Significant Others - Mark Harris on Molly Day Thacher and Elia Kazan

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Journalist and biographer Mark Harris joins Liza to discuss the legacy of Elia Kazan and whether or not there is such a thing as a happy ending in Hollywood.

Welcome back to Significant Others. In yesterday's episode, we learned about an ill-fated marriage between two great theatrical minds. I'm so happy to have journalist, author, and biographer Mark Harris join me today to talk about the legacy of Elia Kazan, the impact he had on the industry, and the particular nature of marriage between two artists. Mark, thank you so much for joining us. You are one of the foremost scholars of this area in Hollywood and this industry. And I'm wondering, have you run across Molly Day Thatcher at all? Well, when they told me about this interview, I thought of two books immediately where I had run across her, besides Kazan's autobiography, which I admit

that I don't remember fantastically well. All 900 pages of it, you mean? Exactly. And when you read an autobiography, I was mining that book when I was reading it for really specific things that didn't necessarily have to do with her. But she shows up quite a bit in Richard Schickel's Kazan biography and also in John Lars' biography of Tennessee Williams. Yeah. So that's sort of like what I know about her other than sort of scattershot articles or something is largely from those books. I mean, he, in his autobiography, I can't tell if he's trying to posthumously credit her or kind of hide behind her, you know? It's such a weird thing.

I mean, I'm married to a playwright and screenwriter. And as you know, spouses of artists have their multiple uses. Sometimes we are cover stories. Sometimes we are the bad cop. Sometimes we're the good cop. Sometimes we're just the last word in the ear before bed or the first word in the morning. Often we're viewed with deep suspicion by any of our spouses, colleagues, you know, it's one thing that I, I had to look this up because I thought I remembered it right. But a phrase that always struck me from Schickel's biography of Kazan was that he referred to Molly as the dangerously

unproduced playwright. Oh, that's great. And that just felt like so packed to me because it's like in that you get, first of all, the idea that a spouse is a frustrated artist who must be taking out his or her resentments in whatever kind of advice they give. And second, you get just the sense of danger that that role implies. That, I mean, dangerously unproduced playwright,

there's so much in that. There's just the whole idea that whatever she had to say about his directorial choices or the plays he picked or the playwrights he picked must have been bound up in some kind of personal resentment. Frustrated ambition, sure. Exactly. And I think particularly in mid-century America when men were really running the whole show, no one could stop to think that she might have been actually a deeply talented, acute, perceptive, smart person. It could only be this thwarted artist living in her husband's shadow.

There's so much in what you just said. I'm trying to sift through, okay, which avenue do we want to pick first? I'm trying to sift through, okay, which avenue do we want to pick first? But I was going to say that the plight of the woman in that era was particularly dismal as it's been for many centuries. And I'm wondering if you think, do you feel that the setup for that dynamic, that power dynamic has shifted in that industry now? Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I hope there's just more general respect accorded to women. Certainly, I think there is more than was true in the 1950s and 1960s. But I think it's always going to be a powder keg if a group of artists are working on something with great intensity, the input of a spouse, whether male or female, is always going to be seen by people who aren't privy to that input, which is basically everyone but the spouse, as a threat to a particular kind of

dynamic. You know, you're fighting for, let's say you're a playwright, and this happened, I think, with Tennessee Williams. You're a playwright who's fighting for the length of your play. And Kazan comes in and says, well, Molly thinks that it's 45 minutes too long. comes in and says, well, Molly thinks that it's 45 minutes too long. You know, that's a really big thing for a director to wield, and it's almost designed to stoke resentment. But one sense I get from reading the few things that I've read about her is that her notes and thoughts were actually very acute. Her notes and thoughts were actually very acute.

And ultimately, when they were delivered directly from her, in one case I know about to Tennessee Williams, that she gave this fantastic note where she said, it's time for you to stop identifying with the play and start identifying with the audience. I mean, if I were a playwright, it would hurt me to receive that note, but I would also know it was a great note. So I hope the story of her is that her intelligence and her acuity kind of made a difference. It certainly seems that she made a big difference in things like convincing her husband that he should direct Streetcar as a movie. Yeah, no, she was hugely influential. She had very good taste, it seems. And she discovered Tennessee Williams from the slush pile when she was working at the magazine and handed him to Kazan. Also, the playwright of Tea and Sympathy, she pushed that project through.

She sounds like, I mean, I wish someone had written her biography already, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm hoping maybe I'll live to get to read it. But because she's a little enigmatic, she was talented, she was brilliant, she was a great dramaturg, which is in itself kind of a peculiar thing, right? Dramaturgs. Right. But this is so hard because this is the stuff that never makes it into archives because it's largely not archivable. I mean, she can be a real creative partner to her husband, she can be like a real creative partner to her husband. But some of that creative partnership consists of saying things like, I think you should go easier on this actor.

Or maybe you need to cool down a little for three days before you address this again. Or I think here's the point you really need to make with this playwright. This is, to me, the thing isn't working. I mean, it's those sort of private off-the-record conversations that don't make their way into memos or letters or anything like that, where someone like Molly Kazan can have enormous shaping influence on her husband and therefore on the work that he does, you know, that we'll never, I mean,

I would love to read a biography of her, but we'll, I'm sort of resigned to never knowing the good bits, you know? No, there are these, they are few and far between. One of the stories I had read about her before I started to research this that really got me interested in her was that she, you know, when Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, he had this flashback, which at the time was completely formally ambitious. No one had done that. And he circulated it and no producer would touch it, even though he was the hottest playwright of the moment. And they all wanted him to change the flashback. And he

kept trying and trying and trying. And she finally said to him, don't. That's how you wrote it. You wrote it that way for a reason. If people don't get it, they don't get it. But you can't take that out. You can't fix the play. And so he gave up. And he says, this is it. Take it or leave it. And they produced it as is. And of course, the rest is history. And he signed his program to her, to Molly, for in effect saving it. She saved the play, which is incredible. I've always heard also that when Miller told them that he was writing about the Salem witch trials, that she was the one who instantly was like what the hell why are you doing that like she knew exactly what that play was going to be about the second he said it yeah and he and she said it's a false equivalency because there were no such thing as witches but communist right but

that but that like spousal you know like it took her one second to realize he's going after my husband. Right, right. Absolutely. And to me, part of the enigma of a partnership like this, there's the stuff that you're talking about, which is the sort of, whether it's pillow talk or dinner table conversation, or just the general support that spouses give each other. I don't know how you feel about Kazan, how you regard him as an artist, but he was gifted. I mean, at the very least, yes.

Completely, yes. Absolutely. He was special. And so when you have someone who's special like that, who, whether you want to use the word genius or not then i always wonder okay how influential can anyone be you know like how he was big personality too right and also how influential would anyone want to be i mean there there's there has to be like at a certain level of talent there you i think you kind of to think, let me get out of the way and let this person kind of find their own way and respect sometimes the thorniness of their

process. And that's a tricky thing too, I think for any spouse is like, what do you do if you see your spouse going in a direction you strongly disagree with? I think if the person is doing something actively self-destructive, it's easy to say, okay, that's a line where I think I want to step in. But what if you think it's not self-destructive, but it's just wrong or it's not working? I, sometimes it is important to not say everything you're thinking, you know. Yeah, and that's hard. Oh, it's definitely hard. And I mean, I've certainly made the mistake of saying too much more often than I've made the mistake of saying too little. But, you know, it's, I mean, it's hard not to say too much sometimes because you do kind of know this person better than anyone else does.

I think it really depends, I think, on at what point you enter each other's lifestream. You know, for example, my husband had been doing what he does for seven years by the time I met him. I mean, on TV for seven years. So before then, for years and years, he had been developing his craft. And so he was able to tell me when we got together, here's what I need from you. I need emotional support. I do not need editing. I do not need notes. I don't need notes. Exactly. Whereas if you meet in college or grad school, as the Kazams did, and you develop together, and he's only in Yale drama. Well, he went to Yale drama following his friend. He had no idea about becoming a theater artist. He met her and fell in love with her there, and then just decides, and she says,

you're great at this. And so then he kind of continues on. Like that's a whole other dynamic. I think that's really, really hard because I mean, you know, when I met Tony, it was like four years after Angels in America. So it's like, oh, I guess you know what you're doing. But, you know, if you're 22 or 23 and, you know.

You're the cheerleader. You're the cheerleader. You're the cheerleader. You're the first one to say, hey, you could really be good at this. And then you turn out to be right. But also, like, maybe you have your own ambitions. And, you know, at that age, it's a totally natural thing to think, like, we could maybe both have these huge upward trajectories and get where we want. And I mean, that I think would be really tough.

And I also think it's, I mean, the other thing is in a marriage where you're both the same kind of creative artist, that's a whole separate mad challenge. Yeah. Mad challenge, yeah. Can we talk a little bit about the myth of genius that like, especially in this, I mean, I don't know if this, especially in the creative world, I don't know if it's true more of, you know, film directors. It's certainly true of many film directors, especially of that time, right? With the Orson Welles kind of mystique and the, I have to be a sort of outsized personality, I have to maybe be a little bit abusive. That's just, I'm, you know, whether it's Picasso or

whoever. Do you think that's more present in this arena, in the sort of performing arts arena, I guess. Yeah, I think I do think that. I think there are geniuses. I really do. And I think there are geniuses in the arts. But at the same time, I kind of hate the word and think it's very problematic because it's used so often as a way of saying, this person should be walled off from normal human consideration. It's like that Twitter sentence that you see over and over again, this person must be protected at all costs. It's like, if you're using the word genius to build a wall around someone and say normal terms of human decency and interaction and communication and consideration do not apply because they are a capital G, you know, etc.

I think that's, I don't know how, that has never seemed to me particularly useful. I think it's really self-serving. I think it allows, you know, I it's really self-serving i think it allows you know i won't say self-serving because i think people very rarely call themselves geniuses but i think it's enabling because i think i think if um people around you say oh well he's a genius that's usually being used as an excuse for something. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Sort of like you all, the trade is worth it for all of you

to put up with my bad behavior because look at the product you get because at the other end of it. Right. Right. But don't we kind of have to take the ethical position that talent is not an excuse for misbehavior? Even great talent?

I think so. I'm curious. I mean, that's one of those sort of unanswerable questions to me, is you can't remove a person from their time, right? And so you can't know how Picasso might have behaved if he were around in the era of Me Too and Twitter trolls and transparency. He might have gone on doing exactly what he did and being hated, but producing amazing work. I have no idea.

But absolutely, it should be incumbent upon every human to act with decency. I wonder if maybe, though, with directors, it's a little bit less that because one thing that you never heard about Kazan is that he was not collaborative. I mean, he definitely was, you know, he had to work really, really closely with writers and really closely with actors. And there's something about directing. And there's something about directing. I mean, it's not, for instance, like composing, where you have to go off in a room by yourself and it's just you and the page. It's not even like writing, which in some forms is collaborative, but in some forms really isn't.

So maybe being a director, I mean, we all know the myth of the autocratic tyrant director who's, you know, my word is law. But in the practical kind of sleeves rolled up rehearsal room life of a director, you do have to work with other people. Yeah, you really have to be a diplomat. Sometimes, yeah. And probably sometimes you have to be a bully, and sometimes you have to be a pushover, and sometimes you have to be a bully and sometimes you have to be a a pushover and sometimes you have to be a daddy or a mommy um but i don't think you can i this is something that mike nichols said that that when he

switched from performing to directing he said i discovered that i really didn't like being the baby i liked being the daddy um and i sort of i mean that might have been unique to Mike, but I mean, I think directing is parenting in some ways. He took that as, by his own word, which seems to ring true, he took that almost as a challenge to thwart every authority figure possible. That's a really interesting lens, though, to look at how people do their work. I think you hear about a lot of directors who had really rough parenting, and who spend their entire professional lives basically trying to fix it. I think some people who may have heard the episode about Kazan might not have a sense of the impact of what it was that he did when he spoke to Congress. It's one of those things,

almost like an age test, you know, where people above a certain age have a very strong reaction, you know, and I have a friend who's a director who is 60. And before I started working on this, I said, you know, what do you think of him? What do you think of Kazan as a director? And he said, well, he was a genius. And I said, oh, okay. And he said, and he was awful. He was a rat. Like, oh, okay. We're still that upset about it this long after it happened? Yeah. Well, I mean, you certainly remember Ed Harris and Amy Madigan not applauding at the Oscars. I mean, yeah, I think it's like, I get that because it almost doesn't matter what the specific issue was. I mean, obviously, it matters deeply, but that's really about betrayal. That's evergreen. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, it goes to the core for so many people. Yeah. And the nationalism part of it feels so current in a

crazy way. I have thought, you know, we had sort of left that era of witch hunts and, you know, who are you for and who are you siding with and against? I thought that had sort of exited our cultural landscape and clearly it has. Right. I mean, these people really were in the grip of, I think that they sincerely believed that they were fighting a terrible threat. Right. It's hard for me to impute the same sincerity to people now because I'm not that nice.

I can't, I can't forgive. I don't know. I feel like, you know, I can't forgive. I don't know. I feel like, you know, he was a genius and he was awful is a completely fair way to hold Kazan in your head. I don't believe in, you know, when people say you can't separate the artist from the art, I always feel like it's already separate. It's like it's not even your choice. Kazan's art is also the art of all of the people who he made it with. So if you're throwing it out, you're throwing out other people's work. That's fascinating. I had never thought of that because

I feel the same. Well, I'm never comfortable with the idea of, you know, cancellation is a whole other conversation, but I'm never comfortable with, I don't want to lose any art. You know, I don't really care who made it. Right, I mean, I don't think that good art is an excuse for misconduct or bad behavior. You know, I don't think like what he did

was any better because he was a great artist, but I just think there, you know, it's, we have to be able to hold those contradictions in ourselves and just live with them as contradictions. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for all of this time that you've shared with us and all of your thoughts and all of your great work. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And the series just sounds fantastic. And I can't wait to hear where it goes. And I'm sure I'll enjoy every bit of it.

Well, I hope so. If not, let me know and we'll change it. We'll fix it. it. Well, I hope so. If not, let me know and we'll change it. We'll fix it. Thank you so much to Mark Harris for joining us today. Be sure to get a copy of his latest book. It's an incredible biography called Mike Nichols, A Life. Join us next time to find out which world famous author never actually went to school and how she learned to write anyway. And finally, if you enjoyed what you heard today, be sure to rate and review wherever you get your podcasts.