Clifford Odets and John Garfield, 1940

Excerpts from The Time Is Ripe, the journal that Clifford Odets kept during the year 1940. That was the last year of the Group Theatre, which closed after the production of Odets’ Night Music (starring Elia Kazan), and Odets was heartbroken and shattered by the savagery of the critics and the play’s failure. Garfield was appearing on Broadway that year in a play called Heavenly Express, but was splitting his time between New York and Hollywood. Odets and Garfield were old friends. Odets goes out to California after the failure of Night Music, and tries to figure out what to do next, in his typically tormented way.

The entire journal is an amazing document, one of the best of its kind, and is certainly a must-read for anyone who wants to be an artist, but it’s also an incisive portrait of a certain time in American history, all, of course, filtered through Odets’ questioning and intense personality. I first read it when I was a teenager and it is still a book I dip into constantly.

Here are some excerpts involving “Julie” Garfield.

Thursday, February 22, 1940

I invited some people down to the house for a drink. Along came the Eislers, Kozlenkos, Bette, Julie Garfield, Boris Aronson, old Harry Carey and his wife, Morris [Carnovsky] and Phoebe [Brand] later, Harold [Clurman], Aaron Copland and Victor [Kraft], Bobby Lewis and his Mexican woman, etc. etc. We drank champagne, Scotch when the wine ran out, talked smoked, filthied up the house, listened to some music. Then they went and I dropped into bed, dog-tired, unhappy, drunk, knowing what the reviews [for Odets’ new play “Night Music”, the last of the Group Theatre productions] would be like in the morning. In and out I slept, in and out of a fever – all of modern twentieth-century life in one day and a night.

Friday, April 19, 1940

At night Bette and I went to see Heavenly Express [on Broadway]. As usual the critics were profoundly at fault, as profoundly as our civilization cripples all mankind. The production is creative in all of its parts and is obviously the best show in town, despite its many faults, particularly in the lack of duality of stylization and a constant submersion of the story line. (It would be a friendly act to write Bobby Lewis, the director, about this.) The impending failure of this play so depressed and saddened me that I was almost speechless when I went backstage and saw some of the cast. {Jane Wyatt and mother, Louis Nizer and wife, Alvah Bessie and girl, Herbie Ratner and friend – all were at the show.) The cast was having a meeting on stage, the usual sort of meeting. The night after you open a play with creative merit, a play and production in which theatre as a whole is making advancement, you call a meeting and tell the actors that the only way you can continue running is if everyone will take a cut. The stagehands never take the cut – they have a strong union and are not interested in art or spirit – but the actors usually take the cut and play piddles along for another two or three weeks. This was the sort of meeting that was taking place when we went backstage. We chatted with Mrs. Harry Carey for a moment (she must have been a very beautiful woman; her spirit is still admirable) and then went down to Julie Garfield’s room. Al Bein was there, a lost boy as always, but with a world of sweetness, looking guilty, as if the bad notices were his fault. Kermit [Bloomgarden] was looking depressed and harassed in the role of entrepreneur. Julie was gauche and well-meaning; his performance was not the best in the world, but it had his energy and zest and a certain directorial intention throughout. On an impulse I said I would furnish half of the needed five thousand dollars if Julie would furnish the other half. Such an idea had never entered Julie’s mind, but what could he do in the face of my dramatic proposal? He accepted and I fear we are now both out twenty-five hundred dollars, money I cannot afford at all to give away. But for me this is a necessity of the spirit – my inner happiness depends on it.

Tuesday, May 14, 1940

In the evening, on the restless impulse, joined Lyons at the Stork Club. John O’Hara was there, tight, insisting that I had no idea how fond of me he was. To prove it he called to mind bits of experiences we had had together in California two years ago; he was playfully offended that I did not remember them. Talking to him made me think that we might be ideal collaborators on the Larry and Barry play. He knows that rotten night life better than I will ever know it. And he looks as if he is waiting for some earnest force (myself?) to generate him into writing activity.

Julie Garfield walked in, having in tow M. Covarubias and party. The laddie is going back to the coast soon: he enjoys this “high life”. I begin to think there is not much there to ruin, excepting good intentions, those famous paving stones which in our time have in them too much sand and not enough cement.

Tuesday, August 27, 1940

Called up Julie (now John) Garfield. Over he came in a hurry, thinking that he should not be feeling juniorish to me and yet feeling that way. We talked a long time, he mostly uneasy because of a waning connection with his wife and a prurience that makes him, so he said, want to sleep with every woman he looks at. What could Poppa do? I talked to him like Poppa! Of course without moralizing but trying to show him that a certain difficult way of life is a fruitful way. He said that it didn’t matter here what you did or who you were – it was only a matter of different brands of canned tuna fish, screen actors, films and all. Correct! Several times, to make certain points about form and disciplined living, it was necessary to read excerpts from this journal. He thoroughly enjoyed himself, said that he had not spent a night in two years; there is no one here to talk to.

I went to sleep gladly when he left, almost two in the morning – ah, California air!

Nose-bobbing is a major industry out here, by the way. It is now as easy here to change your looks as to have a wart or a tonsil removed. Even Julie’s wife had her Jewishness removed. (Really, the aerial perspective is so disturbing here.)

Thursday, August 29, 1940

So I had dinner with Julie and his wife, Robbe, she so much like a gleaming little blackberry. We went to a place called Chasen’s, where all the movie people were hard at work on expensive dinners. Very difficult for me to walk through them, made me nervous and uneasy. I felt unfriendliness from the, feel it for them, and yet (is it strange?) one wants their approval and approbation (which is the dangerous thing!). Already Julie and wife are a drowsy young pair, conscience being a fatiguing element there too. We chatted fitfully and aimlessly over a long dinner, very expensive, splendiferous, and without the slightest trace of character! The small bottle of good French wine seemed unrelated to anything else on the table.

The unimportant story must be briefed down to the fact that I ended up at Ira Gershwin’s house where we played poker till three in the morning. I out almost a hundred and fifty dollars then. Julie drove me home, his wife half asleep, and that was the end of the day.

Saturday, September 14, 1940

At dinnertime I called Julie Garfield. The moment I heard his wife’s voice on the phone I knew they had been quarreling. With some persuasion they agreed to join me [for dinner[ and called here for me. We went to Chasen’s, which swarmed with movie people. Charlie Chaplin, for instance, walked by with Mr. Justice Frank Murphy; in the booth next to us sat Dotty Parker and her group. For a half hour, our dinner gone down the hatch, we were joined by Miss Elaine Barrie, not at all a bad girl, now nervous, talking a blue streak, uncomfortable and tense, headed for a nervous breakdown. She knew all of my plays, even quoting some of the lines and teasing me out of discomfort for being silent and judicial, which I was not, instead being very sympathetic and sorry for her. It touched me that she looked at me as I should be able to settle some of the problems of her hectic young life by a few choice words.

Julie and Robbe came up here for a few minutes before we parted past three in the morning. I talked of my play plans and of the difficulty of keeping one’s head in this marsh of success and glamour. They left and I turned to the bed well satisfied with myself, even glowing. Why? I had been a success during the evening!

Monday, September 16, 1940

I called Fay [Wray] out of a sense of duty, not more, to be honest. I told her I’d have to work. Instead, an hour later, I called Julie and asked him if he cared to go to a movie. He did and we went, seeing Milestone’s new picture, a light comedy with spots of real charm.

On the way to the theatre a man, when we tooted our horn, asking him to move over so we could round the corner, this man turned and swore at us so violently, calling us such filthy names, that even Julie, rougher and tougher than me, was shocked. I mention it because this sort of filthy abuse, this violence, this wrath lies so close under the surface in American life. Julie and I moved on to the theatre in shocked sober silence, uncomfortable, saying nothing to each other about the accident.

Another American note: after the movie we had coffee in the Brown Derby. A woman came over and asked Julie for his autograph, presenting the reverse side of her auto driver’s license for the signature. Then she turned the card and showed him her name. “Did you ever see a name like that? Read it – it makes a whole sentence,” she said. Julie read the name aloud: “Anna Mae Laywell.” “I like you,” she said. “See all of your pictures.” Getting no response, she left.

Tuesday, October 1, 1940

We had dinner with T. Dreiser and wife, Julie and I, Fay unable to go because she is working on a picture now and must be up at five in the morning. When Dreiser was warmed up, a bottle of Pommard drunk between us, he began to expound a theory of life that strangely enough sounded very fascistic. This was very puzzling to us, but finally I understood him to mean the following: you are born with certain chemical elements in you which you can never change or condition – he insisted again and again that any social conditioning was a product of other chemical compounds which could not be changed. What you are you have to be, he insisted.This made man very primal, I said. Dreiser’s answer was that he is. Yet, he said, there are people of good heart and they must be good no matter what they do or say. It is they who fight the evil. In short, there is no free will, he ended.

Julie was very puzzled and distressed by these views, but I pointed out to him that one didn’t sit with Dreiser because of his thinking capacity or because of his intellectual theories. It comes to me more and more that you must know what you want from different people. It is very possible that a woman who is very wonderful in bed makes very bad coffee, but it is not coffee that you look to her for!

Thursday, October 3, 1940

It seems to me that a boy like Julie, already having had his full of Hollywood, would be ready now to come back to a Group Theatre in New York. This is true of others too – Bromberg, perhaps Lee Cobb, and one or two others. We spoke of this here, Julie having driven me home. Yearning, as I wrote somewhere about Chekhov plays, is a condition of life, not death; and all these people have a yearning away from the movies.

Saturday, 10/26

Fay and I went to Julie’s house for a good dinner, had a fine time there, talking of acting problems, quiet and relaxed. Fay wanted to leave early so that we might be alone; I could see she was annoyed. I left Julie with a motto, he having brought up the matter first: “A slack string has no tone.” Anyone with any character is always worried in Hollywood by the slack feeling of the self.