The defiant one

FROM his formative years, Elia Kazan’s role models among directors included Stanislavsky, Dovzhenko and the maestros of European expressionism. As a quintessentially American genius of stage and screen, passionately believing in “roots,” Kazan unveiled Marlon Brando and James Dean for audiences far beyond America’s shores. During his heyday (1930-60), Kazan virtually re-explored the terrain of Dos Passos’ trilogy, “U.S.A.” -- a continent and a Power wonderfully absorbed in itself.

Richard Schickel has produced the first “life” of Kazan (who died in 2003 at age 94), but he is quick to warn that this is a “critical biography.” “It offers no more insight into Elia Kazan’s personal life,” Schickel writes, “than he himself offered in his own autobiography.” If “personal” means “private” (money, women, dreams, shrinks), this is certainly true. Not only is Schickel’s book about half the length of Kazan’s “A Life” (1988), but its virtues -- an impressive knowledge of the terrain, soundly balanced judgments -- tend to blur the living personality of a man whose fierce competitiveness was inseparable from his flair as a showman. Arthur Miller commented that Kazan’s purpose was always “to hit the audience in the belly because he knows all people are alike in the belly, no matter what their social position or education.”

As actor and director, Kazan progressed from the avant-garde Group Theatre of the 1930s (famous for productions such as Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty”) to a blatant enjoyment of the salaries and saunas on offer in the Hollywood studios. He abandoned acting. His personality seems to have gone through a violent mutation, from a lonely, rejected, sexually envious “frozen wolf” at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. (the lupine image was his own) to the upfront, often effusive, sexually conquering superstar of the Truman-Eisenhower era. Yet the wolf’s far-from-casual snarl is heard again in his autobiography -- passages of defiant, in-your-face vulgarity, savage celebrations of sexual conquest in alleys and doorways, the predatory prowl of a loner looking for a pretty face in Central Park.

Kazan thrived in the kind of two-coast career that is more often dreamed of than achieved, working with such major literary talents as Miller, Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, William Inge, John Steinbeck and Budd Schulberg. Schickel records that from March 1943 to the winter of 1953-54, Kazan directed 14 plays and 10 movies. Of the plays, nine became long-running hits, including “Death of a Salesman” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” His first picture, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” was hailed; “Gentleman’s Agreement” brought him his first Academy Award. Calling the 15 years from 1944 “the most remarkable era any American director ever experienced,” Schickel equates Kazan’s heyday with Broadway’s last moment “as a major contributor to the cultural and intellectual life of the country.” His mastery of technique, his corrosive psychological lucidity, his nose for milieu -- the small town (“Baby Doll”) as well as the big city (“On the Waterfront”) -- provide the basis for his compelling brand of American realism. He perfectly understood Blanche DuBois, the washed-up salesman Willy Loman and Terry Malloy with his disfigured sense of honor.

Schickel frames his narrative, fore and aft, with Kazan’s contentious honorary Oscar in 1999, when he was almost 90. After the award’s announcement, uproar ensued. The protest group calling itself the Committee Against Silence took out a full-page ad in the trade papers, accusing Kazan of being “the man who validated the blacklisting of thousands” and gave credibility to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Almost half a century had passed since Kazan named names for the benefit of the committee. Many took the view that Kazan’s sole motive had been to save his bacon as a director acceptable to 20th Century Fox and to moguls like Spyros Skouras and Darryl F. Zanuck, for whom he had recently shot a film with an oblique anti-Communist slant, “Viva Zapata!” starring Marlon Brando.

Kazan was undoubtedly angered (unreasonably, I think) by resistance from the government of Mexico, the preferred location, to the Steinbeck-Kazan story line, which aimed to expose Communist abuse of power by tenuous analogy. Kazan insisted that the real Zapata turned his back -- and his horse -- on power once it was within his grasp (as all good revolutionaries should do, but Leninists never did). John Womack’s scholarly biography of Zapata lends little support to this interpretation, but Kazan’s rising anti-Communism required it. Schickel devotes some excellent pages to this film and what he calls its “well-meaning Yankee ventriloquism,” as when Zapata tells his followers, “A strong people doesn’t need a strong leader. Strong leaders make a weak people.” The making of “Viva Zapata!” and attacks on the film from the left provide significant clues to Kazan’s subsequent decision to name names.

Here was an almost universally admired artist, apparently still on the left, not only unburdening himself to HUAC but also issuing an exculpatory statement -- mainly composed by his wife, Molly -- in the form of a paid advertisement in the New York Times. Schickel does not explicitly exonerate Kazan, but he edges us in that direction by recalling Stalinist crimes, Soviet espionage, the Communist Party USA’s secrecy, bullying and fidelity to a foreign power -- not forgetting oppression in Eastern Europe, the war in Korea and situations elsewhere. All of this is seen as legitimately crowding Kazan’s indignant head, when he decided in April 1952 to do what, that February, he had said honor forbade -- to name names.

How should we explain the postwar red scare misleadingly known as “McCarthyism”? What motivated HUAC (which orchestrated the Hollywood blacklist through rituals of confession, purgation and citations for contempt) was by no means what concerned George Orwell: the horrors of forced collectivization in Ukraine, the mass purges of 1937-38, postwar Stalinist anti-Semitism -- the specter of his “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Although the Yalta “betrayal” became a constant conservative leitmotif, what fueled the inquisition were, in reality, strictly domestic events. It was a time of reckoning with the New Deal, with powerful labor unions, with moves toward racial desegregation, with the welfare state. HUAC declared itself aghast at the pro-Soviet movies turned out by Hollywood during World War II, but the real target was Communist and Progressive influence in the studios and its unions. This is by no means to discount the East European lobby, particularly Catholics outraged by Soviet depredations in the “people’s democracies.”

Arthur Miller famously drew a parallel with witch hunts in his play “The Crucible.” Schickel reports that Molly Kazan once reminded Miller that while witches were always figments of the imagination, Communists were real -- a common observation at that time in the columns of Commentary magazine. But if one compares the domestic Cold War in the United States with that in Britain, one discovers that anti-Communism in America was far from a pragmatic response to Soviet subversion. It also assumed the form of a witch hunt with its own fevered agendas, superstitions, dark racial fears, religious zealots, prejudice against intellectuals, indexes of banned books, probing of associations and friendships. Witches do exist during such periods of communal hysteria. Russia in the 1930s was seething with pointy hats and broomsticks: The so-called saboteurs, wreckers, Trotskyists and fascist agents were invariably figments of controlled hysteria. In Franz Kafka’s view, “they” need only point the finger at “them.”

Schickel asks why we should condemn political informing in the 1950s yet applaud whistle-blowing today. But what Kazan did to save his career had little in common with the good citizen reporting a crime, with the whistle-blower risking his job or with Terry Malloy’s courageous stand against dockland gangsterism in Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.” Years later, Kazan summed it up in “A Life”: “How is the world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence, and I’d been taken in and twisted from my true self.” Having argued “in court” for his client, Schickel finally throws down his briefcase to express ultimate regrets, similar to Kazan’s, about this ethical disaster.

Schickel’s critical biography (authorized by Kazan himself) owes more to the journalistic tradition than to the academic. There is no filmography and no chronology, the reference notes are on the soft side, newspaper and magazine articles are preferred to scholarly journals as sources -- although Schickel has made extensive use of Kazan’s production notes, held in the Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Lacking are coherent composites of Kazan’s movies as they come across to an audience. Of course, it is notoriously more difficult to achieve this kind of report with theatrical productions, since most evaporate without retrievable visual records after the final curtain comes down. In Kazan’s case, the films provide Schickel with some clues to the preceding stage productions, and he often ends up ably analyzing Miller, Williams and Wilder because the plays live on as texts.

When Kazan was awarded the honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Schickel was already personally close to the great man -- perhaps uncomfortably so for an objective biographer. He claims that Kazan’s fame magnetized protesters who yearned for the reflected glory of being among his victims. Schickel defended Kazan’s award in Time magazine, after which, he tells us, Kazan’s third wife, Frances, called to say that she had found Kazan close to tears, a copy of Schickel’s article in his hand. Schickel also directed a short documentary for the Oscar ceremony and wrote the text of Martin Scorsese’s speech of appreciation, but he serves as Kazan’s caretaker only on special occasions.

As he recognizes, what clinched the friendly reception Kazan finally received in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that night was a great director’s acclaim by comparable talent from the next generation. With the joint presentation by Scorsese, “a director in the psychologically intense tradition” as Kazan, and Robert De Niro, “who worked in the Stanislavskian manner Kazan had championed,” forgiveness won the day. *