THE REHABILITATION OF ELIA KAZAN

To understand Kazan’s emblematic fate is an exercise in cultural archaeology. It requires sifting through the ruins of the intellectual Left for clues to the bizarre anxieties attached to the figure of the anti-Communist “informer.” For that is the term, drawn from the lingo of the gangster, that leftists and “liberals” attached to Elia Kazan. More than any other personal journey, his life shows how, in the aftermath of America’s confrontation with Stalinism, history demonstrated its capacity for producing contradictory outcomes and claiming human sacrifices.

Elia Kazanjoglous was born in 1909 to a Greek family in what was then Constantinople. Four years later, his father moved the family to New York and opened what became a prosperous carpet business. The young Kazan graduated from Williams College and studied drama at Yale. Along the way, he picked up the nick-name “Gadget” or “Gadg.”

In 1932, with the political and economic storms of the Depression raging, Gadg Kazan joined the Group Theater, in New York. The encounter would influence a generation of American performers. Those were days when, even with the New Deal in full swing, the fear was widespread and real that the country could succumb to a red revolution. The Group Theater had been founded by the playwright Clifford Odets and other young leftists, along with such non-political figures as Lee Strasberg. In line with the excitements of the time, most left-wing theater consisted of agit-prop skits on the sidewalks of New York, in furtherance of Communist propaganda.

All that changed one night in 1935, when Odets’s new play Waiting for Lefty opened. Unlike other left-wing dramatists, Odets was a born playwright, and his talent was fortified by his collaboration with Strasberg and Kazan. Waiting for Lefty was Art; not the greatest achievement in the history of the stage, but Art, nonetheless.

On the stage sat a group of men, the leaders of a taxi drivers’ union. The action developed around the progress of a meeting called to consider a strike. In front of the stage, between the stage and the audience, actors conjured up the past, the inner lives and secret strivings of the drivers. All present waited for “Lefty,” the charismatic rank-and-file leader without whom the strike could not begin.

At the play’s unexpected conclusion, the young Elia Kazan, planted in the audience, burst to the front of the theater and shouted that Lefty’s body had been found at the taxi barn with a bullet in his head. Other actors seated among the spectators leapt to their feet, shouting as one, “Strike! Strike! Strike!” In a crescendo of protest, filled with sympathetic fury at the death of the proletarian hero, the audience was swept into the chorus.

It was unforgettable. It was a revolution. The American theater had been changed forever.

Outside the theater, revolution failed to materialize in America, and Clifford Odets never fully realized his abilities. But in the late 1930s, performances of Waiting for Lefty were packed, and many young people who saw it started reading the Communist weekly New Masses, and some of them eventually joined the Communist ranks.

The ultimate failure of Odets’s career was part and parcel of the withered hopes of the radical intellectuals of his time. Notwithstanding the stirring slogans of solidarity purveyed in performance and leaflet and song, as the grim decade wore on, Soviet communism perverted and betrayed the enthusiasm of its adherents. The young Elia Kazan, who had joined the Communist party in 1935, left it disillusioned within about a year and a half.

The horrors of Stalin’s forced collectivization and the ensuing famines were covered up (by, among others, Walter Duranty of the New York Times). But in 1936, the Great Purges of old Bolsheviks began in Moscow, very publicly, with the trial of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. As a preliminary to their execution, these sometime companions of Lenin were forced to abase themselves with false confessions of counter-revolutionary activity.

The Spanish Civil War broke out the same year, and the international Left ardently embraced the cause of the Spanish Republic. But Soviet intervention on the side of the Republic led to the murder of revolutionaries guilty of the fatal error of opposing Stalin. It led, too, to the Left’s defeat. As veteran Spanish radical Joaquim Maurin put it, once Spaniards came to see the war as a struggle between Stalin and General Francisco Franco, the brutal incipient dictator, the Republic was doomed, for Franco at least was a Spaniard. The Republic collapsed in 1939.

Within six months, Stalin hatched an alliance with Hitler, and the two mass murderers began carving up Poland. These undeniable horrors — the purges, the betrayal of Spain, and the Hitler-Stalin pact — soured most of the young people who had been so stirred by Odets’s play.

Elia Kazan, meanwhile, had become a journeyman actor and a rising director on Broadway. He soon started acting in movies and directing short films. After World War II, his movie-directing career took off in earnest, with A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945), and just two years later, he won his first Oscar — best director, for Gentlemen’s Agreement.

A film starring Gregory Peck that attacked anti-Semitism, Gentlemen’s Agreement was a landmark of early political correctness. It caused an uproar. Talky and dated though it seems now, it established Kazan as one of Hollywood’s left-wing talents. Also in 1947, Kazan joined Lee Strasberg to found the Actors Studio, first in New York, then in Los Angeles. Actors Studio taught “Method” acting, developed by the Soviet stage director Konstantin Stanislavsky. Among the school’s products were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.

In 1949, Kazan’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman won him plaudits as Broadway’s finest director. But he and Brando were poised for much greater attainments — reached in 1951, with the film of A Streetcar Named Desire. Lyrical, corrosive, and heartbreaking, Tennessee Williams’s creation explored the shadow side of American romantic illusions with a profundity that Miller never rivaled. Streetcar’s frank sexuality — especially Brando’s rendition of an incoherent yet charismatic masculinity — brusquely ended the era of prim Hollywood censorship.

It was then that Kazan, at the height of his fame, was drawn into the controversy over reds in Hollywood.

The U.S. government’s investigations of Communist influence in Hollywood had begun in 1947, at a time when politically attentive Americans were caught up in the emerging Cold War. For patriotic citizens, it was a frightening period. Stalin increasingly reminded them of Hitler. Since the war, Soviet armies had stayed on in Eastern and Central Europe, keeping an eye on the puppet regimes Moscow had installed. And around the world, Communists manipulated a fraudulent “peace” movement.

This last was central to the Communists’ strategy toward the United States. Back when Hitler and Stalin had been allied, from 1939 to 1941, American Communists, in tandem with Nazi agents, had deployed an array of pseudo-pacifist slogans — “The Yanks Are Not Coming!” “No Imperialist War!” — exploiting traditional American isolationism. After 1945, the Soviet dictatorship went beyond borrowing arguments and tactics from the Nazis and actually adopted the role and methods of the fascists in its confrontation with the democracies.

Young American “fellow-travelers,” hypnotized by the Communist peace offensive, seemed to know nothing of even this recent past. Kazan, by contrast, vividly recalled the Stalinist betrayals of the ’30s and the phony pacifism of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Regardless of his popularity among “liberals” and his own continuing leftist sympathies, he saw communism as the enemy of everything he valued.

In April 1952, Kazan took a public stand. The previous January, he had been subpoenaed to testify before a closed executive session of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in Washington, holding hearings on Communists in Hollywood. He had appeared but had refused to identify his former comrades — that is, he had refused to break the silence imposed on Communists by the party’s conspiratorial discipline and on ex-Communists by the manipulation of guilt.

But in the ensuing months, Kazan changed his mind. He came to believe that the secrecy imposed by the party was inappropriate in America and that the Communists’ demand for protection had been indulged too far. No previous radicals in this country had ever claimed the protection of the law for their clandestine activities; no other society in history had offered its citizens rights behind which to shield their political subversion. How could a revolutionary movement merit constitutional protection when its very purpose represented a repudiation of the U.S. Constitution?

On April 10, 1952, Kazan appeared before the committee a second time, at his own request, and “named names” in open session. Interestingly enough, while he knew the entire Hollywood Communist milieu in great detail, he concentrated on the Group Theater — the Communists he had known during the revolutionary period in the mid-’30s when he himself had been a party member.

He identified nine members of the cell to which he had belonged: Odets; the late actor J. Edward Bromberg; the actor Morris Carnovsky, who had appeared before the committee and pled the Fifth Amendment; actress Phoebe Brand, whom Kazan had helped recruit; Paula Strasberg, wife of the anti-Communist Lee; actor Tony Kraber; party functionary Ted Wellman (alias Sid Benson), who with Kraber had recruited Kazan; Lewis Leverett, co-leader of the cell; and an actor named Art Smith.

Kazan recounted how party activities in the theater world had been directed by cultural commissar V. J. Jerome and Andrew Overgaard, a paid official of the Communist International. His prepared statement also mentioned three photographers, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, and Ralph Steiner, as well as a playwright, Arnaud d’Usseau, the deceased actor Robert Caille, and four members of a Communist front, the League of Workers Theaters.

The Group Theater had been saved from Stalinist control, Kazan testified, by the firm stance of three anti-Communists: Lee Strasberg, critic Harold Clurman, and acting teacher Cheryl Crawford. Kazan had quit the party in 1936 because he had “had enough of regimentation, enough of being told what to think, say and do, enough of their habitual violation of the daily practices of democracy to which I was accustomed.”

A month later, Odets made a similar voluntary appearance before the committee and named Kazan, along with five of those Kazan had mentioned; the two had discussed their testimony before appearing. None of the names they mentioned offered any surprise; all but the trio of photographers had been prominent and unapologetic in their defense of Stalinism during the ’30s, although Mrs. Strasberg, like Kazan, had subsequently become an anti-Communist.

Elia Kazan had decided where his loyalties lay, and he would never draw back. Interestingly, he suffered no immediate rejection by the Hollywood Left. In the broader scheme of things, the party and its supporters were clearly on the ropes. Stalin still ruled in Moscow, and war was raging in Korea, with Soviet pilots in action against U.S. and Allied forces.

In 1954, Kazan cast Brando in On the Waterfront, which took a bouquet of Oscars including best director. From the beginning, Kazan made clear that the film — about a union member who defies peer pressure and chooses to testify against labor racketeers — was inspired by his own decision to speak out. “A story about man’s duty to society” was the description he offered the press. The screenplay was written by another ex- and anti-Communist, Budd Schulberg. In some respects, the story paralleled and completed the message presented in Waiting for Lefty almost twenty years before.

Yet even after the defiant On the Waterfront, Kazan was spared the full force of leftist hatred. He continued to produce great work — East of Eden (1955), with James Dean, another of his discoveries; A Face in the Crowd (1957), about the rise of a radio entertainer to political power; and Baby Doll (1956) and Splendor in the Grass (1961), two more demonstrations of his skill at handling complex, intimate subjects. With America, America (1963), he began a series of projects overtly concerned with his own life, including his marvelous memoirs (not published until 1988). He also continued to direct for the stage and wrote successful novels like The Arrangement (1969).

It was only during the 1970s, in the aftermath of the political convulsions of the ’60s, that a revived leftist fundamentalism more virulent even than that of the ’30s emerged and found a target in Elia Kazan.

Two decades after the House Un-American Activities Committee probe of Hollywood, a new witch hunt developed in the land. It was led by “liberal” intellectuals holding that “stool-pigeons” are worse than Stalinists. Why this logic did not prompt them to vilify those Americans who had turned in supporters of the Nazis — or, for that matter, “informers” who testified in murder trials — was never explained. From this point on, Kazan was dogged by a drumbeat of insults and carping gossip.

The worst damage to his reputation was done in the late 1970s by a man dedicated to defending Communist spies, Victor Navasky, publisher of the Nation. In full moral-absolutist cry, convinced that the Vietnam tragedy had forever justified Communist pretensions, Navasky set out to write a kind of dual biography of Elia Kazan (bad) and Arthur Miller (good, for keeping silent before the House committee). But Kazan’s refusal to apologize for his actions or to assist Navasky with his project stirred Navasky’s rage. The result was a book called Naming Names that appeared in 1980.

Up until this time, Kazan’s creative work had carried more weight in most quarters than the Left’s contempt for him. But the young aspiring screenwriters who read Navasky in the early ’80s had no grasp of Kazan’s extraordinary achievements. Their only concern was to punish him for straying from a rigid defense of the global Left. The handful of former Communists he had named to the committee — most of whom had left the film industry before he testified — were transformed in his critics’ minds into hundreds of victims hounded out of the business.

From this point on, the contrasting trajectories of Kazan’s reputation and those of the Stalinists he opposed say a great deal about the meaning of conscience in Hollywood. While Kazan was shunned, denied work, and otherwise humiliated, the Hollywood Ten — the cell of hard-core Stalinists who sought to turn the 1947 House committee hearings into something approximating a congressional riot, and paid for it with prison sentences — were lionized. Not only were their reputations restored, but institutions like the Hollywood talent guilds fawned over the Ten and repudiated their own supposed complicity with the establishment. While the Ten (who became Nine when the courageous Edward Dmytryk broke with the group) were acclaimed by “liberals” for what amounted to Soviet patriotism, Kazan’s achievements were routinely dismissed in such venues as the American Film Institute, where his American patriotism was an embarrassment.

The thick varnish of sentimentality coating Hollywood’s romance with Stalinism long remained intact, impervious even to extensive revelations about clandestine Soviet activities in the United States from the Russian and American archives. We now know from the Venona decryptions released by the National Security Agency, for example, that Mikhail Kalatozov, a Soviet director and cinema functionary prominent in Hollywood during World War II, was a high-ranking KGB agent. When Kalatozov’s name was brought up in the House committee hearings, the Stalinists jeered, claiming that this Soviet operative had only come to the legendary city to buy prints of movies to show back in the motherland.

But we see from the Venona traffic that Kalatozov — who would later direct the famous 1957 Soviet war film The Cranes Are Flying — was a spy reporting directly to Grigory Kheifitz and Grigory Kasparov, the two NKVD station chiefs in San Francisco during World War II. (The Cranes Are Flying was shown to great fanfare in the Eisenhower White House.) Indeed, Venona evidence establishes beyond doubt that Hollywood was a major target of KGB operations in the United States, fully justifying the congressional inquiry.

The latest landmark in Hollywood’s shunning of Kazan came in 1996, when the Los Angeles Film Critics Association dropped him from consideration for its career achievement award. Instead of Kazan, the honor was presented to Roger Corman, producer of, among other films, Attack of the Crab Monsters.

Reviewing this dismal history, one marvels that the Motion Picture Academy has broken down at last and decided on the special Oscar to be given in March. Reportedly, the actor Karl Malden, a star of On The Waterfront, argued the case for Kazan before the academy’s board, to no dissent whatever. Industry sources point out that the crusade to exalt the Hollywood Ten has been mainly an enthusiasm of screenwriters, who tend to be leftists, while directors, producers, and actors always valued Kazan’s art. Indeed, among the young generation in these fields, there is a surprising adulation of directors like Kazan, Samuel Fuller, and Robert Aldrich, despite their political incorrectness. Outside Hollywood, too, it may be a sign of the times that Navasky himself, while intransigent on the cases of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs (!), told the New York Times that Kazan’s age, the passage of time, and the excellence of his work have softened Navasky’s views. “It’s a human thing,” he said. “He’s not physically well, and he made this great cinematic contribution.”

By contrast, Abraham Polonsky, a Hollywood writer who would never have been heard of had he not received a House committee subpoena long ago, met a reporter with a snarl: “Has [Kazan] ever said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I was wrong’?”

Well, no. Kazan has refused, over the past decade, to elaborate on these matters beyond the dignified statement in his memoirs: “I did what I did because it was the more tolerable of two alternatives that were, either way, painful, even disastrous, and either way wrong for me. That’s what a difficult decision means: Either way you go, you lose.” No explanation whatever, of course, comes from Polonsky and others so long devoted to Joseph Stalin. Has Polonsky ever said he regretted enthusiastically supporting the Soviet dictatorship that created Joe McCarthy?

In the late ’40s and early ’50s, many people, when called upon to choose between the House committee and Stalin, chose the committee. Today, belatedly, others may be starting to see the wisdom of that judgment. It may even be that the thaw begun in the Soviet Union when Khrushchev was premier is finally reaching the sunny precincts of Hollywood.

Stephen Schwartz’s From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind was published last year by the Free Press.