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Fame & Fortune. Tall, husky, wearing expensive sloppy clothes, living in a Manhattan penthouse, fussed over by a devoted male secretary. Odets clearly enjoys his success. In the first golden days when he was hoisted into fame, he got a great kick from going to parties, being seen out with Beatrice Lillie and Tallulah Bankhead, weekending with Helen Hayes and her husband, Playwright Charles MacArthur.
At once shrewd and naive, lusty and bookish, youthful and pompous, the Odets personality of those days became a legend. Samples of it were "collected"' like Dorothy Parker's witticisms and Samuel Goldwyn's boners. Example: playing Mozart on the gramophone for a friend. Odets remarked: "Mozart was a young genius, too." Odets no longer has the same interest in gadding about, hooking up with celebrities, asserting his importance. Today most of his close friends are members of the Group. Most of his spare time is spent at home—playing the gramophone. His love for music is ebullient, a little showy. "A good composer was lost," he once said, "when I took up writing."
Money he need not worry about for years. His Hollywood work brought him $90,000; his royalties plus a 25% interest—shared with his wife—in Golden Boy brought him about $2,000 a week during its seven-month run; the cinema sale means $42,000 more. (He and his wife have a 35% joint interest in Rocket to the Moon.) He looks ahead to writing plays without interruption—has "ten or twelve"' plays already laid out. One, a strike play called The Silent Partner, may be produced by the Group later this season.
The theatre around him does not interest Odets much. He goes to about three shows a year. He has stopped reading all playwrights but Shakespeare and Ibsen: "I have nothing to learn from American plays any more." Acting he calls "a whorish thing." But now & then he would like a good part in someone else's play, simply to retain his feel of the stage.
Mainly Opinions. In 1935 Odets led a party to Cuba to investigate its dictatorship, was promptly arrested, soon after deported. Odets now chiefly furthers his beliefs through his writings. Says he: "People can only do one thing at a time. A writer must write. Besides, it is not the explosion that should most concern the artist—it is the causes leading up to it."
Though not a Communist, Odets believes in "some kind of Socialism." As a playwright he has dealt less with the problems of the worker than with the "evils" of the middle class. "An artist cannot be for a middle-class civilization. If he is to write creatively," Odets asserts, "he must be what Andre Malraux calls a man of the opposition: he must cry: Down with the general fraud!''
Odets defines the general fraud. It is the American dream, the Cinderella formula, the success story (presumably including his own). It is life as expressed in popular songs; it is Boy Meets Girl; it is Every Boy Can End Up in the White House. Hollywood is its chief dispenser. American men are its chief victims. As soon, says Odets, as an American man finds his dream girl has a blemish that wasn't in the song about her, he is through with her.