On April 17th, to mark the centennial of the birth of the playwright Clifford Odets, Lincoln Center Theatre will open a new production of “Awake and Sing!,” Odets’s first full-length play and the one that made him a literary superstar in 1935, at the age of twenty-eight. In the years that followed, this magazine dubbed Odets “Revolution’s No. 1 Boy”; Time put his face on its cover; Cole Porter rhymed his name in song (twice); and Walter Winchell coined the word “Bravodets!” “Of all people, you Clifford Odets are the nearest to understand or feel this American reality,” his friend the director Harold Clurman wrote in 1938, urging him “to write, write, write—because we need it so much.” “You are the Man,” Clurman told him.
Odets died, of colon cancer, on August 14, 1963, a month after his fifty-seventh birthday. Nine weeks later, in a high-ceilinged hall above a kosher restaurant, Elia Kazan, the artistic director of the newly minted Lincoln Center Repertory, convened the first rehearsal of the company’s first play, Arthur Miller’s “After the Fall.” As Kazan rose to address the gathered theatricals—among them Miller himself, who had been influenced by Odets’s “unashamed word joy”—Odets was much on his mind. Throughout the early thirties, Kazan and Odets, as members of the Group Theatre, had been sidekicks and disgruntled warriors in the same artistic battles. Kazan had shared Odets’s dreams of greatness and of change; they had also shared a railroad flat on West Fifty-seventh Street—the apartment, “saturated with disappointment,” Kazan later said, where Odets wrote “Awake and Sing!,” in a room so small that his typewriter, which he nicknamed Ambition Corona, had to rest on his lap. Kazan had been among the players who shouted “Strike, strike, strike!” at the finale of “Waiting for Lefty,” Odets’s one-act agitprop salvo heard around the world in 1935. He had appeared in Odets’s first Broadway hit, “Golden Boy,” and in his last play for the Group Theatre, “Night Music.” He had also been a regular visitor in Hollywood, where Odets spent the last two decades of his life writing screenplays that he referred to as “fudge” and “candy pie,” and, in films such as “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957) and plays, later made into movies, such as “The Big Knife” (1949) and “The Country Girl” (1950), mining the legend of his own collapse.
“The tragedy of our times in the theatre is the tragedy of Clifford Odets,” Kazan began, before defending his late friend against the accusations of failure that had appeared in his obituaries. “His plan, he said, was to . . . come back to New York and get [some new] plays on. They’d be, he assured me, the best plays of his life. . . . Cliff wasn’t ‘shot.’ . . . The mind and talent were alive in the man.” On his deathbed, at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, according to Kazan, Odets had “raised his fist for the last time in his characteristic, self-dramatizing way and said, ‘Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!’ ”
Odets had not always resisted the notion of death. By the time he was twenty-five, he had tried to kill himself three times. He was a man of intemperate romantic emotion, haunted by a sense of doom and of transcendence. “I am homeless wherever I go, always lonely,” he wrote at the height of his early fame, in his fascinating 1940 journal, published under the title “The Time Is Ripe.”
The first child of three, he was born in 1906, in Philadelphia, to ill-matched first-generation immigrant parents. Pearl Geisinger had emigrated from Romania when she was eight. At sixteen, she was married off to Lou Odets, a pathological powerhouse from Russia, whose cocksureness was contradicted by the modesty of his achievement. Sixteen months later, Pearl gave birth to Clifford. Her life was a history of abdication and lamentation. Trapped, voiceless, and chronically exhausted by her children—her second child, Genevieve, was crippled by polio—Pearl salted away pennies from her family allowance for an “escape fund,” which she kept in her sewing basket. (By the time she died, in 1935, she had amassed the considerable sum of three thousand dollars.) “Make a break or spend the rest of your life in a coffin,” a character in “Awake and Sing!” pleads to his unhappily married lover. In the play, the woman leaves her family to claim her desires; Pearl never did. Instead, she incarcerated herself at home, cleaning obsessively (she was nicknamed Sanitary Pearl) and enduring her husband’s mockery and philandering, punishing him sometimes with days of silence.
According to Margaret Brenman-Gibson, in the superb biography “Clifford Odets, American Playwright,” the family atmosphere was so deadly that the children “dreaded bringing friends home.” After Genevieve’s illness, when Odets was four, “no one could recall seeing Pearl kiss him.” “She wanted to be consoled,” Odets later wrote. “So did I. She was lonely, distressed and aggrieved; so was I. As a child, I expected to be petted, brought in (not cast out), consoled, and comforted; and she begrudgingly would do none of these things for me; she was, after all, a child herself.” He added, “Any autumn will come, and dusk, and when I am one hundred and one, my heart will hurt that when the streets were cold and dark that, entering the house, my mother did not take me in her arms.”
Lou, “the business hound,” as Odets called him, was no more biddable. Eradicating all hints of the Old World from his speech and his story, the go-getting Lou insisted that he was “born American.” He changed his name from Gorodetsky—“city man,” in Russian—and added a middle initial, inviting people to address him as L.J., which he felt was a more commanding, all-American moniker. L.J. began his career as a feeder in a print shop and soon rose to own a series of small businesses in Philadelphia and New York; he was also the author of a book called “How to Smooth the Selling Path.” A disciple of “the theology of making a fast buck,” as Odets put it in “Sweet Smell of Success,” L.J. never felt the need to apologize for his rapacity. He wanted to be, he said, “a big man—number one.” To his son, he was “a two-bit czar,” a blowhard with “the insane belief that he must pass on (approve or modify) everything the other person is doing.” “I had to fight him every inch of the way not to be swamped and engulfed, to stay alive,” Odets wrote.
Even when Odets was an adult, L.J. continued to belittle him as “big boy.” “My father [is] driving nails into my head,” Odets wrote to a friend. Although he offered L.J. substantial financial assistance—between 1935 and 1950, he gave him more than a hundred thousand dollars—the harangues continued. Trying to persuade Odets to employ him as his manager in 1935, L.J. wrote, “Tell me young man, where have you gotten all the experience in the world, you think you have? I have seen men that was raised higher than you, and then seen them drop lower than that. . . . Yes, you are still the ‘White Hope’ but you are dropping.” When, in 1937, L.J. learned that Odets had separated from Luise Rainer, the two-time Academy Award-winning actress, with whom he had a tempestuous three-year marriage, he sounded off in all his brutishness: “I’m ashamed of you. You are the dummist chunk of humanity I have ever come in contact with. . . . Your all ass backwards and sitting on your brains.” Odets internalized this constant excoriation, berating himself in his journal as a “pig,” a “pissant,” an “idiot,” a “loafer,” and “twice an ass.” He wrote, “It is the father you have incorporated, his characteristics and hated elements—that is the father to be afraid of!” L.J.’s toxic voice also found its way into some of Odets’s most seductive stage villains—the gangsters Eddie Fuseli (“Golden Boy”), Kewpie (“Paradise Lost”), and Moe Axelrod (“Awake and Sing!”), the womanizer Mr. Prince (“Rocket to the Moon”), and the Hollywood mogul Marcus Hoff (“The Big Knife”).
As a child, Odets sought refuge from his humiliation in dreams of public heroism. “All my boyhood and youth I thought of the word nobility and what it meant,” he wrote. An autodidact who read twelve books a week, Odets was especially moved by Victor Hugo, whom he called “the mother of my literary heart.” Hugo “inspired me, made me aspire,” he noted. “I . . . longed to do heroic deeds with my bare hands, thirsted to be kind to people, particularly the weak and humble and oppressed. From Hugo I had my first feeling of social consciousness.” Initially, and perhaps inevitably, as the child of histrionic parents, Odets gravitated to performing. He was, he recollected, “wild . . . to get my name in front of the public,” “to get into people’s love.” Among his first jobs after school was to spin records on New York’s WBNY, offering “custom-made commentary” and using the exposure to finagle the free theatre tickets that made him the city’s “youngest critic,” according to Winchell. At seventeen, Odets got his first professional acting job.
When Odets joined the Group Theatre, eight years later, in 1931, he saw it as a creative rebirth—“from the ashes the phoenix,” he wrote. He had spent the intervening years as a journeyman actor in an American theatre that was still in its teething stages—poor scripts, poor training, poor conditions. “I live low . . . low low low, deep in the stink and slime,” he wrote in “910 Eden Street” (1931), an early, autobiographical stab at playwriting. There were times when he existed, he said, on ten cents a day; he holed up in squalid, bug-infested hotels, surviving for months on a diet of shredded wheat and cans of herring. For the most part, his artistic ambitions far exceeded his opportunities. “It is a very horrible thing, having energies and no wagon to hitch them to,” he wrote to a friend.
The Group was that wagon. Founded by three theatrical idealists—Clurman, the director Lee Strasberg, and the producer Cheryl Crawford—the company was an attempt to redefine the nature of American theatre and to restore dignity to the acting profession. With its emphasis on Stanislavsky’s Method and on the notion of a performing collective, it answered Odets’s artistic desire to merge with something larger than himself. (“I have begun to eat the flesh and blood of the Group,” he wrote in the daybook of the Group’s first summer program. “I am passionate about this thing!!!”) The Group’s embrace of Odets, however, was tentative. “No one thought much of him as an actor except Clifford himself,” Kazan wrote in his memoir, “Elia Kazan: A Life.” Certainly, Clurman and Strasberg were not overwhelmed. But, finally, Clurman played his hunch. “Let’s have him,” he said. “Something is cooking with that man. I don’t know if it’s potato pancakes or what, but what’s cooking has a rich odor.”
Odets was hired at thirty-five dollars a week, but, much to his increasing resentment, he never got a good part: in his first four years with the Group, he played a tenant farmer with one line and a bum on a park bench with his back to the audience, and was an understudy. Though he was initially thrilled at the prospect of being directed by Lee Strasberg, he soon discovered that “those actors who had the good parts got the real and best benefits of Strasberg’s training, and the others did not.” “You felt like a little kid with its nose pressed against the window saying, ‘I wish I could get in so I could get some more of those “geegaws” off the Christmas tree,’ ” he told the theatre professor Arthur Wagner. (Out of that resentment came Odets’s subsequent practice of writing for an ensemble; in all his early plays, instead of one or two starring roles, there are seven or eight characters of equal importance.)
By his own admission, however, without the Group Theatre Odets would not have become a playwright. His work as an actor encouraged a confidence in his own internal resources. “The so-called ‘Method’ forced you to face yourself and really function out of the kind of person you are,” he said. It also taught him fearlessness and emotional honesty. In 1931, he began to experiment with plays. He wrote a piece about life in Philadelphia and another about a musical genius of the Beethoven variety. He asked for feedback from others in the Group, especially Clurman, who was then Odets’s “favorite character outside of fiction.” Clurman wrote of the music play, “It showed no trace of talent. I suggested instead that he write about the people he had met and observed the past few years.” The suggestion took. “I am sure of it now, know the definite feeling of what to do and how,” Odets wrote, at the age of twenty-six, as he began work on the play that would become “Awake and Sing!” “I am filled with materials.”
On January 5, 1935, within two minutes of the lights going up on “Waiting for Lefty,” at the Civic Repertory Theatre, on Fourteenth Street, the audience began to clap. “Line after line brought applause, whistles, bravos, and heartfelt shouts of kinship,” Clurman wrote. Odets and Kazan, who were part of the cast, were sitting together as plants in the audience. “You saw for the first time theatre as a cultural force,” Odets recalled. “There was such an at-oneness with audience and actors that the actors didn’t know whether they were acting and the audience didn’t know whether they were sitting and watching it, or had changed positions.” He continued, “I found myself up on my feet shouting ‘Bravo!’ . . . I forgot I wrote the play, forgot I was in the play. . . . The proscenium arch disappeared.” Kazan—who later directed the premières of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Death of a Salesman”—said, “It was the most overwhelming reception I’ve ever heard in the theatre.”
“Waiting for Lefty,” which Odets wrote in three days, crosscut a union meeting with scenes of the aftermath of the Depression, which had left more than one in four workers unemployed. Odets saw life through a Marxist lens, but his play wasn’t ideological. With its notes of hurt and hope, “Lefty” depicted effectively onstage, for the first time, the brokenhearted world that Odets knew so well, where, as he said, “there is only shame and regret, resignation and anxiety.” Agate, one of the union organizers, tells the workers:
“Waiting for Lefty” became, as Odets said later, “a kind of light machine gun that you wheeled in to use whenever there was any kind of strike trouble.” At the end of the première, there were twenty-eight curtain calls, and for twenty minutes afterward the dazed audience did not leave the theatre; some climbed onto the stage, waiting for the actors to come back out. It was “the birth cry of the thirties,” Clurman said. “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.”
“When I mention the word ‘American,’ it is myself I mean,” Odets said, echoing Walt Whitman, after whom he named his son. Like Whitman, Odets, according to Clurman, felt a “blood-tie with the average guy in the street,” but, whereas Whitman sang the body electric, Odets sang the body politic. His internal landscape—“the homeless thing”—exactly paralleled the nation’s sense of dispossession. And, in his dissection of the American disease, he brought onto the stage a whole range of hitherto undramatized souls. “Waiting for Lefty” made literary material of union goons. “Awake and Sing!” was one of the first sightings on the Broadway stage of the Jewish-American family. “How interesting we all were, how vivid and strong on the beat of that style,” Alfred Kazin wrote of the play. “The words, always real but never flat, brilliantly authentic like no other theatre speech on Broadway, aroused the audience to such delight that one could feel it bounding back and uniting itself with the mind of the writer.”
Idiomatic speech was the key to the tempo of Odets’s plays, which expanded the boundaries of stage naturalism. As an understudy to the lead in John Howard Lawson’s “Success Story,” Odets had learned the poetic power of the colloquial. “It showed me the poetry that was inherent in the chaff of the street,” he told Wagner. “There was something quite elevated . . . in the way people spoke.” Odets believed that “new art work should shoot bullets.” His wisecracks reached across the footlights with a wallop that no previous American writing for the stage had achieved: “I’m in you like a tapeworm”; “I’m versus you! Completely versus!”; “Diphtheria gets more respect than me!”; “Cut your throat, sweetheart. Save time.” At once comic and trenchant, his big-city idiom exposed the brutal adaptations of personality to brutal times; epigrammatic tough talk rippled through the plays and created an unsettling lyrical undertow. “Here without a dollar you don’t look the world in the eye,” the matriarch Bessie says in “Awake and Sing!” “Talk from now to next year—this is life in America.”
Odets thought of his plays as songs. “Perhaps I am the only one . . . who realizes how closely my talent is related to that of songwriters,” he said in his 1940 diary. “We start together from a core of lyric. Each of my plays . . . I could call a song cycle on a given theme.” Odets brought his passion for music to the construction of dialogue as well; his instinct, according to the film director Alexander Mackendrick, with whom he collaborated on “Sweet Smell of Success,” seemed to be “always to devise patterns of three, four, or five interacting characters.” In the swiftness of the ricocheting lines, Odets created a thematic and harmonic density. The first few notes of distinctive complaint in “Awake and Sing!,” for instance, conjure up the stalled life of the Berger household:
“All I wanted was two clean rooms to live in, a phonograph, some records,” Odets said. In fact, he got a lot more than he bargained for. His meteoric emergence from the lower ranks marked a shift of power within the struggling Group Theatre. In 1934, Odets and the other actors began to take control of the Group’s artistic management. Odets and Strasberg were, Odets recalled, “always on the outs.” Strasberg had privately dismissed “Waiting for Lefty,” which had been rehearsed without him; discussing “Awake and Sing!” in front of the company, he had humiliated Odets. (“You don’t seem to understand, Clifford. We don’t like your play,” he said.) Odets’s rise signalled Strasberg’s decline. “We decided that Lee inhibited the actors and we should be wary of his influence,” Kazan recalled. “I think it cost him his creative life,” Odets said. “Because he never recovered.” Within a year, Odets had four plays on Broadway.
“An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the presses, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves,” Arthur Miller wrote in his memoir “Timebends.” “In Marxism was magic, and Odets had the wand.” Odets himself felt the magic. “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. He was both inspired and lumbered by this new responsibility. He was the Group’s cash cow, and, it seemed to him, he had 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 said. “I would let them do it but with a great deal of resentment. They had to have those veal chops on the table.”
Walking into the show-biz hangout Lindy’s one day, in 1940, Odets was stopped by the actor Lionel Stander. “You are a first-class man,” Stander said. “What are you doing with these nitwits?” It was a question that haunted Odets, who by then had grabbed fame’s live wire and couldn’t let go. He travelled back and forth between New York and Hollywood; he was a habitué of café society; he was living in a Village penthouse; he had a Cadillac and was building a treasure trove of modern art. At the same time, he needed calm and isolation in order to write. “I was not the same young man I used to be but trying to hold on to him,” he said. The monk and the winking courtier were perpetually at war inside him. Odets saw his voluptuary itch as a legacy from his mother. “When the child needs consolation . . . and the mother will not give it,” he wrote, “the child will later . . . move towards a series of consolations. . . . Sex, self-sex, distractions, arts, gourmandizing, . . . rich clothes, etc.” And it was his need both to win his father’s approval and to triumph over him that kept Odets forever in thrall to Hollywood’s big bucks—money being L.J.’s only measure of achievement. “I want to be a poor poet and a powerful businessman, a sensational young man and a modest artist with a secret life,” Odets wrote in 1940. “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.”
His plays charted his struggle for equilibrium, “the aching balance,” as he called it. The heroes of “Golden Boy” and “The Big Knife” are both torn between commercial success and artistic fulfillment, driven crazy by their decision to live against their natures; both murder themselves out of nostalgia for their lost integrity. Unlike his characters, however, Odets killed himself not sensationally but by degrees. “I see so plainly what you are trying to do!” he wrote to himself with weird prescience in his 1940 journal. “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.” Still, in his unflinching struggle between heart and appetite, Odets saw honor and perhaps some kind of redemption. “Inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling . . . until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED,” he wrote. “Wrestle, Bernie . . . you may win a blessing,” the heroine of “The Country Girl” advises the would-be lover she rejects, in the play’s last lines. “But stay unregenerate. Life knocks the sauciness out of us soon enough.”
Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee were a one-two punch to Odets’s reputation. In the thirties, he used much of the proceeds of his lucrative screenplay work to support the Group Theatre. When, after the dissolution of the Group, in 1941, he continued to devote himself primarily to screenplays—among them “Humoresque,” the first draft of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and “None but the Lonely Heart,” which he also directed—Odets was perceived as a sellout to the high art of the theatre. “But to what theatre was he supposed to remain faithful?” Miller asked. “There was nothing to return to, no theatre or theatre culture, only show business and some theatrical real estate.”
In 1947, the committee listed Odets as one of seventy-nine members of the film community affiliated with the Communist Party. By the time he appeared before HUAC as a “friendly witness,” in May, 1952, he had married and divorced his second wife, the actress Bette Grayson, and was the father of two children, Nora and Walt. According to Walt Odets, who is now a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, Nora had “serious developmental disabilities. She was going to psychologists, neurologists, endocrinologists her whole childhood. . . . My father was supporting all that.” In other words, Odets could not afford to lose his Hollywood income. (In 1954, when Grayson died suddenly, of pneumonia, Odets became a single parent and those paydays became even more important.) According to Victor Navasky, who wrote a history of the era, Odets both “read the Committee the riot act and, in the vocabulary of the day, ‘named names.’ ” His testimony cost him friends and, according to some, his talent. “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.”
This point, however, is debatable: Odets wrote both “Sweet Smell of Success” and “The Flowering Peach” after his testimony; the former is one of the era’s classic films, and the latter, produced on Broadway in 1954, was originally selected by the judges of the Pulitzer Prize, only to be overruled by the Pulitzer committee, which instead gave the award to “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Odets didn’t lose his talent; he lost the attention of his audience. His “ringing tone” was pitch-perfect for the floundering nation in the mid-thirties, but as early as “Night Music,” which was written in 1939, when the country was mobilizing for war, his bursts of passion had begun to sound forced, even to him. “Your fight is here, not across the water,” a police detective says to an aspiring soldier in the play. “You love this girl? And you mean it? Then fight for love! You want a home? Do you?—then fight for homes!”
Different times required a different way of speaking. The postwar boom brought abundance to the Republic, and a shift in the cultural ethos, from self-sacrifice to self-aggrandizement. The nation had calmed down and turned inward; so had Odets’s idiom, which turned from sociology to psychology. Sometimes judged “dated,” because of their schematic construction, Odets’s later plays, with their study of bad faith, bear witness to a certain kind of American emptiness that is evergreen. “Half-idealism is the peritonitis of the soul,” he wrote in “The Big Knife”; it was an epitaph both for his own self-deception and for what he called “the strange dry country” around him, which had fought a war for freedom abroad only to begin a witch hunt at home.
After the commercial failure of “The Flowering Peach”—he netted only four thousand dollars for two years of work—Odets settled his motherless ménage in Beverly Hills, where he remained until his death, in a series of cluttered rented dwellings. In these chaotic accommodations, according to his son, Odets could usually be found lying on the sofa “in a terry-cloth bathrobe, listening to Beethoven and smoking cigarettes.” He was an affectionate but erratic father. “He was like a furious machine,” Walt told me. “He lived in a kind of intensity that was constant and relentless.” Nora continued to absorb much of Odets’s time and energy. As a rebellious teen-ager, Walt asked to be sent away to boarding school, but Odets refused, saying, “I can’t let you go away and leave me alone with Nora.” “That I couldn’t forgive him for,” Walt said.
In the five years before he decamped for California, Odets wrote seven plays; in the twenty-two years he lived after the demise of the Group Theatre, he wrote three. “I am seething and swollen, lumpy, disordered and baffled, as if I were a woman fifteen months pregnant and unable to sleep or turn, crying aloud, ‘Oh, God, out, out, out!’ ” he wrote to Brenman-Gibson in the early sixties, by which time even the film work was drying up. To make ends meet, he had to sell some of the paintings off his walls. Odets, who had always been adrift, now was just swamped. “Hapless and helpless,” he wrote. “The Jewish prophet is being eaten alive by the Jewish father in me, and if somewhere it doesn’t stop soon, I shall be indeed dead.”
On the cheap maple kitchen table where he wrote, Odets, at the time of his death, had placed two Time articles, both with photographs showing him at his typewriter: one was a 1938 story with the renegade battle cry “Down with the general Fraud!” as a caption; the other was a 1962 clipping headlined “Credo of a Wrong-Living Man,” snidely reporting the news of Odets’s appointment as a script supervisor and writer for the NBC TV series “The Richard Boone Show.” “I may well be not only the foremost playwright manqué of our time but of all time,” Odets wrote in 1961. “I do not believe a dozen playwrights in history had my natural endowment.”
It’s possible that Odets’s narrative of decline is what has kept him from claiming the privileged place in the theatrical discussion that he deserves. Odets’s plays showed a way for the next generation of playwrights to combine linear movement with psychological complexity and depth. He brought a new demotic music to stage speech. His subject was always the struggle of the heartbroken American soul under capitalism. “I will reveal America to itself by revealing myself to myself,” Odets wrote. His plays and his life, full of unique lament and liveliness, eloquently fulfill his prophecy. ♦
