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His father finally told the boy to go ahead and be an actor. Clifford started with amateurs in The Bronx; then joined a cooperative group and earned about $20 a year. He wrote radio plays and went on the air; he worked, like Playwrights Arthur Kober and Moss Hart, in summer camps.
He finally landed odd jobs in stock. Once his father went to see him act, commented afterwards: "You're not very good, you talk too fast." Then, simply by walking in and asking for it, one day Clifford got a road-company job with Manhattan's Theatre Guild.
Those were romantic years. In Philadelphia a girl said: "Every girl should have one Clifford Odets in her life." In Springfield, Mass., there was a "horrible, exquisite" love affair "with something of the Sorrows of Werther about it." In Manhattan there was an unheated railroad flat near Tenth Avenue which Odets shared with eight other people. (The last time this flat was mentioned in print, the landlord wrote to Odets: "You still owe us money.'') Coal for the stove being expensive, the roomers sat around wrapped in blankets. Odets mastered the art of making potato pancakes.
Group Picture. In 1929 some young Theatre Guild actors persuaded the Guild to let them put on some experimental plays (Red Rust, Roar China), soon found their aims so divergent from the Guild's that late in 1931 they set up on their own as the Group Theatre. Directing the new enterprise were Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg. Summers were spent in the country rehearsing, refining, inhaling the Group aroma. The Group, so the story goes, played father to its children, studied their habits, even investigated their sex lives.
Odets was an original but minor member of the Group. He never played important parts; in 1932, when he wrote Awake and Sing! he was an understudy. The Group, unimpressed, produced one act of the play privately at its summer theatre. Later, when a Left organization, New Theatre League, wanted a short play for Sunday night showings, Odets fished up Waiting for Lefty, which he had once written in three days.
The first performance of Lefty was shattering, but next day no repentant Group directors fell prostrate before Odets. The directorate was still thumbs down on him. Pressure from the Group's actors was necessary to get them to produce Awake and Sing! After Awake and Sing! clicked, the Group rushed Lefty uptown, and Odets became Broadway's man-of-the-year.
On the surface, since the days of Awake and Sing! Odets and the Group have marched forward hand in hand. Actually Odets has most of the time carried the Group on his back. His have been the Group's only recent successful plays. When Paradise Lost was choking to death, Odets broke his pledge about not succumbing to Hollywood, went there at $2,500 a week, sent back money to keep the play and the Group going. Again, in the summer of 1937. when the Group existed in name only—its leading actors and its one remaining director were all in Hollywood—Odets came through with the script of Golden Boy, and like a Pied Piper led everybody back to Broadway.