Fifties (43 page)

She was touched by him. She had a sense that his was not merely a worthy talent but a great one. In addition, as someone who had known nothing but affluence her whole life, she was touched by his poverty. At one point just as they were going into production, he told Ms. Selznick that he would waive all rights and royalties to the play
if he could just be guaranteed $250 a week for the rest of his life. But she told him she was certain that greater material wealth lay ahead for him.

For Ms. Selznick the primary job, and it quite terrified her, was to raise the $100,000 required to put on the play. Then she and Williams had to agree on a director. Williams wanted Kazan—he had seen Kazan’s production of Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons.
Kazan was uncertain whether to accept. In desperation, Williams wrote him a letter, pleading with him to take it: “I am sure that you must have had reservations about the script. I will try to clarify my intentions in this play. I think its best quality is its authenticity or its fidelity to life. There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other’s hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a corner to make a last desperate stand—but as a calculating bitch with ‘round heels.’ ... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition—all such distortions within our own egos—condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions in our
own
egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of
others
and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That’s how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other’s naked hearts. Such cases seem purely theoretical to me.”

That clinched it for Kazan. When he took the job, he was thirty-seven and just beginning to emerge as the most important young director in America, first in the theater and later in movies. With
Streetcar
’s success, he became a force on both Broadway and in Hollywood, the director that everyone wanted for any important production—especially one that challenged conventional morality. Tennessee Williams had been absolutely right. Kazan knew how to turn his poetic images into powerful drama. He could, his wife once said, make a hit out of the telephone book.

Like Williams, Elia Kazan was driven by his work and the need to excel, to avenge old slights. His autobiography, published in 1988, is a conquest-by-conquest record of his professional and personal success. It is an odd book, at once exceptionally honest and self-revealing and at the same time a bit like a locker-room boast in its many tales of sexual conquests. He had no use for the conventions
of American life; he was the outsider, the son of Greek immigrants. Of his home and its rules, only the address was American. “I come from a family of voyagers; my uncle and my father were transients, less from disposition than from necessity,” he wrote. “They were slippery, had to be. Raised in a world of memories, they grew up distrustful of fate. ‘Don’t worry,’ my uncle used to say, ‘everything will turn out bad.’ ... This instinct was in me at birth.”

Kazan and Williams, as different in manner and sexuality as two men could be, shared a sense of being different, Kazan thought. They got on so well, so naturally, because they were both, in Kazan’s phrase, “freaks.” What, after all, could be freakier in 1950s America than being the son of George Kazan—Yiorgos Kazanjioglou—who was not merely a Greek immigrant but a Greek immigrant who had grown up in Turkey, where Greeks had learned to dissemble as a way of life. George Kazan was a man of the old world, wary of the corruptions of the new. In the old world, women were bound by prearranged marriages. Mrs. Kazan had pleased her husband on their first meeting in Turkey by not suggesting, as so many of his friends had, that he shave off his mustache. “It’s fine, leave it,” she had said. “That’s the first thing I remember about her,” he later told his son. In his world the men set the rules; they worked, came home, were served dinner, and then played cards with their friends. When one of George Kazan’s American friends came to their home and made a remark about how nice Mrs. Kazan was, George answered, “She’s all right, minds her business.”

Yet early on, Athena Kazan entered into a conspiracy against her husband. The conspiracy was dangerous, for it involved the most sacred thing imaginable: the disposition of a male heir. Athena Kazan had made the journey to the new world, and while she might not have been able to save herself and determine her own fate, she intended to bestow upon her son some of the freedom for which the new world was famous. Her husband was preoccupied with business, so she took care of the schooling, sending her son to a Montessori school, which was not, so to speak, in the Turkish-Greek tradition. Then Mrs. Kazan joined with a high school teacher in a secret plan to send young Elia to Williams, a patrician liberal arts college, rather than a business school as her husband clearly preferred. Not a word of this was said to George Kazan, and in time Elia applied to Williams and was accepted. When Athena Kazan broke the news to George, he hit her in the mouth and knocked her to the ground. When Kazan came back from college for the first time during his freshman year, he found that his parents had begun to sleep in
separate bedrooms—a situation provoked by his father’s view that his wife had betrayed him in the matter of Elia’s education. When Elia described his courses, most of them in the humanities, George asked, “Why you not learning something useful?” His father, Elia knew, had probably given up on him long before. Once, working for his father during the summer, he had tried to fold a rug instead of rolling it. An uncle had yelled over to his father, “Hey, George, you got a dead one here!” The two worlds had diverged. He was no longer a Greek. The question was whether he was yet an American.

Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, was not a particularly hospitable place for the son of immigrants in those days. In the late twenties, it was a citadel of the American upper class. To Kazan everyone seemed tall, blond, and socially graceful. He was short, dark, and socially inept. Never before had he felt his foreignness so intensely nor had he ever felt so vulnerable because of it. He loved to watch the football players at games and at practice, and he even ate at a particular local short-order restaurant where they hung out so he could sit in the corner and admire them: “How confident they were, how glamorous, how awesome. They looked as if their glory would never die.” (Years later he returned to Williams as the famous movie director and found that the former football players now sought him out. One even confided how empty his life had been, and Kazan found that vengeance was his.)

At first he mistakenly believed he would be asked to join a fraternity. He was soon disabused of that notion; he would enter a fraternity the hard way, as someone who waited on tables. He found himself virtually friendless, and it seemed to him that days would pass without anyone talking to him. On the Williams campus, he deliberately chose routes that would spare him from meeting people. His only close relationship seemed to be with his mother, who dutifully shipped him his clean laundry once a week. He left Williams feeling farther than ever from the American dream: “Every time I saw privilege from then on I wanted to tear it down or possess it,” he wrote.

He went from college to Yale Drama School. It was an unlikely move; he had not been that interested in the theater previously, but one of his few friends from Williams, a young man named Alan Baxter, was going there. For lack of anything better to do, Kazan, who wanted no part of the traditional American business world, decided to try it too. It was a decision expedited by the fact that Yale had a job for someone who could operate a dishwashing machine. When George Kazan heard of this latest impractical decision on the
part of his hopeless son, he was appalled. “Four years over in Massachusetts there, looks like he learn nothing,” he told Elia’s brother.

At Yale he wanted to be an actor, but his looks were against him. But he was ambitious, and he quickly became skilled in the areas disdained by more affluent students—stagecraft and production. He could make things and fix things, do lighting, build sets. That was to be his trademark in the early days, and from it came his nickname, Gadge, is a diminutive of Gadget. His role as an outsider made him attractive in a way he did not understand; he brought a certain energy and purpose to everything he did. As a young man, noted his friend Clifford Odets, he seemed like a hungry wolf. He was never bored; he took nothing for granted. He married Molly Day Thacher, a Yale classmate, who appreciated the energy he brought to living; she thought him gifted and bedeviled. From a patrician family, she became his bridge to mainstream America. “Very high class,” George Kazan said of her in a somewhat dubious voice. “Looks like society.”

Not surprisingly, Kazan utterly rejected the prevailing vision of theater as a pleasant, mannerly place where handsome upper-class types acted out drawing-room plays. It bore no relevance to the world he saw around him. He signed on with the experimental Group Theater, a left-wing assemblage of talented, egocentric people in New York City who were trying at once to build a new theater and a new left-wing America at the same time. The dominant figures there were Harold Clurman, the great director-critic and Lee Strasberg, one of the foremost drama teachers of his time. When Kazan went for his audition with Clurman and Strasberg, the latter had turned to him and asked, “Tell us what you want.” “What I want is your job,” Kazan answered. On ego alone Kazan qualified. The Group was nothing if not a place for ideas and adventure. By instinct, the people there were rebellious; they were out to break rules.

At the height of the Depression and the height of his own personal dissidence, Kazan also joined the Communist party for a brief time. But he was much too iconoclastic and original to be a dutiful member of the Party. He saw himself as a working-class radical whereas in truth, as he later noted, no one could have been more middle-class. Work was, he later wrote, his drug. “It held me together. It kept me together. When I wasn’t working I didn’t know who I was or what I was supposed to do.... Work made it impossible for me to dwell on my personal problems. I forgot them. As soon as I stop work, my uncertainties swarm back—even now with all the flattery I’ve received.”

“All they want is a stagehand,” complained Molly Kazan of the Group leadership. “Okay, I’ll be a stagehand,” he answered. Eventually, he began to get small roles. Again he ran into a ceiling because of his looks. “What I could play successfully was a man-boy, angry at the world and turned to violence,” he noted.

Then Robert Ardrey, a young playwright in the Group, asked him to direct his play. Kazan had already begun to develop his own vision of what theater should be. The professionals at Yale were inadequate because they came to the theater without vision and emotion; the people at the Group were inadequate because they were all emotion but no craft. “I,” he wrote, “could bring these two opposite and often conflicting traditions together, as they should be brought together.”

Of his talent there was no doubt from the start. He had a genius for bringing drama out on the page, for finding the emotion in words. Because he was the outsider, he saw challenge and conflict where others did not. When World War Two started, there were fewer directors around. Soon he was being asked to handle increasingly important plays. In December 1941 he was offered Thornton Wilder’s new play,
The Skin of Our Teeth.

The play featured Fredric March, Florence Eldridge March, Tallulah Bankhead, and a young actor named Montgomery Clift. Characteristically, Ms. Bankhead was a source of constant dissidence. She unrelentingly tried to provoke Kazan. Finally, he blew. “I won’t take any more of your shit,” he told her. Later he was sure that was the making of him as a director. The play was a great success; now even Hollywood wanted him. He had won. He had created his own version of the American dream.

When he started on
Streetcar,
he had thought of conventional casting and offered the part to John Garfield, the quintessential craggy but tough good guy. But Garfield set down terms that were impossible: He would play Kowalski for only four months, and he demanded a guarantee of the movie role. Kazan thought it was Garfield’s somewhat polite Hollywood way of saying he did not want the part. That brought him to Brando. Kazan had used him for a bit part in a play called
Truckline
and had witnessed the raw sexual energy he projected onstage. He began thinking of him as Stanley. But a traditional audition was out of the question. Kazan already knew Brando well enough to know that he needed time to absorb the essence of a role. He had a bad reputation for auditions, where he mumbled and strayed emotionally. An additional problem was that Brando, at twenty-four, was significantly younger than the Stanley
that Williams had envisioned. Since Brando disdained telephone ownership, Kazan had to send out word through the Village underground that he was searching for the actor. Then he passed him the script. At first Brando was uneasy with it; he hated the Kowalski character—it was just the kind of male brutality that offended him. He tried to call Kazan and tell him he didn’t want the part, but he was unable to get through. But there was a power to the play that was irresistible. Finally, they got in touch. “Well, what is it, yes or no?” Kazan asked. Yes, said Brando. Kazan lent him twenty dollars and sent him to do an informal reading for Williams, then in Provincetown.

Three days later Kazan called Williams to see what he thought of the young actor he had sent up. “What actor?” Williams asked. Brando had not yet shown up. He had used the borrowed money to eat and, in the company of a girlfriend, was hitchhiking up. He finally arrived in the middle of a crisis. Williams’s plumbing was clogged, the toilet was overflowing, and the electricity was out because a fuse had blown. In came Brando, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. Men in blue jeans and T-shirts knew how to fix toilets (or at least they did back then), and he unclogged the plumbing and put in a new fuse. “He was about the best-looking young man I had ever seen with one or two exceptions,” Williams later wrote. Having performed like Stanley Kowalski in real life, Brando thereupon gave an exceptional reading as well; Williams was in awe. His friend Margo Jones, a Dallas producer, yelled, “Get Kazan on the phone right away! This is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard—in or outside of Texas!” A day later Williams called Kazan, so enthusiastic as to be “near hysteria.” Brando was in. Back in New York City, he tried to insult Mrs. Selznick by putting down the world of Hollywood. But she remained immune to his provocation, and she signed him to the part at $550 a week.