White Hope

(See Cover)

Among plays, many are copyrighted, but few are chosen. Of close to 5,000 registered with the Copyright Office each year, possibly 2,000 go the Broadway rounds, 500 receive serious consideration, 300 land their authors a contract. Of 100 to 200 that are produced, more than 75% flop, less than 10% become smash hits, two or three run into their second year, one wins a Pulitzer Prize.

Once a decade, by some freak, an Abie's Irish Rose or a Tobacco Road bobs up and refuses to sink for several seasons. Once a decade there may be an opening night, like that of What Price Glory? in 1924, when an audience stamps, shouts, weeps from excitement, and refuses to leave the theatre. Once a decade some young playwright who was yesterday unknown, not merely succeeds, but overnight arrives for good & all. Eugene O'Neill did it in the early twenties.

One Sunday night in January 1935 a one-act play about a taxi strike had its premiere in a shabby downtown Manhattan theatre. At its conclusion, a Left Wing audience put on the kind of demonstration that What Price Glory? had known, uptown, ten years before. The play was Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets. Two months later. Lefty was running full blast in one Broadway theatre, Odets' Awake and Sing! in another, and critics were writing elaborate Sunday articles about the author. The Left theatre had become an exciting reality for people in no wise Left-minded, and when 28-year-old Odets was not being hailed as the Boy Wonder of the U. S. theatre, he was being acclaimed as its White Hope.

Since then he has written a flop--Paradise Lost; a popular success that Hollywood paid $75,000 for--Golden Boy. Critics have spanked him. The public has often been exasperated and puzzled. But his position remains unchallenged. Critics, after filing their complaints, hastily add that Odets is his country's most promising playwright. Waiting for Lefty has circled the globe. Odets is still the White Hope, still Art, still News.

The reason Odets has gained and held a public that, by & large, does not share his Leftish ideas is obviously not the ideas themselves but his rich, compassionate, angry feeling for people, his tremendous dramatic punch, his dialogue, bracing as ozone. In every Odets play, regardless of its theme or its worth, at least once or twice during the evening every spectator feels that a fire hose has been turned on his body, that a fist has connected with his chin.

Last week the Group Theatre produced Odets' sixth play, Rocket to the Moon. In Odets' own phrase, it is a play about middle-class love. Its people, running true to form, are frustrated, mired; but this time Society is not the villain.

Stripped to the bone, Rocket to the Moon is a triangle play: the story of a kindly, thin-blooded, tired dentist (Morris Carnovsky) who has accepted life at prevailing odds, surrendered to routine, "gone to sleep." His bitter nagging wife and his sinister, mocking father-in-law (Luther Adler) appreciate his goodness, yet cannot help taunting him. From a romantic young girl (Eleanor Lynn) in his office who is fighting to live, do, go somewhere, and who loves him. he gets sympathy. Suddenly he finds himself in love with her. But when the showdown comes, he stays with his wife: not only because of conscience or past ties, but because he is too weary to wrench himself out of the old life and cope with the high-powered demands of the new.

Odets does not encase this eternal situation in the snug, tight frame of the well-made Broadway "domestic drama.'' Heaving, racked, volcanic, the play belches the hot subterranean lava of its characters' anger, helplessness, pain. It draws back their skin to leave every nerve exposed. In its best scenes Rocket to the Moon is blisteringly real, its dialogue forks and spits like lightning from a scornful sky.

Like Awake and Sing!, like Paradise Lost, like confusion itself, the new play does not move in a straight line. In his social-minded plays Odets has drawn people who are confused because a materialistic society pulls them one way, their instincts another. But in Rocket to the Moon psychological dislocations result from a clash of temperaments, a lack of drive. And Odets will not stay with his plot. He pursues a mystical theme which overrides it: the need for love to vitalize human lives. Inoculated with this virus, his characters cease to be individuals in a specific situation, turn into orators, poets, philosophers who halt the action to harpoon the cosmos.

Like Paradise Lost, Rocket to the Moon is full of clashing moods, windy flights, people half-real, half-symbolic. At moments the over-intense young girl and the too-sinister old man all but tumble into the whacky farce world of a You Can't Take It With You. The last act wobbles all over the place. This is not miscalculation on Odets' part. It springs from a pretentious-side of him that wants to make every common dentist's office widen out into the universe. Sometimes he mistakes abracadabra for revelation.

Growing Pains. "I was a worker's son," says Odets, "until the age of 12." His father had sold papers, peddled salt; his mother had worked in a factory. During Clifford's childhood the family shuttled back & forth between Philadelphia--where he was born in 1906--and The Bronx, where they settled down. The father slowly rose in the world, ceased to be a worker, today is very well off.

Says Odets: "I was a melancholy kid, I guess." He quit high school at 15 because "it was a waste of time." He took to writing poetry, and his father angrily smashed his typewriter. Indignant, Clifford cried: "You can't harness me to a truck--can't you see I'm not a truck horse?" "Believe me," he says today, "there were some very gloomy evenings."

His father finally told the boy to go ahead and be an actor. Clifford started with amateurs in The Bronx; then joined a cooperative group and earned about $20 a year. He wrote radio plays and went on the air; he worked, like Playwrights Arthur Kober and Moss Hart, in summer camps.

He finally landed odd jobs in stock. Once his father went to see him act, commented afterwards: "You're not very good, you talk too fast." Then, simply by walking in and asking for it, one day Clifford got a road-company job with Manhattan's Theatre Guild.

Those were romantic years. In Philadelphia a girl said: "Every girl should have one Clifford Odets in her life." In Springfield, Mass., there was a "horrible, exquisite" love affair "with something of the Sorrows of Werther about it." In Manhattan there was an unheated railroad flat near Tenth Avenue which Odets shared with eight other people. (The last time this flat was mentioned in print, the landlord wrote to Odets: "You still owe us money.'') Coal for the stove being expensive, the roomers sat around wrapped in blankets. Odets mastered the art of making potato pancakes.

Group Picture. In 1929 some young Theatre Guild actors persuaded the Guild to let them put on some experimental plays (Red Rust, Roar China), soon found their aims so divergent from the Guild's that late in 1931 they set up on their own as the Group Theatre. Directing the new enterprise were Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg. Summers were spent in the country rehearsing, refining, inhaling the Group aroma. The Group, so the story goes, played father to its children, studied their habits, even investigated their sex lives.

Odets was an original but minor member of the Group. He never played important parts; in 1932, when he wrote Awake and Sing! he was an understudy. The Group, unimpressed, produced one act of the play privately at its summer theatre. Later, when a Left organization, New Theatre League, wanted a short play for Sunday night showings, Odets fished up Waiting for Lefty, which he had once written in three days.

The first performance of Lefty was shattering, but next day no repentant Group directors fell prostrate before Odets. The directorate was still thumbs down on him. Pressure from the Group's actors was necessary to get them to produce Awake and Sing! After Awake and Sing! clicked, the Group rushed Lefty uptown, and Odets became Broadway's man-of-the-year.

On the surface, since the days of Awake and Sing! Odets and the Group have marched forward hand in hand. Actually Odets has most of the time carried the Group on his back. His have been the Group's only recent successful plays. When Paradise Lost was choking to death, Odets broke his pledge about not succumbing to Hollywood, went there at $2,500 a week, sent back money to keep the play and the Group going. Again, in the summer of 1937. when the Group existed in name only--its leading actors and its one remaining director were all in Hollywood--Odets came through with the script of Golden Boy, and like a Pied Piper led everybody back to Broadway.

Fame & Fortune. Tall, husky, wearing expensive sloppy clothes, living in a Manhattan penthouse, fussed over by a devoted male secretary. Odets clearly enjoys his success. In the first golden days when he was hoisted into fame, he got a great kick from going to parties, being seen out with Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead, weekending with Helen Hayes and her husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur.

At once shrewd and naive, lusty and bookish, youthful and pompous, the Odets personality of those days became a legend. Samples of it were "collected"' like Dorothy Parker's witticisms and Samuel Goldwyn's boners. Example: playing Mozart on the gramophone for a friend. Odets remarked: "Mozart was a young genius, too." Odets no longer has the same interest in gadding about, hooking up with celebrities, asserting his importance. Today most of his close friends are members of the Group. Most of his spare time is spent at home--playing the gramophone. His love for music is ebullient, a little showy. "A good composer was lost," he once said, "when I took up writing."

Money he need not worry about for years. His Hollywood work brought him $90,000; his royalties plus a 25% interest--shared with his wife--in Golden Boy brought him about $2,000 a week during its seven-month run; the cinema sale means $42,000 more. (He and his wife have a 35% joint interest in Rocket to the Moon.) He looks ahead to writing plays without interruption--has "ten or twelve"' plays already laid out. One, a strike play called The Silent Partner, may be produced by the Group later this season.

The theatre around him does not interest Odets much. He goes to about three shows a year. He has stopped reading all playwrights but Shakespeare and Ibsen: "I have nothing to learn from American plays any more." Acting he calls "a whorish thing." But now & then he would like a good part in someone else's play, simply to retain his feel of the stage.

Mainly Opinions. In 1935 Odets led a party to Cuba to investigate its dictatorship, was promptly arrested, soon after deported. Odets now chiefly furthers his beliefs through his writings. Says he: "People can only do one thing at a time. A writer must write. Besides, it is not the explosion that should most concern the artist--it is the causes leading up to it."

Though not a Communist, Odets believes in "some kind of Socialism." As a playwright he has dealt less with the problems of the worker than with the "evils" of the middle class. "An artist cannot be for a middle-class civilization. If he is to write creatively," Odets asserts, "he must be what Andre Malraux calls a man of the opposition: he must cry: Down with the general fraud!''

Odets defines the general fraud. It is the American dream, the Cinderella formula, the success story (presumably including his own). It is life as expressed in popular songs; it is Boy Meets Girl; it is Every Boy Can End Up in the White House. Hollywood is its chief dispenser. American men are its chief victims. As soon, says Odets, as an American man finds his dream girl has a blemish that wasn't in the song about her, he is through with her.

Odets wants to write about the life around him. "To hell with the last century! This is a wonderful time to write. Hart Crane jumped off a boat crying: 'This is no time for poets!' He was wrong. This is no time for weakness, but it is certainly a time for poets."

Odets vows he will not go to Hollywood again: "They want to emasculate me." When, fortnight ago, Columbia's Rouben Mamoulian went to Manhattan to urge Odets to write the film version of Golden Boy, Odets flatly turned him down.

When Odets went to Hollywood early in 1936. he was wildly excited about German-born, Viennese-reared Cinemactress Luise Rainer (rhymes with Shriner), whom he had seen in Escapade. He begged every one he knew to introduce him to her. He finally met her in a restaurant. He disliked her at first. She disliked him. Soon they were seen constantly together, arm-in-arm on the boulevards, holding hands in public.

Their subsequent marriage, estrangement, reunion have been drenched in the gaudiest Hollywood floodlighting. To the public and to themselves, theirs was no ordinary romance. It was, for them, a union of two people of similar--and special--intelligence, temperament, ambitions, ego; the union of an actress and playwright on the grand scale, after the manner of a Duse and a D'Annunzio.

Suddenly last summer Actress Rainer filed suit for divorce. Odets, she claimed, had said there could be only one career in the family: his. She said he had been moody, quarrelsome, neglectful. Then just as suddenly, a month ago, the two were reconciled. Exulted Actress Rainer: "I love him. I love him. ... I love him very much even if he is very stubborn."

Just before they separated, Luise Rainer obtained a new film contract allowing her six months off each year to be with Odets in Manhattan. The idea was that, among other things, she might act in his plays. Said he: "But for our separation, she would be playing in one now." He expects to write one for her soon, calls her "a terrific actress." He talks of the long happy life they are going to lead together. He talks of the house they are going to build in the country. He talks of "the desideratum of marriage"--children. He talks. And he also writes.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.