Kazan, Elia

(b. 7 September 1909 in Constantinople, Turkey; d. 28 September 2003 in New York City), screenwriter, award-winning director of films and plays, and best-selling novelist who won great acclaim for his work but also sparked controversy for his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee in their investigation of Communist subversion in the entertainment industry.

Elia Kazan was born on 7 September 1909, one of four sons of Athena Sishmanoglou, a homemaker, and George Kazanjoglous, a rug merchant. As Anatolian Greeks, the Kazanjoglous family suffered under Turkish rule in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) and looked elsewhere for opportunity. An uncle, who became a model for the protagonist in Kazan’s first novel America America (1962), immigrated to the United States near the turn of the century and funded the trip for his relatives when Kazan was four years old. After shortening their name to Kazan, the family settled in a New York ghetto that left an indelible imprint on the way Kazan later talked, dressed, and carried himself. Kazan’s father fared well enough as a rug merchant to relocate to New Rochelle, New York, and to send young Kazan to Williams College from 1926 to 1930.

While working as a dishwasher in the college dining hall and as a bartender at fraternities, Kazan developed intense resentment for the affluence and privilege of his classmates. Equally offended by his father’s insistence that he do something “useful,” he kept to himself and majored in literature. Following his graduation with a BA, Kazan enrolled in the Yale School of Drama, where the unfolding Depression moved him toward left-wing causes.

At Yale, Kazan met Molly Day Thacher, the daughter of a former Yale president, whom he married on 2 December 1932. The couple had four children.

Kazan left Yale without earning a degree in 1932 and chose instead to join the Group Theatre. During his struggle through apprenticeship to membership in this group, Kazan acquired the nickname “Gadg” (for “gadget”), because he was, he once explained, “handy, useful, and able to cope with any minor emergency.” This recently founded troupe emulated the example of the Russian actor, director, and producer Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater and envisioned a disciplined training and close interaction among members that would lift the quality of Broadway fare. Although its goals were artistic and social, many of the members, including Kazan, insisted that they should be political as well. From 1934 to 1936, Kazan was a member of the Communist Party.

Kazan’s recognition as an actor coincided with Clifford Odets’s emergence as a playwright. Kazan achieved his first acclaim as Agate in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935) and as Eddie Fuseli in Odets’s Golden Boy (1937), roles into which he channeled his intense drive and thwarted yearnings for respect and power. Following the Group’s disintegration in 1941 and a rut of typecasting that doomed his acting career, Kazan turned to directing and quickly achieved a string of successes that included Café Crown (1942), by Hy Kraft; Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth (1942); and Jacobowsky and the Colonel (1944), by S. N. Behrman. By the end of World War II, Kazan had his pick of Broadway’s most promising fare, but his success was attended by worry that he was straying from his commitment to theatrical excellence and social consciousness.

From 1940 to 1945, Kazan had a tempestuous affair with Constance Dowling (many more affairs followed). As a condition of his reconciliation with his wife, Molly insisted that he undergo psychotherapy, an experience he found interesting enough to continue it for many years. Kazan’s blend of optimism and anxiety, of success and disorientation, attuned him to postwar uncertainties and spurred him to search for material with timeliness and punch. Arnaud D’Usseau and James Gow’s Deep Are the Roots (1945) was a worthwhile experiment; S. N. Behrman’s Dunnigan’s Daughter (1945) was a disappointment; and Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café (1946), which Kazan co-produced with Harold Clurman but did not direct, was an outright failure. Collectively, they provided the direction for which he was searching. In 1947, along with his former Group Theatre associates Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, Kazan founded the Actors Studio to furnish performers better training for the psychological dramas he was beginning to favor. When his responsibilities became too demanding of his limited time, Kazan quit and recruited Lee Strasberg to run the Actors Studio.

That same year, Kazan directed Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and, after initial reservations and reluctance, he agreed to handle Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire (the only play that he also directed as a film). He followed this gargantuan success two years later with Miller’s equally impressive Death of a Salesman (1949), making Kazan the director of two of the greatest American plays. Reflecting on these efforts, Kazan later told interviewers that he wanted his plays “to hit audiences in the stomach,” appropriate for a person whose career was bracketed by the memorable characters of the boxers Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Kazan hastened to explain, “A play should hit you where you live, but not just because it screams, but says it in terms of human beings struggling with each other, fighting.” Kazan’s conception of these actions was rooted in sociology, psychology, and emotion.

Meanwhile, Kazan’s debut film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), validated the long-term contract he had signed with Twentieth Century–Fox in 1944. He won respect for Boomerang (1947), Pinky (1949), and Panic in the Streets (1950), but he received his first Oscar in 1947 for Gentleman’s Agreement and its exposé of the anti-Semitism within the decencies of American life. These successes inspired the youthful director, who was not yet forty years old, to enlist the premier playwrights and writers—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and John Steinbeck—to write original film scripts. They agreed to do so because they trusted his genius and his strong studio backing.

Kazan’s ambitious plans, however, ran afoul of an altered political climate that turned the act of criticizing the American way of life into a threat to national security. By the early 1950s, the looming menace of the Soviet Union, with its newly acquired nuclear capability, and the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953) empowered the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee to continue investigating Communist subversion within the entertainment industry. Simultaneously, Kazan seemed to lose his magic touch. On Broadway, George Tabori’s Flight into Egypt (1952) and Williams’s Camino Real (1953) were commercial failures. The film Viva Zapata! (1952), scripted by John Steinbeck, was a bitter disappointment, and the advent of CinemaScope and its biblical pageants in Technicolor threatened the black-and-white realism that was Kazan’s stock-in-trade.

In 1952 Kazan was summoned to Washington, D.C., to account for his Communist past. Like everyone else who had previously been a member of the Communist Party and who was currently working in the motion picture industry, he faced the threat of blacklisting if he could not prove that he was no longer a Communist. After an unsatisfactory congressional hearing behind closed doors, he agreed to a second appearance, during which he cooperated and offered the names of Communists with whom he had associated. This decision was widely perceived as a self-serving act of betrayal, and friends and colleagues abruptly turned against him—many for the remainder of his life. The decision irreparably damaged his reputation. In 1999, when the Motion Picture Academy honored Kazan with its lifetime achievement award, there was vociferous opposition from his colleagues—not to his professional accomplishments but to his testimony from forty-six years before.

Kazan responded to the setbacks of the early 1950s by immersing himself in work. Over the next three years, the high water mark of his career, he directed Broadway productions of Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953) and Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and the films On the Waterfront (1954), for which he won his second Oscar, and East of Eden (1955). Although these works were written by four different authors, all feature male protagonists troubled by a waywardness that only a compassionate woman understands and respects. Kazan’s direction elicited performances that were unanimously acclaimed and distinctively different. On the Waterfront, with its glorification of a stool pigeon and his fierce determination to continue working, boldly acknowledged Kazan’s inspiration from his experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee, but the power of the drama in this and in the other three works resides in the poignant depiction of a man straining to hide and overcome painful, debilitating “mistakes.”

Kazan’s comeback reaffirmed the enduring appeal of his dramatizations of bruising psychological struggles and established him as a dominant force on Broadway and in Hollywood, one of the few directors to be a master of both. By this point he had been awarded Tonys for his direction of two of Arthur Miller’s plays, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, and Oscars for Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront. Among his peers, he would be recognized as an actor’s director, because he discovered players like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Lee Remick and coached them to stardom. Others, like Tallulah Bankhead, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, Burl Ives, Eva Marie Saint, Julie Harris, Lee J. Cobb, Pat Hinkle, and Natalie Wood, he guided to their finest performances. Performers from his films garnered twenty-one Academy Award nominations, and nine won the award.

By 1955 Kazan was once again a film director in demand and able to pick his assignments. However, his efforts grew strained and mannered. Baby Doll (1956) was controversial and A Face in the Crowd (1957) was original, but neither appealed to audiences. Splendor in the Grass (1961) did appeal to them, but reviewers faulted Kazan’s direction as busy and overblown. Conversely, when he had made a concerted effort to slow the tempo and savor the mood in Wild River (1960), everyone was disappointed. On Broadway, William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) and Archibald MacLeish’s J. B. (1958), for which Kazan won a third Tony for direction, were solid successes, but both brought him little sense of accomplishment. He was, however, formidably challenged by Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), in large measure because he agreed to the project out of obligation and fretted that Tennessee Williams’s best work was behind him. Afterward, he announced that he would not direct another play by Williams.

These undertakings would have been a gratifying achievement and would have made a fulfilling career for any other director, but for Kazan they exacerbated a restless yearning for greater challenge. With escalating costs sharply reducing the number of Broadway shows that could raise financing, Kazan looked to the just-opening Lincoln Center as the brightest prospect for something new. His appointment as codirector of its Repertory Theatre came with generous funding and support for a troupe of actors; it both acknowledged his stature in New York theater and inspired visions of a national theater equivalent to those in Europe. However, the results were disappointing, and Kazan’s efforts were flayed by critics. Miller’s After the Fall (1964) came closest to success, but the show itself was upstaged by interest in Kazan’s reunion with Arthur Miller (who had publicly broken with Kazan following his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Miller’s offering of a character with a startling resemblance to his dead wife, Marilyn Monroe.

During previews for After the Fall, Kazan’s wife, Molly, died of a stroke, and his distress over this sudden event was exacerbated by the fact that his current mistress, Barbara Loden, with whom he already had a son and whom he would marry on June 5, 1967, was playing Maggie, the Marilyn Monroe role. Haunted by a discontent that had originated before his wife’s death and by his disappointing Lincoln Center experience, Kazan became introspective, changed psychiatrists, and acknowledged that directing no longer engaged him. Having constructed a brilliant career from the work of others, he concluded that he needed to do his own writing. Although he was not ready to give up directing, doing his own work became more important than the well-funded productions he previously had favored.

Kazan’s initial effort was America America, a film script about the ordeal of a Greek immigrant fashioned from the experiences of his uncle. Kazan’s meager funding ran out before he finished shooting, and the project had to be shelved. When he reconfigured his script as a novel (1962), it attracted enough readers that he was able to raise the money to complete the film (1963). Although the black-and-white result looked like a throwback amid the film industry’s conversion to color, Kazan rose above his constraints and crafted numerous memorable scenes. He received Oscar nominations for directing and for best original screenplay, and the film received a nomination for best picture and an Oscar for art direction.

The Arrangement was conceived as a novel (1967) and never intended to be a film (1969). However, this story about an executive’s troubled abandonment of his successful career became a surprise best seller. Rather than relinquish his work to another director, Kazan negotiated to do the film himself, but this time the result was disappointing and solidified his commitment to writing over directing. Although he did direct The Visitors (1972) and The Last Tycoon (1976), he took greater pride in his novels: The Assassins (1971), The Understudy (1974), Acts of Love (1978), and The Anatolian (1982). His long, controversial, and revealing autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, was published in 1988. Following the death of Barbara Loden in 1980, he married Frances Rudge on 28 June 1982. By the time Kazan died at his Manhattan home on 28 September 2003, he had six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Kazan received the Handel Medallion, New York City’s highest cultural award, in 1972. In 1983 he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Kazan’s best work evokes a bygone era, either his own times or a past with which he identified, but it also endures and offers a taste of greatness. The Depression, World War II, and the cold war affected his life and inspired his work. Kazan had a lifelong preoccupation with American life and culture, the preoccupation of an outsider keenly aware of injustice and drawn to the hard lives of people down the social scale. The human suffering and social injustice at the heart of his material was crucial to his identity, talents, and aesthetic. Kazan’s career memorializes the outsider’s paradoxical centrality to the American experience.

Kazan’s personal papers are held by Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. The best source of information on Kazan is his own autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life (1988). There are also three books of his interviews: Kazan on Kazan (1974), by Michel Ciment; Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films (1999), with Jeff Young; and Elia Kazan: Interviews (2000), edited by Michael Baer. Richard Schickel, Elia Kazan: A Biography (2005), is the first complete biography of Kazan. Thomas H. Pauly, American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture (1983), is a book-length study of Kazan’s whole career. Much useful information can be found in Arthur Miller’s autobiography, Timebends: A Life (1987). See also Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre (1992). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 29 Sept. 2003).

Thomas H. Pauly