August 14, 1963—With his critical reputation in
decline and his onetime Old Left colleagues shunning him for betrayal, Clifford Odets, a prolific and popular
playwright of 1930s Broadway, died at age 57 of colon cancer in Los Angeles,
not far from the film colony that for the last 20 years had paid him handsomely
even as it took pieces of his soul.
Lest you feel I’m being a mite melodramatic with
that last phrase, let me point out that Odets had done so himself in his 1949
drama, The Big Knife (I posted about the Roundabout Theatre revival several weeks ago), where murder is just one of the sins depicted.
Moreover, the title character of the Coen brothers’ 1991 movie Barton Fink finds that Hell is literally
a Hollywood hotel (to which this playwright with the Odets social conscience
and resume and the George S. Kaufman hairdo has fled to overcome writers’ block).
Even before encountering the real Hell, Fink—lured
to Hollywood after a single successful play—finds himself in what seems the
very embodiment of it: writing, for studio star Wallace Beery, a screenplay
about boxing, a sport he knows nothing about.
The scorn heaped by the Coen brothers on their
hapless hero, however, was nothing compared with the self-loathing felt by
Odets. At least Beery could act. Not so Elvis Presley, the star of Odets’ last
film credit, Wild in the Country
(1961). And Odets, the son of Jewish immigrants, who made his name as the voice
of urban America, must have felt just as unmoored as Fink grinding out a boxing
screenplay when he took on his last writing assignment a year before his death:
the Richard Boone TV Western, Have Gun,
Will Travel.
In Some Time
in the Sun, Tom Dardis took a nuanced approach to the traditional tale of
how Hollywood twisted the likes of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Agee, Huxley, and West.
Odets might conform to the stereotype of the misused artist better. To be sure,
he had a couple of successes: Sweet Smell
of Success (1957), a masterful collaboration with Ernest Lehman on a powerful
Winchell-like gossip columnist, and None
But the Lonely Heart (1944), which provided Cary Grant with perhaps his
best dramatic role. Yet much of his time was spent frustratingly on projects
where he never received screen credit (e.g., dialogue for the Grant-Bergman
love scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious).
Among Odets’ final projects was a musical version of
perhaps his greatest Broadway success, Golden
Boy. That drama of an up-from-the-streets young man with opposing talents
for music and boxing starkly posed the choice between art and commercialism,
good and evil—and, many critics (often, former friends) believed,
foretold Odets' own fate.
Especially crucial in this regard was Odets’ 1953 testimony
before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). For the last six years,
after having been identified as a Communist, Odets had fallen squarely within
the committee’s sights, and it soon became clear that his brief but intense
association with Marxism in the mid-1930s had been extensively recorded. The
playwright-screenwriter’s attempt to soften the impact of his testimony, by
only informing on those named by others, could not disguise the fact that he
had capitulated, even while the likes of Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman had,
famously, not done so.
In the early 1940s, when he had walked away from his
associates in the Group Theatre to go to Hollywood, many old friends believed
he had betrayed his gifts by forsaking his dream of socially relevant theater.
A decade later, they could point to the HUAC testimony as a second, more personal betrayal.
For years, Odets had been a tortured soul. New Yorker critic John Lahr, in as fine and sympathetic a treatment as the
playwright has received from any critic in the last couple of decades, notes
that Odets had tried suicide three times before the age of 25. While married to
Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer, he had been so jealous of her friendship with
Albert Einstein that he had cut to shreds a photo of the scientist. Now, with his
HUAC testimony, the anguish became less overt, but still consumed him from
within.
Odets’ harsher critics depict a man too addicted to
the creature comforts of Hollywood to embrace principle at the height of the
blacklist, but the case was not that simple. By the time of his testimony, it
had become abundantly clear that his six-year-old daughter had severe
developmental issues that required extended psychiatric treatment. During these
years, his divorce from wife Bette Grayson (then the latter’s death a couple of
years later) meant that his family expenses had mounted significantly.
The past several years have brought to New York
stages revivals of some of his better-known works: Golden Boy, The Country Girl,
Awake and Sing, and The Big Knife. While it is good that modern audiences now have a chance once again to decide for themselves the
ultimate value of his work, the quality of those productions has varied enough
that we are still nowhere near a consensus on Odets' place in the American
theater landscape.
Even at the height of his fame, Odets sensed this
alienation. “I am homeless wherever I go, always lonely,” he wrote in his
journal in 1940, just before he headed out to Hollywood.
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