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Harold Clurman, a director of the Group Theater, informed Kazan that his only gift was excessive energy. But that, of course, is a quality too often underestimated by intellectuals. Combined with his survivor's shrewdness in observing the behavior that betrays motives, it is what gave his productions both realism and driving power. Above all, it is what enabled him to survive the contempt heaped on him after his HUAC testimony. This is how he remembers his interior monologue at the time, addressed to his critics: "You can't hurt me; you haven't penetrated my guard; I can beat you at any game you choose to play, because I may not be smarter than you or more talented, but I never get tired and you do."
No conventional marriage -- for that matter, no conventional relationship of any kind -- could contain a natural force as powerful as Kazan's. If there is, indeed, something "ugly" in his book, it is his account of his 30 years with his first wife, Molly. She was a Yankee of the old-fashioned kind, high- principled and strong-minded. Her acceptance of him was, Kazan admits, the first sign that he might amount to something; her support and the stable home she provided were vital to his success. Yet he betrayed her constantly, in an obsessive love affair with Actress Constance Dowling that took years to unwind, and before, during and after that in more brief affairs than he can count or recount -- including one with a cheerfully complaisant Marilyn Monroe. "Sick," Kazan pronounces, then adds, "People make fun of the male crisis at 45. I had that crisis all my life. I knew there was more to life than I was getting, and I didn't want to miss out on anything."
That is Kazan's truest tone -- flat and harsh, undercutting his own attempts at rationalization with the bitterly truthful ring he cannot keep out of his voice. It is the voice of a man with no patience for poetry (he confesses that when he staged Archibald MacLeish's J.B. he simply moved the actors whenever he was bored, which was approximately every three lines) and no patience for ideological impositions, intellectual cant or institutional stability. It is perhaps a peasant's voice, valuing survival above all. But surely it is an actor's voice, one that knows it is impossible -- and finally maddening -- to play the same role the same way day after day. However you value the life it recounts, that voice is as compelling and seductive as any you are likely to hear this season.