(5 of 5)
Odets wants to write about the life around him. "To hell with the last century! This is a wonderful time to write. Hart Crane jumped off a boat crying: 'This is no time for poets!' He was wrong. This is no time for weakness, but it is certainly a time for poets."
Odets vows he will not go to Hollywood again: "They want to emasculate me." When, fortnight ago, Columbia's Rouben Mamoulian went to Manhattan to urge Odets to write the film version of Golden Boy, Odets flatly turned him down.
When Odets went to Hollywood early in 1936. he was wildly excited about German-born, Viennese-reared Cinemactress Luise Rainer (rhymes with Shriner), whom he had seen in Escapade. He begged every one he knew to introduce him to her. He finally met her in a restaurant. He disliked her at first. She disliked him. Soon they were seen constantly together, arm-in-arm on the boulevards, holding hands in public.
Their subsequent marriage, estrangement, reunion have been drenched in the gaudiest Hollywood floodlighting. To the public and to themselves, theirs was no ordinary romance. It was, for them, a union of two people of similar—and special—intelligence, temperament, ambitions, ego; the union of an actress and playwright on the grand scale, after the manner of a Duse and a D'Annunzio.
Suddenly last summer Actress Rainer filed suit for divorce. Odets, she claimed, had said there could be only one career in the family: his. She said he had been moody, quarrelsome, neglectful. Then just as suddenly, a month ago, the two were reconciled. Exulted Actress Rainer: "I love him. I love him. ... I love him very much even if he is very stubborn."
Just before they separated, Luise Rainer obtained a new film contract allowing her six months off each year to be with Odets in Manhattan. The idea was that, among other things, she might act in his plays. Said he: "But for our separation, she would be playing in one now." He expects to write one for her soon, calls her "a terrific actress." He talks of the long happy life they are going to lead together. He talks of the house they are going to build in the country. He talks of "the desideratum of marriage"—children. He talks. And he also writes.