I met Elia Kazan once. It was at a production of the Actors Studio - an organization he had helped form in the late 1940s. It still exists.
I couldn't believe it when I saw him walk in. There had been a rumor that he would show, but by that point in his life, he was pretty much a shut-in. It was not expected that he would come. But he did.
He was quite old by then, and quite infirm. There were people hovering around him, helping him.
I looked at his craggy well-known face and thought of ... Jesus. Jesus Christ. There is Elia Kazan.
This man's work means ... more to me than I can even put into words.
It was like laying my eyes upon one of my idols.
No, it wasn't LIKE that. It WAS that. I saw this small old old man walk in, and I saw one of my true idols. One of my true inspirations in life. One of the people who is responsible for me making the choices I have made in my life.
It was an Odets production, too. A production of Awake and Sing, which Kazan had been involved in (not as a cast member) in its original incarnation, during the early 1930s.
To those of you who might not know: Clifford Odets is one of our great American playwrights - and his involvement with the Group Theatre was what catapulted him into fame. Fame which didn't really last the length of the Depression.
Anyone see the Coen brothers' film Barton Fink? That's based on Odets' self-imposed "exile" in Hollywood, trying to make a living as a screenwriter.
Odets and Kazan were great great friends, and great great collaborators.
Odets is long dead. And Kazan came out, on that cold winter night, to see the production of the show he had helped bring to life so many years ago. Kazan was almost completely deaf by this point. He sat in the front row.
I couldn't look at him without feeling all this emotion in my throat.
I knew everyone in the cast - Anne Jackson, Katherine Wallach and others, and had worked for the production. And so there was a party afterwards, with cheap wine in paper cups. And everyone standing around, trying to pretend they wanted to talk to each other, when really - all anyone was aware of was Mr. Kazan.
All I did was shake his hand and say, "So so nice to meet you, Mr. Kazan" - and he, very old, just shook my hand, and stared at my mouth, stared at the shapes my mouth made, trying to see what I said.
I was so wiped out from meeting him, and from his age, and from ... basically what he means to me ... and here I am, in my life, with an opportunity to MEET him ... I left, sat down on an empty stoop, and bawled like a wittle wittle baby.
Posted by sheila