented California house and in an otherwise unoccupied fourbedroom New York apartment on Eighty-first Street in Manhattan.

In the house, one bathroom was stacked floor to ceiling with records, including the shower stall; records were stacked against virtually every accessible baseboard. My father rarely listened to live music performance. The single, peculiar exception that I recall was our occasional Friday night at Jascha Heifetz’s house. Heifetz played the fiddle, and we children square-danced. On one such occasion, resting between dances, Heifetz pointed his bow at my father, sitting alone in a darkened corner of the patio. “He understands as much about music as anyone I’ve known,” he said.

Given my father’s own relationship to music, he had hoped, or perhaps simply expected, that I would be a musical prodigy. I was not. Disappointed at not being a composer himself, he was apparently also disappointed that by the age of nine his son had not written a single piano sonata. One remedy was to treat me to a bedtime musical performance several times a week via an extension speaker in my bedroom. My father usually introduced the musical piece with a small lecture. It would be something like this: “In 1778, Mozart journeyed to Paris to look for work and visited Count So-and-So and his daughter So-and-So, who was an adequate, if untalented, pianist.

For her, Mozart—who was completely out of money and barely had a scrap of stale bread to eat—wrote this A minor sonata, K. 310, for five florins. He hoped to use the money to pay his way back to Salzburg to see if he could possibly find work there. Sleep well, chickadee—and don’t let the bed bugs bite.” For this nine-year-old, these

Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said the first generation of immigrants who come to America want to be American, but they can’t be because they don’t have the language.

The second generation wants to be American even more. They’re ashamed of the first generation’s accents and culture; they go to schools and learn to speak English better, and they turn against their parents. The third generation is told that Washington and Lincoln are their relatives. The fourth generation finds out they’re NOT related to Washington and Lincoln, so they go back to Europe to find their real relatives.

Moral of the story: it takes a helluva long time to become an American.

Young people in the 1930s were children of immigrants, for the most part. They wanted to do and be something—especially to be American. Success and fame are the goals. The mechanization of life is taking out its pleasure. The fruit peddler is being destroyed by technology. Technology kills pride. If you put all your energies into making money, whatever you gain in dollars and success, you lose in your soul and your spiritual awareness.

The feeling of not belonging made these kids angry. Their communities were pockets unto themselves. In Italian neighborhoods like Joe’s, there was a great deal of brutality. “Weren’t you ever a kid?” Lorna asks him. “Not a happy one,” he says. Why not?

Because he was born into an émigré Italian family—the “wops,” the “dagos”—Joe Bonaparte belongs to a section in America that was used and abused like the Puerto Ricans or any other minority in this country, brutalized by prejudice, by the lack of union wages or trades or respect or acceptance. Joe wasn’t and isn’t a happy kid.

You must come in with an understanding of what it means to have been brought up in America without feeling for one minute that you really belonged here. As Mead said, it takes an awfully long time to become integrated into this country. You wanted to be American, but you couldn’t be because you were still a wop, a sheeny, a mick, or a spic. America has always mistreated its minorities. They’re finally fighting back now, but back then they had to be very careful.

This kid Joe is a symbol of every boy and girl in every foreign pocket in America

in the thirties. They had no sense of childhood. Their schools were lousy and overcrowded and full of prejudice and gang fights. While their parents worked, the kids had to sell newspapers or do some other menial jobs—maybe be up all night—to help bring in a few pennies.

Joe’s father was good. He bought him a violin. But when and where was Joe going to practice on it? He had to go to school, fight off the bullies, help his dad, make some money, look after his aunts and uncles. He is bitter about it. It wasn’t easy being named Bonaparte. It wasn’t easy to be named Cohen and Lipschitz in this country. It didn’t get any easier until after six million Jews were killed, and even then—even in Hollywood—it wasn’t easy.

I’ll tell you a little story to illustrate that: I did a film in Los Angeles. I was starring in it. But my film couldn’t be screened if I was billed under the name of Adler. You may not believe this, but it’s true. Paramount couldn’t release it. They said, “It’s not good in the South for a marquee to have the name Adler on it. People might think it’s Jewish.” Eddie Robinson changed his name, and Muni had to do it, and Sylvia Sidney—all the “ethnic” stars had to change their names, otherwise there was no way you could be on a marquee. So they told me to change it, and I said, “It’s not mine to change, it was given to me—I can’t change it.” The lawyers met, but the studio refused to budge, and I finally had to say, “Spell it any way you like, but I’m saying it’s Adler!” And so they released it with my name as Ardler!

I’m not making this up. They thought Ardler sounded more gentile or less Jewish or some goddamn thing. When I told Luther about it, he said, “Ardler? Why didn’t they just change it to ‘Beverly Wilshire’?”

So that was the mentality and the reality in America, and that’s what Joe Bonaparte is going through—that kind of mindless prejudice. I experienced it, and I can tell you, it wasn’t a very good thing in America then to be either a Jew or an Italian. It didn’t make you American. And you got angry because of it. Joe Bonaparte is very angry. He wants revenge. He’s the angry young man in a transitional society who says, “I want the big time—nobody is going to keep me down.” There’s no stopping him.

by Stella Adler

There was no stopping Odets, either.

Golden Boy was a big departure from the social plays he wrote before. This one focused on personal issues. He wrote it after he got back to New York from a scriptwriting job in Hollywood, when a lot of his friends on the left were criticizing him for “selling out.” I think he was torn between the Hollywood movie scene and the New York theater scene in the same way Joe is torn between boxing for big money and becoming a great violinist.

Clifford didn’t want to be in two worlds, but he got caught up in them. He was driven in two directions—art and money. That division was in him and all of his friends, and it was something audiences understood. Odets created this morality play about the artist in America at a time when each group was trying to make sense out of the social chaos, and materialism was not so automatically accepted as a choice.

Mine is the generation he is talking about.

We were all subjected to that same choice of directions, and some of us survived and some of us didn’t....It’s a serious problem for every artist who does it or tries to do it, and it’s how a lot of them go down. Certain types of artists can’t handle it. In some ways, it killed Odets.

It never touched Luther or me, because we had a strong heritage. We had a line given to us. We wanted it. We could always do whatever we could—this stage, that stage, the movies. But with someone like John Garfield, it was the destruction of both his personal life and his art. That division—who am I inside? what am I?—is the most destructive thing that can happen to anyone, but especially to the artist.

You may not know who you are, but you know who you are not. You know that if you’re writing a script in Hollywood and the producer comes in and says “Change that line” and you do it—you know you are not a creative artist.

Stella Adler (1901–1992) was an American actress and acting teacher. A member of the Group Theatre, she starred in two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets’s Golden Boy.

13

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Becoming American

dire good-night tales about artists in trouble, capped with a warning about bugs, were frightening, but otherwise of little interest. I was usually asleep by the fourth measure. My father, the other artist in the house who was in trouble, sat downstairs listening to the same piece on the big speakers, hoping that the inculcation was taking.

The hope was not simply that I be a composer; the hope was that I would find a better life than he had found, a life of personal—and perhaps only secondarily artistic—wholeness. For my father, “being a composer” had come to mean being whole.

Without Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and, particularly, his beloved companion B., it is conceivable that my father might not have survived even the fifty-seven difficult years he did manage. In 1962, a year before his death, he wrote a cautionary reminder to himself: “A man like myself, of a lesser breed than Beethoven, had and has similar problems. I was not strong enough to stand the loneliness, the opprobrium....In the creative sense I was never neurotic until I tried to live the ‘normal’ life, of other men.” My father never managed to have this normal life, and he never achieved a workable balance between his artistic and personal lives. He certainly never led the life of a composer in the narrow sense. To my ear, however, his relationship to music finds voice in both the structure and the language of his writing. This is particularly true of the “Odets rhythm” that so characterizes both his scene construction and his dialogue.

In Act I of Golden Boy, Joe tells Lorna, “Playing music...that’s like saying, ‘I am man. I belong here. How do you do, World—good evening!’” Such writing is musical composition of my father’s kind.

Walt Odets is a photographer and a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Berkeley, California. He has written extensively on HIV and AIDS issues, and on HIV prevention for gay men in the United States. He has played the clarinet since the age of nine.

Excerpted from Stella Alder on America’s Master Playwrights by Stella Adler, edited and with commentary

by Barry Paris. © 2012 by The Estate of Stella Adler. Recently published by Alfred A. Knopf.

extremely astute ear and was able to hear tiny changes in phonograph needles and vacuum tubes that most others could not detect.

So my father’s relationship to music took the form not of composing or performing but of listening to recordings. At the time of his death in 1963, he had about eight thousand LP and 78 recordings stored in our rented California house and in an otherwise unoccupied fourbedroom New York apartment on Eighty-first Street in Manhattan.

In the house, one bathroom was stacked floor to ceiling with records, including the shower stall; records were stacked against virtually every accessible baseboard. My father rarely listened to live music performance. The single, peculiar exception that I recall was our occasional Friday night at Jascha Heifetz’s house. Heifetz played the fiddle, and we children square-danced. On one such occasion, resting between dances, Heifetz pointed his bow at my father, sitting alone in a darkened corner of the patio. “He understands as much about music as anyone I’ve known,” he said.

Given my father’s own relationship to music, he had hoped, or perhaps simply expected, that I would be a musical prodigy. I was not. Disappointed at not being a composer himself, he was apparently also disappointed that by the age of nine his son had not written a single piano sonata. One remedy was to treat me to a bedtime musical performance several times a week via an extension speaker in my bedroom. My father usually introduced the musical piece with a small lecture. It would be something like this: “In 1778, Mozart journeyed to Paris to look for work and visited Count So-and-So and his daughter So-and-So, who was an adequate, if untalented, pianist.

For her, Mozart—who was completely out of money and barely had a scrap of stale bread to eat—wrote this A minor sonata, K. 310, for five florins. He hoped to use the money to pay his way back to Salzburg to see if he could possibly find work there. Sleep well, chickadee—and don’t let the bed bugs bite.” For this nine-year-old, these

Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said the first generation of immigrants who come to America want to be American, but they can’t be because they don’t have the language.

The second generation wants to be American even more. They’re ashamed of the first generation’s accents and culture; they go to schools and learn to speak English better, and they turn against their parents. The third generation is told that Washington and Lincoln are their relatives. The fourth generation finds out they’re NOT related to Washington and Lincoln, so they go back to Europe to find their real relatives.

Moral of the story: it takes a helluva long time to become an American.

Young people in the 1930s were children of immigrants, for the most part. They wanted to do and be something—especially to be American. Success and fame are the goals. The mechanization of life is taking out its pleasure. The fruit peddler is being destroyed by technology. Technology kills pride. If you put all your energies into making money, whatever you gain in dollars and success, you lose in your soul and your spiritual awareness.

The feeling of not belonging made these kids angry. Their communities were pockets unto themselves. In Italian neighborhoods like Joe’s, there was a great deal of brutality. “Weren’t you ever a kid?” Lorna asks him. “Not a happy one,” he says. Why not?

Because he was born into an émigré Italian family—the “wops,” the “dagos”—Joe Bonaparte belongs to a section in America that was used and abused like the Puerto Ricans or any other minority in this country, brutalized by prejudice, by the lack of union wages or trades or respect or acceptance. Joe wasn’t and isn’t a happy kid.

You must come in with an understanding of what it means to have been brought up in America without feeling for one minute that you really belonged here. As Mead said, it takes an awfully long time to become integrated into this country. You wanted to be American, but you couldn’t be because you were still a wop, a sheeny, a mick, or a spic. America has always mistreated its minorities. They’re finally fighting back now, but back then they had to be very careful.

This kid Joe is a symbol of every boy and girl in every foreign pocket in America

in the thirties. They had no sense of childhood. Their schools were lousy and overcrowded and full of prejudice and gang fights. While their parents worked, the kids had to sell newspapers or do some other menial jobs—maybe be up all night—to help bring in a few pennies.

Joe’s father was good. He bought him a violin. But when and where was Joe going to practice on it? He had to go to school, fight off the bullies, help his dad, make some money, look after his aunts and uncles. He is bitter about it. It wasn’t easy being named Bonaparte. It wasn’t easy to be named Cohen and Lipschitz in this country. It didn’t get any easier until after six million Jews were killed, and even then—even in Hollywood—it wasn’t easy.

I’ll tell you a little story to illustrate that: I did a film in Los Angeles. I was starring in it. But my film couldn’t be screened if I was billed under the name of Adler. You may not believe this, but it’s true. Paramount couldn’t release it. They said, “It’s not good in the South for a marquee to have the name Adler on it. People might think it’s Jewish.” Eddie Robinson changed his name, and Muni had to do it, and Sylvia Sidney—all the “ethnic” stars had to change their names, otherwise there was no way you could be on a marquee. So they told me to change it, and I said, “It’s not mine to change, it was given to me—I can’t change it.” The lawyers met, but the studio refused to budge, and I finally had to say, “Spell it any way you like, but I’m saying it’s Adler!” And so they released it with my name as Ardler!

I’m not making this up. They thought Ardler sounded more gentile or less Jewish or some goddamn thing. When I told Luther about it, he said, “Ardler? Why didn’t they just change it to ‘Beverly Wilshire’?”

So that was the mentality and the reality in America, and that’s what Joe Bonaparte is going through—that kind of mindless prejudice. I experienced it, and I can tell you, it wasn’t a very good thing in America then to be either a Jew or an Italian. It didn’t make you American. And you got angry because of it. Joe Bonaparte is very angry. He wants revenge. He’s the angry young man in a transitional society who says, “I want the big time—nobody is going to keep me down.” There’s no stopping him.

by Stella Adler

There was no stopping Odets, either.

Golden Boy was a big departure from the social plays he wrote before. This one focused on personal issues. He wrote it after he got back to New York from a scriptwriting job in Hollywood, when a lot of his friends on the left were criticizing him for “selling out.” I think he was torn between the Hollywood movie scene and the New York theater scene in the same way Joe is torn between boxing for big money and becoming a great violinist.

Clifford didn’t want to be in two worlds, but he got caught up in them. He was driven in two directions—art and money. That division was in him and all of his friends, and it was something audiences understood. Odets created this morality play about the artist in America at a time when each group was trying to make sense out of the social chaos, and materialism was not so automatically accepted as a choice.

Mine is the generation he is talking about.

We were all subjected to that same choice of directions, and some of us survived and some of us didn’t....It’s a serious problem for every artist who does it or tries to do it, and it’s how a lot of them go down. Certain types of artists can’t handle it. In some ways, it killed Odets.

It never touched Luther or me, because we had a strong heritage. We had a line given to us. We wanted it. We could always do whatever we could—this stage, that stage, the movies. But with someone like John Garfield, it was the destruction of both his personal life and his art. That division—who am I inside? what am I?—is the most destructive thing that can happen to anyone, but especially to the artist.

You may not know who you are, but you know who you are not. You know that if you’re writing a script in Hollywood and the producer comes in and says “Change that line” and you do it—you know you are not a creative artist.

Stella Adler (1901–1992) was an American actress and acting teacher. A member of the Group Theatre, she starred in two Clifford Odets plays, Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, and directed the touring company of Odets’s Golden Boy.

13

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Becoming American

When Louis knocked Savold out, I came away singularly revived—as if I, rather than Louis, had demonstrated resistance to the erosion of time. As long as Joe could get by, I felt, I had a link with an era when we were both a lot younger. Only the great champions give their fellow citizens time to feel that way about them, because only the great ones win the title young and hold on to it. There have been three like that among the heavyweights in this century—Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey, and Louis….

Louis was the champion, in the public mind, from 1935, when he slaughtered Primo Carnera and Max Baer, until 1951….

At about the same time, I learned that Louis, who was thirty-seven, had been 14

contracts. The younger Weill has a job-lot commission business in Dayton, Ohio, and isn’t properly a boxing man at all. When the elder Weill became matchmaker, he “gave” his son the fighter....

As the fight date drew near..., I decided to...ask the elder Weill what was doing....

The matchmaker is of the build referred to in ready-made clothing stores as a portly, which means not quite a stout. There is an implication of at least one kind of recklessness about a fat man: he lets himself go when he eats. A portly man, on the other hand, is a man who would like to be fat but restrains himself—a calculator. Weill has... an over-all grayish coloration that is complemented by the suits he generally wears and the cigar ashes he frequently spills on them. On his home block—86th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive—he blends perfectly with the tired 1910 grandeur of the apartment houses; he looks like one more garment manufacturer worried by a swollen inventory. This does not stop him from knowing more about the fight business than any of the flashier types

Excerpts from “Broken Fighter Arrives” from “The Big Fellows” from The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling. © 1956 by the Estate of A. J. Liebling. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author’s estate. ©1956 by A.J. Liebling.

by A. J. Liebling

“made” with a new heavyweight, Rocky Marciano, who was twenty-seven and a puncher. I didn’t think much about it then, but as October twenty-sixth, the date set for the fight, approached, I began to feel uneasy. Marciano, to be sure, had never had a professional fight until shortly after Louis first announced his retirement, in 1948. (Joe had subsequently, of course, recanted.) In addition, Marciano had beaten only two opponents of any note, both young heavyweights like himself, who were rated as no better than promising. He was not big for a heavyweight, and was supposed to be rather crude. What bothered me, though, about the impending affair was that Marciano was, as he still is, steered by a man I know, named Al Weill, who is one of the most realistic fellows in a milieu where illusions are few....Weill, I was sure, would never risk the depreciation of an asset unless he felt he had a good bet.

Weill is at present the matchmaker of the I.B.C., which controls boxing here in New York and in a dozen other large cities, and his son, Marty Weill, is Marciano’s manager “of record,” which means he signs the

Photographs © James A. Fox. From the book, Boxing by James A Fox. (Stewart Tabori and Chang, 2001.)

Broken Fighter Arrives

who wear long beige jackets and stay downtown after dark.

Weill is a frugal man, and he likes frugal fighters. Every kind of serious trouble a fighter can get into, he says, has its origin in the disbursement of currency—rich food, liquor, women, horse-race betting, and fast automobiles. Once a fighter starts gambling, Weill doesn’t want him. “A gambler thinks he can get money without working for it,” he says. Weill had a big string of fighters before the war, and used to quarter them all in a lodging house near Central Park West, where the housemaster would issue to each boy a weekly meal ticket with a face value of five dollars and fifty cents, redeemable in trade at a coffeepot on Columbus Avenue. The tickets cost Weill five dollars each, cash. A fighter could get a second ticket before the week was out, but only if he showed that the first one had been punched out to the last nickel. None of those fighters ever suffered a defeat that could be attributed to high living. Mere frugality, however, may prove a boomerang, for the fighter sometimes gets to like it. There was once an old colored heavy-

weight named Bob Armstrong, who, when asked his utmost ambition, said, “To wake up every morning and find a dollar under my pillow.” Naturally, he never got to be champion. Weill wouldn’t want a fighter like that. What he really loves is an avaricious fighter.

When I asked Weill about Marciano he looked happy. “He is a nice boy,” he said.

“The dollar is his God. That is to say, he is a poor Italian boy from a large, poor family, and he appreciates the buck more than almost anybody else. Them type guys is hard to get outa there. You want to look out for them young broken fighters.” By “broken fighter,” Weill, who is a purist, meant a fighter who is broke. “He only got two halfway decent purses—with LaStarza and Layne—and it was like a tiger tasting blood,” Weill went on. “So you know how confident he is when he will take a fight like this for fifteen per cent of the gate. Louis gets forty-five. Why, Marciano will bring more money into the Garden than Louis.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Mas-

sachusetts will be empty that night.” Marciano hails from Brockton, Massachusetts.

Having considered the morale factor, which with him always comes first, Weill passed to the tactical level. He said Marciano would never be a clever boxer; he wasn’t made for it, anyway, being short for a heavyweight, and wide, with short, thick arms. “But he knows what he has to do,” Weill said. “Get in close enough to hit and then keep on hitting.”... ...“Three years ago a fellow I know used to promote around Boston wrote me there was a hell of an amateur he would like me to take. So I sent up the carfare for them to come down. They come, and we took Rocky to the C.Y.O. gym and put him in with a young heavyweight from Staten Island, a big blond guy belonged to a friend of mine.

We had to stop him or he’d killed the Staten Island guy. I seen right then Rocky had the beginning of it.”... ★ When I entered Madison Square Garden on the night of the fight I couldn’t help hoping Marciano was still too far away to 15

When Louis knocked Savold out, I came away singularly revived—as if I, rather than Louis, had demonstrated resistance to the erosion of time. As long as Joe could get by, I felt, I had a link with an era when we were both a lot younger. Only the great champions give their fellow citizens time to feel that way about them, because only the great ones win the title young and hold on to it. There have been three like that among the heavyweights in this century—Jim Jeffries, Jack Dempsey, and Louis….

Louis was the champion, in the public mind, from 1935, when he slaughtered Primo Carnera and Max Baer, until 1951….

At about the same time, I learned that Louis, who was thirty-seven, had been 14

contracts. The younger Weill has a job-lot commission business in Dayton, Ohio, and isn’t properly a boxing man at all. When the elder Weill became matchmaker, he “gave” his son the fighter....

As the fight date drew near..., I decided to...ask the elder Weill what was doing....

The matchmaker is of the build referred to in ready-made clothing stores as a portly, which means not quite a stout. There is an implication of at least one kind of recklessness about a fat man: he lets himself go when he eats. A portly man, on the other hand, is a man who would like to be fat but restrains himself—a calculator. Weill has... an over-all grayish coloration that is complemented by the suits he generally wears and the cigar ashes he frequently spills on them. On his home block—86th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive—he blends perfectly with the tired 1910 grandeur of the apartment houses; he looks like one more garment manufacturer worried by a swollen inventory. This does not stop him from knowing more about the fight business than any of the flashier types

Excerpts from “Broken Fighter Arrives” from “The Big Fellows” from The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling. © 1956 by the Estate of A. J. Liebling. Reprinted by permission of North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted by the permission of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author’s estate. ©1956 by A.J. Liebling.

by A. J. Liebling

“made” with a new heavyweight, Rocky Marciano, who was twenty-seven and a puncher. I didn’t think much about it then, but as October twenty-sixth, the date set for the fight, approached, I began to feel uneasy. Marciano, to be sure, had never had a professional fight until shortly after Louis first announced his retirement, in 1948. (Joe had subsequently, of course, recanted.) In addition, Marciano had beaten only two opponents of any note, both young heavyweights like himself, who were rated as no better than promising. He was not big for a heavyweight, and was supposed to be rather crude. What bothered me, though, about the impending affair was that Marciano was, as he still is, steered by a man I know, named Al Weill, who is one of the most realistic fellows in a milieu where illusions are few....Weill, I was sure, would never risk the depreciation of an asset unless he felt he had a good bet.

Weill is at present the matchmaker of the I.B.C., which controls boxing here in New York and in a dozen other large cities, and his son, Marty Weill, is Marciano’s manager “of record,” which means he signs the

Photographs © James A. Fox. From the book, Boxing by James A Fox. (Stewart Tabori and Chang, 2001.)

Broken Fighter Arrives

who wear long beige jackets and stay downtown after dark.

Weill is a frugal man, and he likes frugal fighters. Every kind of serious trouble a fighter can get into, he says, has its origin in the disbursement of currency—rich food, liquor, women, horse-race betting, and fast automobiles. Once a fighter starts gambling, Weill doesn’t want him. “A gambler thinks he can get money without working for it,” he says. Weill had a big string of fighters before the war, and used to quarter them all in a lodging house near Central Park West, where the housemaster would issue to each boy a weekly meal ticket with a face value of five dollars and fifty cents, redeemable in trade at a coffeepot on Columbus Avenue. The tickets cost Weill five dollars each, cash. A fighter could get a second ticket before the week was out, but only if he showed that the first one had been punched out to the last nickel. None of those fighters ever suffered a defeat that could be attributed to high living. Mere frugality, however, may prove a boomerang, for the fighter sometimes gets to like it. There was once an old colored heavy-

weight named Bob Armstrong, who, when asked his utmost ambition, said, “To wake up every morning and find a dollar under my pillow.” Naturally, he never got to be champion. Weill wouldn’t want a fighter like that. What he really loves is an avaricious fighter.

When I asked Weill about Marciano he looked happy. “He is a nice boy,” he said.

“The dollar is his God. That is to say, he is a poor Italian boy from a large, poor family, and he appreciates the buck more than almost anybody else. Them type guys is hard to get outa there. You want to look out for them young broken fighters.” By “broken fighter,” Weill, who is a purist, meant a fighter who is broke. “He only got two halfway decent purses—with LaStarza and Layne—and it was like a tiger tasting blood,” Weill went on. “So you know how confident he is when he will take a fight like this for fifteen per cent of the gate. Louis gets forty-five. Why, Marciano will bring more money into the Garden than Louis.

Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Mas-

sachusetts will be empty that night.” Marciano hails from Brockton, Massachusetts.

Having considered the morale factor, which with him always comes first, Weill passed to the tactical level. He said Marciano would never be a clever boxer; he wasn’t made for it, anyway, being short for a heavyweight, and wide, with short, thick arms. “But he knows what he has to do,” Weill said. “Get in close enough to hit and then keep on hitting.”... ...“Three years ago a fellow I know used to promote around Boston wrote me there was a hell of an amateur he would like me to take. So I sent up the carfare for them to come down. They come, and we took Rocky to the C.Y.O. gym and put him in with a young heavyweight from Staten Island, a big blond guy belonged to a friend of mine.

We had to stop him or he’d killed the Staten Island guy. I seen right then Rocky had the beginning of it.”... ★ When I entered Madison Square Garden on the night of the fight I couldn’t help hoping Marciano was still too far away to 15

16

Then Marciano threw one of those rights, and it landed, it seemed to me, just under Louis’s left ear. Louis had dropped his left shoulder after jabbing—an old fault, which brought about most of the bad moments of his career. This was the kind of punch that addles a man’s brains, and if it had happened thirty seconds earlier and Marciano had pressed his advantage, he might have knocked Louis out in the first round.

I think that punch was the one that made Joe feel old. Between the rounds, I could see Seamon pressing an ice bag against the back of Louis’s neck, and when I turned my binoculars on Charlie Goldman’s face, he was grinning. Louis was apparently clearheaded when he came out for the second, but he didn’t do much. I thought he won the next three rounds, jabbing Marciano’s face and jolting him with rights in close.

But the rights didn’t sicken Marciano, as they had sickened Louis’s opponents from 1935 to 1940; he reacted as if he were being hit by just an ordinary fighter. Marciano was missing almost all his own swings, and Goldman, between the rounds, was looking very serious as he talked to his pupil.

Also, he was working on Rocky’s brows with cotton-tipped toothpicks that had been steeped in some astringent solution. The jabs had cut. But Rocky came out for each new round very gay, as Egan would say, and went across to Louis as if to ask for a light.

When the fifth round ended, marking the halfway point of the fight, I felt that it would be a long way home but that Louis would make it. He had hardly used his left hook, which was now his best punch. Critics had been saying for years that his right had lost its authority, but the hook had existed in all its pristine glory as recently as the Savold bout....The way I figured it, Louis was being so careful about the crazy Marciano right that he was afraid to pull his own left back to hook. He would just jab and drop his forearm onto Rocky’s right biceps, so he couldn’t counter. Sooner or later, Joe would throw the hook, I thought, and that would end the fight. It looked like a fight between two men with one good hand apiece.

In the sixth, things started to go sour. It wasn’t that Marciano grew better or stronger; it was that Louis seemed to get slower and weaker. The spring was gone from his

legs—and it had been only a slight spring in the beginning—and in the clinches Marciano was shoving him around. A man can be as strong for tugging and hauling at thirtyseven, or for that matter at forty-seven, as he was in his twenties, but he can’t keep on starting and stopping for as many minutes.

And even grazing blows begin to hurt after a while. Near the end of the round, Marciano hit Louis another solid one.

The seventh was bad for Louis. Marciano didn’t catch him with one big punch, but he was battering at his body and arms, and shoving him around, and Joe didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Then, toward the end of the round, Joe threw the hook. It was beautiful. It hit Marciano flush on the right side of the jaw, but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit. I knew then that Joe was beaten, but I thought that it might be only a decision. Three rounds don’t seem forever, especially when you’re just watching.

Then, in the eighth round...,Marciano, the right-hand specialist, knocked Louis down with a left hook that Goldman had not previously publicized. When Louis got up, Marciano hit him with two more left hooks, which set him up for the right and the pitiful finish.

Right after Marciano knocked Louis down the first time, Sugar Ray Robinson started working his way toward the ring, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, and by the time Rocky threw the final right, Robinson’s hand was on the lowest rope of the ring, as if he meant to jump in. The punch knocked Joe through the ropes and he lay on the ring apron, only one leg inside.

The tall blonde was bawling, and pretty soon she began to sob. The fellow who had brought her was horrified. “Rocky didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “He didn’t foul him. What you booing?”

The blonde said, “You’re so cold. I hate you, too.”

Two weeks later, I stopped by the offices of the International Boxing Club to ask Al Weill how he felt about things now.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “You want to look out for them broken fighters. The way things look now, the kid could make a fortune of money.”

A. J. Liebling joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935 and wrote for the magazine until his death in 1963.

Golden Boy designer Catherine Zuber speaks with Bartlett Sher This summer our editors spoke with Catherine Zuber and Bartlett Sher, the costume designer and director of Golden Boy. Lincoln Center Theater audiences have seen their work on Awake and Sing!, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

demolish Louis. His day was bound to come anyway, if Goldman was right, and I wanted to see Louis get by once more….

There were the usual introductions from the ring of white and colored men in knee-length jackets with flaring shoulders—rough, tough Paddy DeMarco, Philadelphia’s undefeated Gil Turner, Sugar Ray Robinson, former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles, and, finally, Jersey Joe Walcott, the reigning champion, as old as Louis by his own statement, several years older by popular report. (“I’m not old,” he told a sports writer in 1947. “I’m just ugly.”) The names of the judges and referee were announced....And then the two factions were in the ring—Louis’s in the northwest corner, Marciano’s in the southeast....Marciano was bouncing on his thick legs and punching the air to warm up. A tall, ash-blond woman near me was saying, “I hate him! I hate him! I think he’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.” This struck me as being hard on Rocky; he didn’t look particularly repulsive. Husky as he was, he looked slight compared to Louis, who was three inches taller and, according to the announced weights, twenty-five pounds heavier. When the fighters were introduced, it was evident that if Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Massachusetts were not completely empty, their populations were at least substantially depleted for the evening. The Marciano supporters were cheering him as if he were a high-school football team. But Louis got an even bigger welcome....

I had a pair of pocket binoculars, 6 x 15s, and I kept them trained on Louis for the first half minute. His face was impassive, as usual, but his actions showed that he wasn’t taking the strong boy lightly. Instead of moving relentlessly forward, as in his great days, he seemed to be waiting to see what he was up against. In the first clinches, it was he who shifted Marciano, and not the other way about; Louis was stronger than the strong boy—at the beginning, anyway.

He could outbox him at a distance, and if he could continue to smother him in close, I thought he would get by. Up to the last five seconds of the round, I noted, glancing at the ringside clock, neither of them had done anything remarkable, and that was all right with me. I had had a feeling that Marciano might rush out of his corner throwing punches and try to take Louis by storm.

The Alchemy of the Dress:

Editor: What is the process when you two begin working on a show together?

Catherine Zuber: What I always love doing with Bart is going through each character.

He gives me his take on who that person is, what’s important to him, the nuances—the good, the bad, the ugly of every character; their hopes, their dreams, what they wished they were, what they are. We discuss a lot more than clothing specifics; we investigate the essence of that person and how Bart sees him onstage. We usually have many meetings.

Bart Sher: We talk about the play and the character. What I will not do is say what they should wear. We don’t talk like that at all. We talk about the people and we talk about the ideas of the play, and we talk about the approach of the play.

CZ: And the sociology, the historical reference.

BS: And what we know about Odets. The last thing that happens, and what I don’t participate in, is actually the clothing. There’s sort of a building up of intuition, and then Cathy goes off and translates that into an expression through the clothes.

CZ: Then Bart will look at the sketch and comment on things that may not be delivering his vision of the character in quite the right way. They’re usually not extreme changes; they’re modifications.

BS: The other thing that’s really important about developing costume design is developing characters over the course of time.

You have to build in the progression of the piece from the opening to the end—the

Joe Bonaparte

clothes can be a beautiful reflection of that. A good example would be Awake and Sing!—at the very end of the show we put in two coats that had a lot of color, when up until then the palette had been very narrow.

As Moe and Hennie left, they changed into this color that suddenly lifted a brightness into the palette. This is going to be really important in Golden Boy—how the Golden Boy and Lorna develop over time.

ED: After you have these conversations, what do you do?

CZ: As these discussions are progressing, I am organizing research on the period, the characters, the particulars—on Golden Boy, the world of boxing, and the immigrant life of New York City as an exciting starting

point. It is great to see what Bart responds to. I always feel Bart is the captain of the ship and we have to follow.

BS: It’s not like I try to decide everything; I just try to integrate everything that everybody’s doing. I hold the center of all the conversations.

ED: So the play is set in 1937.

BS: 1937 is interesting because, as much as they were recovering from the Depression, there were some serious setbacks in the late thirties in terms of economic policy, etc..

People were tired from the economic struggle that had started in twenty-nine and were nowhere near out of it yet. So that tension is important from a sociological point of view, from an economic point of view, from a historical point of view. Capitalism was really in 17

16

Then Marciano threw one of those rights, and it landed, it seemed to me, just under Louis’s left ear. Louis had dropped his left shoulder after jabbing—an old fault, which brought about most of the bad moments of his career. This was the kind of punch that addles a man’s brains, and if it had happened thirty seconds earlier and Marciano had pressed his advantage, he might have knocked Louis out in the first round.

I think that punch was the one that made Joe feel old. Between the rounds, I could see Seamon pressing an ice bag against the back of Louis’s neck, and when I turned my binoculars on Charlie Goldman’s face, he was grinning. Louis was apparently clearheaded when he came out for the second, but he didn’t do much. I thought he won the next three rounds, jabbing Marciano’s face and jolting him with rights in close.

But the rights didn’t sicken Marciano, as they had sickened Louis’s opponents from 1935 to 1940; he reacted as if he were being hit by just an ordinary fighter. Marciano was missing almost all his own swings, and Goldman, between the rounds, was looking very serious as he talked to his pupil.

Also, he was working on Rocky’s brows with cotton-tipped toothpicks that had been steeped in some astringent solution. The jabs had cut. But Rocky came out for each new round very gay, as Egan would say, and went across to Louis as if to ask for a light.

When the fifth round ended, marking the halfway point of the fight, I felt that it would be a long way home but that Louis would make it. He had hardly used his left hook, which was now his best punch. Critics had been saying for years that his right had lost its authority, but the hook had existed in all its pristine glory as recently as the Savold bout....The way I figured it, Louis was being so careful about the crazy Marciano right that he was afraid to pull his own left back to hook. He would just jab and drop his forearm onto Rocky’s right biceps, so he couldn’t counter. Sooner or later, Joe would throw the hook, I thought, and that would end the fight. It looked like a fight between two men with one good hand apiece.

In the sixth, things started to go sour. It wasn’t that Marciano grew better or stronger; it was that Louis seemed to get slower and weaker. The spring was gone from his

legs—and it had been only a slight spring in the beginning—and in the clinches Marciano was shoving him around. A man can be as strong for tugging and hauling at thirtyseven, or for that matter at forty-seven, as he was in his twenties, but he can’t keep on starting and stopping for as many minutes.

And even grazing blows begin to hurt after a while. Near the end of the round, Marciano hit Louis another solid one.

The seventh was bad for Louis. Marciano didn’t catch him with one big punch, but he was battering at his body and arms, and shoving him around, and Joe didn’t seem to be able to do anything about it. Then, toward the end of the round, Joe threw the hook. It was beautiful. It hit Marciano flush on the right side of the jaw, but it didn’t seem to faze him a bit. I knew then that Joe was beaten, but I thought that it might be only a decision. Three rounds don’t seem forever, especially when you’re just watching.

Then, in the eighth round...,Marciano, the right-hand specialist, knocked Louis down with a left hook that Goldman had not previously publicized. When Louis got up, Marciano hit him with two more left hooks, which set him up for the right and the pitiful finish.

Right after Marciano knocked Louis down the first time, Sugar Ray Robinson started working his way toward the ring, as if drawn by some horrid fascination, and by the time Rocky threw the final right, Robinson’s hand was on the lowest rope of the ring, as if he meant to jump in. The punch knocked Joe through the ropes and he lay on the ring apron, only one leg inside.

The tall blonde was bawling, and pretty soon she began to sob. The fellow who had brought her was horrified. “Rocky didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “He didn’t foul him. What you booing?”

The blonde said, “You’re so cold. I hate you, too.”

Two weeks later, I stopped by the offices of the International Boxing Club to ask Al Weill how he felt about things now.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “You want to look out for them broken fighters. The way things look now, the kid could make a fortune of money.”

A. J. Liebling joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1935 and wrote for the magazine until his death in 1963.

Golden Boy designer Catherine Zuber speaks with Bartlett Sher This summer our editors spoke with Catherine Zuber and Bartlett Sher, the costume designer and director of Golden Boy. Lincoln Center Theater audiences have seen their work on Awake and Sing!, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

demolish Louis. His day was bound to come anyway, if Goldman was right, and I wanted to see Louis get by once more….

There were the usual introductions from the ring of white and colored men in knee-length jackets with flaring shoulders—rough, tough Paddy DeMarco, Philadelphia’s undefeated Gil Turner, Sugar Ray Robinson, former heavyweight champion Ezzard Charles, and, finally, Jersey Joe Walcott, the reigning champion, as old as Louis by his own statement, several years older by popular report. (“I’m not old,” he told a sports writer in 1947. “I’m just ugly.”) The names of the judges and referee were announced....And then the two factions were in the ring—Louis’s in the northwest corner, Marciano’s in the southeast....Marciano was bouncing on his thick legs and punching the air to warm up. A tall, ash-blond woman near me was saying, “I hate him! I hate him! I think he’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.” This struck me as being hard on Rocky; he didn’t look particularly repulsive. Husky as he was, he looked slight compared to Louis, who was three inches taller and, according to the announced weights, twenty-five pounds heavier. When the fighters were introduced, it was evident that if Connecticut, Rhode Island, and half of Massachusetts were not completely empty, their populations were at least substantially depleted for the evening. The Marciano supporters were cheering him as if he were a high-school football team. But Louis got an even bigger welcome....

I had a pair of pocket binoculars, 6 x 15s, and I kept them trained on Louis for the first half minute. His face was impassive, as usual, but his actions showed that he wasn’t taking the strong boy lightly. Instead of moving relentlessly forward, as in his great days, he seemed to be waiting to see what he was up against. In the first clinches, it was he who shifted Marciano, and not the other way about; Louis was stronger than the strong boy—at the beginning, anyway.

He could outbox him at a distance, and if he could continue to smother him in close, I thought he would get by. Up to the last five seconds of the round, I noted, glancing at the ringside clock, neither of them had done anything remarkable, and that was all right with me. I had had a feeling that Marciano might rush out of his corner throwing punches and try to take Louis by storm.

The Alchemy of the Dress:

Editor: What is the process when you two begin working on a show together?

Catherine Zuber: What I always love doing with Bart is going through each character.

He gives me his take on who that person is, what’s important to him, the nuances—the good, the bad, the ugly of every character; their hopes, their dreams, what they wished they were, what they are. We discuss a lot more than clothing specifics; we investigate the essence of that person and how Bart sees him onstage. We usually have many meetings.

Bart Sher: We talk about the play and the character. What I will not do is say what they should wear. We don’t talk like that at all. We talk about the people and we talk about the ideas of the play, and we talk about the approach of the play.

CZ: And the sociology, the historical reference.

BS: And what we know about Odets. The last thing that happens, and what I don’t participate in, is actually the clothing. There’s sort of a building up of intuition, and then Cathy goes off and translates that into an expression through the clothes.

CZ: Then Bart will look at the sketch and comment on things that may not be delivering his vision of the character in quite the right way. They’re usually not extreme changes; they’re modifications.

BS: The other thing that’s really important about developing costume design is developing characters over the course of time.

You have to build in the progression of the piece from the opening to the end—the

Joe Bonaparte

clothes can be a beautiful reflection of that. A good example would be Awake and Sing!—at the very end of the show we put in two coats that had a lot of color, when up until then the palette had been very narrow.

As Moe and Hennie left, they changed into this color that suddenly lifted a brightness into the palette. This is going to be really important in Golden Boy—how the Golden Boy and Lorna develop over time.

ED: After you have these conversations, what do you do?

CZ: As these discussions are progressing, I am organizing research on the period, the characters, the particulars—on Golden Boy, the world of boxing, and the immigrant life of New York City as an exciting starting

point. It is great to see what Bart responds to. I always feel Bart is the captain of the ship and we have to follow.

BS: It’s not like I try to decide everything; I just try to integrate everything that everybody’s doing. I hold the center of all the conversations.

ED: So the play is set in 1937.

BS: 1937 is interesting because, as much as they were recovering from the Depression, there were some serious setbacks in the late thirties in terms of economic policy, etc..

People were tired from the economic struggle that had started in twenty-nine and were nowhere near out of it yet. So that tension is important from a sociological point of view, from an economic point of view, from a historical point of view. Capitalism was really in 17

VINTAGE RESEARCH MATERIAL IN THE ZUBER STUDIO

Eddie Fuseli

Moody

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

18

turgically, actually drawing the costume sketch is quite simple, because the process of absorbing all this information has been an incredible journey.

ED: So you draw a portrait?

CZ: Yes, a portrait. That’s the fun part for me, conjuring the person on paper. Sometimes in ten minutes I go, “It’s perfect.

I’ve got it.” Other times it’s, like, “Nah, it seems too stiff. It’s not right. It’s not what he said. I’m missing something.” And I keep going until I get it. Sometimes it can take two hours, but I know when I’ve got the right components, the right body language. Maybe what somebody is wearing is quite simple; maybe it’s a white shirt and pair of trousers, so if I do a sketch where somebody’s standing like a stiff robot Bart is going to say, “Oh, what is that?” But if I have the right body language—the shirt is wrinkled, the hair is right, the expression on the face—that simple shirt and pair of trousers is really quite a strong statement.

ED: Does that ever influence casting?

BS: No, the sketch doesn’t.

CZ: But if there is a discovery in casting—a performer who has inspired Bart to go in a whole new direction that none of us thought was the way to go—we do a new sketch.

BS: I’m in the middle of casting now and I really like thinking about sets and costumes all at the same time, because you’re sort of channeling toward something special. Another character who’s pretty interesting is Lorna. She is a young woman who is really kind of outside of the world of the play. She’s not from the immigrant world of the Bonapartes. She’s not from the gangster world. She seems to be a woman who has fallen on hard times. Again, it’s

Lorna

Studio photograph by Tamar Cohen

the throes of transformation and really brutal in terms of its impact on people’s lives.

CZ: Yes, and Bart feels that Joe Bonaparte’s character is driven by the hunger for success, for financial success. Many of the characters you see have a need for a golden parachute out of a depressive world.

BS: What’s interesting is that the father says what he wants for his son is a “truthful success.” And the son himself is a very poetic young man, a very interesting guy who is a beautiful violinist who becomes a boxer in his urge to find what the future is, how to fight through it, and how to make sense of it. A big theme of Odets’s work is the struggle to live an authentic life. The line in Awake and Sing! is “Life isn’t printed on dollar bills.”

ED: Who is Joe’s father? How do you begin to discover what makes him special?

BS: They never say where he’s from in Italy.

He’s an Italian immigrant. We don’t know, but he could have been from an educated class. He sits in his house with this Jewish man, Mr. Carp, who lives down the street and runs a candy store, and they talk about Schopenhauer, and philosophy, and different ideas, and he loves music, but his real job as an immigrant on the Lower East Side is that he has a vegetable truck and a horse.

He doesn’t feel his son should be a boxer, doesn’t feel he should ruin his hands. He thinks he should take the more difficult path, which is not like parents now. Parents now are only worried that their sons or daughters make as much money as possible and they’re taken care of. I find him a very moving, strangely unique character to modern contemporary life.

ED: Cathy, how do you convey his occupation, his intellectual life?

CZ: Once the character is in place drama-

a place where casting has been extremely delicate—we need to find somebody who has the right combination of vulnerability, beauty, and brokenness, and can play the damage and the hardness.

ED: Those must have been interesting research materials; there are lots of ways to go with a character like that.

CZ: With someone like Lorna, until the role is cast you really don’t know. It’s alchemy.

Often, until the character has been cast, there is a waiting period until I continue.

Sometimes it’s adding, sometimes it’s taking away—like if somebody is incredibly beautiful and shouldn’t be beautiful we need to take that down.

ED: What will happen when Bart decides on the cast?

CZ: A very important part of the process is the actor, because they become the guardian of that character. They’re spending more time on that character than anyone else. It’s wonderful when you start to work with a really passionate actor and they contribute to the journey of the character. For instance, Mark Ruffalo, in Awake and Sing!, was an incredible pleasure to work with because he was so specific about what he wanted.

ED: What kinds of things did he suggest?

CZ: Well, he was very particular about the wooden leg and how it would function. He really wanted it to work in a certain way, and we collaborated with him to make sure that it was just what he wanted, because if it wasn’t it could have hindered his performance. A really, beautifully imaginative actor will absorb what you give them and give you really great details that push the character along. It’s a pleasure to feel that those little things, even in a small way, are helping him.

BS: Those gestures and details—it may be the weight of a fabric—might help an actor.

Getting actors the right shoes for the character is incredibly important.

CZ: It changes the way they walk. It can influence body language.

BS: One of the first things you have to have in rehearsal is shoes, so they know where they are in the world.

ED: Everyone always says no one knows more about what’s going on in the play than the dressers or the people in the costume shop.

CZ: Well, you are seeing people in a vulnerable state because you are undressing them and dressing them. I do feel ninety-five per-

It’s alchemy. Often, until the character has been cast, there is a waiting period until I continue. Sometimes it’s adding, sometimes it’s taking away-like if somebody is incredibly beautiful and shouldn’t be beautiful we need to take that down.”

VINTAGE RESEARCH MATERIAL IN THE ZUBER STUDIO

Eddie Fuseli

Moody

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

18

turgically, actually drawing the costume sketch is quite simple, because the process of absorbing all this information has been an incredible journey.

ED: So you draw a portrait?

CZ: Yes, a portrait. That’s the fun part for me, conjuring the person on paper. Sometimes in ten minutes I go, “It’s perfect.

I’ve got it.” Other times it’s, like, “Nah, it seems too stiff. It’s not right. It’s not what he said. I’m missing something.” And I keep going until I get it. Sometimes it can take two hours, but I know when I’ve got the right components, the right body language. Maybe what somebody is wearing is quite simple; maybe it’s a white shirt and pair of trousers, so if I do a sketch where somebody’s standing like a stiff robot Bart is going to say, “Oh, what is that?” But if I have the right body language—the shirt is wrinkled, the hair is right, the expression on the face—that simple shirt and pair of trousers is really quite a strong statement.

ED: Does that ever influence casting?

BS: No, the sketch doesn’t.

CZ: But if there is a discovery in casting—a performer who has inspired Bart to go in a whole new direction that none of us thought was the way to go—we do a new sketch.

BS: I’m in the middle of casting now and I really like thinking about sets and costumes all at the same time, because you’re sort of channeling toward something special. Another character who’s pretty interesting is Lorna. She is a young woman who is really kind of outside of the world of the play. She’s not from the immigrant world of the Bonapartes. She’s not from the gangster world. She seems to be a woman who has fallen on hard times. Again, it’s

Lorna

Studio photograph by Tamar Cohen

the throes of transformation and really brutal in terms of its impact on people’s lives.

CZ: Yes, and Bart feels that Joe Bonaparte’s character is driven by the hunger for success, for financial success. Many of the characters you see have a need for a golden parachute out of a depressive world.

BS: What’s interesting is that the father says what he wants for his son is a “truthful success.” And the son himself is a very poetic young man, a very interesting guy who is a beautiful violinist who becomes a boxer in his urge to find what the future is, how to fight through it, and how to make sense of it. A big theme of Odets’s work is the struggle to live an authentic life. The line in Awake and Sing! is “Life isn’t printed on dollar bills.”

ED: Who is Joe’s father? How do you begin to discover what makes him special?

BS: They never say where he’s from in Italy.

He’s an Italian immigrant. We don’t know, but he could have been from an educated class. He sits in his house with this Jewish man, Mr. Carp, who lives down the street and runs a candy store, and they talk about Schopenhauer, and philosophy, and different ideas, and he loves music, but his real job as an immigrant on the Lower East Side is that he has a vegetable truck and a horse.

He doesn’t feel his son should be a boxer, doesn’t feel he should ruin his hands. He thinks he should take the more difficult path, which is not like parents now. Parents now are only worried that their sons or daughters make as much money as possible and they’re taken care of. I find him a very moving, strangely unique character to modern contemporary life.

ED: Cathy, how do you convey his occupation, his intellectual life?

CZ: Once the character is in place drama-

a place where casting has been extremely delicate—we need to find somebody who has the right combination of vulnerability, beauty, and brokenness, and can play the damage and the hardness.

ED: Those must have been interesting research materials; there are lots of ways to go with a character like that.

CZ: With someone like Lorna, until the role is cast you really don’t know. It’s alchemy.

Often, until the character has been cast, there is a waiting period until I continue.

Sometimes it’s adding, sometimes it’s taking away—like if somebody is incredibly beautiful and shouldn’t be beautiful we need to take that down.

ED: What will happen when Bart decides on the cast?

CZ: A very important part of the process is the actor, because they become the guardian of that character. They’re spending more time on that character than anyone else. It’s wonderful when you start to work with a really passionate actor and they contribute to the journey of the character. For instance, Mark Ruffalo, in Awake and Sing!, was an incredible pleasure to work with because he was so specific about what he wanted.

ED: What kinds of things did he suggest?

CZ: Well, he was very particular about the wooden leg and how it would function. He really wanted it to work in a certain way, and we collaborated with him to make sure that it was just what he wanted, because if it wasn’t it could have hindered his performance. A really, beautifully imaginative actor will absorb what you give them and give you really great details that push the character along. It’s a pleasure to feel that those little things, even in a small way, are helping him.

BS: Those gestures and details—it may be the weight of a fabric—might help an actor.

Getting actors the right shoes for the character is incredibly important.

CZ: It changes the way they walk. It can influence body language.

BS: One of the first things you have to have in rehearsal is shoes, so they know where they are in the world.

ED: Everyone always says no one knows more about what’s going on in the play than the dressers or the people in the costume shop.

CZ: Well, you are seeing people in a vulnerable state because you are undressing them and dressing them. I do feel ninety-five per-

It’s alchemy. Often, until the character has been cast, there is a waiting period until I continue. Sometimes it’s adding, sometimes it’s taking away-like if somebody is incredibly beautiful and shouldn’t be beautiful we need to take that down.”

Joe

An Interview with Ellen Adler

From left: Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, and Luther Adler in London. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

20

conversations are critical to the long-term journey of the piece.

CZ: I always get a sort of cosmic message when I work on a play in terms of what the muscle of the design should be regarding costumes. For Golden Boy, I feel it’s an authenticity of the clothes where you really feel like you’re time-traveling. So the fabrics, the boxing clothes, the gloves—ideally, they will just seem so right to the time, not an interpretation of the time. And that authenticity, in contrast to a set that might be a little less specific in terms of period detail, I think, can be quite interesting.

BS: Yes, it has to. The set can capture a slice of that. The clothes can capture much more, in a strange way.

CZ: We really need to be sociologists with the clothes, and when you look at the research it really is quite theatrical—the world of people who were involved in boxing, it is a very interesting visual world.

ED: I’m fascinated by how the history of what people wear is perceived. People may think they know what the look was in the past, but sometimes it’s surprising to see what it actually was.

BS: That’s pretty common. It’s true for periods like the eighteenth century or nineteenth century. You may find that what they really wore were strange patterns and things that were very odd, which if we put them in a film now, no one would really want to see, even though that’s actually what they wore.

CZ: They wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “Oh, you’ve taken a liberty.” This is true even in modern dress. Last night I was on the subway, and there was this couple that had just come from a Yankees game and what they were wearing was so extreme, I said to my friend, “If this was a play and I put that onstage, it would get cut because it’s too over the top.” But it’s reality. So I guess the key is that it shouldn’t be distracting. If it’s not adding to the storytelling, it’s a distraction.

So if a piece of historical research is a distraction, it’s not the right choice. There’s probably something else that’s historically appropriate that would not distract. You don’t want people’s minds to wander and go, “What is that?” They should be listening to the words and they should be experiencing the story, not stumbling upon a visual choice that is intrusive.

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

Oh, I almost feel it's like a great chef—you enjoy the meal, but you don't really need to know that they have to get up at three in the morning to go to a specific market to get the perfect fish and all the other ingredients.

The guests are just enjoying the meal.

cent of the time actors are very happy to work with me because they feel a level of trust in that I won’t just say, “Here, wear this and that’s it.” I really love to collaborate. If an actor is requesting something that’s not going to be what Bart was anticipating, I will say, “Bart, I need your help on this. We need to have a character discussion with the actor.”

ED: What about the character of Eddie?

BS: Eddie Fuseli is a gangster who comes into the story partway through to join the syndicate which is supporting Joe Bonaparte as a boxer. He’s a war veteran. He’s absolutely the scariest guy who enters the piece.

Very quiet-spoken, very intense, but he has some quirks. One of them which is interesting is that he, according to Odets, was a closet homosexual who’s also a dangerous gangster who’s clearly obsessed with and infatuated with Joe Bonaparte, the boxer.

He presents an interesting challenge in terms of his costumes.

ED: So what do you do?

CZ: Well, regarding that character, Bart has been clear about what he doesn’t want.

ED: Okay. (Laughter) Pinkie rings.

BS: Yes. There’s one whole scene where he talks with Joe about buying him shirts, particular colors, and how they look good on him. He’s very, very precise about his clothing. Clearly, he’s somebody who’s well dressed and wealthy. So that’s a place to start.

ED: How involved are you in the materials, the fabrics, the authenticity of the details?

I’ve always been astonished, talking to designers, at just how much time and effort go into these details that the audience might not consciously notice.

CZ: Oh, I almost feel it’s like a great chef— you enjoy the meal, but you don’t really need to know that they have to get up at three in the morning to go to a specific market to get the perfect fish and all the other ingredients. The guests are just enjoying the meal. I always feel that’s what it’s like with costume design; hopefully, the audience will understand the character a little better because of all the choices that have gone into it.

BS: There are a lot of really complicated decisions. The costumes, especially in a design like this, have to do a lot of work.

We will have a lot of conversations with Don Holder, the lighting designer, and with Michael Yeargan, the set designer. These

A Different Kind of Success: The accomplished painter Ellen Adler, daughter of the legendary actress and teacher Stella Adler, has in her lifetime known an astonishing array of the major lights in American cultural history. Our executive editors, John Guare and Anne Cattaneo, enjoyed a delightful afternoon with Ellen in the winter of 2005 as she reminisced about Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre.

Editor: Can you tell us how Clifford fit into the dynamic of Stella Adler and Harold Clurman in the Group Theatre?

Ellen Adler: In November 1934, Clifford had already written Awake and Sing!, but Lee Strasberg didn’t want to do it. It was Stella who said, “But we have our play.“ All those actors were absolutely ready for him.

It makes me shiver to think about it. Harold worked with Clifford on every play. They were very close, Harold and Clifford.

The thing about Clifford is that he really lusted for the fame. I remember when Edward Albee was very young, we were friendly at that time, and Harold used to say to Edward, “Edward, go home. Don’t stay up.“ He didn’t want Edward to fritter his talent away staying late at parties. But Clifford loved it. Clifford loved power. He left bohemia very quickly. He married the actress Luise Rainer. It’s my understanding that she was his second wife.

When the Group Theatre went to England in 1938 to stage Golden Boy, the company went on the S.S. America, and Clifford, Luther Adler, Harold, Stella, and I went on the Queen Mary. Luther became engaged to Sylvia Sidney on that boat, and Clifford got a wire from Luise that she wanted a divorce, so he took his wedding ring and he threw it out of the porthole into the ocean. He told me once, “Luise and I had to be married because God had to witness the kind of fights we had. We fought so violently.“ ED: But wasn’t Clifford always running around?

EA: I was just a little girl then—he was very generous to me. He gave me books like Pinocchio and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He sent stamps to Franklin Roosevelt’s grandchildren because they were stamp collectors. He was tremendously generous and thoughtful always. When I was in college, one time I came home for a visit.

We lived on Fifty-fourth Street then. He was staying on Fifty-ninth Street, at the Essex House. He called and said, “Is Harold there?“ I said, “No, he’s not home.“ “Is Stella there?“ “No.“ He said, “Well, how are you?“ I said, “I’m fine.“ And he said, “Why don’t you come over for a drink?“ In those days, when you were a child you dressed like a child. And then at a certain age—and it was very exciting—you became a woman. I put on a dress that had been my mother’s and had been made over for me.

It was silk, a raspberries-and-cream color, and it had a ruffle all the way down. I had on high heels and silk stockings with a seam up the back, and I went over to Clifford’s.

When he saw me, I was a completely different person. The door was opened and then locked. And he made such a pass at me.

But I thought he was too old. (Laughs) He was thirty-one or thirty-six or something.

I didn’t like him that way at all. He came to visit Harold and Stella at the end of that time he was in New York. He brought me a watercolor by George Grosz. And he brought my mother a box of chocolates. She said, “I don’t understand the presents.“ I still have the watercolor. I think he made passes at every single girl in the world.

ED: When his third wife, Bette Grayson, left him, he raised their children, right?

EA: What happened was Bette left him and became engaged to a doctor or psychoanalyst—something like that. But she got encephalitis before she was to be married and she died very suddenly. She died very young. By this time, Clifford had already given names to the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]. We went to the funeral, which was at Riverside Chapel here in New York. Bette was very friendly with all the people from the Group, and all the lefties were there. And nobody would speak to Clifford.

That was really the wound. He never should have done that, named names. It 21

Joe

An Interview with Ellen Adler

From left: Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, and Luther Adler in London. © Bettmann/CORBIS.

20

conversations are critical to the long-term journey of the piece.

CZ: I always get a sort of cosmic message when I work on a play in terms of what the muscle of the design should be regarding costumes. For Golden Boy, I feel it’s an authenticity of the clothes where you really feel like you’re time-traveling. So the fabrics, the boxing clothes, the gloves—ideally, they will just seem so right to the time, not an interpretation of the time. And that authenticity, in contrast to a set that might be a little less specific in terms of period detail, I think, can be quite interesting.

BS: Yes, it has to. The set can capture a slice of that. The clothes can capture much more, in a strange way.

CZ: We really need to be sociologists with the clothes, and when you look at the research it really is quite theatrical—the world of people who were involved in boxing, it is a very interesting visual world.

ED: I’m fascinated by how the history of what people wear is perceived. People may think they know what the look was in the past, but sometimes it’s surprising to see what it actually was.

BS: That’s pretty common. It’s true for periods like the eighteenth century or nineteenth century. You may find that what they really wore were strange patterns and things that were very odd, which if we put them in a film now, no one would really want to see, even though that’s actually what they wore.

CZ: They wouldn’t believe it. They’d say, “Oh, you’ve taken a liberty.” This is true even in modern dress. Last night I was on the subway, and there was this couple that had just come from a Yankees game and what they were wearing was so extreme, I said to my friend, “If this was a play and I put that onstage, it would get cut because it’s too over the top.” But it’s reality. So I guess the key is that it shouldn’t be distracting. If it’s not adding to the storytelling, it’s a distraction.

So if a piece of historical research is a distraction, it’s not the right choice. There’s probably something else that’s historically appropriate that would not distract. You don’t want people’s minds to wander and go, “What is that?” They should be listening to the words and they should be experiencing the story, not stumbling upon a visual choice that is intrusive.

Sketches © Catherine Zuber, 2012.

Oh, I almost feel it's like a great chef—you enjoy the meal, but you don't really need to know that they have to get up at three in the morning to go to a specific market to get the perfect fish and all the other ingredients.

The guests are just enjoying the meal.

cent of the time actors are very happy to work with me because they feel a level of trust in that I won’t just say, “Here, wear this and that’s it.” I really love to collaborate. If an actor is requesting something that’s not going to be what Bart was anticipating, I will say, “Bart, I need your help on this. We need to have a character discussion with the actor.”

ED: What about the character of Eddie?

BS: Eddie Fuseli is a gangster who comes into the story partway through to join the syndicate which is supporting Joe Bonaparte as a boxer. He’s a war veteran. He’s absolutely the scariest guy who enters the piece.

Very quiet-spoken, very intense, but he has some quirks. One of them which is interesting is that he, according to Odets, was a closet homosexual who’s also a dangerous gangster who’s clearly obsessed with and infatuated with Joe Bonaparte, the boxer.

He presents an interesting challenge in terms of his costumes.

ED: So what do you do?

CZ: Well, regarding that character, Bart has been clear about what he doesn’t want.

ED: Okay. (Laughter) Pinkie rings.

BS: Yes. There’s one whole scene where he talks with Joe about buying him shirts, particular colors, and how they look good on him. He’s very, very precise about his clothing. Clearly, he’s somebody who’s well dressed and wealthy. So that’s a place to start.

ED: How involved are you in the materials, the fabrics, the authenticity of the details?

I’ve always been astonished, talking to designers, at just how much time and effort go into these details that the audience might not consciously notice.

CZ: Oh, I almost feel it’s like a great chef— you enjoy the meal, but you don’t really need to know that they have to get up at three in the morning to go to a specific market to get the perfect fish and all the other ingredients. The guests are just enjoying the meal. I always feel that’s what it’s like with costume design; hopefully, the audience will understand the character a little better because of all the choices that have gone into it.

BS: There are a lot of really complicated decisions. The costumes, especially in a design like this, have to do a lot of work.

We will have a lot of conversations with Don Holder, the lighting designer, and with Michael Yeargan, the set designer. These

A Different Kind of Success: The accomplished painter Ellen Adler, daughter of the legendary actress and teacher Stella Adler, has in her lifetime known an astonishing array of the major lights in American cultural history. Our executive editors, John Guare and Anne Cattaneo, enjoyed a delightful afternoon with Ellen in the winter of 2005 as she reminisced about Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre.

Editor: Can you tell us how Clifford fit into the dynamic of Stella Adler and Harold Clurman in the Group Theatre?

Ellen Adler: In November 1934, Clifford had already written Awake and Sing!, but Lee Strasberg didn’t want to do it. It was Stella who said, “But we have our play.“ All those actors were absolutely ready for him.

It makes me shiver to think about it. Harold worked with Clifford on every play. They were very close, Harold and Clifford.

The thing about Clifford is that he really lusted for the fame. I remember when Edward Albee was very young, we were friendly at that time, and Harold used to say to Edward, “Edward, go home. Don’t stay up.“ He didn’t want Edward to fritter his talent away staying late at parties. But Clifford loved it. Clifford loved power. He left bohemia very quickly. He married the actress Luise Rainer. It’s my understanding that she was his second wife.

When the Group Theatre went to England in 1938 to stage Golden Boy, the company went on the S.S. America, and Clifford, Luther Adler, Harold, Stella, and I went on the Queen Mary. Luther became engaged to Sylvia Sidney on that boat, and Clifford got a wire from Luise that she wanted a divorce, so he took his wedding ring and he threw it out of the porthole into the ocean. He told me once, “Luise and I had to be married because God had to witness the kind of fights we had. We fought so violently.“ ED: But wasn’t Clifford always running around?

EA: I was just a little girl then—he was very generous to me. He gave me books like Pinocchio and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

He sent stamps to Franklin Roosevelt’s grandchildren because they were stamp collectors. He was tremendously generous and thoughtful always. When I was in college, one time I came home for a visit.

We lived on Fifty-fourth Street then. He was staying on Fifty-ninth Street, at the Essex House. He called and said, “Is Harold there?“ I said, “No, he’s not home.“ “Is Stella there?“ “No.“ He said, “Well, how are you?“ I said, “I’m fine.“ And he said, “Why don’t you come over for a drink?“ In those days, when you were a child you dressed like a child. And then at a certain age—and it was very exciting—you became a woman. I put on a dress that had been my mother’s and had been made over for me.

It was silk, a raspberries-and-cream color, and it had a ruffle all the way down. I had on high heels and silk stockings with a seam up the back, and I went over to Clifford’s.

When he saw me, I was a completely different person. The door was opened and then locked. And he made such a pass at me.

But I thought he was too old. (Laughs) He was thirty-one or thirty-six or something.

I didn’t like him that way at all. He came to visit Harold and Stella at the end of that time he was in New York. He brought me a watercolor by George Grosz. And he brought my mother a box of chocolates. She said, “I don’t understand the presents.“ I still have the watercolor. I think he made passes at every single girl in the world.

ED: When his third wife, Bette Grayson, left him, he raised their children, right?

EA: What happened was Bette left him and became engaged to a doctor or psychoanalyst—something like that. But she got encephalitis before she was to be married and she died very suddenly. She died very young. By this time, Clifford had already given names to the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC]. We went to the funeral, which was at Riverside Chapel here in New York. Bette was very friendly with all the people from the Group, and all the lefties were there. And nobody would speak to Clifford.

That was really the wound. He never should have done that, named names. It 21

Even when the Group went to England— Golden Boy was an extraordinary success there. They had never seen acting like that.

The Group couldn’t have done it without Clifford, and he could never have done it without them. tors had been together for seven or eight years—they were all working for the same thing. They worked very hard. There were classes in voice and movement—all these grown-ups, every summer, all summer long.

ED: What was the audience for the Group Theatre?

EA: I think it was a lot of working-class people. The intelligentsia. A lot of Jews.

ED: What was Stella’s relationship with Odets later on? Did she stay in touch with him after the naming of names?

EA: Yes, she did. Harold and Stella did not discriminate when people gave names, at all. It wasn’t in their spirit. They just went on exactly as before. It was part of the story of life. They didn’t take a position against this one or that one.

I think Clifford wanted a different kind of success—a Broadway success. When the Group broke up, he just moved on. He wrote

The Country Girl—that was not a Group Theatre kind of play. He wrote various movies.

And then he wrote that very strange play, The Flowering Peach.

I think the plays of his that brought him his real greatness happened at a time when there was a real feeling of community in America. People were poor, the families lived together. The fathers came from the Old Country, the boys wanted to do something else. The Group had an audience, and they had an acting troupe that was not like anything that anybody’s ever seen since.

People really believed at that time, whether we were wrong or right, that the world could be changed for the better.

ED: Clifford’s screenplay for Humoresque— about a boy from the Lower East Side who can play the fiddle better than anybody, and he’s drawn into the world at large, and the question is will it destroy him?

EA: Well, that’s the story in Golden Boy, too, isn’t it? He always did that. What’s gonna destroy me?

ED: It’s also the theme in Sweet Smell of Success.

EA: He seems to have understood unconsciously that he was going to struggle with that himself. I don’t know what happened in the end. I remember I had a little house in Watermill, and I was hanging out with Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, all these artists—a million miles away from the Group Theatre. The news came over the radio that Clifford Odets had died. I thought the world was going to end. I think Clifford suffered more for giving names than anyone else, because he lost his people. He was really broken by that. He lost his integrity with the people who mattered to him. It was painful for him. Then he was in Hollywood and he did second-rate things and he did rewrites and that sort of stuff. It kind of broke him. He had a lot of grandiosity, Clifford. He had an enormous amount of grandiosity, in a way that I never saw in Arthur Miller or any other playwright. He had this posture of greatness. He was very striking, with eyes like a lion. His eyes were sort of frightening—he saw everything. And he had the most beautiful hands in the world; everybody who knew him remembered that they were like hands in an Italian painting.

by Elia Kazan

From Elia Kazan: A Life by Elia Kazan, © 1988 by Elia Kazan. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

22

to go home, Clifford liked the big life—he liked being famous, he liked being rich.

ED: In retrospect, do you think Clifford’s talent flourished in and should be judged only by the work he did in the Group Theatre?

EA: I don’t think so, but I do think that the way his plays were acted, that something happened that made it completely unlike any other theater that anyone had ever seen. Even when the Group went to England—Golden Boy was an extraordinary success there. They had never seen acting like that. The Group couldn’t have done it without Clifford, and he could never have done it without them. First of all, the ac-

Center photo: Clifford Odets.

wasn’t like with Gadg [Elia Kazan]. Gadg really wanted to make movies. Everybody knew it. Harold once said to the actor David Margulies, “What you have to understand about Gadg is that when he wants something he has to have it.“ That was his character and people didn’t expect otherwise.

ED: What was it in Clifford’s character that made him name names?

EA: That’s what I will never understand.

When Jerry Robbins named names, he was going out with Nora Kaye at the time, and she said, “Jerry’s gonna sing—Jerry would give his mother away.“ So that was known.

ED: Jerry was terrified. He did it out of terror. Why did Clifford do it?

EA: I have no idea. He and Bette had this lovely apartment on Eighty-first Street. Everybody would get together there. It never crossed anybody’s mind that he would give names.

José Ferrer gave my mother’s name. “You oughta look into that broad.“ That’s what he said. She went before the Committee, but my grandmother died right when Stella was supposed to appear at the same hearing as Larry Parks. Since my grandmother was the famous Yiddish actress Sarah Adler, Jacob Javits, who was then a New York congressman, arranged for a state funeral that went all the way down Second Avenue to the funeral home. The Committee thought this wouldn’t look good, so my mother got her own hearing. But she said she was never so frightened in her life. Maybe that’s what happened to Clifford. It was a terrifying thing.

I was with him the afternoon, in 1954, when the hearings were going on. He had already given names. It was summertime and there was no air-conditioning. All the windows were open on Madison Avenue, and we heard Joseph Welch, the chief army counsel, say to Senator McCarthy, “Have you no shame?“ That turned the whole thing around. For some reason, that was the turning point.

Clifford was very defensive about having given names, but I don’t think he ever expected that every friend he had would stop speaking to him. And that went on in Hollywood, too. He had already gone out to Hollywood, and he liked that life. Unlike Faulkner and the others who always wanted

Go On, Shout!

When I think of large talents that were beached by a crisis in their lives, I think first of Clifford Odets. There is one sorrow that must pain men so stranded most: that they were unable to live up to the image of themselves that once gave them their pride. Clifford was what Orson [Welles] was not, a celebrated member of the Communist Party. In 1935, after his first two plays hit New York, he was the artist-revolutionary of the day, honored and respected by all good men. In 1952, he did what I’d done, named the Party members in the Group to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and whereas that act, unhappy as it was, gave me an identity I could carry, naming his old comrades deprived Odets of the heroic identity he needed most. I don’t believe he was ever again the same man….

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.

The last time I saw him outside a hospital was in February of this year [1963]. I was full of Lincoln Center [Repertory Theatre], and I reminded him that he’d always said that if a theater existed, he would write for it, that he could not and would not write for “Broad-

way.“ I told him that we were trying to do what he’d been waiting for, and he must write his plays now and write them for us, that we wanted to produce them all at the Repertory Theatre. Again he answered that he intended to spend only nine months more in California—it was the Dick Boone show this time, not a movie rewrite—and once that job was done, he’d be through there. Then he went on again about the five plays that he had all laid out—a phrase that by then had come to have an ominous connotation.

He died on the fourteenth of August, but on that day in February, there wasn’t a sign of illness on his face, and his eyes flashed with fire as they had when he was twenty-five and writing Waiting for Lefty.

His skin had the velvety look of a healthy man in his mid-fifties. Did he believe that he was going to remain in Hollywood only nine months more? Did he believe that the TV shows he was writing for Dick Boone and the residuals therefrom would solve his financial problems, that there’d be no more polish jobs, scavenger jobs, dialogue jobs, save-the-show jobs, that all these humiliations would come to an end and he’d be back speaking for the human spirit again from a free stage and giving forth his special incandescence?

He had to believe that. So he did.

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 is dying!“ Elia Kazan (1909–2003), the Group Theatre member who incited the “strike” in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, went on to have a renowned and controversial career as the director of some of the twentieth century’s most notable plays and films. He founded the Actors Studio with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis in 1947.

Even when the Group went to England— Golden Boy was an extraordinary success there. They had never seen acting like that.

The Group couldn’t have done it without Clifford, and he could never have done it without them. tors had been together for seven or eight years—they were all working for the same thing. They worked very hard. There were classes in voice and movement—all these grown-ups, every summer, all summer long.

ED: What was the audience for the Group Theatre?

EA: I think it was a lot of working-class people. The intelligentsia. A lot of Jews.

ED: What was Stella’s relationship with Odets later on? Did she stay in touch with him after the naming of names?

EA: Yes, she did. Harold and Stella did not discriminate when people gave names, at all. It wasn’t in their spirit. They just went on exactly as before. It was part of the story of life. They didn’t take a position against this one or that one.

I think Clifford wanted a different kind of success—a Broadway success. When the Group broke up, he just moved on. He wrote

The Country Girl—that was not a Group Theatre kind of play. He wrote various movies.

And then he wrote that very strange play, The Flowering Peach.

I think the plays of his that brought him his real greatness happened at a time when there was a real feeling of community in America. People were poor, the families lived together. The fathers came from the Old Country, the boys wanted to do something else. The Group had an audience, and they had an acting troupe that was not like anything that anybody’s ever seen since.

People really believed at that time, whether we were wrong or right, that the world could be changed for the better.

ED: Clifford’s screenplay for Humoresque— about a boy from the Lower East Side who can play the fiddle better than anybody, and he’s drawn into the world at large, and the question is will it destroy him?

EA: Well, that’s the story in Golden Boy, too, isn’t it? He always did that. What’s gonna destroy me?

ED: It’s also the theme in Sweet Smell of Success.

EA: He seems to have understood unconsciously that he was going to struggle with that himself. I don’t know what happened in the end. I remember I had a little house in Watermill, and I was hanging out with Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, all these artists—a million miles away from the Group Theatre. The news came over the radio that Clifford Odets had died. I thought the world was going to end. I think Clifford suffered more for giving names than anyone else, because he lost his people. He was really broken by that. He lost his integrity with the people who mattered to him. It was painful for him. Then he was in Hollywood and he did second-rate things and he did rewrites and that sort of stuff. It kind of broke him. He had a lot of grandiosity, Clifford. He had an enormous amount of grandiosity, in a way that I never saw in Arthur Miller or any other playwright. He had this posture of greatness. He was very striking, with eyes like a lion. His eyes were sort of frightening—he saw everything. And he had the most beautiful hands in the world; everybody who knew him remembered that they were like hands in an Italian painting.

by Elia Kazan

From Elia Kazan: A Life by Elia Kazan, © 1988 by Elia Kazan. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

22

to go home, Clifford liked the big life—he liked being famous, he liked being rich.

ED: In retrospect, do you think Clifford’s talent flourished in and should be judged only by the work he did in the Group Theatre?

EA: I don’t think so, but I do think that the way his plays were acted, that something happened that made it completely unlike any other theater that anyone had ever seen. Even when the Group went to England—Golden Boy was an extraordinary success there. They had never seen acting like that. The Group couldn’t have done it without Clifford, and he could never have done it without them. First of all, the ac-

Center photo: Clifford Odets.

wasn’t like with Gadg [Elia Kazan]. Gadg really wanted to make movies. Everybody knew it. Harold once said to the actor David Margulies, “What you have to understand about Gadg is that when he wants something he has to have it.“ That was his character and people didn’t expect otherwise.

ED: What was it in Clifford’s character that made him name names?

EA: That’s what I will never understand.

When Jerry Robbins named names, he was going out with Nora Kaye at the time, and she said, “Jerry’s gonna sing—Jerry would give his mother away.“ So that was known.

ED: Jerry was terrified. He did it out of terror. Why did Clifford do it?

EA: I have no idea. He and Bette had this lovely apartment on Eighty-first Street. Everybody would get together there. It never crossed anybody’s mind that he would give names.

José Ferrer gave my mother’s name. “You oughta look into that broad.“ That’s what he said. She went before the Committee, but my grandmother died right when Stella was supposed to appear at the same hearing as Larry Parks. Since my grandmother was the famous Yiddish actress Sarah Adler, Jacob Javits, who was then a New York congressman, arranged for a state funeral that went all the way down Second Avenue to the funeral home. The Committee thought this wouldn’t look good, so my mother got her own hearing. But she said she was never so frightened in her life. Maybe that’s what happened to Clifford. It was a terrifying thing.

I was with him the afternoon, in 1954, when the hearings were going on. He had already given names. It was summertime and there was no air-conditioning. All the windows were open on Madison Avenue, and we heard Joseph Welch, the chief army counsel, say to Senator McCarthy, “Have you no shame?“ That turned the whole thing around. For some reason, that was the turning point.

Clifford was very defensive about having given names, but I don’t think he ever expected that every friend he had would stop speaking to him. And that went on in Hollywood, too. He had already gone out to Hollywood, and he liked that life. Unlike Faulkner and the others who always wanted

Go On, Shout!

When I think of large talents that were beached by a crisis in their lives, I think first of Clifford Odets. There is one sorrow that must pain men so stranded most: that they were unable to live up to the image of themselves that once gave them their pride. Clifford was what Orson [Welles] was not, a celebrated member of the Communist Party. In 1935, after his first two plays hit New York, he was the artist-revolutionary of the day, honored and respected by all good men. In 1952, he did what I’d done, named the Party members in the Group to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and whereas that act, unhappy as it was, gave me an identity I could carry, naming his old comrades deprived Odets of the heroic identity he needed most. I don’t believe he was ever again the same man….

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.

The last time I saw him outside a hospital was in February of this year [1963]. I was full of Lincoln Center [Repertory Theatre], and I reminded him that he’d always said that if a theater existed, he would write for it, that he could not and would not write for “Broad-

way.“ I told him that we were trying to do what he’d been waiting for, and he must write his plays now and write them for us, that we wanted to produce them all at the Repertory Theatre. Again he answered that he intended to spend only nine months more in California—it was the Dick Boone show this time, not a movie rewrite—and once that job was done, he’d be through there. Then he went on again about the five plays that he had all laid out—a phrase that by then had come to have an ominous connotation.

He died on the fourteenth of August, but on that day in February, there wasn’t a sign of illness on his face, and his eyes flashed with fire as they had when he was twenty-five and writing Waiting for Lefty.

His skin had the velvety look of a healthy man in his mid-fifties. Did he believe that he was going to remain in Hollywood only nine months more? Did he believe that the TV shows he was writing for Dick Boone and the residuals therefrom would solve his financial problems, that there’d be no more polish jobs, scavenger jobs, dialogue jobs, save-the-show jobs, that all these humiliations would come to an end and he’d be back speaking for the human spirit again from a free stage and giving forth his special incandescence?

He had to believe that. So he did.

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 is dying!“ Elia Kazan (1909–2003), the Group Theatre member who incited the “strike” in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, went on to have a renowned and controversial career as the director of some of the twentieth century’s most notable plays and films. He founded the Actors Studio with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis in 1947.