The struggles of Clifford Odets.
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”).
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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:
**{: .break one} ** Well, maybe I don’t know a thing; maybe I fell outa the cradle when I was a kid and ain’t been right since. . . . Maybe I got a glass eye, but it come from working in a factory at the age of eleven. They hooked it out because they didn’t have a shield on the works. But I wear it like a medal ’cause it tells the world where I belong—deep down in the working class! . . . This is your life and mine! It’s skull and bones every incha the road! Christ, we’re dyin’ by inches! For what? For the debutant-ees to have their sweet comin’ out parties in the Ritz! Poppa’s got a daughter she’s gotta get her picture in the papers. Christ, they make ’em with our blood. . . . Slow death or fight. It’s war! **
“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:
{: .break one} ** ** RALPH: Where’s advancement down the place? Work like crazy! Think they see it? You’d drop dead first. MYRON*: Never mind, son, merit never goes unrewarded. Teddy Roosevelt used to say— Hennie: It rewarded you—thirty years a haberdashery clerk! (Jacob laughs) Ralph: All I want’s a chance to get to first base. Hennie: That’s all? ***
“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
Hollywood, California), leading dramatist of the theatre of social protest in the United States during the 1930s. His important affiliation with the celebrated Group Theatre contributed to that company’s considerable influence on the American stage.
From 1923 to 1928 Odets learned his profession as an actor in repertory companies; in 1931 he joined the newly founded Group Theatre as one of its original members. Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935), his first great success, used both auditorium and stage for action and was an effective plea for labour unionism; Awake and Sing (1935) is a naturalistic family drama; and Golden Boy (1937; filmed 1939) concerns an Italian youth who rejects his artistic potential to become a boxer. Paradise Lost (1935) deals with the tragic life of a middle-class family. In 1936 Odets married the Austrian actress Luise Rainer.
Odets moved to Hollywood in the late ’30s to write for motion pictures and became a successful director. His later plays include The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950; U.K. title Winter Journey), and The Flowering Peach (1954).
Clifford Odets was born on July 18, 1906, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was raised in the Bronx, New York, but dropped out of high school to pursue acting. He helped found the Group Theatre in 1933, an influential left-wing theatre company that specialized in experimental acting. After briefly trying acting, Odets decided to become the Group Theatre’s first original playwright. In 1935, he wrote the play Awake and Sing! Although it was only his first play, it is often considered his masterpiece.
Mainly due to misgivings from Group leader Lee Strasberg, Awake and Sing! was not produced right away. Odets’ first play to actually be produced was the one-act play Waiting for Lefty (1935). That same year, he also wrote one of the first anti-Nazi played produced in the United States, the one-act Till the Day I Die. When his next play, Paradise Lost, flopped, Odets moved to Hollywood to begin writing for the screen as well as the stage. While in Hollywood, he wrote several unsuccessful films, then returned to Broadway and the Group, recharged with engery for stage production. His next play, Golden Boy (1937), became his biggest commercial success. When the Group Theatre disbanded in 1942, Odets returned to Hollywood. Back in the film industry, Odets tried once more at directing, filming his own script of Richard Llewelyn's novel None But the Lonely Heart.
These plays, along with Odets’ other major Group Theatre plays of the 1930s, are harsh criticisms of the capitalist class in the Great Depression. In later years, Odets’ plays became more reflective and autobiographical, although class consciousness was ever in the background.
In 1953, Odets was investigated by Joseph McCarthy and called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He disavowed his communist affiliations and cooperated by “naming names”; as a result, he did not share the fate of many of his colleagues who were blacklisted. Nevertheless, Odets became filled with self-loathing, and found it very difficult to write. He only completed one more play, The Flowering Peach (1954).
The Flowering Peach became the basis for the 1970 musical Two by Two. Golden Boy became the basis for a 1964 musical of the same name. His screenplay for the Sweet Smell of Success became the basis for the 2002 musical of the same name.
Odets died on August 18, 1963, at the age of 57, from stomach cancer.
Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 14, 1963)[1] was an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. In the mid-1930s he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash.[2] From January 1935 Odets' socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Night in the 1941–'42 season, Odets focused his energies primarily on film projects, remaining in Hollywood for the next seven years. He returned to New York in 1948 for five and a half years, during which time he produced three more Broadway plays, only one of which was a success. His prominence was eventually eclipsed by Miller, Tennessee Williams, and in the early- to mid-1950s, by William Inge.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 Theater
2.2 Hollywood
3 Style
4 House Committee on Un-American Activities
4.1 Later years
5 Personal life
6 Death
7 Legacy
8 Stage
8.1 Actor
8.2 Writer
8.3 Director
9 Filmography
9.1 Writer
9.2 Director
10 Bibliography
11 See also
12 References
13 External links
13.1 Archival collections
13.2 Other
Early life
Odets was born in Philadelphia to Louis J. Odets (born Leib Gorodetsky) and Pearl Geisinger, Russian- and Romanian-Jewish immigrants, and was raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York.[3] He dropped out of high school after two years to become an actor and a writer.
Career
Theater
Odets pursued acting with great passion and ingenuity. At the age of 19 he struck out on his own, billing himself as "The Rover Reciter." Under this moniker he participated in talent contests and procured bookings as a radio elocutionist.[4] He appeared in several plays with Harry Kemp's Poet's Theatre on the Lower East Side.[5] Odets was among America's first real disc jockeys at about this time, at radio station WBNY and others in Manhattan, where he would play records and ad lib commentary. He also functioned as a drama critic, allowing him free entry to Broadway and downtown shows.[6] In this capacity he saw the 1926 Broadway production of Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock.[7] O'Casey's work would prove to be a powerful influence on Odets as a playwright.
In the early 1920s, Odets spent four summers as a dramatics counselor at Jewish camps in the Catskills and the Poconos. He toured extensively with stock companies, in particular Philadelphia's popular Mae Desmond Company, playing a large variety of character roles at their theater in Chester, Pennsylvania. His first Broadway break came in 1929 when he was cast in two small roles and as understudy to the young Spencer Tracy in Conflict by Warren F. Lawrence.[8] Odets landed his first job with the prestigious Theatre Guild in the fall of 1929 as an extra. He acted in small roles in a number of Theatre Guild productions between 1929 and 1931. It was at the Guild that he befriended the casting director, Cheryl Crawford. Crawford suggested that Harold Clurman, then a play reader for the Guild, invite Odets to a meeting to discuss new theater concepts they were developing with Lee Strasberg.[9] Though initially bewildered by the concept of acting as an art, Odets was nonetheless mesmerized by Clurman's talks and became the last actor chosen for the Group Theatre's first summer of rehearsals in June 1931 at Brookfield Center in Connecticut.[10][11]
In 1933 he became a member of the Group Theatre, which proved to be one of the most influential companies in the history of the American stage. They were the first to base their work on an acting technique new to the United States, devised by the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski. It was further developed by Group Theatre director Lee Strasberg and became known as The Method or Method Acting.
From the start, Odets was relegated to small roles and understudying his Group colleagues. He understudied lead actor Luther Adler during the Group's production of John Howard Lawson's Success Story during the 1932-33 season. Much to Odets' frustration, Adler never missed a performance, but he gained much knowledge of the playwriting craft by standing in the wings and listening to the play. Odets credited Lawson with giving him an understanding of the potential theatrical power of colloquial language.[12] With time on his hands and at Clurman's urging he began to try his own hand at writing plays.
Odets wrote two early plays, an autobiographical piece entitled 910 Eden Street, and one about his hero, Beethoven, with the working title "Victory." Clurman dismissed these two plays as juvenilia but encouraged his friend to continue writing, while steering him towards familiar milieus. In late 1932, Odets began writing a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, initially called I Got the Blues. He worked diligently on this play, sharing drafts of it with Clurman and promising parts to his fellow actors – often the same parts. While at Green Mansions, their 1933 summer rehearsal venue in Warrensburg, New York,[13][14] the Group performed Act II of the play, now retitled Awake and Sing!, for other camp residents. The audience was enthusiastic[15] but the Group's leadership, Lee Strasberg in particular, was still, at this point, opposed to producing it.[16][17]
Until his debut as a playwright, Odets continued to train as an actor with the Group at their various summer rehearsal headquarters in the Connecticut countryside and upstate New York. In addition to Brookfield Center and Green Mansions, these venues included Dover Furnace in Dutchess County (1932)[18][19] and a large house in Ellenville, New York (1934).[20][21] The Group spent the summer of 1936[22][23] at Pine Brook Country Club in Fairfield County, Connecticut.[24] Their final summer retreat was at Lake Grove, in Smithtown, New York, in 1939.[25][26] Odets' Group training under Strasberg's tutelage was essential to his development as a playwright. He stated in an interview late in life that "My chief influence as a playwright was the Group Theatre acting company, and being a member of that company ... And you can see the Group Theatre acting technique crept right into the plays."[27]
Odets became the first "Method" playwright with his first produced play, the one-act Waiting for Lefty, on January 5, 1935 at the former Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York City. The occasion was a benefit performance for New Theatre Magazine.[28] Like Lawson, a member of the Communist Party, Odets was by this time influenced by Marxism and his plays became increasingly political. Waiting for Lefty was inspired by the 1934 New York City taxi strike and is written in the format of a minstrel show. A one-act play, it is composed of interconnected scenes depicting social and economic dilemmas of workers in various fields. The focus alternates between a union meeting of taxi drivers and vignettes from the workers' difficult and oppressed lives. A young medical intern falls victim to anti-Semitism; a laboratory assistant's job is threatened if he refuses to comply with orders to spy on a colleague; couples are thwarted in marriage and torn apart by the hopelessness of economic conditions caused by the Depression. The climax is a defiant call for the taxi drivers' union to strike, which brought the entire opening night audience to its feet. The play does not require a proscenium stage and can therefore be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. Waiting for Lefty's unexpectedly wild success brought Odets international fame, though its strong pro-union bent caused it to be banned in many towns and cities in the United States. It was produced by a number of left-wing theaters in Britain, Australia, and other English-speaking countries, and has been widely translated.
Awake and Sing!, finally produced by the Group Theatre in February 1935 following the popular success of Waiting for Lefty', is generally regarded as Odets' masterpiece. It has been cited as "the earliest quintessential Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre."[29] The play concerns the Berger family who struggle to maintain some respectability and self-esteem in the Longwood section of the Bronx under the shadow of economic collapse. Odets' choice of opening the play in medias res, his dialogue style, its blatant bias towards the working class, and the fact that it was the first play on Broadway to focus entirely on a Jewish family distinguish Awake and Sing! from other full-length plays produced on Broadway during this time.
Odets became the Group's signature playwright with the debuts of Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! and his reputation is inextricably connected with the Group Theatre.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1937
The two 1935 one-acts Waiting for Lefty and Till the Day I Die, along with a number of other works by various playwrights produced by the Group Theatre, are harsh criticisms of profiteers and exploitative economic systems during the Great Depression. They have been dismissed by some critics as left-wing propaganda. More commonly, however, Waiting for Lefty is considered iconic in the agitprop genre and the piece is widely translated and anthologized and continues to be popular. Odets asserted that all of his plays deal with the human spirit persevering in the face of any opponent, whether or not the characters are depicted as struggling with the capitalist system. The highly successful Golden Boy (1937) portrays a young man torn between artistic and material fulfillment. Ironically, it was the Group Theatre's biggest commercial success. From Golden Boy on, Odets' work focused more on the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as affected by the moral dilemmas of individual characters. In 1938 the Group presented Rocket to the Moon, a psychological play that explores the failure of human beings to fulfill their creative potential. Leftist critics rebuked Odets for abandoning his formerly overt political stance and the play was only modestly successful. The playwright George S. Kaufman queried, "Odets, where is thy sting?"[30] Nonetheless, Rocket to the Moon garnered enough attention to place Odets on the cover of Time in December 1938.[31]
Rocket to the Moon was followed by Night Music (1940) and Clash by Night (1941), neither of which were successful. Except for his adaptation of Konstantin Simonov's play The Russian People in the 1942–1943 season, Odets did not have another Broadway production until 1949. The Big Knife is an allegory about the damaging effects of fame and money on the character of the artist. The play's harsh critique of Hollywood mores was interpreted as ingratitude on the part of Odets, who had by this time made a significant amount of money writing films. It ran only three months and lost money at the box office.
Odets' 1950 play, The Country Girl focuses on the effects of alcohol abuse on creativity and marital relations. It was a critical and box office success and was later adapted for a film starring Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly. Both actors earned Academy Award nominations for their performances. Kelly won the Best Actress award for her work in the film, and screenwriter George Seaton received an Oscar for his adaptation. Odets' last play was produced on Broadway in 1954. The Flowering Peach was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, but under pressure from Joseph Pulitzer Jr., the prize instead was given to Tennessee Williams for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which the jury had considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees.[32]
Hollywood
The immediate success of Odets's early plays attracted the attention of Hollywood producers. He first went to Hollywood in early 1936[33] to write for the screen as well as the stage. From this point on he would spend most of his life in Hollywood. His initial intention was to make money to help subsidize the Group Theatre's run of his late-1935 play Paradise Lost[34] over which the critics were divided, and to help him fulfill his own financial obligations.[35] His first screenplay was produced by Paramount and directed by Lewis Milestone. Starring Gary Cooper and Madeleine Carroll, The General Died at Dawn (1936) received some positive reviews, though Frank Nugent of the New York Times reiterated Kaufman's barb in his article's title.[clarification needed]
Like most screenwriters of the time, Odets worked within the studio system until the advent of independent production in the 1950s. Thus Odets would often write drafts for films such as Rhapsody in Blue and It's a Wonderful Life that were handed off to another screenwriter or team for further development. Odets declined to be credited for many of the films on which he worked. He did, however, accept full credit as both screenwriter and director for None but the Lonely Heart (1944), adapted from the novel by Richard Llewellyn and produced by RKO. The film starred Cary Grant, Ethel Barrymore (who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress), Barry Fitzgerald, and Jane Wyatt.
Odets wrote the 1957 screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success, based on the novelette and a first draft by Ernest Lehman and produced by the independent company Hecht-Hill-Lancaster. Starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, this film noir depicts the underbelly of the newspaper world. The character of J.J. Hunsecker, played by Lancaster, was voted the 35th most despicable villain in 100 years of film by the American Film Institute.[36] Odets directed one other film, for which he also wrote the screenplay, The Story on Page One (1959).
Four of Odets' plays – Golden Boy, Clash by Night, The Big Knife and The Country Girl – have been made into films, though Odets did not write the screenplays.
Style
Odets' dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk. Arthur Miller observed that, with Odets' first plays, "For the very first time in America, language itself ... marked a playwright as unique."[37] Odets' use of local urban speech patterns reflects the influence of Seán O'Casey, another socialist playwright with proletarian concerns. Other hallmarks of Odets' style are his humanistic point of view, and his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, reflecting the influence of Anton Chekhov.[38]
House Committee on Un-American Activities
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA; more commonly, HUAC) initiated its Hollywood Investigation in October 1947. The House Committee was investigating possible subversive communist influences in Hollywood and inevitably subpoenaed Odets in April 1952. He first testified in executive session, and on May 19 and 20 he again testified, this time in public hearing.
He had belonged to the Communist Party for less than a year, between 1934 and 1935,[39] but continued to sponsor many left-wing, progressive groups, some of which were suspected as communist fronts. He cooperated with the Committee to the extent that he responded to their questions and reiterated names of Communist Party members who had been previously cited by his friend and former Group colleague, Elia Kazan. Prior to Kazan's final testimony in April 1952, they had agreed to name each other.[40] Odets thereby avoided overt blacklisting though the Committee did not thank him for his testimony, an omission generally construed as signifying their displeasure. He also found it increasingly difficult to garner film assignments. The negative reactions to his testimony confused him as he did not consider himself a cooperative witness. A partial transcript of Odets' testimony can be found in Eric Bentley's Thirty Years of Treason..[41]
Odets was tormented by public reaction to his testimony for the rest of his life. In his autobiography, Kazan recalls incidents of Odets being accosted in New York City streets and snubbed in Hollywood restaurants after his HUAC appearance.[42] His productivity markedly declined after the event; he finished only one play and, while he advised other filmmakers such as his friend Nicholas Ray and was sporadically hired as a script-doctor, he managed to produce only one entire screenplay of his own, along with his rewrite of Ernest Lehman's Sweet Smell of Success for the production team of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster.
Later years
In the early 1960s, Odets contracted to write four of a proposed total of 13 teleplays for The Richard Boone Show, NBC's new dramatic anthology born of a plan for televised repertory theater. He also acted as script supervisor.[43] Two of Odets's finished scripts were aired posthumously: "Big Mitch" (December 10, 1963), and "The Mafia Man" (January 7, 1964).[44] Odets also worked on the libretto for a projected musical version of Golden Boy. He died before the project came to fruition. Playwright William Gibson, a former student of Odets' when he taught at the Actors Studio, completed the play's book.
Though many obituaries lamented his work in Hollywood and considered him someone who had not lived up to his promise, director Elia Kazan understood it differently. "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."[12]
Personal life
Luise Rainer and Clifford Odets in January 1937, shortly before their marriage
Odets married actress Luise Rainer in January 1937, just months before she won her first of two consecutive Academy Awards for Best Actress.[45] They divorced in May 1940.[46] He married actress Bette Grayson in 1943, and the couple had two children: Nora, born in 1945, and Walt Whitman,[47] born in 1947. Odets and Grayson divorced in 1951.[48] Nora Odets died at Long Beach, Long Island in 2008; Walt Odets became a clinical psychologist, author, and photographer residing in Berkeley, California.
Odets also had relationships with actresses Frances Farmer, Kim Stanley and Fay Wray,[49][50] among others.
Death
Odets had long been suffering from gastrointestinal distress and on July 23, 1963 was admitted to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles to undergo treatment for stomach ulcers. During surgery, doctors discovered that he had metastatic stomach cancer.[51] He received bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Marlon Brando, Lee Strasberg and Paula Strasberg, Jean Renoir and his wife Dido, Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Shirley MacLaine, and Danny Kaye,[52] among many others. Renoir dedicated a chapter of his autobiography to his close friendship with Odets.[53] On August 14, 1963, Odets died of stomach cancer at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at the age of 57.[54]
Odets's ashes were interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale in Glendale, California.
Legacy
Odets is regarded as one of the American theater's most important playwrights. According to Arthur Miller, "An Odets play was awaited like news hot off the press, as though through him we would know what to think of ourselves and our prospects."[55] Marian Seldes wrote that "Paddy Chayefsky, who felt competitive with Odets, ... told an interviewer, 'There isn't a writer of my generation, especially a New York writer, who doesn't owe his very breath–his entire attitude toward theatre–to Odets.'"[56]
Golden Boy was made into a 1939 film and became the basis for a 1964 musical of the same name. The Flowering Peach became the basis for the 1970 Broadway musical Two by Two, which starred Danny Kaye. Odets's screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success became the basis for the 2002 musical of the same name starring John Lithgow.
Lincoln Center celebrated the centennial of Odets's birth with their 2006 production of Awake and Sing!, directed by Bartlett Sher. It won that year's Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play and sparked an ongoing revival of interest in Odets's work. Another centennial production, Rocket to the Moon, directed by Daniel Fish, was produced by Long Wharf Theater. American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts produced Paradise Lost in 2010, also directed by Daniel Fish. Golden Boy was produced by Lincoln Center with Bartlett Sher again directing. It opened on December 5, 2012 to enthusiastic reviews, subsequently garnering 8 Tony Award nominations.[57] John Lahr declared "In this distinguished, almost symphonic production, Sher and Lincoln Center have done a great thing: they have put Odets finally and forever in the pantheon, where he belongs." [58]
Odets's early, more left-wing plays, such as Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Paradise Lost, have enjoyed numerous revivals since the 2008 economic crash. The Roundabout Theatre Company presented the first revival of Odets's 1949 play, The Big Knife, in the Spring of 2013 at the American Airlines Theatre in New York, with Doug Hughes directing Bobby Cannavale in the lead role of Charlie Castle.[59] The role was originated by Odets's former Group Theatre colleague, John Garfield.[60] The National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) mounted a highly acclaimed production of Awake and Sing! in September 2013 with an all-Asian cast. Performed in a small downtown theatre space in New York's Soho area, the limited run played to sold out houses. According to New York Times reviewer Anita Gates, "the production easily makes the point that ethnicity is transcended by the humanity of frightened, imperfect people facing unpleasant realities." [61] NAATCO was invited by the Public Theater to revive the all-Asian production under their auspices in the summer of 2015.
Joel and Ethan Coen's 1990 film Barton Fink contains a number of indirect visual and historical references to Odets's personal appearance, background and career.[62][63] A minor character in the 1982 film Diner speaks only lines from Odets' screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success. The Odets character was played by Jeffrey DeMunn in the film Frances, and by John Heard in the 1983 biography Will There Be A Morning?, both about Frances Farmer.
Odets's name is mentioned in an episode of the television series Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, "The Wrap Party." The episode's subplot dealt with The Hollywood Ten.
Odets was the subject of a psycho-biography by psychoanalyst Margaret Brenman-Gibson, wife of playwright William Gibson: Clifford Odets – American Playwright – The Years from 1906–1940. It was one component of an umbrella project undertaken by Brenman-Gibson on the subject of creativity. The biography was intended to be a three-volume work, with the second and third volumes to cover the final twenty-three years of Odets's life. Brenman-Gibson died in 2004, leaving the project unfinished. A new, full-length biography of Odets is currently in progress with the cooperation of the Odets Estate, to be published by Random House Doubleday Knopf.
Apart from Brenman-Gibson's work, six critical biographies have appeared by the following authors: R. Baird Shuman (1962);[64] Edward Murray (1968);[65] Michael Mendelsohn (1969);[66] Gerald Weales (1971);[67] Harold Cantor (1978);[68] and Christopher J. Herr (2003).[69]
Clifford Odets was named a member of the American Theater Hall of Fame.[70]
Stage
Actor
Midnight (1930)
1931– (1931)
Big Night (1933)
They All Come to Moscow (1933)
Men in White (1933)
Gold Eagle Guy (1934)
Waiting for Lefty (1935)
Writer
Waiting for Lefty (1935)
Awake and Sing! (1935)
Till the Day I Die (1935)
Paradise Lost (1935)
I Can't Sleep (1935, monologue)
Sarah Bernhardt (1936, radio play)
The Silent Partner (1936, unproduced)
Golden Boy (1937)
Rocket to the Moon (1938)
Night Music (1940)
Clash by Night (1941)
The Russian People (1942, adaptation)
The Big Knife (1949)
Golden Boy (1950)
The Flowering Peach (1954)
Director
The Country Girl (1950, original Broadway production)
Golden Boy (1952, revival)
The Flowering Peach (1954, original Broadway production)
Filmography
Writer
The General Died at Dawn (1936)
None but the Lonely Heart (1944)
Humoresque (1946, screenplay adaptation, with Zachary Gold)[71]
Notorious (1946, dialogue: love scenes; uncredited)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
The Story on Page One (1959)
Wild in the Country (1961)
Director
None but the Lonely Heart (1944)
The Story on Page One (1959)
Bibliography
Introduction to Modern Library edition of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls (1936)
Samuel Wanamaker, actor, director and producer: born Chicago 14 June 1919; CBE 1993; married 1940 Charlotte Holland (three daughters); died London 18 December 1993.
IF Sam Wanamaker wasn't as famous or acclaimed an actor as he might have been, he only had himself to blame. Or rather, his obsession. For over 20 years he poured the lion's share of his considerable energy into recreating Shakespeare's wooden 'O', the Globe Theatre, on London's south bank.
Born in Chicago in 1919, Wanamaker had a dogged entrepreneurial zeal that was often mistaken for American excess in the London theatrical establishment, especially since he was always aware of the commercial imperatives attendant upon his dream to rebuild the Globe. The need to make it a going concern was seen by many as thinly veiled Disneyism.
What his detractors often forgot was that Wanamaker was a genuine Shakespearean enthusiast, man and boy. Appropriately, his debut in Shakespeare was in a plywood and paper replica of the Globe at the Chicago World Fair in 1934, when he appeared as a teenager in condensed versions of the Bard's greatest hits.
Wanamaker was 23 when he first played Broadway in Cafe Crown in 1942. The following year he was called up and spent the next three years doing his US military duty. Returning to the theatre in 1946, he took on a succession of headstrong juvenile leads in long-forgotten plays. What he hankered after was classical theatre of the kind that flourished in England. To this end he created the Festival Repertory Theatre in New York in 1950.
Two years later, by now blacklisted by Senator McCarthy's
Commie- bashers, he came to London to join Laurence Olivier's company at the St James's Theatre, playing alongside Michael Redgrave in Winter Journey, which he also directed. One of the first things he did on arriving in London was to seek out the site of Shakespeare's Globe. Instead of the elaborate memorial he'd always imagined, Wanamaker found a dirty plaque fixed to the wall of a Courage brewery bottling plant in a particularly drab Southwark back street.
From 1953 to 1960 he produced and acted in plays in London and the provinces, creating the New Shakespeare Theatre in Liverpool, where his productions included A View From the Bridge, The Rose Tattoo, The Rainmaker and Bus Stop. Another American play, The Big Knife by Clifford Odets, was a personal success for Wanamaker as actor-director at the Duke of York's in 1954. Perhaps his outstanding performance of this period, certainly the one for which he is best remenbered, was Iago to Paul Robeson's Othello in Tony Richardson's 1959 production at Stratford.
He first tackled opera in 1962, Tippett's King Priam, twice revived at Covent Garden. Wanamaker later admitted he relied on others better acquainted with operatic production to tell him what to do, including the composer himself, 'who kept laughing, patting me on the back and telling me not to worry'.
Later that year his radical reinvention of Verdi's La Forza del Destino caused a sensation at Covent Garden, and led to many other operatic offers, including, much later, the opening production at Sydney Opera House, Prokofiev's War and Peace. In 1977 he returned to Covent Garden to produce the premiere of Tippett's The Ice Break.
Wanamaker's track record shows a commendable lack of cultural elitism. He would happily go from producing Verdi to playing a cameo in a Goldie Hawn film (Private Benjamin, 1980), or directing an episode of Hawaii Five-0 (1978). He thrived on diversity and contrast, the more challenging the better. Though there were some memorable screen roles in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1964), The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1966), the 1978 television mini-series Holocaust and, most recently, Guilty by Suspicion (1991) with Robert De Niro, Wanamaker never took film seriously enough to claim the first- division status that was his due.
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From the late 1960s his colleagues in almost every job he undertook were regaled, like it or not, with the latest chapter in the Globe saga, which sometimes seemed as if it would never reach its climax. From the moment he first presented the Architectural Association with a model of the Globe he had had made at Shepperton Studios in 1969, Wanamaker was a man with a mission - to create an international focus for the study and celebration of Shakespeare.
He found a staunch ally in Theo Crosby, who became chief architect of the scheme, sharing Wanamaker's determination to make it both commercially viable (since government subsidy always seemed unlikely) and true to the Spartan style of its 16th-century blueprint - hard wooden benches, no heating, no amplification, and no roof to cover the hole in the middle.
Over two decades of fund-raising and bureaucratic battles, Wanamaker's missionary zeal was stretched to the limit, mostly by the left-wingers of Southwark Council, who tried to sabotage what they saw as indulgent elitism by claiming the Globe site back for council housing. The matter was finally settled in court, where Wanamaker's contention that the Globe project would bring employment to many and regeneration to a notably depressed area of London finally won the day.
By the late 1980s the Globe had beaten off its chief adversaries, and become virtually unassailable thanks to the patronage of the Duke of Edinburgh, Ronald Reagan, Michael Caine, Dustin Hoffman and a host of other victims of Wanamaker's persuasive powers. No longer was he perceived as the cranky Yank building castles in the air; despite an unfavourable economic climate and constantly escalating costs, the Globe really would be rebuilt and Wanamaker's dream vindicated.
In more recent years, the quest for funds took him, appropriately, all over the globe, shored up by his commitment to posterity and the firm belief that there was, just around the next corner, that elusive crock of gold. The first bays of the Globe Theatre were unveiled this year. It is scheduled to open for business in April 1995.