(Photo Credits 34.1)

OSMAN’S fate, more intensely felt because imagined, had an effect on me. Like the reprobate of legend, I determined to transgress what seemed to be my nature and behave. With the Repertory Theatre becoming a reality, with so many people looking to me, I was obliged to be the “pappou,” providing moral example, clearheaded decisions, and even some inspiration, while surrendering myself to respectability. I had an impressive-sounding title, new stationery with my name in a position of command, an office with a second secretary, and I was expected to attend meetings of the Lincoln Center board at regular intervals, properly dressed.

At the same time, I had a task dearer to me, the production of a difficult film, my own. I no longer spent my days writing in the morning, then seeing Barbara, but was organizing the production of America America. The most difficult problem was getting the money I needed to make the film. Friends in the business seemed to admire the script, but none of the major companies would risk capital for its production. We were even turned down by Warner Brothers, who were to be our eventual sponsors. I was bitter about this; I remembered how much money my films had made for Warners and Fox and Columbia Pictures. Finally a firm that was just beginning—Elliot Hyman and Ray Stark—indicated interest, and a deal, not favorable to me, was agreed to. One thing that made all this difficult was my determination, in the interest of realism, to cast the film with actors industry people call “unknowns.” There was also something “grubby”—someone used that word—about my story. Skouras, when he turned me down, said, “This isn’t Kazan!” What the hell did he think it was? I had believed that he, as an immigrant boy, would appreciate the drama of what I’d written. Perhaps it embarrassed him.

I proceeded with casting, but had no one in mind for the leading role, an Anatolian boy who makes the journey from Kayseri to New York. It was, I believed, a fine part for an actor to play, but the character was not distinguished by nobility of motive or grandeur of vision; he was not a hero. Quite the contrary: He was an ordinary kid whose outstanding quality was tenacity. He made his way west, as so many had, in the best way he could and not always honorably. I had the image of my uncle in mind, a colorful rascal who, after he’d prospered in business here, betrayed his partner, my father. I didn’t scrub the character clean; I was looking for a ferret, not a lion, someone who had what was my boy’s single redeeming quality, devotion to his father and family.

Finding the right actor for the central role of a film is critical; the total effort hangs on your choice. The main thrust of the character as imagined by the director must truly be in the actor he chooses; when it’s faked, it will seem fake. The director should also hope to find an element of danger in the actor himself; if he or she is a person the director would hesitate to cross in life, this amounts to a kind of respect. There should also be something inscrutable about the actor, a mystery, so that as you watch him, you wonder what he’s thinking. The actor the director chooses must be a person who, for any of these or for other reasons, you would like to see more of, as you would in life; someone the director will not get bored with over a long shooting schedule and the audience will not tire of watching for two hours on a screen; someone the camera “loves,” makes more, not less interesting. In short, a person impossible to find.

I looked everywhere; took trips to England—no luck—then to France; brought a French actor back to America to test and found him much too good-looking. Handsome men, I decided, lack desperation. I looked in California, but there was mush in the hearts of the actors I saw there. Of course, I looked in the Actors Studio; no luck. Finally I did the obvious, went to Athens, and in the office a film director found an apprentice sweeping the floor so he could be near production work. I liked the kid and his looks, but he had little acting experience or English. Still I talked to him and was won over by his stories. His father had been in the civil war on the Communist side, was beaten around the kidneys by the rightists until he began to hemorrhage internally, then bled to death in his son’s arms. When he told me about his father’s death, detail by detail, I saw the material I needed for the part in the boy’s face. I believe that if I’d found a De Niro, a Hoffman, or a Pacino, the film might have been more effective and certainly more successful commercially, but this boy had one merit superior actors did not have: He was the real thing. America America is my favorite film both despite the performance in its central role and because of it.

I brought the boy to America, made him speak English all day, encouraged him to find an American girlfriend—the best way to learn a new language. I found him devoted, honest, and loyal; all you had to do was look at him and you believed the story; he was too amateurish to contrive. It was to be not a characterization but a fact; this young man was it. His performance can be compared to that of the man in De Sica’s Bicycle Thief. Like that nonactor, Stathis Giallelis may have been hurt by his sudden importance; after my film, he went on trying to be an actor in America but never learned to speak English without a noticeable accent and didn’t have the patience to train himself. He was a good boy, but he was also what Greek mothers call sons they’re proud of: a rooster. The only son in a family of four daughters, he’d been spoiled in every way; his women made him believe that all he had to do was speak and he’d be obeyed. Served at the head of the table by his women, fed, clothed, and supported, praised for virtues he possessed and those he didn’t possess, he was that wonderful thing, a male. Most Greek men are mother spoiled.

THERE continued to be an unspoken tension between Art Miller and me, but also a little of the affection that had once been there. The problem was that the discord between us was unarticulated; we were both determined to get along for the sake of the Repertory Theatre, and we did. I admired Art for his unwavering devotion to our cause. We were together on a raft in the middle of the ocean, and there was nothing for us to do but paddle; to save my life, I had to save his.

There was one subtle problem, and it’s difficult to explain. I did tell him everything I thought about the scenes he read to us as he was writing his new play, but in one fundamental respect I backed away from the truth. Bob Whitehead and I found ourselves in the desperate circumstances of needing the play to be ready on time; we’d begun to feel the pressure of dates. We wanted to open the Washington Square Theatre as soon as it was ready for an audience. We knew that enthusiasm drains away. So while I plainly criticized the details of Art’s play, I didn’t tell him what I thought of the overall pseudoconfessional concept and particularly that of the first half of the play, which I didn’t like then and like less in retrospect, or of the central figure, based, I had to believe, on Art himself. I found him a bore.

The first act concerned Art’s crisis under the pressure of HUAC and deals with his ambivalence. There is a character based on me and my testimony, and although that character is not how I thought of myself, Art must have considered it reasonable, even generous, and I was ready to accept it as how, looking back, he saw the events. He had a right to his version of that bit of history. However, I thought that the self-dramatization, the turgid introspection, and a kind of self-favoring in Art’s Quentin were heavy going and not interesting. Art’s historical viewpoint on Arthur Miller, the hero of the McCarthy crisis, made for dull drama—and that was the first act.

I did truly admire the second act—the one so many people resented. It was about Art’s obsessive romance with Marilyn Monroe. He had denied, foolishly, that the story of that relationship in the play was based on his personal history, denied that his character, Maggie, was based on Marilyn. But he put into the mouth of Maggie precisely what Marilyn had thought of him, and particularly her scorn for him at the end of their marriage. This character is true and has an interesting dramatic development from adoration to contempt. Art is rough on himself, giving us all that Marilyn said in her disappointment and resentment. The play’s summation—summations are by definition boring—is insufferably self-favoring and “noble.” Audiences should be able to make up their own minds what the events shown have meant, but Art knew what he wanted the audience to think, and he told them.

As an independent director I might not have done the play, but as a responsible producer, I did.

BOB and I were putting together our company, and the essential requirement was that the actors would be well cast in Art’s play. Quickly we found actresses who suited all the women in the play except the central role of Maggie. The men were easy to find; some of them were members of the Actors Studio. No one I invited to join the company from the Studio refused, this despite the constant rat-tat-tat of anger from that temple of self-righteousness, and the prompting that came from Lee Strasberg in a jet stream. Liska March, probably the oldest and one of the most devoted members of the Studio, not an actress but an administrator, was there throughout this time. She reported the boiling of anger that went on as Lee fed the flames. “He was a god then,” she said to me, “and you didn’t say no to him when he berated anyone. Instead the actors got on the bandwagon and added their two cents, spoke up saying how awful what you’d done was and how disloyal, how could you do such a thing, and so on.” Liska felt that Lee incited them to say what he wanted to hear. Some of the actors who came with me were also the objects of revilement—but soon they didn’t care, and I certainly didn’t.

Then I got a surprise. Rumor spread that there was an Actors Studio Theatre being formed. Liska March said that this was in order to prove that they could get along without me; but it had a more serious purpose. The theory behind the theatre was to be Lee’s concept of a “floating company,” in which one actor would replace another so that productions could be maintained by the presence of a strong constellation of “stars” or near stars. Lee and Cheryl had sent a pledge form to all members. The form read: “I understand and am fully in sympathy with the Actors Studio’s plans to extend its activities to include a production organization. I am aware of the principle of the Floating Company on which this theatre will be based and as a member of the Actors Studio, I would like to participate in this program. I will make myself available to the Actors Studio Production Unit for a period of at least four months during the year 1963 … 1964 … 1965. Signed …”

I received one of these pledge forms and thought I should respond. “Dear Lee,” I wrote, “I’ve thought about your plan for a Floating Company and I can’t go along with it.” I didn’t explain my reasons.

Then I thought that the cleanest thing for me to do was resign, not as a member but as one of the directors, since my onetime associates were pursuing a policy I disapproved of. I was never in favor of the Studio’s becoming a theatre and had resisted that at every turn. A studio is a studio—a place to experiment, to work without tensions, where actors can be free of the stresses of commercial production. To make a theatre of the Studio would require a fundamental change in its purpose, its organization, and its leadership. Since I didn’t believe that Lee would be a capable leader for a production theatre, I decided that a complete break would be best for both sides and composed the following letter:

Dear Cheryl: Life is tough enough without making it tougher. When I read the announcement that you and Lee were forming an Actors Studio Theatre, I could only think, “Well, God bless them both.” Why do any of us do anything except make things easier for each other? You and Lee want to go ahead as you and the actors there see fit and I certainly don’t want to do the least thing to impede you. Nor do I want to sit here and look disapproving. Not my role in life, is it? Or to be off in Turkey this summer, the absent dissident. The hell with that. I’ll simply resign from the Board of Directors, which is clean and quick, and give you all my blessing and fervent good wishes, as a member of the Actors Studio—which I will always be.

Then I went on more formally:

I am sending a short announcement to the hungry press as follows: “The time is now coming for active production in the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre of which I am co-producing director. At the same time, the Actors Studio, of which I was a founder and on whose Board of Directors I sit, has embarked upon its own program of production. This activity overlaps and competes with some of the activity for which I am responsible at the Repertory Theatre. It seems right to me that I now resign from the Board of Directors of the Actors Studio in order to be able to give my undivided attention and effort to my job at the Repertory Theatre. That resignation I have effected today and am no longer a Director of the Actors Studio. ELIA KAZAN.”

I also wished to communicate clearly and directly with the actor members, and I sent them this telegram: “To all: I resigned as a director only. That was necessary. But I’m still with you and for any and all efforts you make. I’m sure whatever you do will bring credit to our years of work and to Lee’s teaching.” It was signed: “The First Member.”

I am not proud of that telegram. It doesn’t sound like what I was feeling but like what I thought was “right” for me to say.

Liska March told me that the telegram was several times torn down from the bulletin board where she’d pinned it but that she kept putting it back. She also told me that some members felt my loss, wished me luck, and missed me a great deal. I believe Lee did too—miss me, not wish me luck. Most of the actors were for him and, since they felt abandoned and rejected, resented my departure. Lee did nothing to discourage this resentment, but instead encouraged a hero worship that created a Khomeini-like terror. The powerful man as a martyr is a great force.

I then decided to make the emotional and artistic break complete. I wrote an article for The New York Times, summing up my true feelings. “The Actors Studio,” I wrote, “has made a historic contribution to the American Theatre. It is now no longer a group of young insurgents. It is itself an orthodoxy and takes particular pride in its roster of stars. It deserves the acclaim it has received. My great disappointment with the work there has been that it always stopped at the same point, a preoccupation with the purely psychological side of acting. I am speaking of my own failure as well as that of others.”

That was a true resignation. After that I became comfortable with Lee’s anger and stopped worrying about it. The long theatrical civil war that followed was not fought in the dark but in a blaze of newsprint. Most everything said, each stand taken, was printed and became gossip, STUDIO DIVORCE, a headline in the New York Post announced, and it continued: WILL KAZAN GET THE KIDS? The World-Telegram & Sun predicted in a headline: TALENT RAID FORESEEN AS KAZAN SHIFTS JOBS. Paul Newman was quoted, saying that my leaving the Studio was as great a disappointment as if his wife had walked out on him. “I’ll stay with the Studio,” he concluded. And the most official theatrical column, that of Sam Zolotow in The New York Times, gave the schism feature space beneath the headline: KAZAN QUITS POST. We hadn’t realized until this outburst of interest that we were quite that important. “Not since Leon Trotsky left Josef Stalin,” wrote one columnist, “has any rift caused as much rancor as Elia Kazan’s departure from the Actors Studio to head, with Robert Whitehead, the Lincoln Center Theatre.”

Even now, a quarter of a century later, some of the bitterness endures, and if some people can’t find anything else for which to criticize me, they recall this old “treachery.” I recently asked certain actors to record their memories of that time on tape. Some of those most prominently involved refused to return my phone calls, even though, had we met on the street, they’d have been quite civil and given me the smile of concord. I particularly wanted to hear Cheryl Crawford’s side of the issue, because she was at Lee’s side throughout the split and on into the formation of the Actors Studio Theatre. Cheryl told my secretary, whom she knew well and who has done some work for her, that she couldn’t recall the events in question because she wasn’t involved in them. But photographs prove she was there, arm linked with Lee’s. I appreciate her tender concern for Lee; he was badly hurt and was to be hurt even more in the next two years.

THERE is a corny joke about three “men of God” being asked to respond to the fundamental question When does life begin? The Catholic priest answered, “At the instant the sperm joins with the egg in the womb.” The Presbyterian minister’s answer was: “At the instant when the mother feels the first movement in her belly.” The rabbi’s answer was: “When the last child leaves home.” This was happening to Molly and me. Our daughter Katharine was about to go away to the George School, and Molly and I would be left alone together. We had a servant to prepare dinner, make the bed, and keep the place clean, so all Molly had to do, at last, was write. It was the moment for which she’d been waiting all her adult life.

When I thought of what Molly had done for me and for our family of children, I felt guilty, and I completely enlisted in her coming struggle. The guilt I dealt with by vowing to her that I’d support her in every way, be home every night for dinner and thereafter. I was glad that we were still married, glad that Anatolian men don’t divorce. I was grateful to her and knew it was time for her to be rewarded. She’d given me four fine children who, whatever else they thought, loved me—not always easy to do. She’d kept our family together despite my chaotic behavior, remained loyal to me through painful times, and tried to understand a nature as different from her own as it was possible to be. She’d set up a series of homes for the family in apartments and brownstones here and there around the city. She’d fixed up a country home for us and for the kids and then, on the same piece of land, built a studio for us, in which she would write, I work on my projects. It was a beautiful building, plain and sturdy, with no false ornament, perfectly functional; it was like Molly. I am typing in it now.

She’d also seen four children through four schools, selected the schools carefully—with no help from me—and, on the whole, with good sense. She’d made sure that the children were properly and appropriately dressed, sewn name tapes on their summer clothes. She’d also seen them through psychological difficulties, been attentive to their problems, day after day, again without much help from me. On three occasions she’d brought the entire family to the location where I was shooting a film and set up a home for us, making my work on location more comfortable and more stable. She’d always been every way loving.

She herself had been through a long psychoanalysis, which was painful; for a time I thought it would never come to an end, but it did and not happily. The analyst to whom she’d been going several times a week for three years, and to whom she’d been devoted, announced one day that he didn’t think he could help her further. It was a shocking dismissal. This depressed her terribly and made me furious with the analyst. Molly had to believe that the man thought her hopeless. Seeing what it had meant to her, I determined to provide her with the support she’d lost from him. I would pay reparations for my own past behavior.

Now the time had come for her finally to put other people’s needs behind her and devote herself to herself. The first thing she wanted to do was move us into a small apartment, one that would be simple for her to take care of. I told her she could have anything she wished for and to spare no cost. She found and we bought an apartment on the sixteenth floor of 115 Central Park West. She set about planning alterations and choosing the furnishings for what she called our “final, perfect apartment.” She meant those words, but I didn’t believe anything was final or perfect or that happiness and good intentions last. However, I kept my doubts to myself. I was determined to do my best to see her effort succeed.

There was a room facing east and, adjoining it, a balcony over the park. It was a beautiful room, and choosing it for her study was the first time she’d treated herself generously. Every detail of that writing room was pleasing to her eye and appropriate to her work pattern, and at last she was going to have what she wanted, her final, perfect place. She also bought two pretty housecoats to work in, one pink, one green. Her rapture—that’s what it was—moved me deeply. I sought her out now, became truly devoted to her, and paid her the admiration she deserved. I found her beautiful again, distinguished, patrician. Years of alienation and virtual separation were put behind us. I wasn’t seeing Barbara or anyone else. Molly’s cheeks regained their high color and she bought herself new clothes that were more frivolous as well as choosing a new, trimmer hairstyle. Observing the change in me, Molly was pleased and she was made confident. We were going to start another life, in an apartment where we’d be secure and happy forever.

WHEN we had cast Art’s play totally, except for the crucial part of Maggie, I had an inspiration: Barbara. I’d seen her with a blond wig when I was making Splendor in the Grass and had then and have now great admiration for her work as an actress. I believed that her scope was limited, but within that range she was as good as anyone working in the theatre. At this time she was monumentally pregnant, but one day I said to Art that I had an idea that might solve our problem. With considerable difficulty, I convinced Barbara that she should come, pregnant as she was, and read for Art. I got her a blond wig and did the best I could with her belly, keeping her seated before the reading. She read the part brilliantly. It was obvious she’d be the right choice, because she understood the role in ways totally experiential; she’d been there! Art was immediately taken with her—Marilyn-lookalike wig and all. Later he was to say that she hurt his play because she made the audience believe it was Marilyn he was writing about. Whom did he think he was kidding? But at the time he was vastly relieved that our casting problem was solved.

I talked with Barbara after the reading to tell her how well she’d done. Then I asked how she was getting along. She gave me a nonanswer. “I’m all right. Don’t worry about me.” Was I guilty about Barbara’s coming child? I have not noticed that children brought up in an orderly and traditional manner are invariably sounder and smarter than those brought up in difficult circumstances.

Now, with the play fully cast and I believed well cast, the theatre at Washington Square almost finished, the “perfect and forever” apartment progressing, and Molly about to start writing her own plays at last, with the Actors Studio problem settled—at least for me, if only by indifference—I left for Europe to embark on what was, despite all else, my major interest: making the film of my screenplay America America. On the way to Turkey, where the crew would meet me, we stopped off at Stockholm to do some advance publicity for Splendor in the Grass. There I received the telegram from New York, phrased in a prearranged code, informing me that a son had been born.

IN ANKARA, the capital city of Turkey, sitting on one side of a table that could have supported a small tank, Charlie Maguire and I confronted the Turkish censorship board, five men, two of them in uniforms of the Turkish army, whose permission we had to obtain to film there. They’d read the script I’d presented, but apparently they weren’t certain what their opinions were. No one of them wanted to be that member of the board who’d allowed a scene to slip through that might outrage men of higher rank. The safest thing for them to have done was deny us permission. But then they’d face another charge: that they’d let pass a chance to bring at least half a million American dollars into their country.

They kept glancing at one of their number, the officer with the most citation stripes, the only one of them who’d not spoken—although he’d frequently cleared his throat. He’d studied me as I made my presentation, didn’t smile back when I smiled at him. It was obvious that what the others were waiting for was this man’s judgment. I was waiting for it too, especially anxious because I’d omitted two scenes from the Turkish script I’d given them, ones I knew would cause them to reject my application. Silence makes you imagine many things.

He stood up. He had, I now noticed, a more Asiatic cast to the bones of his face and to his eyes. He spoke in a voice of command to a translator, who said to me, in a tone even more imperious, “You will have a person from our government at your side every day and he will tell you what you can show and what you cannot show. That is our requirement.”

I had it! I’d won their permission!

“Do you accept?” the officer said in Turkish to the interpreter. It was immediately translated into English, even though I’d assured them all to begin with that I understood Turkish.

“Of course,” I replied in Turkish, “I understand the colonel’s concern.”

“General,” the interpreter corrected. Then more Turkish was given to him to pass on to me. “Our pasha hopes you are sincere. But as they say in your country, talk is cheap. What we must expect of you is a film masterpiece that will show our people not as they are shamefully portrayed in American films but as they are in truth, honest and hard-working, with great love for their soil and for Allah.”

“That is precisely my intention,” I lied.

The pasha smiled at me in a curious way. Being a politician as well as an army man, perhaps he appreciated cunning. We shook hands American style when I left. “I’ve been to Pittsburgh,” he said, in English. “And Akron, Ohio.”

“SO we’ll be watched every minute we’re here,” I wrote Molly as soon as I got to the hotel, then described the entire interview.

I’d received a disturbing letter from her. She’d decided to move earlier than planned out of the brownstone we were selling into the apartment we’d bought. That way, she could supervise every change, as it was being altered to her specifications. She was determined to “settle everything,” so she could get down to work on her plays. Molly had a passion for order in the details of her life, as people do who feel their inner lives are disordered. While all the building activity was going on, she found time to brood over our life together, overseeing the past and peering into the future. “You have much reason for pride,” she wrote me, “but I’ve been off my center of gravity. Now here I am, free of many old burdens, with our last one off to school, and this is my chance. Now if ever. I’ve got to get firm with myself. And forget much of what happened between us. I don’t think ‘fault’ means much—your fault, my fault. We did what we couldn’t help doing, being the way we were.” She wrote about her loneliness. “It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve not had a kid to look after and with you gone too, the house feels empty. But for a time that’s what I need, isn’t it? There’s nothing to distract me now. No one to blame …” Then she wondered: “How’ll we do in our new place? You’ll work, I know. I? That’s my problem.”

I had to linger in Ankara a few days to get the official certificate of approval. During this time I had another letter. I could tell she was frightened but, being what she was, concealed her fears from herself and so from me. Morally fastidious, she was careful not to write what might upset me in my work. I read her letters with admiration but with mounting anxiety. I had the impression she was now challenging herself, do or die.

“Things have improved,” she wrote. “I have a table that will hold a typewriter, and one scaffold is out of the living room. When the carpenters give me my study, I’ll be able to think about working. At last. I have to. Soon. All I do now is work on the house. It’s hard to concentrate because of the tile man and the plumber, the damned phone calls and spending all afternoons scouting wallpaper. So I fall into bed exhausted at a foolishly early hour, rise with the sun and sit at the typewriter. But NOTHING HAPPENS.”

She’d go on and on about the children, with whom she kept in touch constantly. She was discovering what it would take me longer to realize: that parenthood doesn’t stop, that a mother continues sewing on name tapes for the rest of her days. Otherwise she’d committed her mind totally, blocked off all escape routes. As she said, it was now or never. What frightened me was that perhaps it was a gamble taken too late, a bet placed on herself after the race was past winning.

Then it occurred to me that a great part of her problem was my fault. I saw that my lies about our intimate life, since they’d been successful, had prevented her from confronting the conflicts in her own life. The shield I’d put around my behavior, and so hers, was so perfect that it had not permitted her to face her dilemmas. By concealing from her our true situation, I’d harmed her, that way more than any other. It was as if I’d prevented her life from happening to her.

I defended myself. After all, there’d been painful conflicts in our life together, of which she’d been made aware. The Defense League of Central Park West Wives, Paula Strasberg, president, had informed her about my affectionate relationship with two of my close friends. Molly had felt publicly shamed—and I was guilty of that. Twice she’d moved to divorce me, employing powerful lawyers in her father’s old Wall Street firm. They’d leaped to horse and presented me with terms that were devastating, trying to break me. But I’d agreed to those terms, since she was “in the right.” At which she’d called off the legal brigade. But here’s the question: Would she have written this drama as it had happened? She was completely attached to me while, at the same time, altogether condemning my behavior. If she’d written the part of an unfaithful husband in a play, would she have been true to the contradictions of her own experience? Would she have given her “villain” the qualities that made her persevere with me? I doubted it.

That’s why I doubted her gamble and didn’t dare think what she’d feel and what she’d do if she failed. Her total worth was at stake—not for me, not for the rest of the world; only for herself. So I worried terribly, woke in the middle of the night believing that harm had already come to her or soon would. I waited anxiously for each letter from America, asking the reception desk and our office two or three times a day if anything had arrived from home.

Then I was blessed with a cheerful letter. It contained the news that one of her short plays, which had been performed in a small New York theatre to quite a good press, was about to be done at the Spoleto Festival, and she’d been invited there as a guest by the festival’s organizer, Gian-Carlo Menotti. Could I, she asked, possibly come over and be with her, even for a day? I knew how much a performance at Spoleto would mean to her now; my presence would make the celebration complete. But there was no way I could, not at the time she indicated, nor ever until my film was “in the can.” Difficulties and the demands on me were becoming heavier every day. I wrote her this, sandwiched in between the most ardent congratulations. Then, the next day, wrote her the same letter again.

FROM the Istanbul airport I went straight to the Hilton, where our crew was being put up. I found them in the bar, vacationing. They were a new bunch to me, so I socialized with them and with my cameraman, Haskell Wexler. I noticed he was signing bar checks not in his name but in that of my company. I recalled that he came from a wealthy Chicago family. My experience is that those born to wealth tend to be the most careful with their money and the most spendthrift with others’. That’s how they stay rich.

The crew were talking about the city, how dirty it was and how mean the people on the streets looked. Our apple-assed script girl had discovered that the flush toilets in the Istanbul Hilton were not up to strict U.S. standards. Advice was being swapped about how to spot pickpockets, how to avoid disease, what not to eat, and what to do about the water. They were all particularly horrified by the hamals, the human beasts of burden. “They’re hardly human,” one of them said. In our story, my “hero” becomes one for a while. I refrained from making a comparison of the humanity on Istanbul’s streets with that of our American crew, who seemed thoroughly spoiled by our affluent civilization. We had some Italians—our head electrician and carpenter were from Rome—and they seemed at ease and not at all frightened.

While I was drinking and becoming less and less amiable, I was informed that I had an overseas call, New York. Afraid of bad news coming from Molly or about one of the children, I rushed to the nearest phone. The man on the line was my lawyer, Bill Fitelson, who loved real-life drama. “He’s out!” he said, not bothering with the usual prologue about the weather. “Who’s out?” I asked. “Stark’s out,” he said. Bill had written my deal with Ray Stark and Elliot Hyman, and he was telling me they’d withdrawn from my project. “How could they?” I asked. As he told me, I thought of the crew running up a fat bill at the bar; the check we’d been counting on to pay this and the room charges was not going to be coming from Stark-Hyman. “What are we going to do?” I asked. “You keep your mouth shut. Let me work on it.” Bill’s aggressive tone was reassuring. “I’ll get back to you,” he said, “as soon as I know something,” and abruptly hung up.

As I walked away, I gave in to the useless exercise of cursing Stark and Hyman, but remembering Bill’s admonition about not looking disturbed, I walked into the bar and ordered an ouzo. After a few minutes, I found an opportunity to take Charlie Maguire aside and, having warned him to show no anxiety, told him the news. “We don’t have money to pay the hotel bill,” he said. “Do the bar bill first,” I said. “That will maintain our credit.” “I don’t have the money for that either,” Charlie said. Later I gathered all my trusted people—Anna Hill Johnstone, Gene Callahan, and Charlie—in my hotel room and we dug into our pockets, brought out our cash and American Express checks, and managed to pay the bar bill.

The next morning, heeding Fitelson’s instruction and behaving as if nothing had gone wrong, I walked with Wexler around the city, showing him what I hoped to photograph and from what angles. He didn’t respond favorably to my suggestions—or point of view. He was to tell me a few weeks later that I had no “eye.” I’d always thought it was an “ear” I lacked. Now it seemed I was without the two essentials for a director.

The prime relationship in filmmaking is that between a director and his cameraman. I was to discover two things about “Pete” Wexler: He was a man of considerable talent, and he was a considerable pain in the ass. This is often the case with people of talent in show business. I realized early on that I’d made a mistake engaging him. But there we were, in Turkey, and how would I go about changing a cameraman, where would I interview alternate choices, and what would I do about the crew? They’d come with Wexler, they’d go with Wexler. So I decided to suffer it through, to treat Pete as a challenge, one I might learn from. And it happened that I did learn from him. He gave me my first experience with the hand-held camera. Pete could, with the smoothest motion, dip and turn, move in and out like a perfectly operated small crane, all the time making his focus-length adjustments. He was damned good, I had to admit. I admired him even as I begrudged him the respect I felt.

Later I was told that he’d held my anti-Communist testimony against me. That would explain what went on between us, but why, then, had he accepted the job with me? On the last day of shooting, I accosted him. “Tell me, Pete,” I said. “Now that we’re through, what did you think of my script?” “I thought it was a piece of shit,” he said. “Then why did you take the job?” I asked. His answer was: “I knew what a Kazan picture would do for my career.” Years after the film had opened and been awarded some praise, Wexler volunteered, “Now I begin to see what you were getting at.” A halfhearted apology makes you like a man less.

Whatever I felt about Pete, there was nothing to do about it. And two days after he’d given me the bad news, my gallant, hustling lawyer called; he’d rescued me. “Warner Brothers!” Bill said. That was a puzzle, because they’d turned down the project months before. Why they’d changed their position didn’t matter to me; I didn’t even ask for the details of the deal. Money was on its way east. We could pay our hotel bill, load cameras, and begin to expose negative before the mosques, streets, and waterfront of Istanbul.

HE WAS a little fellow in his early thirties, and there was nothing about him that suggested the censor. He was pear-shaped, most of his weight bundled below his belt. He wore a neatly pressed suit and a thin mustache, was well groomed and well mannered. I woke my Anatolian guile, which is never totally asleep, and had a stool placed under the camera’s lens, telling him that was the position traditionally occupied by the director, because from there he’d see precisely what would be on film. He demurred at this welcome—after all, it was my place, he said. But I insisted and finally he acquiesced and sat where I’d indicated, back straight, knees primly together. All around him the camera operator and the man who “pulled” focus hustled; my censor had to scrunch up tight to stay out of their way. I saw to it that he had a copy of the script—as edited for the Turkish authorities—placed open on his lap so he’d know where what we were photographing would appear in the film, and I gave him the silver American ballpoint out of my pocket. This gift particularly affected him, and his face warmed. I explained what I was doing and why—which was not difficult on our first day, because we were photographing my “little gevur boy from Kayseri” walking past the great camis, the mosques of Mohammed. At the break, I had a box lunch brought to him so he could eat with our leading actor and feel one with us. Food is a great seducer.

By the end of that day, Ankara’s little watchdog and I were getting along like old friends, so well that I began to feel embarrassed at my trickiness. I knew I had scenes ahead that would reveal less attractive aspects of Istanbul and its society, but I felt confident that by that time I’d have him totally on my side, or to put it otherwise, I would have completely corrupted him from his duty.

ON THE third day, we organized ourselves to shoot the scene we most needed, a main reason we’d come to Istanbul. A line of hamals carrying ship’s cargo file across an open dockside to load an American merchant ship. They walk slowly; their burdens are crushing and the heat is in the nineties. Many of the hamals are young and able, but there are others whose strength has been drained by years of this work, their backs permanently humped. Watching at one side is a crowd of idlers, and among them is my little gevur. On his journey west, he’s been robbed of the goods and money his father entrusted to him. His pockets are empty, but he’s too ashamed to turn home for help. Desperate, he must find employment or go hungry.

Suddenly one of the older hamals mounting the ship’s stairs with his load collapses. An officer turns him over; the man is dead. The hamals loading the ship go on walking past his body. Stavros, seeing his chance, dashes to the fallen man, picks up his load, and takes his place in the line. He has a job—at the bottom of the social ladder.

That day there must have been at least five thousand people watching us work, those who had nothing to do or chose to have nothing to do. The crowd was lively; there was a constant taunting murmur of curiosity, sparked by laughter, jibes, caustic comment, calls, and shouts. Hawkers of nuts, sweets, and bread rings, as well as vendors who sell cool water by the cup, passed among the bystanders as they would work a holiday crowd. Every so often there’d be a wave of unruliness, which made me feel that the crowd was somehow hostile and potentially dangerous. I was still afraid of Turks and would never get over it. There had been mention of me in one of the morning newspapers, objecting to my presence there; I’d come to shame the Turkish people, an editorial declared. The effect of this accusation was intensified by my fearful imagination. Besides, it was close to the truth.

My little censor, on the other hand, in the spirit of the occasion, was growing livelier by the hour. He seemed to be enjoying his prominence, sitting under the camera or sometimes rising to lean on it with his elbow—a member of the “shoot.” I noticed that he was carrying his copy of the script in a new binder and that he held it proudly.

It was then that I noticed my cousin Stellio. Far back in the crowd, he was gliding along the wall of the buildings like a shadow, looking our way but never slowing his pace or stopping so he might better observe what we were doing. I waved to him to come stand beside me, but he didn’t respond, rather scuttled off like a crab and disappeared from sight. Ten minutes later, he hurried by again, moving in the opposite direction. I waved and was sure he’d seen me, because I was standing on an electrician’s box behind the camera. But he slithered off and disappeared. Clearly he didn’t want to be publicly identified with me, and it didn’t take much thought to figure out why. If the film turned out badly from the Turkish government’s point of view, which was bound to happen when I included the scenes I’d not shown their censors, he didn’t want to be connected with me. I was actually putting his life in hazard. Ten minutes later, when he scooted by again, I didn’t wave; I understood why I shouldn’t.

Despite the heat, he was dressed neatly in a vested suit, collar, and tie. I thought about this “business suit,” saw it for what it was—a kind of uniform. It identified him as a merchant and a gevur. The gevur had for many years won a traditional place in Turkish society. He was the educated man, the clever one who could read, write, keep accounts, and speak several languages. He was the office manager, the treasurer, the diplomat, the administrator of the sultan’s staff, and highly regarded as such. His Western clothes and manners affirmed his identity.

My father had been one of this number. I have old photographs of him wearing a business suit and vest, a high, hard collar and a tie, cuffs stiffened and held together with links. This costume, while it was evidence of a higher capability than that of the native Turk who “worked with his back,” also marked him and other Anatolian Greeks as targets in times of riot, so it became essential for these Greeks to behave circumspectly on the streets, be above criticism at all times, self-effacing, and as near invisible as possible. That is how my cousin was acting and why he made me think of my father.

If George Kazan had not brought his wife and two sons to America in 1913, I could have been there now, dressed as my cousin was dressed, hustling everywhere as he hustled everywhere, “invisible.” If it hadn’t been for my father’s courage—a quality I had not until that day associated with him—I’d now be what my cousin was.

Perhaps it was this feeling of gratitude and reconciliation that brought on an extraordinary feeling late that afternoon. There comes a moment on a production, usually toward the end of the first week of work, when a crew will notice that their director’s tensions have eased, that he’s no longer edgy and anxious but confident and even playful, enjoying both the power that’s rightfully his and the work itself. Such a moment took place that afternoon—a flash of assurance and swelling confidence. It was on that afternoon, as the crew was breaking for the day, that I believed I had it all, that nothing could or would stop me, that I had something special here, that it was all going to work!

The next morning, we set up our camera at the end of an alley in an impoverished part of the city. It was littered with rubbish—a perfect setting—and I instructed my crew not to alter what was there in any way, not how the refuse was piled on the pavement or how the vegetable trimmings rotted in a corner. The shot was background and mood, and it would tell what I wanted it to tell. It would not, however, attract tourists to Turkey.

My censor had not objected to anything I’d done; he’d watched with admiration and deference, particularly appreciating the differences between what was in the script he held and what I was photographing. He was becoming a student of cinema, not a censor protecting the touristic hopes of his country. I was treating him as I might a nephew of whom I was fond. That morning he’d brought me some sugar-dusted pastries from his mother’s oven.

I’d asked Haskell to pan his camera at the end of the shot to include a close-up of the large pile of rubbish and rotting vegetation. As the camera wheeled, I walked behind my “nephew” and put my hand on his head. I didn’t expect him to object to what I was doing, but I thought I might make things easier for him if I didn’t permit him to see where the shot was to end. So I held his head, affectionately but firmly, to prevent it from turning. We got the shot I wanted; I made a joke; he laughed. He belonged to me!

We moved on to our next location, a bazaar where rugs were being traded—again, background and mood to be part of an opening montage depicting my little gevur’s first impression of Istanbul. He was to walk through this scene at a moment when the bargaining over price was heated. Four men were engaged in this bazaarlik, and I encouraged the actors to make the bargaining graphic and lively, since the scene was in a language no Western audience would understand. The censor watched with interest, laughing, looking back at me, nodding his head. It was a familiar sight to him.

Suddenly, from out of the crowd behind the camera, there burst a man of about forty-five, dressed in a gray suit that reminded me of the men standing by outside the censor’s office in Ankara. I immediately placed him: secret police. He was confident as only police are in that society, and his face was ferocious. Turkish men, like Japanese and Mexicans, have no gradations of anger; it’s friendship or frenzy. This man rushed up to my little censor, screaming murder. As near as I could make out, what he was demanding to know at the top of his voice was why my censor permitted that kind of overemphatic bargaining in a scene; audiences, he said, would laugh at the Turkish people. I tried to intercede, but the secret policeman ignored me and went on shouting at the censor. “Why everybody waving both hands like crazy people? Why eight hands waving like that? The world will think Turkey insane asylum. Speak! Say! What! What?”

The little censor, silenced by panic, had no defense. His new world of friends collapsed. I guessed that this secret policeman had either been watching us earlier or been tipped off that our censor was becoming too friendly with the Americans. The cop in gray kept illustrating what he didn’t like by gesticulating in the same fashion he was objecting to, waving his hands in the censor’s face. Then he ordered my “nephew” to get up and led him off. I never saw the little censor again.

A half hour later, this same secret policeman came back and, to establish his authority, objected violently to a scene I was making around a waterspout. Did he want the world to believe, I asked, that poor Turkish people in the first decade of this century had running water in their homes? That they didn’t have to stand in line at a public spigot to wash their clothes? I myself had witnessed what I was putting on film, I said; it was true. He demanded that it be changed. We folded our equipment and stopped work.

Charlie and I went to my hotel room, I stretching out on the bed as usual, Charlie alert. I was very depressed. I found the prospect of unrelenting surveillance intolerable. I ordered a drink—a Scotch, not raki. “Let’s get out of here,” Charlie said. “You think the room is bugged?” “I know it’s bugged.” I had a little balcony, and I followed Charlie out and closed the door. “I didn’t mean out of the room,” he whispered. “I meant out of Turkey.” He was looking at me hard, and I could see he meant it. “How the hell are we going to move?” I said. “All our equipment—camera and sound and clothes and film—and what’ll we do with our exposed film? I don’t mean to lose that. We’re trapped. We have no choice except to stay and make the best of it.” “You’ll go crazy here,” Charlie said. “That fellow who broke in on us today, I noticed him in the background before. They got cops on their cops here. I’ve had to spread some loot around to get us as far as we’ve gotten.” “What would we do about the film we’ve shot?” I said. “Let me worry about that,” Charlie said. “And you let me think about the whole idea,” I said. “But think fast,” Charlie said. “If we move, we’ve got to do it before they catch on. And don’t talk about what we’ve talked about, not to anyone. I’m going to get some expert Turkish advice.” “You know a Turk here you trust?” I said. “I know no one here I trust,” Charlie said. “But there are men who value the dollar, especially when it’s deposited for them in a Swiss bank. I’m going to squander some Warner Brothers gold, and when I come back, I’ll tell you if it can be done, and if it can, what it’ll cost. If you spend enough dollars, you can do anything here, including have the prime minister shot.”

He left me and I thought about it. To move was a disaster for me. In that extraordinary city, I had before my camera the rotting hulk of the civilization from which my hero was to escape and from which my father had freed me. We’d never find its like again—not the harbor, not the streets, not the mosques, not the people’s faces. Where would I find extras like these again? And quite as important was the effect of the place upon me; as it was a source of fear, it was a source of inspiration. The very force that drove my hero west was the one I experienced every day as I walked the streets; I was a foreigner who feared his surroundings. I still felt what my hero felt: I’ve got to get out of here alive. Didn’t Charlie know how important this place—even its inconveniences and its corruption—was to me? He was thinking like a unit manager, not a director. Besides, we’d lose the film we’d shot; they’d certainly confiscate it, and what we had that would accredit my film as real, make my story a true story, not just a “movie,” would be lost. Where the hell could we get stuff like what we’d shot again? Where else were there hamals? Nowhere!

By the time Charlie returned, I’d decided to stay there and do the best I could under the circumstances. But Charlie came back with a practical plan to pull our unit out of Istanbul and move it to Athens. “It will take some time to make the move,” Charlie told me, “so there’ll be a delay.” I was against it until he told me he guaranteed to get the film we’d exposed out of the country. This changed my mind. And he made good. Some days later, when I got to Athens, where our people were already finding new locations and building sets, Charlie told me how he’d saved the scenes I’d shot. The exposed film had been put into boxes marked “raw stock,” passed through Turkish customs, and arrived safely in Athens. On the film the Turkish government had confiscated, unexposed negative placed in “used” boxes, there were no images.

So it turned out that I would have five or six days off before the transfer of equipment, camera, sound, and crew could be made. It was my chance to get to Spoleto and be with Molly.