Dear American Friend - A Biography of Clifford Odets
By Maggie Carlin, Northlight Theatre Dramaturgy Assistant

Great artistry and talent often emerge from those among us that have lived lives of sadness, setbacks, failure and heartache.  Clifford Odets lived such a life.  He was born from humble beginnings, growing into a man with extraordinary potential and coming to his end with so much more to give and not having the time to finish.

He was born in Philadelphia on July 18, 1906 to Lou and Pearl Odets.  Lou was originally from Russia and changed his name from Gorodetsky to Odet when he arrived in America.  (The ‘s’ would be added later, due to a misspelling on his union card.)  Pearl Geisinger entered the U.S. at age eight from Romania and by age eleven worked in a stockings factory.  At sixteen she was forced into marriage with Lou, a situation that would forever plague her life.  Several months later, she gave birth to Clifford.

When Odets was two years old, the family moved from Philadelphia to the Bronx in New York City.  Lou had worked in print shops in Philadelphia and when they settled in their new home he opened a shop of his own.  Later he moved into direct mail advertising.  The Odets lived in an elevator building; one of only three in the Bronx.  

In 1910, Pearl gave birth to another child, Genevieve, who within the first year of her life was crippled by polio.  This caused a great change in Pearl: she became obsessively neat and kept everything spotless. Between her extensive tidiness and caring after her invalid daughter, her affection for her son began to fade.  No one could recall her kissing her son after the age of four.  Odets remembered, “She wanted to be consoled.  So did I.  She was lonely, distressed and aggrieved; so was I.  As a child I expected to be petted, brought in, (not cast out), consoled and comforted; and she begrudgingly would do none of these things for me.  She was, after all, a child herself.”  He added, “Any autumn will come, and dusk, and when I am one hundred and one, my heart will hurt that when the streets were cold and dark, that entering my house, my mother did not take me into her arms.”

Florence, his youngest sister, was born in 1917.  Odets’s relationship with her was greatly different than that with Genevieve.  He became a father figure to Florence and taught her how to read and play the piano.  Odets did not completely shut out his other sister, however; he would defend Genevieve against those who tormented her for her disability, such as their father, who began to call her ‘Gimpty’ by the age of six.  Nevertheless, despite his protectiveness, Odets always harbored resentment toward her.  After all, in his eyes, she had stolen away the attention and affection he once had from their mother.

In high school Odets devoted most of his time and effort to science, English and especially theatre.  Nothing else interested him.  His father forced him to take Spanish because he was convinced that one day they were going to be doing a lot of business with Spanish-speaking countries.  But Odets hated the language and failed the class more than once.  It was about that time he decided he wanted to be an actor, so he dropped out during his junior year in 1923.  “I thought high school was a waste of time,” he said in an interview.

His choice of profession infuriated his father who had hoped that Clifford would work with his advertising firm.  Lou often lost his temper about Clifford’s inability to make money.  A favorite anecdote from Odets’s past was that of his father smashing his typewriter out of frustration.  The typewriter was eventually replaced, and after some time Lou was finally able to accept his son’s choice.  Despite the acrimony with his father, Odets did not lose his strong ties to his family and saw them as often as he could, moving between New York and Philadelphia over the years.  

Odets began his acting career with the Drawing Room Players in New York City, a small acting group that did one-act plays, and another theater, who performed poetic English dramas.  From 1925 to 1927, he worked in radio as well and claimed to be the first disc jockey.  “I used to play records all the time and would plug certain firms I made ties with.”  During his time there he wrote two radio plays, Dawn and At the Waterline.  He managed to play the lead in At the Waterline in both New York and Philadelphia’s radio productions.  Later in life someone would come across his resume at NBC, where he claimed the ability to play in many different dialects such as French, Jewish, Negro, Cockney, Irish, English, Russian, Chinese, and any regional American.

On April 4, 1927, he made his first appearance with Mae Desmond and her Players in What Price Glory?  Mae was considered one of the “last stock Queens in existence.”  Mae and her Players, Odets included, worked with Union Stock Company and as counselors at drama summer camps.  As someone who wasn’t often praised for his acting, he was thrilled when Mae Desmond told him he had talent.  In 1929, he got a big break and was cast to understudy Spencer Tracey on Broadway in the show Conflict.  Here he met Albert Van Dekker, who introduced him to Theatre Guild, for which Odets played many minor roles.
Although through his theater work Odets had met friends, he still lived a solitary life which caused him to be lonely and often depressed.  Before reaching the age of twenty-five he had attempted suicide three times.  He was saved once by his own renewed will to live, and the other two times by the grace and kindness of strangers.  He was always looking for a place he could call home, with people who would love and understand him.  He needed a place where he could be accepted and feel as though he fit in.  He finally found that in 1931 with The Group Theater.

The Group Theater was formed by many of those who had worked with the Theater Guild.  Its main players were Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg.  Their intention was to create a strong core of actors and not just one star; they wanted to be more of an ensemble.  They developed an acting technique similar to the Stanislavski system, now known as Method acting.  The point was to remember your personal emotion from a past experience and apply it to the scene onstage.  In the summer of 1931, they moved out to the countryside to begin rehearsing their first play and to build the ensemble.  This was the core of their success over the next 10 years.

In 1932, Odets played his last role outside of the Group; it was also his largest role.  Burns Mantle, a reviewer, wrote, “Jack Davis serves modestly as the upright American engineer; Clifford Odets matches his nobility as the patriotic Russian husband.”  Another reviewer, Arthur Pollock, observed, “Clifford Odets is probably the best of the players, though he is practically inanimate.”  Describing his own acting to John McCarten five years later Odets admitted, “I was too tense…I couldn’t relax.”

Between the years of 1931 and 1933, he played many minor roles in the Group’s productions.  The company had become a second family to him and was the strongest influence on him.  After ten years of acting the impulse to write took over, and he began to pen plays for the Group.  In 1934, he wrote I Got the Blues, which eventually was renamed Awake and Sing!

Awake and Sing! was not his first produced play.  Waiting for Lefty, a one-act of vignettes revolving around cab drivers striking, was produced in 1935 by the Group Theatre.  According to Odets, the viewers enjoyed the show so much that “after each scene the audience stopped the show, they got up, they began to cheer and weep.”

After the success of Lefty, the Group produced Awake and Sing! but not without some initial resistance.  Strasberg, who was completely against the play, responded to Odets’s inquiry, "I have told you a dozen times.  I do not like your play.  Your play will not be done by the Group Theatre."  It was Stella Adler who stood up to Strasberg first, and the other members soon followed.  After several rewrites, the Group performed Awake and Sing! and in doing so found themselves a playwright.  During that year he also wrote Till The day I Die and Paradise Lost.  1935 was his best year for his work; he was not able to generate the same amount of critical success in the years to follow.  It would forever be the year he could not live up to or repeat.

That same year, Odets lost his mother.  He was just starting to become a success when she passed and claimed that this is what killed her.  “It excited her.  It sent her off in ecstasies.  Just before she died I showed her a picture of myself in a New York newspaper, she smiled and said ‘It is good.’  That was the last thing she said to me.”  It was at the end of her life that he found she had secretly been hiding away pennies to escape from the life that she hadn’t wanted; the total amount that she had at her death was around three thousand dollars.

In 1936, Odets went to Hollywood.  Writing screenplays was how he kept himself, his family and the Group Theatre afloat during the tough economic times.  Many debated whether or not Hollywood would take over the unspoiled playwright.  George Ross wrote in his column, “So This Is Broadway,” “They spoke last year of a flaming playwright of the Theatre’s White Hope of the new O’Neil, and they were speaking this year, in the same circles and in whispers and in less reverent tones, of Clifford Odets… [he] had been seen with Tallulah Bankhead, had been noticed talking to Beatrice Lillie at somebody’s midnight social, had been observed at Fire Island weekending with Fannie Brice, the Gershwins, Gene Fowlers, and the like… ‘Will Odets,’ it often was asked at numerous soirees, ‘keep his head after all that acclaim or will he go in for social climbing Hollywood and cocktails at five?’”

In Hollywood he met actress Luise Rainer, whom he married in 1937.  They moved back to New York and Odets threw himself back into theatre.  But as an actress, Luise spent a lot of time in Hollywood making movies, and travelling back and forth put stress on both of their careers and their relationship.  Many times Luise would not have the time to respond to his telegrams and he would become upset.   When they would see each other in New York they would fight so severely that many times she would promptly return to California.  Odets once told Ellen Adler, Stella Adler’s daughter, "Luise and I had to be married because God had to witness the kind of fights we had.  We fought so violently."  The last straw of their relationship came in May of 1938.  After weeks of silence, Luise telegrammed Odets, simply stating, “I am going to have a baby.  Luise.”  Odets responded to this abrupt communication with hostility.  He sent a telegraph back, “Dear Luise will wire you Monday because now I don’t know what to say.  Love, Clifford.”  The word “love” was penciled in as an afterthought.  Broken hearted upon reading this, Luise had an abortion immediately and filed for a divorce.  They reconciled briefly in December, but unable to make it work, Odets and Luise split up for good in 1939.

Between 1937 and 1941, Odets wrote four plays including: Golden Boy, Rocket to the Moon, Night Music and Clash By Night.  Golden Boy was the Group’s most successful production to date.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t enough for the financially-struggling company.  After ten years, the Group closed their doors for good.
During the 1940s, Odets continued to write plays as he kept up a career in Hollywood.  He began to direct some of his own work.  His modest income allowed him to develop his love for art; he began collecting works by famous artists such as Picasso, Matisse and Rouault as a hobby.  In 1943 he married actress Bette Grayson with whom he had two children.  He had a daughter named Nora, born in 1945, and a son, Walt Whitman, born in 1947.  Bette and Odets divorced in 1951.  In 1954, Bette died at the young age of 32 leaving Odets alone to raise the children.

In 1947, the U.S. government named Odets as one of the seventy-five communist screenwriters in America.  In 1952, he was called and questioned by the House of Un-American Activities Committee. Unlike his fellow writers, he was not blacklisted as he served as a “cooperative witness” and named names.  Odets lost many of his friends for this, and several of those loaned paintings were promptly returned after he testified.  Many asked why he didn’t “plead the Fifth” but according to his son, Walt Odets, “[Father] believed that taking the Fifth meant he had something to hide—and he had nothing to hide.”  In addition, at the time Odets had much to lose.  He was his children’s financial support and not talking meant not feeding his children.  In 1955, after being shunned by many of his friends, plus the devastating failure of his latest play, The Flowering Peach, on Broadway, Odets finally became a permanent resident of California.

Despite his theatrical frustrations, Odets continued to work in Hollywood over the next fifteen years, but by now he had branched out into television.  When he died in 1963, he was working as a story editor for a NBC-TV dramatic series, of which he finished three out of twelve teleplays.  But death came too soon for Odets; he was not ready to leave this world and was looking to start a new stage in his life.  He had multiple plays in progress, and great plans for the future.  “The tragedy of our times in the theater is the tragedy of Clifford Odets,” Elia Kazan began before defending his late friend against the accusations of personal and critical failure that had appeared in his obituaries.  “His plan, he said, was to… come back to New York and get [some new] plays on. They’d be, he assured me, the best plays of his life…Cliff was not ‘shot’…. The mind and talent were alive in the man.”  According to Kazan, on his deathbed at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, Odets had raised his fist for the last time in his characteristic, self-dramatizing way, and said “Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!”

Nonetheless, on August 14, 1963, he succumbed to colon cancer, leaving behind a career that was cut short and a talent to never be forgotten.  On his deathbed he wrote in his journal: “Dear American Friend, that miserable patch of events, that mélange of nothing, while you were looking ahead for something to happen, that was it! That was it! That was life! You lived it!”