On the Kazan Front

A great adulterous womaniser, with a passion for blondes, Elia Kazan's biography is a tour de force through Broadway and Hollywood at its most sparkling time. Review by John Simon

Abiographer's life is not an easy one. Aside from taxing demands of IRS (insight, research, style), there is the supreme test of tact: knowing what to include, what to exclude. There are not only sins, but also virtues, of omission. A good biography is like a good marriage: biographer and biographee (if they knew each other personally) must have a mutual love, but a discriminatingly nuanced rather than blind one. And both had better be interesting. All this obtains in Richard Schickel's Elia Kazan: A Biography, the life story of the distinguished stage and screen director.

No mere page-turner, this is a page-devourer, generating the kind of suspense that is usually the province of the playwright or novelist. But Elia Kazan's life, as lived and written up here, is dramatic to a fault, and easily as strange as fiction.

To start with the prose, take this sentence from the discussion of the making of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, during which, Schickel says, Kazan started "inhabiting that sublime zone directors sometimes achieve, a zone in which they sense that their every decision is the right one." Promptly, there is even better: Kazan "wanted his actors to bring their discoveries to him, like children finding pretty objects on a beach." Lest, however, this make Kazan out to be a laissez-faire director, there follows, "Impact – the more shattering the better – was everything with Kazan". And there you have him: permissive yet manipulative, enlightened but also commercial.

Kazan is a tough subject because there is so much to deal with. Equally renowned as a stage and screen director, he also became a lacerating autobiographer and prolific novelist. He helped found the enormously influential Actors Studio, cradle of the questionable "Method". He kept profuse, revelatory notes on virtually every project he undertook; there are numerous published articles by and interviews with him, including a book-length one with the French critic Michel Ciment. Further, he appears in autobiographies by major writers. Moreover, as a friendly witness naming names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), he became politically controversial, necessitating knowledge of the McCarthy era and its long shadow. Lastly, this complex and contradictory figure has inspired reams of important film and drama criticism.

And even that is not quite the last. There remains Kazan the great adulterous womaniser, with his passion for blondes. From the semiautobiographical novel The Arrangement, Schickel quotes, "Being Greek, blondness is my fetish." (Opposites, you'll recall, attract.) "All three of Kazan's wives were blondes," Schickel writes. "Almost invariably his leading ladies were, too."

Like Kazan, Schickel names names. The major extramarital affairs are there: the extended ones with the actresses Constance Dowling (causing a serious rift with the first wife, Molly Day Thatcher) and Barbara Loden (later legalised); the more playful ones, too, as with Marilyn Monroe, whose favours he shared with Miller; and even some minor ones. Their treatment is commendably succinct, short on gossipy details.

As for research, there is enough here for a lesser biographer to leave you bleary-eyed: Kazan's often fussily meticulous tomes could stop a portcullis, never mind a door. Schickel has clearly grappled with them all, but keeps matters relatively concise yet amply informative. No reader will leave either hungry or unduly replete. As for insight, Schickel makes good use of others' as well as his own. Aptly he quotes a passage like the following from Ciment's book, about a confrontation with the notorious studio head Louis B Mayer during Kazan's shooting of The Sea of Grass, concerning Katharine Hepburn's crying scene:

MAYER. She cries too much.

KAZAN. But that is the scene, Mr Mayer.

MAYER. But the channel of her tears is wrong.

KAZAN. What do you mean?

MAYER. The channel of her tears goes too close to her nostril, it looks like it's coming out of her nose like snot.

KAZAN. Jesus, I can't do anything with the channel of her tears.

MAYER. Young man: you have one thing to learn. We are in the business of making beautiful pictures of beautiful people and anybody who does not acknowledge that should not be in this business.

As Schickel points out, Mayer "was, in a sense, right". He expatiates on how all this affected Kazan, and why he too was right not to yield to his temptation to quit, but instead "at least insist on doing things his way and get fired". Which did not happen.

In 1913, the four-year-old Kazan, whose family name was Kazanjioglou, arrived in the United States from Anatolia with his mother; his father and an uncle had preceded them, starting a rug business for which Elia seemed destined. His formidable father, George, was the only man Kazan ever feared, yet he defied him in choice of career. Sensibly, Schickel wastes little space on family history, or on Kazan's studies at Williams College and the Yale Drama School, from neither of which the young man felt he had gained much.

Not so, however, from the Group Theatre, into which he inveigled his way through charm and sweat, eventually reaching the top echelon. He had some respect for Harold Clurman, but scant use for Lee Strasberg, whom he resolved to supplant. Beginning as a character actor, he specialised in gangster roles; no less a critic than J Edgar Hoover proclaimed him the most authentic hood he had seen. He befriended Clifford Odets and appeared in Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy; in Chicago, the Mafia was so impressed as to get him better housing than he could afford. Still, Clurman had told him, "You may have talent for the theatre, but it's certainly not for acting."

Directing, he gradually decided, was a more "manly art" than acting. He also joined the Communist Party in 1935, but left it in disgust after 19 months. "I understood Communism better than they did," he was to declare. By directing a popular downtown Jewish comedy, Café Crown, he gained a foothold in the commercial theatre. Next he wangled the job directing Thornton Wilder's demanding Skin of Our Teeth with a notable cast. He was only 34 and inexperienced, but his services came cheap.

That piece was a milestone. Everyone in it was fighting with almost everyone else: Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, with Tallulah Bankhead; Florence Reed with Bankhead; and, most ferociously, Bankhead with Kazan. Tallulah did her level best to get him fired, but he survived her tantrums and manoeuvres. Later he said she had "made a director of me," because "every fighter has one fight that makes or breaks him. That was my fight."

Soon Kazan was working with Helen Hayes, for whom he could do nothing, and Mary Martin, whom, in One Touch of Venus, he was able to make "more down-to-earth, less of a soubrette." In the delightful Jacobowsky and the Colonel, he learned from its beguiling star, Oscar Karlweis, that there was more to acting than the glorified grubbiness of the Group Theatre. He also realised that his great successes were to be built around star turns, without which his shows would fail.

Pretty soon he branched out into movies, where his first success was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945. Here he developed his technique, which often consisted of setting up creative antagonisms between actors, or, as in the case of the young Peggy Ann Garner, of tormenting her into evincing grief for her alcoholic father, played by the excellent James Dunn. The film allowed Kazan to address one of his perennially favourite topics, that of "the immigrant outsider, ever the imperfect American," which no success could quite uproot from his mind, producing a neediness that "drove almost all his actions – from his marriages to his politics".

We are taken in breathtaking, often riotous but never excessive, detail through Kazan's many achievements. We get the making of such hits as A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, plus several more by Williams and Miller, vividly conveying how much the plays owed to him, how different their authors' careers might have been without him. Also works by lesser dramatists like Robert Anderson, William Inge and Archibald MacLeish, whose genesis is no less stimulating. Even a number of flops provide compelling evidence of how effectively, even if sometimes adversarially, Kazan worked with different playwrights and players. Especially gripping is the interaction with Marlon Brando, whom he loved, and James Dean, whom he didn't.

And then all those movies! Boomerang and Panic in the Streets, with its exciting location photography; then Streetcar and his heroic grappling with censors and Vivien Leigh, the affair with whom Kazan was to ungallantly brag about. The fine Viva Zapata!, with Brando again and a screenplay by John Steinbeck, was nevertheless, as Schickel shows, a problem picture. The biography goes exuberantly to town on On the Waterfront, the collaboration with Budd Schulberg, an account so rich in funny and grim particulars that it could form a terse, mandatory volume for all film courses. It is Brando's on-screen best, later prompting Martin Scorsese's observation that Kazan "was forging a new acting style".

Indeed, Brando and Eva Marie Saint infused the film with great tenderness. As Saint was to comment about her director, "There was such empathy felt from this man." Kazan knew how to get to know his actors intimately, to tremendous artistic effect.

Another major success was East of Eden, again with assistance from Steinbeck. Here, the technique of sharpening intramural antagonism was perfected, in this case between Dean and Raymond Massey as his father, eliciting rewardingly taut performances. For autobiographical reasons, the father-son conflict kept running through, and lending power to, Kazan's oeuvre. Schickel's pungent account of Baby Doll reawakens interest in that memorable but neglected comedy, Kazan's most erotic picture. As his wife, the patrician, puritanical Molly, hitherto a useful literary adviser, became ever more "calcified" to him, Kazan started an affair with Barbara Loden. Molly's opposite, she was passionately lower-class, free from abstract ideas, very attractive and, of course, blond.

With the satirical Face in the Crowd, Kazan returned to a favourite theme, "the hidden ambiguity of idealistic enterprises". Schickel also makes a strong case for Wild River, about problems involving the Tennessee Valley Authority; here Kazan worked with Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick to splendid effect, but meager box-office returns.

Kazan's last hit movie was Splendor in the Grass in 1961, with Warren Beatty (in his film debut) and Natalie Wood, from whom Kazan evoked superb performances, well beyond Inge's script and powerfully caught by Boris Kaufman's camera. Onstage, meanwhile, Kazan was stuck with Arthur Miller's political and marital auto-whitewash, After the Fall, which, in spite of the shaky writing, provided Loden with her greatest success.

Kazan's scrappiness comes across in such statements as "It's stimulating to dislike someone, don't you think?". But the later phases of his career were less than stimulating. The marriage to Loden soured, and though his unremarkable novels kept morale and cash flow going, the Kazan star was fading. Yet there was still a happy adventure with a recent widow on a romantic trip to Europe. And Elia faithfully nursed the by-then-estranged Barbara through her two-year-long losing battle with cancer.

His final movie, The Last Tycoon, flopped: "The resilience has gone out of me. And the fun." To a film teacher he remarked, "Tell your students they'll throw you away eventually". But he had a good third marriage with Frances Rudge, a blond Englishwoman. His last novel, Beyond the Aegean, a sequel to his family-historical book and movie America, America, was reviewed practically nowhere. Afflicted with deafness and arteriosclerosis, he was only half there when receiving his controversial lifetime-achievement Oscar in 1999. Four years later he died, having just turned 94.

Schickel got to know Kazan by making a television documentary about him. He also put together the film clips introducing that rather stormy Oscar presentation. He is cogent about Kazan's politics, and makes a convincing case for Kazan's naming of names to HUAC – hardly heroic, but far from indefensible. Only a self-justifying ad Kazan took out in the New York Times, urged on him and written by Molly, earns Schickel's just censure.

Long ago, Schickel and I edited an obscure anthology together, but since those days we never communed or even communicated. I neglected, probably wrongly, his many books and TV documentaries. So I was stunned by the sharpness, level headedness and multifariousness of Elia Kazan, some errors notwithstanding. There are typos ("Irwin" for Erwin Piscator, "Tavianni" for the Taviani brothers, "Brodsky" for Harold Brodkey). Also problems of accidence ("whom some thought was a journalist"), subject and verb agreement, tautology ("reverted back") and the nonword "thusly". The Changeling is a 17th-century, not a 15th-century, play. "A bathetically bathed Oscar broadcast" is clumsy, and how is progress of a car "not enlightened" by knots of demonstrators?

But let's forgive a book that, without any flab, manages to be, over and above a biography, a stirring bit of social history and a panorama of Broadway and Hollywood during what may have been their glory days. It could not be a more pertinent study of a spellbinding subject.

©The New York Times

ELIA KAZAN

A Biography.

By Richard Schickel.

Illustrated. 510 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. €25.00