LEFTY was immediately performed in half a dozen theatres over the country. It was published, complete and thoroughly illustrated, in New Theatre magazine; copies were treasured. The critical review there had this comment: “The Group is emerging from its period of groping artistic introspection. The results of four years of collective work in a sound theatrical method are here (at last) applied to express their continually maturing revolutionary convictions.”

Gold Eagle Guy and its lustreless production were forgotten, as was Lee’s reaction to Lefty, a shrug. With Lefty taking the city and the critics by storm, the message was obvious to all—except the directors. They called a meeting in the cellar of the Belasco Theatre, where Melvin Levy’s play was dying, and Harold, speaking for the three, announced that they’d decided to call it a season and turn their efforts to finding a play to rehearse during the coming summer.

Since it was January, this decision would throw the actors, still exhilarated from the triumph of Lefty, out into the cold streets, unemployed and without rent and food money. At this, Stella, the one member of the company who was not afraid of Lee’s wrath, expressed what we all felt. “As long as we can find something to act,” she said, “let’s act.” She looked at Clifford, who then suggested, rather timorously, that since his play, now called Awake and Sing!, was free—the man who’d optioned it hadn’t renewed his hold—why not do what Stella urged: put it into rehearsal.

The answer of the directors was silence. Lee and Cheryl, who’d done the work on Gold Eagle Guy, were exhausted, but why, Stella demanded, did Harold, who had not worked and was not exhausted, feel obliged to concur with the other two? Why did he notify the actors of a decision with which he didn’t agree?

Harold was on the spot. Stella knew, of course, what he really felt and would come down hard on him in private. Later Harold admitted that he was ashamed that he hadn’t stood up for what he believed. The meeting was dissolved, but that evening, all through the performance of Gold Eagle Guy and afterward, there was a rage among the actors against the three directors. To throw thirty of us out on the street in midwinter without work or rent money when there was a play available—that was a cue for rebellion. The actors demanded another meeting with the directors.

Lee came to that second meeting with a reluctance he didn’t conceal. Once again, his authority, which until Lefty had been unchallenged, was being defied. White-faced, tight-lipped, as the meeting gathered and got under way, he studied the sports page of a newspaper, giving the impression that since it was a meeting the actors, not the directors, had called, he was doing us a favor by attending.

It turned out to be a meeting that changed his life.

For a time he maintained his show of indifference; as far as he was concerned, the season was over. But the actors were no longer the docile, worshipful “children” he’d been training for more than five years. Lefty had changed them. One of their number had written it; they’d mounted it despite Lee’s indifference and Harold’s lassitude. Now, in a charged atmosphere, the actors were not to be denied.

They pressed Lee, forcing him into an unequivocal statement of his position. He spoke a single sentence, which, I believe, destroyed his power in the Group. Even more than what he said, it was his tone, his attitude, that did it. No one made allowances for his weariness and for the disappointments he’d suffered. Mouth clenched, all asperity, he said to a group of actors who’d made sacrifices year after year to keep the Group together, who’d been through deprivation and hardship and remained loyal to him summer and winter, who now wanted only what all actors want, to go on working, he said to Clifford and through him to the company, “You don’t seem to understand, Clifford: We don’t like your play!” These words were never forgotten or forgiven.

Silence! The actors looked at each other. Did that “we” include Harold? Harold didn’t speak. Neither did Cheryl. I wondered if Clifford’s sudden success and fame had shaken Lee up so that he was desperate to hold on to the power that he must have believed was slipping. For some reason, although everyone in the room had heard him, Lee now repeated what he’d said, again using the first person plural (a form he became increasingly fond of as he grew older): “Why don’t you understand, Clifford? We don’t like your play!” These words were spoken as if they would certainly conclude the discussion—and end the season. As far as Lee was concerned, the meeting was over.

The actors turned away; they no longer expected anything from Lee. Harold still said nothing, but the actors did. They decided what a number of us had already decided in a caucus that had preceded this meeting—that Clifford should read his rewritten play to the acting company.

Lee did not attend the reading; he said he knew the play. Harold came and by that act took the side of the actors. He had the benefit of hearing the play read again, to an ecstatic audience. The actors were completely won and confirmed in their determination. It was their play, charged with the spirit of their lives. The poetry of the dialogue reached them, and its humor broke them up. The decision was inevitable. Like it or not, directors, this play would be done! Now.

Harold convened a meeting on the closing night of Gold Eagle Guy and announced that the next production of the Group Theatre would be Awake and Sing! By doing this, Harold broke openly with Lee. No one knew how completely then; time would show. Harold also announced that he’d called our old colleague Franchot Tone in Hollywood, and Tone had promised to send the five thousand dollars needed to mount the production. (Yes, five thousand dollars!) Furthermore, Harold said that he would direct the production; it would be his first. In his account of these times, The Fervent Years, Harold reports Lee’s comment when he heard that Harold was going to direct Awake and Sing!: “It will be very beneficial for him.”

AS I NOTED, there’d been a caucus of certain actors preceding these meetings; this was the Communist cell. The idea of Clifford’s reading the play to the actors—“going to the people,” it was called, or, on a large scale, “going to the masses”—was not Clifford’s alone. Since Gold Eagle Guy had opened in the Belasco Theatre, the Group cell had been meeting every Tuesday night after the performance in Joe Bromberg’s dressing room, there because Joe was our leader (perhaps because he looked like Dimitroff; had even played Dimitroff in the play another actor and I had written). Joe was an impressive man at this time and well schooled in dogma and its expression. In his dressing room the steps that led to the reading and ultimately to the production of Awake and Sing! were plotted; there we had determined that this play would be our next production whether Lee Strasberg liked it or not.

One member of the Group’s cell was Lee’s wife, Paula.

I was astonished years later, when I read Cheryl Crawford’s account of her life, that she had no suspicion there were weekly meetings of the CP cell in the Belasco Theatre. Our conspiracy may have been of little importance, but it was successful. We achieved our goal—democratically.

HAROLD CLURMAN came out of the Lower East Side from a middle-class home and an affectionate, cultured family. Before Harold was ten, his father had taken him to see Chekhov performed by a Yiddish theatre company. Later Mr. Clurman was able to send young Harold to the Sorbonne. In Paris he met the intellectuals who shaped his thoughts and his values, among them Aaron Copland.

I was his stage manager in 1935, watched him as he directed Awake and Sing! He was the best first-week director of our time, as he was our best theatre critic. What he did during that marvelous first week’s work was illuminate the play’s theme, then sketch each role brilliantly, defining its place in building the final meaning of the production. Then he’d sit back and watch the actors struggle to achieve the goals he’d set.

I learned from Harold that a director’s first task is to make his actors eager to play their parts. He had a unique way of talking to actors—I didn’t have it and I never heard of another director who did; he turned them on with his intellect, his analyses, and his insights. But also by his high spirits. Harold’s work was joyous. He didn’t hector his actors from an authoritarian position; he was a partner, not an overlord, in the struggle of production. He’d reveal to each actor at the onset a concept of his or her performance, one the actor could not have anticipated and could not have found on his own. Harold’s visions were brilliant; actors were eager to realize them. His character descriptions were full of details, of stage “business.” They were also full of compassion for the characters’ dilemmas, their failings and their aspirations. He was a man of broad sympathies; he blended perfectly with Odets’s way of looking at life and people.

I used to read the notes he made in the margin of his text and to write down what he said to the actors after each rehearsal. I was with him every day and every evening, asking questions. (Stella was jealous of how close we were. “Is he queer?” she asked.) I marveled at the penetration and the humanity of the man’s vision.

Harold’s rehearsals were like parties, at which he was the guest of honor. Most directors don’t like people sitting in the auditorium behind them when they work; Harold encouraged it. After he’d unloaded a piece of instruction—or a joke with which he was particularly pleased—he’d look back over his shoulder, rubbing his palms together vigorously, to see if the people out front had appreciated what he’d said. Harold himself certainly had; his laughter was self-congratulatory.

Harold loved actors—to be with them, to goad them, to listen to them, to debate with them, to inspire them. He loved to fight with the Adlers, brother and sister; he valued contention. Those tiffs were great fun to watch. After they were over, one never felt that the actor had been cowed into obedience or forced to agree. In this respect his directorial style was essentially different from Lee’s. He encouraged actors and admired them, instead of confronting them with their inadequacies. The atmosphere he created was of goodhearted fellowship. When there were quarrels, they were of the kind family members have. He enjoyed the life of the theatre, the companionship of writers, designers, and technicians as well as actors; relished their gossip and all the rumble and sport thrown off during work: the “irrelevant” arguments about art and politics, the sharing of problems about each other’s love lives—in fact, everything related or seemingly unrelated to the play being worked on. It was all one to Harold, all part of the interchange of creation.

He had the culture to know that if you attempt difficult tasks you’re bound to fail as often as not, and that it was no disgrace to fail. Defeat was temporary, never a defeat of the essence. In good fortune or catastrophe, I’ve never seen Harold humbled—weary, disappointed, hurt, yes, but not humbled. In failure, he did not sulk, grumble, or complain; he did not leave town. His pride was not vulnerable for others to tear down. In defeat, he was an example to me; he taught me to write my own notices.

And he taught me arrogance. I should inform you, reader, if you’re not already aware of it, that I don’t believe the meek will inherit the earth. The meek in the performing arts should change to another profession. Harold made me feel that artists are above all other humans, not only in our society but in all of history. I’m not impressed with any other elite, not of money, power, or fame. I got that from Harold.

After a glorious start came the second and third weeks. It quickly became evident that Harold had little stage facility. He had trouble turning the psychology he had so brilliantly detailed into behavior on the same level of penetration and originality. There was often something inept about his staging; he had trouble getting people in and out of doors. He relied on the actors to work this out, and occasionally, when he had a clumsy piece of stage movement to deal with, he’d ask me to work it out for him. I’d do what he asked, feeling not that Harold was incapable but only that he was above what he considered to be the mechanics of directing. An architect need not be carpenter, mason, electrician, and plumber.

Everyone has his limitations. But Harold’s were of no consequence that year in that emergency. I believe he was perfect. There was no way Awake and Sing! could have been cast or directed or played better.

When the play opened, he sent me a telegram calling me his brother. We’d become close friends and would be so for as long as he lived. I did feel like his younger brother, looking up to him for insight and knowledge I didn’t have. There were aspects of directing I knew that he did not and never would grasp, but the general spirit of how to approach a play and how to deal with actors, what the rehearsal of a play can and should be—a joyous process—I learned from him. I was ever after in his debt.

There was something I didn’t realize until later: His artistic view and feeling were an antidote to the way Communists looked at life. He was a humanist, not a Marxist.

AWAKE AND SING! opened on the nineteenth of February, 1935. Some of the critics carped, but none took exception to the essential worth of the play and its performance. Here was a new voice in the theatre! Critics on the left thought it “insufficiently revolutionary,” but they forgave Clifford; after all, the play had been written before Lefty. They were sure he’d do better next time and dispatched comrades to advise him.

It was a professional triumph for the Group company; they also felt the triumph in another and more personal way: They’d been proved right. Lee’s words about the play to Clifford in the basement of the Belasco Theatre were not forgotten; malicious souls repeated them.

But the company that had triumphed was the company Lee had worked so hard, for so many years, to gather and train. Harold had not made our actors a perfect ensemble; Lee had. For this he didn’t get credit. He was, as we celebrated, a forlorn figure. Since his confidence, like that of all directors, was based on the readiness of others to believe and serve, Lee’s own confidence took years to recover. In fact, it didn’t—not in his time with the Group. He was never again revered, as he had been. Nor was he ever rewarded for what he’d contributed to the triumph of the company.

As for Clifford, he became the most sought-after celebrity in town. There was a media landslide—critical reviews, columns, radio chatter shows. The movie companies were all over him. Everyone wanted to meet him, look him over, ask him questions, listen to what he had to say—and fuck him. Women were especially curious; he was being sought by a different kind of woman now, more sophisticated, more experienced, and more aggressive. His dates overlapped. He suddenly found himself pursued by Tallulah Bankhead, a witty, entertaining bitch, impatient with the confinements society placed on her social life. Bea Lillie adored him. Ruth Gordon took him up, filling the space between Jed Harris and Garson Kanin with this other genius; they became close. A curious and experimental man himself, Clifford filled his pocket notebook with observations about them all. His life would never be the same again. He moved out of the modest apartment where he’d been living with Harold Clurman and took a place high over University Place, where his life would be unrestricted.

Clifford

His name was dropped everywhere: “Cliff, Cliff, Cliff!” (But his old friends called him Clifford.) He was asked to speak, and his opinion was sought, on every subject. He was acclaimed—this naive and introspective man—for his political opinions. It’s our way with artists that when they become famous for their work, they’re made authorities in fields outside their ken—politics, for instance. Clifford was named head of a committee to be sent to Cuba to observe (and condemn) the rule of Batista. After a short stay in jail there, he and his committee were shipped back to the States. The newspapers reporting this misadventure made Clifford more famous than ever. He wrote a report on “conditions” there—although he’d spent most of his time in detention. Still it was front-page stuff.

I believe Clifford knew there was something fraudulent about his acclaim. Soon he no longer felt like a success. In the play he wrote two years later, Golden Boy, the woman he’s pursuing says to the hero, who’s moving to the top of his profession, “The thing I like best about you is you still feel like a flop.” I can recall that at intervals all through this time of overblown adulation, Clifford privately doubted the praise showered on him. He felt increasingly morose and was frequently suspicious of and hostile to the sycophants around him. His time was being devoured—and his life—by activities he wasn’t really concerned about. He longed for the simplicity of former days.

I remember the feeling I had in my own time of public prominence years later—and on occasion still have now. I asked myself, “Do I deserve that exaggerated respect?” I felt—and believe Clifford must have felt—the gap between what people said I was and what I knew myself to be. “I am not the person they’re talking about!” I’ve asked and still ask who the hell they are talking about when they say that name. Am I Elia Kazan? Would they invite me to their parties if they knew who I really was? And what I thought of them?

I’ve learned what Clifford was to learn—how small the distance is between the top and the bottom in our field and how quick and sudden the fall can be. This has made me quirky and doubting.

Clifford clung to the Group desperately, to the friends he had there, the actors he used to play with, and to Harold, who was, for a time, his conscience. I think that is why I am now, decades later, so devoted to the Actors Studio and the actors there, especially the “unknowns.” They remind me of my old self, the person I once was. I still wear the rabbit’s foot in my cabbie’s cap—but only I know it.

At the same time that his new fame distressed Clifford, he gobbled it up like a starved man who, when food is finally put before him, eats too much. He often seemed out of his own control and sometimes behaved like a damned fool. He was suddenly being asked to every party, mostly out of curiosity. Present at a certain gathering were Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman. Moss was especially curious about the young man with the burning eyes he’d been reading about, so he cornered Cliff for a talk. Moss used to take a gentle but perverse pleasure, as many sensitive people do, in self-deprecation; he told the “genius of the hour” about the trouble he and George were having fixing on a subject for their next collaboration. Clifford listened gravely, remarked that it was a trouble he did not have, since he had five plays in his files, “all laid out,” plot-perfect, and that Moss and George were welcome to come to his apartment, look these outlines over, and take any one of them they wanted. “All they need is dialoguing,” Clifford said (according to Moss). George, listening, looked owlish. Moss was aghast and repeated the conversation to others. It became part of Clifford’s legend in the society of the time. But Clifford was less what Moss thought of him—insufferably arrogant—than naive and childlike.

The final bit of flattery came from the Party. They took Clifford’s Party card away, erased his name from their lists, and pulled his record out of their membership file. Already alert that a repression was coming, they elevated him and some other notables to the supreme status: members without a card, also called members at large. If the Party offices were broken into by the “fascist cops,” Clifford would be safe. I’ve always suspected that this was the honor accorded Lillian Hellman and some other glamour intellectuals.

So, in every way, Clifford’s life was made simultaneously easier and more complicated. His pleasures were multiplied, while he had less and less time for himself. The flattery never stopped and he couldn’t help eating it up, while at the same time he believed what was said about him less and less and finally not at all.

Here’s the tragic heart of the problem—as I understood it. When the irritations, the problems, and the conflicts that existed before the big success are eased and removed, when the struggle is (apparently) over and one lives behind a permanent Don’t Disturb sign, it soon becomes evident that these troubles, now put behind, were the source and the genesis of the talent that brought on the success. Fame and money were insulating Clifford from the discomforts and challenges of his earlier years but, at the same time, “saving” him from those abrasions that were the source of his “genius.”

There’s a price for everything.

Now came the classic questions: “Suddenly I can do anything I want, so what do I do? I can go any which way; which way will I choose? What do I ask of life? What do I want to do with my years and energy? If I do have the talent they say I have, to what shall I turn it? Now that I have what appear to be unlimited choices, which choices shall I make?”