| Clifford Odets | |
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Clifford Odets photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1937 |
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| Born | July 18, 1906 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | August 18, 1963 (aged 57) Los Angeles, California |
| Spouse | Luise Rainer (1937-1940) Bette Grayson (1943-1952) |
Clifford Odets (July 18, 1906 – August 18, 1963) was an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester.
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Odets was born in Philadelphia to Romanian- and Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Louis Odets (born Gorodetsky) and Esther Geisinger, and raised in Philadelphia and the Bronx, New York.[1] He dropped out of high school to pursue acting. In 1931, he became a founding member of the Group Theatre, a highly influential theatre company in the U.S. that utilized a new acting technique, closely associated with the thinking of the Russian master Constantin Stanislavski. Odets eventually became The Group's primary playwright.
Odets pursued acting with great passion. He worked consistently at The Theatre Guild, where he befriended the casting director, Cheryl Crawford. It was Crawford who suggested that Harold Clurman meet and invite Odets to a meeting to discuss the new theatre that they were developing with Lee Strasberg. Odets was mesmerized by Clurman's talks, and became the last actor chosen for The Group's first summer of rehearsals in June, 1931. From the start, Odets was relegated to small roles and being an understudy. With the extra time on his hands and at Clurman's urging, he began to write plays. He wrote two early plays, one about his hero Beethoven, and an autobiographical play. Clurman dismissed these two plays, but encourage his friend to continue writing. In late 1932, Odets began writing a play about a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx called I Got the Blues. He worked diligently on this play, sharing drafts of it with Clurman and promising parts to his fellow actors - often the same parts. In the summer of 1933, The Group performed Act II of the play, now called Awake and Sing, with great success, yet The Group's leadership, especially Lee Strasberg, had no intention of producing it.[2]
Odets's first play to be produced was the one-act Waiting for Lefty. This is a series of interconnected scenes depicting workers for a fictional taxi company. The focus alternates between the drivers' union meeting and vignettes from their difficult, oppressed lives. The climax is a defiant call for the union to strike. The play can be performed in any acting space, including union meeting halls and on the street. The play's wild success brought Odets unexpected fame and fortune. In 1938 Odets wrote Rocket to the Moon, about a guilt-ridden dentist, which put him on the cover of Time magazine.[3]
Odets would soon move to Hollywood to begin writing for the screen as well as the stage. His play The Flowering Peach was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, but under pressure from Joseph Pulitzer Jr., the prize went instead to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which the jury considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees.[4]
These plays, along with Odets's other major Group Theatre plays of the 1930s, are harsh criticisms of profiteers and exploitative economic systems during the Great Depression. They have been dismissed by some critics as mere propaganda, but Odets asserted that all of his plays deal with the human spirit persevering in the face of all opponents, whether they be the capitalist class or not. In later years, Odets's plays became more reflective and autobiographical, although class consciousness was ever in the background. The playwright George S. Kaufman gently tweaked him about his innocuous turn: "Odets, where is thy sting?"[5]
Odets spent summers with The Group, including 1936, at their summer rehearsal headquarter's located at Pine Brook Country Club in the countryside of Nichols, Connecticut.[6] Other artists who worked at Pine Brook were; Elia Kazan, Sanford Meisner.[7][8][9]
In 1952, Odets was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). He disavowed any current communist affiliations and cooperated by answering the Committee's questions, thus avoiding being blacklisted. Odets did not provide the names of anyone who had not already been mentioned to the Committee. Odets was, however, reportedly tormented by the public reaction to his testimony until his death in 1963, and he wrote relatively little for stage or screen after his 1952 testimony.[10] Two notable scripts in the 1950s were The Big Knife (play and 1955 movie), and Sweet Smell of Success (movie, 1957). His last play, The Flowering Peach was produced on Broadway in 1955.
In the early 1960s Odets was revised librettos for projected musical versions of Golden Boy and The Flowering Peach, and signed a lucrative contract for a dozen teleplays for NBC's new dramatic anthology, The Richard Boone Show. Time magazine ran an article on his artistic rebirth and quoted him as saying, "The American people don't know who they are or where they're going." The article went on to say, "Clifford Odets knows where he's going—to NBC as a television writer." Unfortunately Odets had neglected his health and by mid-1963 was hospitalized with advanced stomach and bowel cancer. He died on August 14, 1963, following many bedside visits from such movie and theater friends as Shirley MacLaine and Danny Kaye, who eventually would star in the musical version of The Flowering Peach.[11]
Odets's dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk, by his socialist politics, and by his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot, which Odets attributed to the influence of Anton Chekhov. In general, Odets's political statements reflect the Marxism that was common in the 1930s; he often points to the Soviet Union as an example of a perfect socialist state.
His first wife was Academy-Award winning actress Luise Rainer; his second wife was actress Bette Grayson, and he also had a relationship with actress Frances Farmer. Grayson's death at 34 left Odets to care for their two children, Nora, born in 1945, and Walt Whitman,[12] now a clinical psychologist, author and photographer, born in 1947. Odets was a close friend of Jean Renoir, who was also working in Hollywood during the 1940s. Renoir dedicated an entire chapter of his autobiography to his friendship with Odets [1] including a moving visit to the playwright on his deathbed.
Clifford Odets died of colon cancer at the age of 57 in 1963 and his ashes were interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.
The Flowering Peach became the basis for the 1970 musical Two by Two. Golden Boy was made into a 1939 film and became the basis for a 1964 musical of the same name. His screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success became the basis for the 2002 musical of the same name.
A (very) loose retelling of Clifford Odets's trouble adapting to writing screenplays in Hollywood is the basis for the 1991 film Barton Fink.
Odets was the subject of a critically acclaimed biography by Margaret Brenman-Gibson, wife of playwright William Gibson: Clifford Odets - American Playwright - The Years from 1906-1940. This was supposed to be a two-volume work, with the second volume to cover the final twenty-three years of Odets's life. However, no second volume was ever published, and Brenman-Gibson died in 2004.
Odets was played by Jeffrey DeMunn in Frances, and by John Heard in the 1983 biography, Will There Be A Morning?, both about Frances Farmer.
Odets' name is mentioned in an episode of the NBC series Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, "The Wrap Party." The episode's subplot dealt with The Hollywood Ten.