I found the union office in a side street and went up a flight of steps to a tiny room over an empty store, from which, so I had heard, a couple of brothers were running the strike. A young man wearing a baseball cap was staring out the window. He glanced at me and introduced himself as Walter Reuther (his brother Victor, who had made a trip to the Soviet Union, was rumored to be a Socialist). I asked Walter how things were. He was a pale and reflective man with red hair and a simple, direct quality of respectful attention to me, a mere student reporter from the university. I had expected a tough guy with no interest in what I was trying to do.
“Well, let’s see,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “I think we’ve got over three hundred members right now …”
Three hundredl An amazing number, I thought. There were many reports in the press that the whole thing was a fluke and would soon collapse, for it was a practically unheard-of attempt to organize unskilled workers rather than machinists, toolmakers, and carpenters, whose elite unions had been started at the turn of the century.
“But we’re signing up more and more all the time.”
“Then you think you can win recognition? How long will they stay in there before they get sick of it?”
“I think they’ll stay in.”
“Can I ask you why?”
He let a grin pass over his lips. “They’ve kind of got to like it in there.” We both laughed. “They’ve been through a lot together, you know. They’ve got their pride going now, and there’s a lot of good feeling in there.”
Talking to Walter Reuther, I realized that he did not think of himself as controlling this incredible event but at best guiding and shaping an emotion that had boiled up from below. I had heard that some of the hard organizing was being done by the Communists, but no one seemed to know where I could find them, so I never found out.
I had to return to school before victory day, February u, 1937, when the company caved in and recognized the United Auto Workers. It made me feel safer on the earth, and as it did to others trying to write or make art in that time, it seemed to me a new beauty was being born. It would not have crossed my mind that a new power to coerce was also being created here, certainly not one that would often turn a cynical gangster face to the world and, incidentally, suppress a movie I had written—but that was a decade and a half later. It must be said, however, that the UAW itself remained remarkably democratic.
The twisting of meaning proceeds. It was the spirit of the thirties that Odets—unfashionably, by 1949—was trying to shout up out of its grave at the Waldorf Conference. When I recall the nuns with their scrubbed, frightened faces glancing up at me as I picked my way between them, and almost four decades later when I read about Catholic clergy in the Third World ministering to the poor and often leading revolution rather than serving as outriders of the rich, the world seems to be evolving. Now, too, a council of American Catholic bishops condemns the ruthless strain in a federal policy content to let illiteracy, racism, and hunger erode immense sectors of society, and I think of the hopelessness of trying to so much as discuss such matters with that line of kneeling sisters at the Waldorf entrance. They and I see the same world at last, but I have changed as much as they.
Finishing All My Sons after two years, I sent it to Herman Shumlin, who had produced and directed Lillian Hellman’s plays. After three or four days I was told that he “didn’t understand it.” Herman was as prestigious a producer as Broadway had, a rather severe man of terrifying principle, but gentle and extremely soft-spoken—until, so I was told, he lost his temper. Apparently he had lost it with Lillian, as she had lost hers with him, and they had parted company. Notwithstanding his great need for a new social playwright, my play was evidently beyond him. I could not imagine what it was that baffled him, and it was a crisis for me to be judged a failure after two years of the most careful work, especially since I had vowed to abandon play writing if All My Sons failed.
Mary and I and our first child, Jane, were spending summers in a rented bungalow near Port Jefferson, Long Island, where I had finished the play on the porcelain-topped kitchen table. I had given a copy to my old friend and summer neighbor Ralph Bell, who had been in my Michigan class and was a stage and radio actor now. His wife, Pert Kelton, older than Ralph, had been born into show business, had been in the Ziegfeld Follies, and was an opera singer as well as a Broadway comedienne. She became the first TV wife of Jackie Gleason on his Honeymooners show, the original Mrs. Kramden. She read my play and said it was a big one, “like an opera,” and that compliment, along with the wide-eyed look of wonder in her face, strengthened me against Shumlin’s rejection. Pert, to whom Charlie Chaplin had presented his famous bowler and cane back in the twenties as tokens of his admiration for her imitation of him in the Follies, had a raw backstage wit and a caustic laugh. She was studying Christian Science, trying to cure herself of epileptic seizures. In that summer of 1946 we couldn’t have guessed that four or five years later, as the nationally known female star of the country’s biggest hit TV program, she would be notified by telegram—in a Chicago hospital bed where she was recovering from a minor illness—that she had been fired from the show. As a long series of inquiries finally revealed, the cause was that Ralph had once participated in a May Day parade, many years before. Ralph, I knew, had had absolutely no leftist connections whatever but had simply thrown himself in with a gang of actors protesting whatever it was that year, and Pert had never even voted in her life.
It was a situation not dissimilar to Untermeyer’s, and the brutal coldness with which she had been thrown down, as it were, to hit the concrete frightened her so deeply that she always thereafter seemed to have a reserve of furtiveness, even though she continued rather successfully in the theatre and in films long after the blacklisting madness had died away. In 19461 do not think we could have believed that such a blacklist was possible, that the current of one’s life and career could simply be switched off and the wires left dead.
As I mentioned, I had also sent the play to glamorous Leland Hayward, my agent at least in name. There was no response at all. After a weekor so I went to his offices, only to be told that he hadn’t read it, was in California, and could not be reached. To his anxious secretary I announced that I wanted all my old scripts back then and there and that I was leaving the agency. I mention this at all because it tells me that I had somewhere found a certain confidence that I could no longer be stopped. It may merely have been the pride of desperation, but I actually gathered up the scripts of my earlier plays and off I went. Not, however, before the secretary convinced me to leave the new play for a Miss Brown to read.
Kay Brown would be my agent for very nearly forty years. She phoned me next day in Port Jefferson to tell me that the play was terrific and that she would be honored to handle it and had some ideas about where to send it now that Shumlin had turned it down. Mary and Jane and I were moving back to New York that very day. I pushed the pedal down on the old Nash-Lafayette two-door, which was crammed with Jane’s crib and toys and our stuff, and blew a tire as we came off the Southern State Parkway. Like a sign of good things to come, there was a tire store twenty yards away where I bought a new one for twelve dollars, an expense I really could not afford.
I had heard of Elia Kazan and of course of Harold Clurman, who had been one of the heads of the Group Theatre and its most literate figure. The Group had vanished five years before, and they had recently started up a partnership to produce plays commercially. Kay thought they might be interested, as well as the Theatre Guild. In a day or two both organizations wanted to option All My Sons.
The Guild’s head, Theresa Helburn, had a claim on my loyalties because it was she who had been the chief officer of the Bureau of New Plays when it had selected me for a national award back in 1937. And the Guild had been O’Neill’s initial producer, although in recent years its reputation was rather more glamorously “theatrical” than I felt comfortable with.
Kazan and Clurman, in contrast, ha
d been among the creators of that thirties mixture of Stanislavsky and social protest which was the real glamour to me. The choice of their new organization did not take me long to make, but I was not prepared to be asked which of them I wanted as director. Clurman, it was my impression, had been the Group’s chief thinker; he had directed all of Odets in the thirties and was already a legendary figure to outsiders like me. Kazan, however, was said to be the more aggressive and vital director although he was younger than Clurman, his mentor, and had fewer credits. By this time I knew many actors, and the picture they were giving out was of a Clurman who might be inspired but could often fumble, and a Kazan who was wily and could punch directly to the point with actors.
Naturally, to meet both of them in their offices with the purpose of choosing between them was heady stuff. If such a thing as a directorial expert existed, here were two of the greatest. I suppose I loved them both after the first five awkward minutes. They were heaping compliments on the play and were grateful I had chosen them over the Guild, already a triumph for their new company. The energy in the air was fierce. Kazan grinned under his enormous nose, his head tilted down like a fighter’s, and Clurman leaned back rubbing his hands together as though about to sit down to a roast turkey. The place was simply happy. And it was eager. This was a time when it was still imagined that with the possible exception of a doctor saving a life, writing a worthy play was the most important thing a human being could do.
It was just about ten years since I had asked Jim Doll across the hall how long an act normally lasted. In those Depression times Harold Clurman had come forward as a priest of a new kind of theatre that would cry down injustice and heal the sick nation’s spirit. Kazan had played in Waiting for Lefty, and I had seen him in Golden Boy as Fuseli, the gangster who appears in the doorway of the gym and, watching Luther Adler punch a bag, leans menacingly far forward without raising his heels and says, “I want a piece of that boy.” Ah, what glamour, what hard and clear strokes of theatrical characterization! And here were both of them fairly lusting after my play. I had arrived.
I had led a nearly isolated life, still turning out the occasional radio play to pay the bills and working every day on All My Sons until it seemed as tight as a drum. It was exhilarating, as it usually is the first time around, merely to come to the production office on East Fifty-seventh Street every morning to watch Clurman and Kazan interviewing actors. Of course none seemed to resemble “real” people like the ones I had modeled the characters on, the young women being too beautiful and the young men too handsome; even when they looked ordinary they had the performer’s charge of energy that normal people lacked. I feared artificiality taking over. And I suppose I learned more about the theatre in that five or six weeks of casting than I ever would again.
Kazan’s capacity to objectify actors’ personalities was really an exercise in clinical psychology. At one and the same instant he could seem intimately and lovingly involved with an actor while standing back to gauge the impression he might make in the role. Those we ended up with he had known or observed onstage before, so there was no real question of acting ability. Clurman, smelling like a barbershop, took charge of interviewing the ladies, a daily toil that filled him with a zest and happiness that all but foamed. He seemed never to notice a woman’s flaws, only her good points—she might have two pairs of ears, but then again she had terrific legs or fantastic eyes or an engaging laugh. Walter Fried, their cigar-smoking business manager, himself not immune to the parade of females passing his desk, added his lisping anticipation of a hit to the prayers of Clurman, who, as soon as the office was empty, would have his young secretary, another of his adoring worshipers, on her knees buffing his shoes while he rubbed his hands gleefully together, laughed unscrupulously, and commanded God, “I want a hit, a hit!”
This diktat had its own historic significance in 1947, for it was flung at the memory of the always impoverished Group Theatre years, which with this commercial production were officially declared over and done with. Now each part would go to the most fitting and attractive actor rather than being cast out of the Group itself, which had sometimes been more necessary than desirable. Clurman was also acknowledging a new realism about theatre; this play would ask for no allowances from a clique audience willing to overlook some dull stretches for the sake of artistic or social points. Despite his apparent—at least to me—disappointment at not having been chosen to direct it, Clurman, in one of his uncontrollable seizures of enthusiasm, would suddenly bang the flat of his hand down on a desk and stand up and yell, “Goddamit, this play is built !”
Kazan, who had been Clurman’s stage manager in the Group and still saw him as the father-master, was no less hot about the possibilities of success but was far more calculating, remorselessly grasping an objectifying view at whatever cost. What counted was what came over to the audience, no excuses and no mercy to be expected. Clurman’s mind implicitly appealed to some high court of culture at whose feet he lay his offerings of artistry; if he failed in the real theatre, he could find solace in a transcendent judgment of his work’s higher, if mundanely unappreciated, value. Kazan looked to the sky only for weather, not supportive judgments, and it was more training than directing that his actors got from him. He pointed an actor and then walked along beside him with an arm over his shoulder in a gentle embrace of steel. “Casting is ninety-five percent of it,” he would say, for the audience knows only what it sees and hears, not what author or director have tried to set before it. He drove the actors relentlessly in All My Sons, as I had driven myself in the writing. At one rehearsal he pressed Karl Maiden—as the outraged lawyer son of the unjustly imprisoned partner of Joe Keller—closer and closer to such an actual explosion of emotions that he burst onto the stage and stood facing the actress playing his sister, Lois Wheeler, unable to speak at all, swaying dizzily and nearly collapsing. Kazan was thereupon satisfied that he had hit Maiden’s outer limits of indignation.
Likewise with Arthur Kennedy, whose sweet idealism in the first act must turn to murderous anger at the climax of the second, a scene Kazan knew would make or break the play. He had staged it so that Ed Begley, the guilty father, was sitting remorsefully with head in hands just as Kennedy brought his fist down on his back. After much rehearsal Begley’s back was very painful and he had to strap a rubber pad on under his jacket to protect himself, such was the closeness to reality of the emotions in that production.
Approaching the height of his powers, Kazan was eating fire in those days, working with great certainty and discretion. He had asked for one important excision, of a long speech by the doctor-neighbor lamenting the closing down of his youthful idealism—advice I resisted until I began to hear it, as Kazan had, as an authorial exercise rather than an authentic outgrowth of the play’s essential structure. He relied, although by no means as totally as was rumored, on his wife Molly’s analytic capacities in this. In my experience, she was very good at tracing the lines of force of a play’s story and character structures but sometimes tended to crop excrescences dangerously close to a play’s nerve. Kazan was far more the poet but was sometimes uncertain whether to unleash a play’s fancifulness or scramble back for safety to its main plot lines. In a sense, nevertheless, and not only in the theatre, Molly was his conscience, a figure he had both to rely on and to slyly evade on occasion.
Life in a Kazan production had that hushed air of conspiracy I’ve described before, a conspiracy not only against the existing theatre but society, capitalism—in fact, everybody who was not part of the production. People kept coming up to whisper in his ear, and they were whispering in each other’s ears too, with sideways glances. It was all new to me and immensely challenging, even if I could hardly guess what it was all about. What I did feel was a love for this man in his insatiable rooting out of the least weakness. You knew you were on the first team and that the idea was to win, and no margin of safety was too great. The audience was an enemy that had to be overwhelmed and dominated like a woma
n, and only then loved. The path to victory was opened up by clarity about the play’s mission, its reason for existing, as well as about the actor’s motives and the shape of his personality and talent. But Kazan’s was no mere technical virtuosity; from the Group and its Russian and European antecedents, he had learned that a theatrical production is, or should be, a slice through the thickness of the culture from which it emerges, and that it is speaking not only to its audience but to other plays, to painting and dance, to music and to all forms of human expression by which at any moment we read our time. And so he would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to read a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, and another he would simply kiss. And more, though he never mentioned political people or ideas, it was assumed that he identified himself with the idealism of the left and that his emotional and intellectual loyalties lay with the workers and the simple and the poor. Like Odets, he wore the fading colors of the thirties into the forties and fifties, the resonances of the culture of antifascism that had once united artists everywhere in the world.
Even in 1947, however, one undersood that Kazan stood alone in this implicitly principled ambience. His old friend and co-director Clurman, who had pretty much the same outlook on life and the theatre, never offered either his personal comradeship beyond the theatre’s walls or any kind of political example. Harold tacitly let you know that he was on the train for as long as he could bear it but that his interests might prompt him to get off a stop or two before yours. Oddly, while Kazan on the whole was warm but quiet onstage, Harold could rant and shriek and literally howl to the flies, but his enthusiasms would never make him forget a dinner date. At the same time, without mentioning it to anyone, he would visit a sick or unstable actor and hold his hand for a couple of hours. But work for him was work, and he was careful not to promise any more of himself than he could deliver—perhaps a little less. Clurman’s selfishness, in short, he wore on his sleeve along with his loving heart.
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