 About the Author
Clifford Odets
Clifford Odets was born in Philadelphia on July
18, 1906 the son of Louis Gorodetsky, a first generation Russian Jewish
peddler and printer. In 1908, the family moved to the Bronx and enjoyed
moderate financial success. In spite of his relatively comfortable
situation, Odets described himself as a "melancholy kid" who
frequently fought with his father and dropped out of high school after just
two years.
In 1923 at age 17, Clifford Odets plunged head first
into the world of the theatre. He joined The Drawing Room Players and
Harry Kemp's Poets' Theatre as well as writing radio plays, doing summer
stock, and hitting the Vaudeville circuit as the "Roving Reciter."
In 1929, Odets was hired as the understudy to Spencer
Tracy in the play CONFLICT on Broadway. Odets moved to Manhattan
and it was shortly thereafter that he came into contact with the Group
Theatre.
THE GROUP THEATRE.
Harold Clurman, Cheryl
Crawford, and Lee Strasberg founded the Group
Theatre in the summer of 1931 around the
discipline of "Method Acting." Method Acting was the
Group Theatre's American adaptation of the techniques of groundbreaking Russian
Actor/Director Konstantin Stanislavsky who trained actors to genuinely feel
every emotion they portrayed on stage.
The principles of Method Acting would
ultimately revolutionize acting in the Twentieth Century (Marlon
Brando, Paul
Newman, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Dennis Hopper and many other of today's most
famous actors are products of the Group Theatre's teachings). But the
Founders of the Group Theatre were out to shake up much more than just the art
world. Their "Method" demanded that they portray real life, the
troubled life of their times: its issues,
its conflicts, its dreams. The Group focused on new plays that dared to rage
against suffering and agitated for a more just
society.
With great excitement, Clifford Odets joined the
Group in late 1931 seeing it as a creative rebirth -- "From the ashes,
the phoenix," he proudly declared.
But the Group didn't quite
know what to do with the 25-year-old kid. “No one thought
much of him as an actor except Clifford himself,” Group Member Elia
Kazan wrote in his memoirs. Odets was very
disappointed to find himself relegated to minor roles with little stage time
(it has been speculated that the reason why so many of Odets' plays involve
such large casts with such an even distribution of lines is because of the
empathy he developed for bit actors during this period of his life).
THE PLAYWRIGHT EMERGES.
In 1932, Odets first tried his hand at playwriting
with little success. As his financial situation continued to worsen, his
interest in social and political issues grew. In 1934, Odets joined the
Communist Party. It was at this time that he started work on the play
that would ultimately come to be called AWAKE AND SING while sharing a
railroad flat with Elia Kazan on West 57th Street. According to
Kazan, the room was so small that "Cliff had to type with his
typewriter -- nicknamed 'Ambition Corona' -- balanced on his knees."
After completing his first full-length play in the
summer of 1934, Odets decided to write a drama based on a strike of New York
City cabdrivers that had taken place just a few months earlier. He
interviewed many actual participants in the strike and then sat down to
write. Just three days later he had completed a One-Act Play entitled WAITING
FOR LEFTY.
LEFTY'S DEBUT.
On January 5, 1935, Odets at last got one of his
plays performed for the world. WAITING FOR LEFTY was presented at
the Civic Theatre under the direction of Sanford Meisner (Strasburg refused to
have anything to do with the play) as a one-night-only fund-raiser for the New
Theatre Magazine with a cast that featured Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, and the
playwright himself.
Within two minutes of the play's opening lines, the
audience began to clap. “Line after line brought applause, whistles,
bravos, and heartfelt shouts of kinship,” Clurman wrote. Kazan --
after directing the premières of some of the greatest works of the American
Theatre -- looked back on the opening of WAITING FOR LEFTY and said: “It
was the most overwhelming reception I’ve ever heard in the theatre.”
When the play was over, applause lasted for a
record-breaking twenty-eight curtain calls. Working class members of the
audience stormed onto the stage overjoyed. They hoisted Odets up on their
shoulders and carried him around in celebration for almost a full hour.
Members of the Longshoreman's Union in attendance spontaneously declared
themselves on strike -- no specific demands, no plan of action, just an
outright celebration of workers' power!
According to Clurman, it was “the birth cry of
the thirties. Our youth had found its voice.” Kazan wrote, “None
of us was ever to be the same again, and I suppose we all knew it. But
we had no idea how far and how fast this change would go. Cliff was to
become a god.”
THAT METEORIC RISE.
By the end of 1935, Odets was one of the most
celebrated playwrights in America. Only 28 years old, he found his
picture on the cover of Time Magazine while the New Yorker Magazine declared
him "Revolution's No. 1 Boy."
A Nation outraged at the degradations of the
Great Depression had found a champion. In the plays that followed, Odets
spoke out unflinchingly for the working man and the struggles of the
underdog. Each new work railed against the evils of exploitation,
prejudice, war-mongering, and class discrimination. “New art work
should shoot bullets,” he brazenly declared.
With AWAKE AND SING opening in February of
1935, a full production of WAITING FOR LEFTY appearing on a double-bill
with Odets' other new one-act play TILL THE DAY I DIE in March, and
then the opening of PARADISE LOST in September, Odets became the first
and -- still to this day -- only playwright in the history of Broadway to
debut four plays in the same year.
“An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the
presses, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves,”
Playwright Arthur Miller wrote in his memoir TIMEBENDS. “In
Marxism was magic, and Odets had the wand.” Odets was well aware
of the magic at his command. “Now not only was I a man with a
ten-million-dollar arm but I could really direct the ball now just where it
wanted to go,” he said.
But there was a downside to all this success.
Odets was suddenly the Group Theatre’s cash cow and he immediately felt the
expectation to provide a calf every season. “I dropped this calf and some
people would rush up and grab it, wipe it off and take it away and I would be
left there bellowing,” he recalled. “I would let them do it
but with a great deal of resentment. They had to have those veal chops
on the table.”
DECADENCE AND THE LURE OF HOLLYWOOD.
In the early 1930s, a poverty-stricken Odets had
once written to a friend, “All I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a
phonograph, some records.” A national celebrity by 1936, he
suddenly had more material success than he knew what to do with -- a penthouse
apartment in Greenwich Village, a brand new Cadillac, and a very expensive
collection of modern art.
After only a year's membership, Odets quit the
Communist Party as impulsively as he had joined it.
Increasingly disenchanted by the in-fighting within
the Group Theatre, Odets turned to Hollywood writing his first film script, THE
GENERAL DIED AT DAWN, in 1936. While he returned to Broadway
to debut THE GOLDEN BOY in 1937 and again in 1938 for ROCKET TO THE
MOON, Odets' focus steadily shifted to the silver screen. After his
marriage to two-time Academy Award-winning Actress Luise Rainer ended
bitterly, Odets moved to Los Angeles in 1940 and would not move back to New
York for over two decades.
Now completely removed from his blue collar roots,
surrounded by the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Odets' time was spent more
and more on trivial diversions -- fancy meals, clothes, alcohol, cars,
affairs. He was well aware of his own self-indulgence. In
his 1940 Memoir THE TIME IS RIPE, Odets confessed “There are
contradictory pulls -- one to live with tightened discipline, sharp, hard and
cold; the other to go hotly and passionately to hell as fast and as fully as
possible.” In a chilling passage addressed to himself, he wrote “You
will never conquer the MORAL MAN within you!
You are trying to kill him, but he will not permit it; he will murder you with
regret and anguish first.”
This decadent lifestyle took its toll on Odets'
writing. Throughout the 1940s, his work dealt less and less with the
poor and oppressed characters that had until then been his bread and
butter. His writing became much more personal, apolitical, and somber. The
"bullets" that filled his earlier plays gradually
disappeared.
THE TIDE TURNS.
Of course it wasn't just Odets who had
changed. The 1940s brought the end of the Great Depression and the
outbreak of World War II. A nation that was once eager to discuss
poverty and injustice at home, quickly turned its attention to the war abroad.
And when the war was over, the Cold War began and anti-Communist
rhetoric became the order of the day.
With McCarthyism on the rise, the House on
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched its investigations into "Communist
infiltration in the entertainment industry" in 1947. The Red
Scare was on and it was only a matter of time before HUAC would come after "Revolution's
No. 1 Boy."
While he offered personal support to friends who were
investigated by HUAC -- even delivering the eulogy for his blacklisted friend
and former Group Theatre colleague Morris Carnovsky saying "It was the
blacklist that killed him" -- Odets shied away from speaking out
publicly against the blacklist. When called before HUAC in 1952, the
once brash playwright found he could not practice the same defiance that his
plays had preached. Like other former Group Theatre Members Elia Kazan
and Lee J. Cobb before him, Odets named names to the Committee and returned
from Washington a broken man.
“He was never the same after he testified,”
Kazan wrote. “He was no longer the hero-rebel, the fearless prophet
of a new world. It choked
off the voice he’d had.”
AND SO IT ENDS.
Clifford Odets died of colon cancer on August 14,
1963 at just 57 years of age. Shortly after his death, Elia Kazan
proclaimed that “The tragedy of our times in the theatre is the tragedy
of Clifford Odets.”
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