Elia Kazan and The Case
for Silence
A story is told that in 1955, after Arthur Miller had
finished A View from the Bridge, his one-act play about a Sicilian waterfront
worker who in a jealous rage informs on his illegal immigrant nephew, Miller
sent a copy to Elia Kazan, who had directed his prize-winning smash Broadway
hits All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949), but had broken with him
over the issue of naming names before HUAC. “I have read your play and would be
honored to direct it,” Kazan is supposed to have wired back. “You don’t
understand,” Miller replied, “I didn’t send it to you because I wanted you to
direct it. I sent it to you because I wanted you to know what I think of stool
pigeons.”
Apocryphal? Perhaps. But the story had credibility
and currency because after Kazan’s April 1952 testimony before HUAC, Miller and
Kazan, once the closest of collaborators and the best of friends, no longer
spoke. Kazan was not asked to direct Miller’s next play, The Crucible (1953),
and as Sam Zolotow delicately reported, “It is known that a
disagreement--nothing to do with the play, though--exists between them that
would make their further association incompatible.” They had planned to
collaborate on a movie about the waterfront to be called “The Hook,” but now
Kazan went on to do his own waterfront picture, On the Waterfront, in which
Terry Malloy comes to maturity when he realizes his obligation to fink on his
fellow hoods. And Miller wrote View, which tried simultaneously to understand
and condemn the informer, Kazan emerged in the folklore of the left as the
quintessential informer, and Miller was hailed as the risk-taking conscience of
the times. “One could almost say,” said Richard Rovere, “that Miller’s sense of
himself is the principle that holds informing to be the ultimate in human
wickedness.” Arthur Miller
If we are to understand why so many otherwise
high-minded people agreed to lend themselves to HUAC’s degradation ceremonies,
Kazan is a good place to begin. Not because he is typical--he was too
successful, articulate, self-aware, and visible to be that--but because in his
life, his politics, and his art he has done as much to defend the naming of
names as his old colleague Miller has done to challenge it.
“If Kazan had refused to cooperate [with HUAC],”
speculates one director-victim of the day, “he couldn’t have derailed the
Committee, but he might well have broken the blacklist. He was too important to
be ignored.” Probably no single individual could have broken the blacklist in
April 1952, and yet no person was in a better strategic position to try than
Kazan, by virtue of his prestige and economic invulnerability, to mount a
symbolic campaign against it, and by this example inspire hundreds of fence
sitters to come over to the opposition.
Even Kazan’s harshest critics conceded he had earned
his success and power through talent and effort. Born in 1909 in Istanbul,
Turkey, to the Kazanjoglouses, a family of Anatolian Greeks who emigrated to
the United States when he was four years old, Kazan worked his way through
Williams College and Yale Drama School as a waiter. “I think the reason why I
later joined the Communist Party and turned against everybody was born at
Williams. I had this antagonism to privilege, to good looks, to Americans, to
Wasps.”
An alumnus of the already legendary Group Theatre of
the 1930s, in the late 1940s Kazan along with Lee Strasberg had helped to found
the Actors Studio, which gave America the Stanislavski-based “method” and such
outsize talents as Marlon Brando, Julie Harris, Lee J. Cobb, Montgomery Clift,
Shelley Winters, and James Dean. Besides Miller’s plays, Kazan directed such
classics as Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth and Tennessee Williams’ A
Streetcar Named Desire His burgeoning career as a screen director was marked by
the successes of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), the controversial Gentleman’s
Agreement (1948), the documentary-style Boomerang (1947), and the poetically
powerful screen version of Streetcar (1951). From 1946 on he had de facto
first-refusal rights on any Broadway-bound play. And since the blacklist never
dominated the New York theater as it did Hollywood, the conventional wisdom was
that he wouldn’t have, in the vernacular of the day, to sing for his supper.
Kazan had a hard-won reputation for caring about the
social content of his work. As an actor in the Group Theatre he was the taxi
driver in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty who held up his fist at the end
and yelled “Strike!” as the audience yelled “Strike!” right back, in unison. As
a member of the proletarian theater movement, he had coauthored a play with Art
Smith (on whom he was later to inform) called Dimitrof; subtitled “A Play of
Mass Pressure.” It told how the pressure of the world proletariat forced the
release of the Bulgarian Communist Dimitroff after he gave a stirring courtroom
speech and refused to confess falsely to the setting of the Reichstag fire. The
villain of the play was the informer Van der Lubbe, who had been persuaded by
Hitler and Goring to put the finger on Dimitroff. The hero of the play, the
authors explained in an introductory note, is “mass pressure.”
On Broadway, the plays Kazan directed dealt with
problems of conscience, responsibility, and personal honor in a materialistic
society, and even in Hollywood he traded in such socially significant themes as
anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement), racial discrimination (Pinky [1949]),
and revolution (Viva Zapata [1952]).
It was because Kazan seemed to take the social
content of his art so seriously that his appearance before HUAC caused such
astonished dismay among many of his friends and colleagues. He was in rehearsal
in Boston on Flight into Egypt, George Tabori’s play about a group of refugees
from Austria awaiting passage to America, when he was first subpoenaed by HUAC
and the rumors started to fly. He went to Washington for a hearing in executive
session on a day when he and Tabori had been scheduled to observe the waiting
room of a local hospital (on the theory that since much of the action of the
play took place in a waiting room, maybe they would pick up some usable
business). On his return, Kazan asked Tabori what he had seen, and the
playwright, who felt that Kazan’s own confusion about his HUAC appearance was
distorting his perspective on the play and its theme of betrayal, was said to
have replied, “They cut a man’s tongue out.”
The late Kermit Bloomgarden, who had produced Death
of a Salesman, told me, “I do remember that any number of times in the course
of the investigations Kazan would say he had been [in the Communist Party], he
was not now, he wanted no part of the Communists, but if they wanted him to
give names, he’d tell them where to get off. He told me that as late as six
weeks before he testified.
“I had an office at 1545 Broadway on the first floor.
Kazan had one on the fourth floor. My office had a window then. He waved to me
through the window to come down and have a drink with him at Dinty Moore’s. He
told me he’d been to Washington and met with J. Edgar Hoover and Spyros Skouras
and they wanted him to give names and he was going to call the people whom he
had to name. Gadg [Kazan’s nickname] wanted to know what I thought, and I said,
‘Everyone must do what his conscience tells him to do.’ He said, ‘I’ve got to think
of my kids.’ And I said, ‘This too shall pass, and then you’ll be an informer
in the eyes of your kids, think of that.’ Finally we left Dinty Moore’s and we
walked down the block and he went his way and I went mine and we didn’t see or
speak to each other for fifteen years. I immediately called Miller and I said
to Arthur that it was ninty-nine percent sure that Gadg was giving names.
Miller went over to see Gadg and Molly [Kazan’s wife], and then he and Gadg
walked for hours through the woods in Roxbury, Connecticut, where Miller told
him he would regret it for the rest of his life and tried to talk him out of
what he was going to do. When he couldn’t, Gadg went to Washington and Miller
went right up to Salem and wrote The Crucible.”
Kazan appeared before the House Un-American
Activities Committee twice, the first time in January 1952, when he answered
all questions except the one about what people he knew to be members of the
Communist Party between the summer of 1934, when he joined it, and the spring
of 1936, when he left. In April he told the Committee he had come to the
conclusion “that I did wrong to withhold these names before, because secrecy
serves the Communists, and is exactly what they want.” Now his testimony,
written in advance, was articulate, tough, and detailed as he named eight
members of his Group Theatre unit and some Party functionaries. He split with
the Party, he said, over its attempt to use him to take over the group:
... I was instructed by the Communist unit to demand
that the group be run “democratically.” This was a characteristic Communist
tactic; they were not interested in democracy; they wanted control. They had no
chance of controlling the directors, but they thought that if authority went to
the actors, they would have a chance to dominate through the usual tricks of
behind-the-scenes caucuses, block voting, and confusion of issues. This was the
specific issue on which I quit the Party. I had enough regimentation, enough of
being told what to think and say and do, enough of their habitual violation of
the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed. The last straw came
when I was invited to go through a typical Communist scene of crawling and
apologizing and admitting the error of my ways.... I had had a taste of
police-state living and I did not like it.
Had he simply told his story and named his names
along with the scores of other witnesses, he might have been denounced on the
left, celebrated on the right, and his testimony forgotten. But Kazan was not
content to let his affidavit speak for itself. First, he appended to his
testimony an annotated bibliography cum apologia which listed and “explained”
the entire history of his twenty-five professional forays as a director. This
seemed to his critics unnecessary bending. Most of the items on his list were
comparatively harmless, and Kazan said so, but whenever there was the
possibility of an interpretation at odds with prevailing dogma, he anticipated
the objection. Thus:
Boomerang (picture), 1946: Based on an incident in
the life of Homer Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States. It
tells how an initial miscarriage of justice was righted by the persistence and
integrity of a young district attorney, who risked his career to save an
innocent man. This shows the exact opposite of the Communist libels on America.
All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, 1947: The story of a
war veteran who came home to discover that his father, a small manufacturer,
had shipped defective plane parts to the Armed Forces during the war. Some
people have searched for hidden propaganda in this one, but I believe it to be
a deeply moral investigation of problems of conscience and responsibility.
Gentleman’s Agreement (picture): Picture version of
the best-selling novel about anti-Semitism. It won an Academy Award and I think
it is in a healthy American tradition, for it shows Americans exploring a
problem and tackling a solution. Again it is opposite to the picture which
Communists present of Americans....
Pinky (picture), 1949: The story of a Negro girl who
passed for white in the North and returns to the South to encounter freshly the
impact of prejudice. Almost everyone liked this except the Communists, who
attracked it virulently. It was extremely successful throughout the country, as
much so in the South as elsewhere....
Viva Zapata (picture, my most recent one), 1951: This
is an anti-Communist picture. Please see my article on political aspects of
this picture in the Saturday Review of April 5, which I forwarded to your investigator,
Mr. Nixon.
The day after his testimony was given (in executive
session), it was released, and the day after that (April 12, 1952) Kazan took
an ad in The New York Times explaining his position and exhorting others to do
likewise. Its logic--that the way to fight totalitarian secrecy was with
free-world openness--seemed impeccable, if one accepted its premise (that all
Communists were totalitarian conspirators), its asides (that the employment of
liberals was threatened “because they had allowed themselves to be associated
with Communists,” rather than because some freelance vigilantes had joined with
HUAC to create and enforce a blacklist), and its rhetoric (Communist censorship
is “thought control” but HUAC intimidation is unmentioned). It will be
recalled--although Kazan didn’t mention it in the ad--that part of the reason
he left the Party was because they wanted him to confess error and humiliate
himself. Here is the ad:
A STATEMENT, by Elia
Kazan
In the past weeks intolerable rumors about my
political position have been circulating in New York and Hollywood. I want to
make my stand clear:
I believe that Communist activities confront the
people of this country with an unprecedented and exceptionally tough problem.
That is, how to protect ourselves from a dangerous and alien conspiracy and
still keep the free, open, healthy way of life that gives us self-respect.
I believe that the American people can solve this
problem wisely only if they have the facts about Communism. All the facts. Now,
I believe that any American who is in possession of such facts has the
obligation to make them known, either to the public or to the appropriate
Government agency.
Whatever hysteria exists--and there is some,
particularly in Hollywood--is inflamed by mystery, suspicion and secrecy. Hard
and exact facts will cool it.
The facts I have are sixteen years out of date, but
they supply a small piece of background to the graver picture of Communism
today. I have placed these facts before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities without reserve and I now place them before the public and before my
coworkers in motion pictures and in the theatre. Seventeen and a half years ago
I was a twenty-four-year-old stage manager and bit actor, making $40 a week,
when I worked.
At that time nearly all of us felt menaced by two
things: the depression and the ever growing power of Hitler. The streets were
full of unemployed and shaken men. I was taken in by the Hard Times version of
what might be called the Communists’ advertising or recruiting technique. They
claimed to have a cure for depressions and a cure for Naziism and Fascism.
I joined the Communist Party late in the summer of
1934. I got out a year and a half later. I have no spy stories to tell, because
I saw no spies. Nor did I understand, at that time, any opposition between
American and Russian national interest. It was not even clear to me in 1936
that the American Communist Party was abjectly taking its orders from the
Kremlin.
What I learned was the
minimum that anyone must learn who puts his head into the noose of party “discipline.”
The Communists automatically violated the daily practices of democracy to which
I was accustomed. They attempted to control thought and to suppress personal
opinion. They tried to dictate personal conduct. They habitually distorted and
disregarded and violated the truth. All this was crudely opposite to their
claims of “democracy” and “the scientific approach.”
To be a member of the
Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It is a diluted taste
but it is bitter and unforgettable. It is diluted because you can walk out.
I got out in the spring of 1936.
The question will be asked why I did not tell this
story sooner. I was held back, primarily, by concern for the reputations and
employment of people who may, like myself, have left the Party many years ago.
I was also held back by a piece of specious reasoning
which has silenced many liberals. It goes like this: “You may hate the
Communists, but you must not attack them or expose them, because if you do you
are attacking the right to hold unpopular opinions and you are joining the
people who attack civil liberties.”
I have thought soberly about this. It is, simply, a
lie.
Secrecy serves the Communists. At the other pole, it
serves those who are interested in silencing liberal voices. The employment of
a lot of good liberals is threatened because they have allowed themselves to
become associated with or silenced by the Communists.
Liberals must speak out.
I think it is useful that certain of us had this kind
of experience with the Communists, for if we had not we should not know them so
well. Today, when all the world fears war and they scream peace, we know how
much their professions are worth. We know tomorrow they will have a new slogan.
Firsthand experience of dictatorship and thought
control left me with an abiding hatred of these. It left me with an abiding
hatred of Communist philosophy and methods and the conviction that these must
be resisted always. It also left me with the passionate conviction that we must
never let the Communists get away with the pretense that they stand for the
very things which they kill in their own countries.
I am talking about free speech, a free press, the rights of
property, the rights of labor, racial equality and, above all, individual
rights. I value these things. I take them seriously. I value peace, too, when
it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies. I believe these things
must be fought for wherever they are not fully honored and protected whenever
they are threatened.
The motion pictures I have made and the plays I have
chosen to direct represent my convictions.
I expect to continue to make the same kinds of
pictures and to direct the same kinds of plays.
Kazan’s status, testimony, apologetic curriculum
vitae, and advertisement, and rumors that he could make a big-money deal with
Spyros Skouras contingent on his naming names--these collectively established
him on the left as the ultimate betrayer, even as he was hailed on the right as
patriot and applauded by centrist liberals for doing the difflcult but right
wing. He went on the letterhead of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom
(which condemned Miller for being insufflciently vocal in his condemnations of
Soviet totalitarianism), and his first post-HUAC film, Man on a Tightrope (1953), had an overtly anti-Communist theme. The Daily Worker, picking up on Kazan’s
having named his old Dimitroff co-author, Art Smith, asked with characteristic
rhetorical overkill: “Isn’t it clear that Kazan, like Vander Lubbe, is
repeating the same old vicious lies the Nazis invented to cover up their
murderous aggression! And for a similar purpose--to aid Wall Street’s drive to
world power?”
The Worker went on to observe that in Scene
One of Dimitroff, Hitler puts his arms around Vander Lubbe and says, “This is
the greatest moment of my life.” Said the Worker: “Kazan’s belly-crawling
statement calling upon U.S. intellectuals to prostrate themselves before the
Big Money sounds as if he too really believes (one can visualize the chairman
of the Un-American Activities Committee putting his arm around him), ‘This is
the greatest moment of my life.’ “It is the lowest moment of Kazan’s life, one
which will haunt him forever.”
It soon became clear that whatever Kazan’s motives,
his reputation as the epitome of a betrayer would outlast the Party’s
ritualistic indignation.
When HUAC asked the folksinger Tony Kraber, another
Group Theatre alumnus who had been named by Kazan, whether they had known each
other in the Party, Kraber responded, “Is this the Kazan that signed the
contract for five hundred thousand dollars the day after he gave names to this
Committee?” To the day he died in 1977, Zero Mostel, who made it back to a
stardom he had never known before he was blacklisted, referred to Kazan as “Looselips.”
Sidney Zion, the editor of Scanlan’s Monthly, a brash magazine that flourished
briefly in the 1970s, once ran an article called “Hello, Informer,” and to
accompany it, he republished Kazan’s 1952 ad and sent him a check for $150. No
matter how unrelated the occasion, few serious interviewers fail to ask Kazan
about his informing.
Today, Kazan declines to discuss his
twenty-odd-year-old decision to name names. He has, he tells me--in person and
by mail--received dozens of requests for interviews on this subject, but with
one partial exception he has turned them all down. He gives a number of
reasons, some personal, some general, depending on who is doing the asking. It
is, he says, not all that important. If he had the same decision to make again,
he might decide the same way. In any event, he is now busy with other
things--writing novels and traveling--and that’s what he would prefer to talk
about. He will “do that scene” in his own way in his own good time, and he
doesn’t intend to undercut his future eflfort to write about the 1950s. Another
thing: the decision to name names was a difflcult decision, and a difflcult
decision brings pain no matter which way one goes. “The liberals who think I
did it for the money are simplistic. I’ve turned down million-dollar deals.”
Besides, he would prefer to describe his position outside the “envelope” of
someone else’s words. After all, he was there, and he is a novelist, and to
capture the complexities requires a novelist’s ability to recreate context. He
has been reading over his voluminous papers (which he donated to Wesleyan
University, under terms that render them unavailable to the public until he has
finished using them for his own purposes), and he finds them unique and
personal and full of unexpected turns. The trick is not to attack others, but
to try to understand some of the painful events in a context where
personalities and past experiences and pressures interlock, and who is better qualified
than he? The materials, after all, include intimate diaries, including his own
notes following sessions with his therapist, letters from and to such varied
personalities as Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, et al. It is all
so intimate that he “wouldn’t show it to my own brother.”
The partial exception is Michel Ciment, the French
critic who regards Kazan as one of the great film directors of all time and who
was granted permission to ask Kazan whatever he wanted, provided Kazan had
final editing privileges on the taped interview. Although they discussed the
subject only briefly, what he told Ciment in 1971 was not inconsistent with his
more generalized comments when ostensibly refusing to discuss the matter with
others, a cross between ambivalence and justification:
I don’t think there’s anything in my life toward
which I have more ambivalence, because, obviously, there’s something disgusting
about giving other people’s names. On the other hand . . . at that time I was
convinced that the Soviet empire was monolithic.... I also felt that their
behavior over Korea was aggressive and essentially imperialistic.... Since
then, I’ve had two feelings. One feeling is that what I did was repulsive, and
the opposite feeling, when I see what the Soviet Union has done to its writers,
and their death camps, and the Nazi pact and the Polish and Czech
repression.... It revived in me the feeling I had at that time, that it was
essentially a symbolic act, not a personal act. I also have to admit and I’ve
never denied, that there was a personal element in it, which is that I was
angry, humiliated, and disturbed--furious, I guess--at the way they booted me
out of the Party.... There was no doubt that there was a vast organization
which was making fools of the liberals in Hollywood.... It was disgusting to me
what many of them did, crawling in front of the Party. Albert Maltz published
something in few Masses, I think, that revolted me: he was made to get on his
hands and knees and beg forgiveness for things he’d written and things he’d
felt. I felt that essentially I had a choice between two evils, but one thing I
could not see was (by not saying anything) to continue to be a part of the
secret maneuvering and behind the scenes planning that was the Communist Party
as I knew it. I’ve often, since then, felt on a personal level that it’s a
shame that I named people, although they were all known, it’s not as if I were
turning them over to the police; everybody knew who they were, it was obvious
and clear. It was a token act to me, and expressed what I thought at the
time....
I don’t say that what I did was entirely a good
thing. What’s called “a difficult decision” is a difficult decision because
either way you go there are penalties,tright? What makes some things difficult
in life is if you’re marrying one woman you’re not marrying another woman. If
you go one course you’re not going another course. But I would rather do what I
did than crawl in front of a ritualistic Left and lie the way those other
comrades did, and betray my own soul. I didn’t betray it.
If Kazan had fully refrained from discussing the
issue of informing, that would indeed be unfortunate, since he has so much to
tell us. Happily for students of the phenomenon, however, Kazan has been
talking about informing for twenty-five years, although he has frequently put
out his message in disguised form. Indeed, it can be argued that his film On
the Waterfront, with its screenplay by Budd Schulberg (who also named names),
makes the definitive case for the HUAC informer or at least is--among its
considerable other achievements--a valiant attempt to complicate the public
perception of the issue. The image of the informer is transformed from
thirties-McLaglen to fifties-Brando.
After he unwittingly sets up young Joey Doyle to be
pushed off the roof, the hero, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) reflects, “He wasn’t
a bad kid, that Joey,” but he is quickly reminded, “He was a canary,” which by
the waterfront ethic is supposed to justify the brutal murder.
The movie is rife with talk of “rats,” “stoolies,” “cheesies,”
“canaries.” Terry Malloy has to choose between the waterfront ethic, which
holds ratting to be the greatest evil, and the Christian ethic, which suggests
that one ought to speak truth to power. The former is represented by the
vulgar, vicious, cigar-chomping corrupt labor boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J.
Cobb, also a real-life informer), and the latter by the cleancut, gutsy,
straight-talking priest, Father Barry (Karl Malden). Terry comes to maturity
and wins the girl (Eva Marie Saint) when he gains the courage to inform. In
addition he achieves heroic stature as he single-handedly takes on the mob at
the risk of his life and in the process comes to true self-knowledge. “I been
ratting on myself all these years,” he tells Johnny Friendly, “and I didn’t
know it. I’m glad what I done.”
A particularly poignant moment occurs when Terry’s
protege, Tommy, who has helped him tend Joey Doyle’s pigeons on the roof,
confronts him after he has turned informer and throws a dead bird at his feet. “What’s
that for?” asks Terry. “A pigeon for a pigeon,” says Tommy. Even here, however,
the message is clear: The injunction against informing is all right as a
guideline for an adolescent street gang like Tommy’s Golden Warriors, but it
won’t do for adults who are obliged to look at each situation in its own moral
context. (What’s ratting for them is telling the truth for you.) Squealing is
relative.
Whatever else it may be, Waterfront seems an allegory
for 1950s anti-Communism, with the Waterfront Crime Commission an analog for
HUAC. The critic Peter Biskind [in the book Seeing is Believing] has gone
further, ingeniously elaborating a religious metaphor. According to Biskind,
when Terry decides to become a stool pigeon he fuses the spiritual and secular
realms:
In Christian terms, Terry voluntarily assumes the
role of the meek (the dove); in secular terms he assumes the role of the stool
pigeon (the informer); and the one transfigures the other. The political
informer as Christian saint. Terry is well on his way to crucifixion before he
testifies. He puts his hand through a plate-glass window (stigmata) and later
when his friends avoid him after his testimony he experiences the abandonment
of Christ on the Cross.
But one needn’t accept either the cold war or
religious analogies to recognize the fact of Kazan-Schulberg’s achievement: the
creation of a context in which the naming of names is the only honorable thing
to do--the maximum case for informing.
Kazan says life is ambiguous and his movies are meant to
avoid black-and-white portrayals. “The librals’
answer to HUAC is simplistic. That’s what I think is wrong with Arthur’s plays,”
he says, “and you know how I like him. But he’s always striving for an
absolute, a single answer. That’s what I object to about Lillian [Hellman]. I respect
her work but she’s an either-or person.” Yet Kazan-Schulberg leave no room
for ambiguity in Waterfront. The most memorable moment in the picture is the
taxicab scene where Terry tells his brother Johnny (Rod Steiger) that Johnny
should have taken better care of him (“I couldda been a contender”). If his
informing had meant that the loyal and loving Terry would be sending his
brother to prison or perhaps the electric chair, then the dilemma posed by the
act of informing would have been real. But Kazan-Schulberg have the mob rub
Johnny out, thereby giving Terry a socially sanctified personal motive
(revenge) for testifying against the mob, as well as the political one
(anti-corruption): This denies the audience any opportunity for genuine
consideration of the ambivalent and dangerous complexities of the informer
issue. “Squealing” may be relative, but in Waterfront it is mandatory.
Waterfront is not Kazan’s only indirect reference to
his HUAC experiences. In novels, films, and interviews he frequently includes
material that justifies informing. After writing his number-one best-seller,
The Arrangement, which was published in 1967 by Stein & Day (whose
co-founder is the same Sol Stein who was formerly executive director of the
American Committee for Cultural Freedom), and making it into a movie, Kazan let
it be known that he was forsaking moviemaking, which had lost its magic for
him, for full-time novel-writing. But two best-sellers later, he returned to
the screen with a quite powerful low-budget movie he filmed at his country home
in Connecticut, and which he directed at the request of his son Christopher,
who had written it. The Visitors (1972) is the story of a gentle Vietnam vet
who informed on two Calley-type buddies whom he had witnessed raping a
Vietnamese girl in a My Lai situation. The film tells what happens when the
brutal men he testified against are released from the stockade and journey up
to Connecticut to terrorize him and his girlfriend.
In a number of conversations with me, the ostensible
purpose of which were to (1) get to know each other but (2) explain why he
wouldn’t talk about his naming of names, the subject of informing kept coming
up spontaneously. John Dean was appearing before the Senate Watergate
Committee, in its televised hearings, as we talked one time, and Kazan observed
that Dean’s mouth seemed to move apart from the rest of his face; neither of us
was unaware that Dean was an informer who might be said to be engaged in
socially constructive betrayal. Kazan mentioned a jury on which he had served
that was about to acquit a guilty man because the only evidence against him was
provided by a police informant, until Kazan and the critic Alfred Kazin, who
was also on the jury, intervened and carried the day. He lent me the transcript
of a trial involving a Jewish Defense League police informer who was being
persecuted by the police. And when we ran into each other on a Broadway bus a
few days after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was published, Kazan observed, “Isn’t
it interesting that all of that was going on while all of what you’re looking
at was going on?” The implication: If he was right about Stalinist brutality,
perhaps he was not altogether wrong to name the names of those who denied
Stalinist brutality.
Even if Kazan had really found it possible to resist
the temptation to revisit the scene of his alleged crime, his historical
connection with Arthur Miller probably of itself guarantees that for him there
is no escaping the issue. For Miller, preoccupied as he is with the relationships
between public and private morality, between the claims of the state and the
claims of conscience, has returned again and again to the theme of betrayal,
and each journey serves to remind those who care of Kazan’s counterpoint role.
Miller’s The Crucible, set in Salem during the
witchcraft trials of the 1600s, tells the story of a community in the grip of
terror. Its central character is John Proctor, who prefers to die rather than
to give false testimony. When the prosecutor Danforth asks John Proctor to name
names, he says:
I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have
no tongue for it.... I have three children--how may I teach them to walk like
men in the world, and I sold my friends?
DANFORTH: You have not sold your friends—
PROCTOR: Beguile me not! I blacken all of them when
this [a false confession he has prepared] is nailed to the church the very day
they hang for silence!—
Miller had written the play from documents he
uncovered in research, and it was his conviction that “the fact that Proctor
and others refused to give false evidence probably helped to bring the witch
trials to an end. Their character was such that it penetrated the mob. When it
came time for Rebecca Church to be hanged, the mob surged in and had to be
stopped by cavalry.
The critic Eric Bentley and others attacked the
implicit analogy in the play between Massachusetts and Washington on the
grounds that there hadn’t actually been any witches in Salem, whereas there
were Communists in Washington. As Miller recalls it, “The Crucible appeared to
some as a misreading of the problem at best--a ‘naivete,’ or at worst a
specious and even sinister attempt to whitewash the guilt of the Communists
with the noble heroism of those in 1692 who had rather be hung than confess to
nonexistent crimes.... The truth is,” Miller argues, “the playwriting part of
me was drawn to what I felt was a tragic process underlying the political
manifestation.... When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral
goodness somebody has to die. I thought that in terms of this process the
witch-hunts had something to say to the anti-Communist hysteria. No man lives
who has not got a panic button and when it is pressed by the clean white hand
of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion.”
(For a somewhat similar film, see Big Jim McClain.)
Miller might have added that there was another sense
in which his allegory was appropriate. The word “Communist” had come, as we
have seen, to signify an amalgam of traitorous espionage-agent and
conspiratorial, violent revolutionary, yet Kazan and the other entertainment
community witnesses called before HUAC were not, and never had been, either of
these. In that sense HUAC was hunting in Hollywood for something that wasn’t
there.
To the charge that his play was agitprop against the
McCarthy witchhunt, Miller, like Kazan, had a complicated answer:
It is not any more an attempt to cure witch hunts
than Salesman is a plea for the improvement of conditions for traveling men,
All My Sons a plea for better inspection of airplane parts.... The Crucible is,
internally, Salesman’s blood brother. It is examining ... the conflict between
a man’s raw deeds and his conception of himself; the question of whether
conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being, and what happens when
it is handed over not merely to the state or the mores of the time but to one’s
friend or wife.”
Even as Miller argues that critics have misread the
symbolic meaning of The Crucible, Kazan has suggested that it is wrong to read
On the Waterfront primarily as an allegory in defense of his behavior before
HUAC. “It was aimed at something more universal,” he told two interviewers in
1971. He cited the Mafia trials and the My Lai investigations as examples of
situations where good people are conflicted between the social duty to expose
and the ethic of silence. “That’s a very characteristic and very genuine inner
conflict of man. As a matter of fact,” says Kazan, “On the Waterfront did not
start with Budd Schulberg, it started with Arthur Miller.” And he tells the
story of how, long before he knew Schulberg, long before his HUAC testimony, he
went to Arthur Miller and said, “Let’s do a story about the waterfront!” They
actually got as far as Miller’s drafting the screenplay of The Hook,” which was
scheduled to be made by Columbia Pictures. “Then I got a phone call from Art,”
says Kazan, “saying that he had decided he didn’t want to do it. I still don’t
know why he did that.”‘ (The reason, according to Miller, is that Harry Cohn,
Roy Brewer, and the FBI all suggested that Miller should substitute reds for
racketeers as the force terrorizing the waterfront workers. When Miller said
no, Cohn fired off a telegram to him which said, “Strange how the minute we
want to make a script proAmerican, Miller pulls out.”)
Miller did not get around to his own waterfront drama
until 1955; A View from the Bridge is
the story of Eddie Carbone, an Italian immigrant who lives on the waterfront
with his wife Beatrice and his niece Catherine, for whom he has an irresistible
attraction. When a Sicilian cousin, Rodolpho, who has entered the country
illegally, wins Catherine’s love, Eddie, consumed with incestuous jealousy,
informs on Rodolpho to the immigration authorities, and soon thereafter suffers
the fatal consequences of his betrayal.
Whatever Miller’s intention (he later told me, “We
don’t want to forget the enemy--it wasn’t the informer. It was the state which
forced people to inform”), the anti-informer theme is inescapable. The
injunction against informing is underlined at the outset as Eddie explains to
his family why it is best that they tell nobody about the illegals:
EDDIE: I don’t care what the question is. You--don’t--know--nothin’.
They got stool pigeons all over this neighborhood they’re payin’ them every week
for information, and you don’t know who they are. It could be your best friend.
You hear? To Beatrice: Like Vinny Bolzano, remember Vinny?
BEATRICE: Oh yeah. God forbid.
EDDIE: Tell her about Vinny. To Catherine: You think
I’m blowin’ steam here? To Beatrice: Go ahead, tell her. To Catherine: You was
a baby then. There was a family lived next door to her mother, he was about
sixteen—
BEATRICE: No, he was not more than fourteen, cause I
was to his confirmation in Saint Agnes. But the family had an uncle that they
were hidin’ in the house, and he snitched to the Immigration.
CATHERINE: The kid snitched?
EDDIE: On his own uncle!
CATHERINE: What, was he crazy?
EDDIE: He was crazy after, I tell you that, boy.
BEATRICE: Oh, it was terrible. He had five brothers
and the old father. And they grabbed him in the kitchen and pulled him down the
stairs--three flights his head was bouncin’ like a coconut. And they spit on
him in the street, his own father and his brothers. The whole neighborhood was
cryin’.
CATHERINE: Ts! So what happened to him?
BEATRICE: I think he went away. To Eddie: I never
seen him again, did you?
EDDIE: . . . Him? You’ll never see him no more, a guy
do a thing like that. How’s he gonna show his face? To Catherine: Just remember
kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that
you gave away.
In an effort to reconcile an impulse he doesn’t
understand, Eddie forgets what happened to Vinny and why. He consults the
lawyer-narrator Alfieri, a sort of Greek-chorus character. And when Alfieri
understands what is on Eddie’s mind he says:
I’m not only telling you now, I’m warning you.... You
won’t have a friend in the world, Eddie! Even those who understand will turn
against you, even the ones who feel the same will despise you. Put it out of
your mind! Eddie!’
Eddie is powerless to resist. And by his act of
informing he betrays not only Rodolpho but the people he loves most. He has no
place to go, as the people who knew him and accepted him--the neighborhood--reject
him. And so he dies.
By the time Miller was called to appear before HUAC
on June 21, 1956, he had already found his way onto a number of blacklists,
including that of the New York Board of Education, which canceled a contract
with him to write a film on street gangs. His performance before the Committee
almost lived up to his art.
Like Proctor, Miller was willing to talk about
himself--and he did, at considerable length--but not to name others. Thus,
asked why the Communist Party produced his play You’re Next, he remarked, “I
take no more responsibility for who plays my plays than General Motors can take
for who rides in their Chevrolets.” He also told the Committee, apropos his
brief flirtation with organized Communism, that “I have had to go to hell to
meet the devil” (which led Lillian Hellman to quip that he must have gone as a
tourist). But when asked whether he had attended a Communist Party meeting at
the home of one Sue Warren, which was chaired by Arnaud d’Usseau, author of the
play Deep Are the Roots (directed, as it happens, by Kazan), he declined to
answer. Unlike most resisting witnesses, however, he did not invoke the Fifth
Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. Instead, he invoked the
First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and, by implication, the right to
silence. Whereas the straight Fifth would, under prevailing doctrine, have
definitely kept Miller out of jail, “taking the First” risked incurring the
fate of the Hollywood Ten. Under these circumstances, many people on the
liberal left perceived him as something of a heroic countersymbol to the
prevailing informer-as-hero type. But the reality was somewhat more ambiguous
than that, since Miller conceded the Committee’s right to inquire into his own
political opinions, which is more than many resisters wanted to grant; also, by
1956 the worst ravages of the anti-Communist terror seemed to have passed, and
Miller after all had at his side his fiancee, the nation’s reigning sex queen,
Marilyn Monroe: The reason he wanted a passport in the first place (the
ostensible subject of the hearings) was to take her to London, where they
planned to honeymoon and see one of his plays. Finally, although if convicted
he was subject to a maximum sentence of $1000 and a year in prison, he was so
polite that Chairman Walter thanked him for his testimony, leading some to
believe he might never be cited for contempt; in the event, he was fined $500
and given a suspended thirty-day sentence.
In arguing on appeal from his contempt of Congress
citation, Miller’s attorney, Joseph Rauh, was able to ask a unique rhetorical
question: “What could have a more restraining effect on a man’s future writing
than forcing him publicly to perform an act openly condemned by his current
writing?” At the very moment the Committee was interrogating Miller, A View
from the Bridge was being performed in various parts of this country and was
being readied for production in England.
It was not only those who agreed with him who saw
Miller as the archetypal anti-informer. The liberal Richard Rovere found that
what Miller did before the Committee involved “a certain amount of moral and
political confusion.” Even if Miller was morally justified in refusing to bow
to the Committee’s procedure of testing the good faith of witnesses by
demanding that they name names, Rovere thought, he was wrong in trying to
elevate the refusal to inform into a “universal principle.” Otherwise, wrote
Rovere, we should supplement the Fifth Amendment with another one saying, “No
man could be required to incriminate another,” and if we did that, the whole
machinery of law enforcement would collapse because, “If any agency of the
community is authorized to undertake a serious investigation of any of our
common problems, then the identities of others’ names are of great importance.”
But Rovere attributed to Miller a position he never
took. Miller the witness was articulating a point of conscience, not a
legislative program. Miller the playwright never pretended to take his
characters beyond their context. Moreover, although Miller may have been the
informer’s most visible symbolic enemy, his own attitudes on the matter were in
flux. Marilyn Monroe, who had worked with Kazan at the Actors Studio and had an
affection for him, got the two ex‑friends back on speaking terms. Miller
revised A View from the Bridge, so that it was less a condemnation of Eddie
Carbone-as-informer and more a legend of the human condition. In the final
version the lawyer Alfieri makes a new speech that gives Eddie a dignity he
originally lacked:
Most of the time now we settle for half and I like it
better. But the truth is holy, and even as I know how wrong he was, and his
death useless, I tremble for I confess that something perversely pure calls to
me from his memory not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself
to be wholly known and for that I think I will love him more than all my
sensible clients. And yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be! And so
I mourn him--I admit it--with a certain...alarm.
In 1963, when Miller and Kazan--who had separately
dreamed of working with a national repertory theater--were invited to serve as
resident playwright and director, respectively, of Lincoln Center for its first
season (1963-64), the reconciliation between these two was hard for many to
understand, much less accept. This was especially true since the play on which
they were to renew their collaboration was Miller’s autobiographical After the
Fall, which had as its protagonist Quentin (Jason Robards), a one-time
Communist who breaks with a friend about to turn informer before a
congressional committee. At the time most of the gossip focused on blond,
beautiful, vulnerable Maggie, modeled, it seemed, on the late Marilyn Monroe,
but the insiders knew that Kazan was also directing an informer-character based
on Kazan. The New York Times critic wrote at the time, the play recalls “those
who would name names and those who wouldn’t.... After the Fall seeks to
understand, not to judge.”
One member of the company recalls: “I couldn’t believe
what was going on. Gadg in his own really paranoid way thought he was the hero
of this play--not that he ever asked Arthur. He thought it was about him, not
Marilyn. He and Jason had a big battle about that long naming-names speech.
That’s when Jason vanished--went off on a week’s binge and they couldn’t find
him. It was a bitter, dark, and terrifying fight they had over that speech. “At
first Miller thought Kazan understood his play--then he thought Kazan used
Barbara Loden (Maggie) to take it away from the central issue. I mean, he
looked at things sexually instead of intellectually--he made her play it in a
see-through dress--and that was a road to escape. “The problem with Arthur is
that he was an ‘informer.’ He was informing. Gadg kind of had one over him
because he was really ‘naming’ Marilyn and the rest of them. The invasion of
privacy is what made it so sick.”
Miller never accepted the criticism that he had
invaded Marilyn Monroe’s privacy. The critic Tom Prideaux probably had it right
when he wrote, “For many years, whoever sees After the Fall will be haunted by
Marilyn’s golden image. It comes with the territory....Miller points out that
those who were vicious to her alive were most quick to condemn the alleged
portrayal of her dead. “The hypocrisy which bewildered and finally enraged her
in life indeed seems to be following her in death.”
Many of Miller’s friends never forgave him for
reuniting with Kazan. “The irony of Kazan doing After the Fall,” notes Norman
Rosten, a friend of Miller and Monroe, ‘was that Miller thought he was getting
the same man who directed Death of a Salesman, and Kazan was not the same man.
It was not the same setup. Miller was looking for a replay of his past triumphs
and the plays were different, the times were different. Kazan--because of what
he had gone through--was not the same man and the chemistry was different.”
Kermit Bloomgarden, too, blamed Miller for the play
and its director. “He gave the Kazan-character a flag of honesty and then he
attacked the people who took the Fifth Amendment.”
Even Miller’s close friend and publicist on all his
plays, James Proctor, stopped talking to him for two years. He remembers the
day in 1958 he was to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee: “At
seven-thirty in the morning my doorbell rang and it was Arthur. He was there to
bolster my morale.” Now Proctor was bafffled as to why Miller, who had never
waivered on what he himself would do, would allow Kazan to direct his play.
(But then, Proctor had what some might characterize as a bias. He had been
named by Kazan--specifically, Kazan had told HUAC that Proctor had signed Molly
Kazan’s name as a sponsor of the Waldorf Peace Conference--the 1949
popular-front gathering attacked for its Communist participants--without her
permission, and that he had later apologized for this.) Proctor is a moralist
who says, “I’ve always believed that why a subject behaved as he did was a
proper subject for medical study, but how he behaved was a proper basis for
judging a person.”
“It was a time when everybody became an expert on
everybody else’s life,” says Conrad Bromberg, the son of the actor J. Edward
Bromberg, who was named by Kazan and appeared before HUAC under compulsion and
against doctor’s orders. He declined to cooperate and
died shortly after. Conrad (who has written and rewritten a dozen drafts
of a play called “The Death of a Blacklisted Actor,” the titular character
being based on a combination of his father, John Garfield, and Edward G.
Robinson) observes, “There was a great Brownie point system set up, depending
on which way you wanted to jump. Who was more cowardly? Who was more
courageous? Lee Strasberg [director at the Group Theatre and Actors Studio] was
a big adviser on what to do. His position was that artists have no place in
politics, and if you get caught you get out. Everybody was meeting in living
rooms and everywhere the same argument occurred. On the basis of what do you
take that position? It was not so much a defense of the USSR as a question of
how far do you bend in order to survive? If it doesn’t bother you, you bend all
the way, with the knowledge that it will affect others. For two years my father
ducked subpoenas. But that didn’t matter. Anything this side of giving names
and addresses of your best friends was okay. Whether you talk to them or lie to
them or evade them didn’t matter.
“You were constantly in the position of asking, Who
am I in relation to other people? Do I trust my impulses, my humanity, my own
sense of living, or do I follow others? Is it all matter of power? Arthur
Miller made a decision, in spite of an awful lot of advice the other way.
People said, ‘You are blowing your career.’ Either he was braver or smarter
than they were or he could not be in the company of corrupt men for too long and
live well with himself. There’s a kind of healthy arrogance that many creative
people have. They don’t want to be bothered with hustlers. And you certainly
don’t want your life controlled by them. Would you want to be a prisoner of
Victor Riesel, who could tell you to appear at a certain meeting? That’s what
it came down to--that you belong to somebody else who was not even your peer.”
Conrad thinks “Kazan made a very pragmatic decision.
He takes the offensive whenever possible. Clifford [Odets] named names out of
ego--he never liked to be made to look like a schmuck. and something like
taking the Fifth Amendment smelled, and I don’t think he liked that. But Gadg
knew that nobody opposed the Committee and came out with a whole career. You
knew that up front. And he wasn’t about to be destroyed. Business was involved,
too. Twentieth Century-Fox had pictures in the can directed by Kazan. In a
sense he had leverage. He also had a contract for several hundreds of thousands
of dollars. So if he did a number for them they had to do a number for him.
“I’ve seen Gadg since.... I ought to be angry at him
but I’m not. The obligation fights the reality. When I see him, I keep thinking
he’s a figure out of my childhood.”
Conrad Bromberg is a man who has come to terms with
personal ambiguities. Others see his father, Joe Bromberg, as victim, perhaps
martyr, and Kazan as victimizer. These nagging I.D.’s won’t go away. When in
1972 Kazan appeared on WNBC Television’s hour-long interview show Speaking
Freely, to discuss with Edwin Newman among other things his latest novel, The
Assassins (which has an informer-character in it), two-thirds of the way
through the following exchange took place:
NEWMAN: Some of [the Group Theatre’s actors] got into
political difficulty in Hollywood which is a subject that I really cannot
avoid. In 1952--and this is, I suppose one of the things for which you were
most criticized--you appeared before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities and confessed that you had been briefly for eighteen months a
Communist when you were young. And you named I think it was seven other people
who had been Communists. A good many people thought you shouldn’t have named
any other names whatever you said about yourself. You have never over the years
said much about that. Is there anything you want to say about it?
KAZAN: Well, not really, in the brief context of a
program like this, Ed, because I’m going to write about it. I think when it is
understood from the point of 1972 it is one thing and when it is understood in
the context of what was going on in 1952 and how we felt in 1952 [it is
another]. Also then I think there is something disgusting about naming
things, naming names and all that, that I felt ambivalent about. But on the
other hand, when we knew about what Khrushchev reported in his book, we had
close contact with it. We knew about a society that the
left was idealizing then, the Russian society. We knew that it was a slave
society. We had a good idea how many people were being killed. I’ve often
wondered how some of the people who criticized me went through those years and
stayed behind Russia, . . . continued to idealize it when they knew what was
happening.... [WoodyAllen] I’ve felt sad about it or bad about it, and I’ve
sometimes felt--well, I would do the same thing over again.... To talk about
regrets, I do have some and I don’t have some. I think I spoke up not for any
reason of money or security or anything else, but because I actually felt it.
If I made a mistake, then that was a mistake that was honestly made.... It was
a part of a thing that has to be understood in terms of that time. Now, when I
look back on it, you know hurnanly I feel some regrets, and as a symbolic
gesture I don’t. I feei that I didn’t tell a lie, I didn’t tell any falsehoods,
I didn’t speculate, I didn’t do a lot of the things that I would feel
dishonorable about. And as I say, to write about it, to speak about it, very
briefly and simply, I think is not what I want to do. I’d rather in my own
time, in my own way speak about it at length.”
One evening in 1978 I was driving home from the
country and the radio talk-show host Barry Gray announced that his next guest
would be Elia Kazan, who as it happened was plugging his latest novel, An Act
of Love. Before the program was over Gray asked Kazan about his HUAC
experience, and inevitably the listening audience was duly informed that that
was in the past, that nobody, especially Kazan, was really interested in it
anymore, that it wasn’t worth talking about, that the subject was in any event
too complicated to cover in two minutes on the air but that he was writing a
book about it where he would tell his side, and so forth.
There is method to Kazan’s reticence. It’s a
strategic silence, as much mystification as anything else. There is about it
the strong hint that were he at liberty or inclined to tell all, had he but the
time to say his say or get it on paper, the painful nobility of his action
would at last be appreciated. But don’t get him wrong, it was a tough decision
either way and he is as ambivalent today as he was then.
At the time, Kazan urged all former comrades to
follow his example and fight totalitarian secrecy with “the facts.” Now he
prefers to keep his counsel, to take, as it were, a retrospective Fifth.
It says something that those like Miller and the
Hollywood Ten, who claimed their right to silence then, now miss no opportunity
to tell their tale, whereas many, like Kazan, who talked at the time, citing
the compulsion of history, today invoke their preference for silence.
Kazan has written, “My
favorite quote is from Jean Renoir: ‘Everyone has his reasons.’” And yet
for his own reasons he hasn’t fully shared his reasons. His thesis--that in
certain contexts to inform can be an act of honor, and that therefore it is
simplistic to condemn all informers--sounds reasonable. But it begs the
question of whether his own “token” betrayal occurred in such a context.
His silence, however, has resonance. Without giving a
single American interview on the subject, he has sent the message that the
decision he made was a painful but honest one, that given the same context he
might do the same thing again, that the Communists rather than the informers
were the betrayers, that he injured no one by his conduct, that perhaps Kazan
really believed what he said, that he will tell his story in time, and that the
whole thing is not really all that important, not worth talking about.
In fact, it is so “unimportant” that he refuses to
talk about it. Yet each of Kazan’s hints are themes that anticipate or echo
more elaborate justifications advanced by other informers more willing or able
to share their experience, to explain and try to understand out loud why they
did what they did, to subject their “reasons why” to the tests of conversation,
consideration, logic, analysis.
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