Elia Kazan

Elia Kazan0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Elia Kazan0:05

For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music, the programme was originally broadcast in 1979, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week is the American stage and film director and novelist Elir Kazan. Kazan is an abbreviation of your real name, isn't it? Yes. Our our name in Anatolia, where my father and mother were born, was Kazanjioglu, which means the son of the man who makes cauldrons.

Presenter0:46

Or pots or ovens, but usually it means a great big cauldron that sits over an open fire. How old were you when you went to the United States? Four. I was four. My father went ahead of me, and then, as is the custom with Greek families, Anatolian families, all, all immigrants, he brought the whole family over when he had money enough to keep us. How big a family? Well, I had three brothers, a mother and three brothers, but they're a whole mess of uncles and aunts, and they all one by one came over. So Greek, of course, was your first language? Yes. Turkey, too, both. Turkish, I mean. Learned both together. How important in your life is music? Oh, I can't describe it. It was the first great luxury I had. The first thing I did when I had money enough was to buy quartets, and then, of course, I bought all Beethoven's symphonies. I bought the symphonies of Mozart. Then I bought a lot of jazz. And it was the first real thing I did with a little extra money. Books I could always get in the lending library. I always used to go to the lending library, but I used to just sit by the hour and listen to music. I don't do it as much anymore. Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you play an instrument? Just the phonograph. I'm quite good at that. I have none. I have none, Roy. You've never directed a stage musical or? Yes, I have. I did three of them. Did you? I did three. I did two by Kurt Weill.

Elia Kazan1:56

And I have

Elia Kazan2:00

Yes, I have.

Elia Kazan2:01

Did you?

Presenter2:04

and one that was based on American folk songs. One was quite a success. It had Mary Martin in it, you've heard of her, and uh Quitt wrote the music for it. Which was that? It was called One Touch of Venus. And uh the uh lyrics were written by S. J. Perlman and Ogden Nash. It was it was quite good.

Elia Kazan2:07

It was cool.

Elia Kazan2:15

And the

Presenter2:22

I don't think that was my forty, though.

Presenter2:24

Right now, eight disks for a desert island, and those eight may have to last a long time. Watch the first one.

Presenter2:31

Well, just one thing in general, first, Roy, taking the thing absolutely seriously and personally, I would feel that if I were cast away on a desert island, a lot of my time would be spent reminiscing and remembering things I'd done and things that were important to me in the past. And of course, my films are very important to me. They've meant a lot to me. And one that meant the most of all of them was the first film that I wrote myself and that I wrote about my own family, and that's America America. And the first piece of music that I would take along is the soundtrack from America America. It has the deepest feelings of sentiment, of nostalgia, of love for the background and culture that it represents. And it meant a lot to me. Incidentally, the title was changed for this country to The Anatolian Smile. Yes, that's right.

Speaker 33:23

The fan exhausted you.

Speaker 33:27

Ma Parimphani, Mesakto Pala Bakani Nagina Gima Kefodiya, Nasangaya Sukse nidhiya

Speaker 33:44

Guess he's

Presenter3:48

A song from the Anatolian smile The Stars of Voya sung by Zozo Fitosi.

Presenter3:54

No.

Presenter3:55

Elio, your qualifications as a castaway. Are you a resourceful man? Yes, I am. I live in the country a lot. I know how to work with my hands. When I was a boy, I used to build scenery. I've built turntables. I've built flats. I've built stairs. Shelter, no problem. Food, fishing? Fishing, I can't fish. I fish a lot. I've caught some very difficult and large fish in my time, including a wahoo. How big is a wahoo? A wahoo can be about seven feet long. That's a large size. They can be six feet. They're one of the fastest fish in the ocean. And by the time I brought him in, a shark had taken off half of them. That's disappointing. How are you with small boats? Would you try to escape?

Elia Kazan4:31

Ha ha ha

Presenter4:33

Oh, I of course I row and uh I take my shirts, uh my extensive wardrobe and sew them together into a into a sale and see if that would help. Great. Not worried about you. Let's have record number two. All right. Record number two is uh something from Benny Goodman and uh although I'm from a Greek background and Greek heritage, I uh was immediately an extremely uh I was a street kid. I was uh part of the jazz world when I was a boy and uh Benny Goodman was one of the great classic musicians.

Presenter5:35

Royal Garden Blues, the Benny Goodman Septet. Now we established you arrived in the United States at the age of four. You settled straight away in New York? Yes, we we lived in New York. And then uh when my father got a little money together he moved us to Neurochell, New York, which is a suburb.

Presenter5:50

And we lived there for quite a time. You went through high school. As a boy, what was your ambition? What did you want to be? Boy, well, I really had no positive ambition. I had a negative ambition was not to be sucked into my father's rug business. Also, to find something to make a living that I enjoyed doing. That was the rule of my life then: find something to make a living that you like. And that was terribly important to me. You went on to Williams College to read English. You had to work your way. Yes, I was a waiter at the Zeta Psi House. That's a fraternity house. I was a waiter there for three years, and then one year at another fraternity, Kappa Alpha House. And I worked my way through. How did the theater come into your life? Never did. I had no interest in the theater then. But when I got through college, again, I had this problem of what was I going to do. And I had learned how to get through school by working my way through and getting a scholarship and so on. And I had a chance to go to the Yale Drama School. And I wasn't really very interested in theater at first, Roy. The thing was that I knew how to work a dishwashing machine and I got a scholarship. I did some work around the place. Did you have to wait your way through drama school as well? Yes, I washed dishes. Drama school was different. I worked the dishwashing machine. That was promotional. Yes, that was a step up. And over the dishwashing machine, I met my first wife. So the dishwashing machine led me into romance. You didn't stay till the end of that course, did you? No, I had two years of it, and that was enough. I got a chance to go with the group theater then. More waiting? No, by God, there was. How did you know? One summer there was. I was a waiter. The group used to go away for the summer to rehearse. And the first summer they said to me, you can come along, but it costs $20 a week. $20 was a lot of money in those days. It isn't anymore.

Elia Kazan7:14

What the

Presenter7:28

So I said, Fine, I'll come along. I had exactly $100 to my name saved up and I went for five weeks. At the end of five weeks I said to them, I said, I'm broke. I said, I can't pay you anymore, but I'm not going to leave. So they said, well, why don't you wait on table? So they had a dining room. They'd lost a waiter and I began to wait on table. You were the best qualified waiter within my.

Presenter7:46

At least I did a lot of it.

Elia Kazan7:46

Yeah.

Presenter7:48

The idea of a group theater, an integrated company, this was something pretty new in the American theater. In the American theater, correct. It absolutely was. And also the way we worked, the cohesiveness of it, we more or less all worked the same way. See, the directors of the group theater at that time were 30 years old. They were boys. And we were all... I was 22. Everybody was, I mean, the oldest man among us was 35. It was a very young group. So we had to go in for makeup, for costuming, for characterization. And it was a great education in the theater to. This is where you learned to be an electrician and to build scenery and all that. When we went away for the summer, we had to, as a theater, earn our way. So we used to perform comedy routines and do plays at a Jewish summer camp. And I used to build the scenery there.

Elia Kazan8:21

Do not

Presenter8:33

Let's have another record. We got to your third. What is that? Well, this third record is an improvisation by a great Greek musician, a Buzuki player. Buzuki is the classic Greek Anatolian instrument. It has a long arm and small body and a stringed instrument. And this man is one of the great improvisers of the world, and his name is Tsitsanis. He's a friend of mine.

Speaker 29:12

Ela bon con sis e la bom con si se mi munca vasta gusta mu que ti pot yamos vi.

Speaker 39:21

A mustamo que divor

Presenter9:25

Tzetzanis with Marika Ninu.

Presenter9:28

An improvisation called Come As You Are.

Presenter9:31

How long were you an actor? I was an actor for eight years and uh I really don't think I was a great actor, but I did certain intense parts well. One of your first leading parts was in Golden Boyne. I remember the New York Company came to London. Did you come with it? Yes, I was here. I opened here. I opened in London. The St. James's, wasn't it? St. James's Theatre, now down. Despite the protests of Vivian Lee.

Elia Kazan9:52

Yeah, despite the

Presenter9:55

How early on did you get it in your head that you wanted to direct? Was that something that began to nag quite soon? Yes, quite right. Before I even became an actor, I was a stage manager. But in those years, at the very beginning, I saw films by Podovkin and Eisenstein and the great Russian films of the 20, and I said, that's for me, that's what I want to do. And at last, I had a goal. What was your first opportunity? My first opportunity was about 1934. It was a communist group, a communist theater, off Broadway, I mean, a small theater. And I directed a play of protest against something called the CCC camps, the Civilian Conservation Corps. And they took these kids that were out of work. They ought to do it now. And they sent them out into the woods and they cut trees down and did things like that, cleared brush, you know, made roads and stuff. It doesn't seem anything to protest about. Well, no. In those days, we protested about a lot of things. What was your first significant success? Well, the first real success I had was Streetcar Named Desire, I think, the first sizable success. I had a great success with something called The Skin of Our Teeth. With Thornton Wilder, which was a fine play, but I wasn't praised as much as Thornton Wilder. I shouldn't be. But also, there were big stars in Skin of Our Teeth, and they got all the write-ups and the notices and the attentions. And I was just a boy that held them all together. But in Streetcar, I got a lot of attention. And from then on, I was movie-bound, too. I got a lot of movie offers. Yes, you lived this double life, directing plays in New York and films in Holland. I used to do a play and a movie the same year. I used to be a two-coast character. Collecting awards on both coasts. Well, before we go into all that in detail, I think another record. What's number four? Well, we're playing the theme from Streetcar Named Desire, which if I were on a desert island, I would like to hear the themes from all the movies I made. This is one of them. They would remind me of things in my past that meant a lot.

Elia Kazan10:45

Yeah.

Elia Kazan11:16

Yes.

Elia Kazan11:19

Yes.

Presenter12:13

The theme from the film A Streetcar Named Desire by Alex North, played by Elmer Bernstein in his orchestra. Now so that we don't shuttle back and forth between New York and Hollywood too rapidly, let's talk about your plays first.

Presenter12:26

Streetcar, you found an excellent young actor for the New York cast, whose name was

Elia Kazan12:31

I hear it.

Presenter12:32

I've forgotten. What was his name, I wonder? Marlon Brando, do you mean him? I mean Marlon Brando. Yes. Where did you find him? Well, his mother really found him first. I was suddenly in bed with her one morning. He was around. He was a pupil with a woman named Stella Adler, with whom I used to act. She was his teacher. And I produced a play with Harold Kluerman called Truckline Cafe. And there was a three-minute bit in it of a man that sort of had a fit and went wild. And he was recommended to me, and he was marvelous in the play. He was just wonderful in the play. And when John Garfield, who was going to do Streetcar, dropped out, I suggested Marlon Brand up to Tennessee Williams, and Tennessee Williams liked him, and that's how he got his start. I remember seeing that production. There was an extraordinary...

Speaker 313:07

Uh

Presenter13:19

Marvelous air of realism about it. During the first act, there's the fight, and bodies bounced off the side of the set, and the set didn't shake. I had to reinforce the set. I did. You're absolutely right about that. As the thing worked out, I had the set reinforced and panels put in, things like that. Now, shortly after a streetcar named Lazar, you and Lee Strasberg established the Actors' Studio.

Elia Kazan13:26

I had a written

Elia Kazan13:28

Yeah.

Presenter13:41

This was what, a a development of that early group theater, wasn't it? Well, it was after the war then, it was nineteen for uh it was at the same time as Streetcar actually, but it wasn't Lee Strasberg then, it was uh a man named Robert Lewis, uh uh

Elia Kazan13:44

Yeah.

Presenter13:53

Compadre of mine, an actor who I work with. And after I came, I was in the Philippine Islands in 1944, 45, and I came back, and there was nothing for actors at all. And we all missed the group theater, Bobby and I did, and we started the actor studio. And it was a very small, modest organization at first. And about seven or eight years later, we got Strasberg into it. And Strasberg has become the soul of it. He's it now. And it's grown to be world famous and so on. But at the beginning, it had better actors, but the reputation was more modest. And what were the other Tennessee Williams plays you went on to do? I did.

Elia Kazan14:14

Oh yeah.

Presenter14:26

Camino Real, did you ever see that play here? Was it ever done here? That played here, yes. I did that.

Elia Kazan14:28

They are played here, yes.

Presenter14:30

I did um

Presenter14:32

What was the play?

Presenter14:34

Sweet bird of youth, I did that play

Presenter14:37

And I did uh Cat in the Hutchins Roof. Another very considerable success of yours was Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. Yes, it was with Deborah Carr. She was wonderful in it. And Bob is one of my very close friends now, as Williams is. One thing uh one thing nice, I've kept friendship with these fellows whose plays I've done. It's nice because we have a lot of common memories and

Elia Kazan14:49

Hmm.

Presenter14:57

Which was the play that you directed in London as well as in New York? Death of a Salesman.

Presenter15:05

And uh

Presenter15:06

I don't think the English liked it much. Uh it wasn't to their taste. They they thought it was excessive. I have trouble with the English, with you English. Sorry, Roy. You're all charming and everything else. And then when when you review my works, you sometimes find that they're uh hysterical or excessive. But I I think your life is far better organized, is calmer than ours. And I don't think that uh you're aware of how intense a culture I live in and uh how violent it is and how

Presenter15:35

How uncontrolled it can be. And therefore, I think my books correctly reflect what I see, just as your taste correctly reflects the life that you all tend to live. Moving on a few years, you attempted to build a national theatre company in the Lincoln Center, New York. What went wrong with that? Well, I don't think I was the right person for it. I think I failed because, first place, I'm an impatient man. I don't like to see the same people every day. You mean the administration that's necessary with a national company? I'm not an office animal at all. I just can't stand an office. I was the wrong man for it.

Speaker 316:03

That is necessary with a national

Speaker 316:06

I'm just

Presenter16:10

And also I have very little capability to direct classics. I don't think I'm a director for Shakespeare. I think you people do it well. I am good at contemporary plays, plays whose themes mean something to me. And I think basically I failed. It wasn't the idea. But the way America is when it failed, they said, well, if that fellow failed, we haven't got they try to get someone else and he was equally bad. And they gave up on the whole idea, which they should not have done.

Presenter16:39

Another record. Number five we've got tuna. Yeah, I began to go down south a lot and finally f started with Street Car. I began to go s down south a lot and got to know a lot of Negroes and a lot of Negro artists and I had two great Negro artists in Cat in the Hartin Roof playing at the end.

Presenter16:54

Willie McGee and Brownie and I got interested in Bessie Smith and she meant a lot to me and this record is one of her great songs.

Speaker 317:03

You might call three times a day, baby.

Speaker 317:08

Come and drive my blues away.

Speaker 317:11

When you come, be ready to play.

Speaker 317:16

Do your duty. If you want to have some love, give your baby your last buck. Don't come quacking like a duck.

Presenter17:33

Bessie Smith singing Do Your Duty. Now we've been talking about your Broadway plays. In the meantime, back on the coast, you were making pictures, a number of very distinguished films. Gentleman's Agreement won you an Oscar. How do you look back on that one? With mixed feelings. I'm not too proud of that film. It was rather a conventional film, but at its time, it was more daring than it appears now. It appears terribly ordinary now, I think, conventional.

Presenter18:01

Panic in the Streets was a good film. I like that. It was exciting.

Presenter18:05

And the film version of Streetcar Brando again and a different Blanche Dubois.

Presenter18:11

Vivian. Did that give you a different distribution of weight in the story? Well, uh no, there was a little problem at the beginning. She kept saying that she and Larry had done it a certain way, and I kept saying, Well, now you're here with me. And that lasted for about a week, but then she and I began to get along, and that was the end of it. She was terrific. She was a wonderful girl.

Elia Kazan18:11

Vivian. Vivian Lee.

Speaker 318:27

Uh

Presenter18:29

Woman, sorry. And On the Waterfront, another excellent film with Brando. Yes. That most unpromising.

Presenter18:36

Story, most unpromising subject, you would think, Labour Troubles and Hoboken.

Presenter18:41

And yet it came up like that. You you really knew what you were doing with that one? No, the script was very good. We worked very hard on the story. Uh Sam Spiegel, but especially Bud Schulberg and I, all three of us, worked very hard and we got a good script out of it. And uh it's a very intense story and a very good story. I like the film.

Presenter18:59

And another young hero, following in the footsteps of Brando, you you worked with James Dean.

Presenter19:05

Why has he become such a cult? I don't think he is a cult anymore in America. He may be here, Roy, but in America at that time, he represented all the rebellion against the parents by kids who were disappointed in what their parents were doing. I mean, they thought their fathers misguided, foolish, venal.

Presenter19:25

Uninteresting, stupid. And he represented all that resentment again. And still, with all that, Roy, a craving for the f the love of the father. So they both were alienated at the same time wanted the love. Do you understand? Yes, yes. Had had he a big potential as an actor? I don't think so, no. He was extremely good in a very, very narrow range. I don't think he had uh

Presenter19:48

great potential. Brando does, but I wouldn't say Dean did. But in his range he was very good.

Presenter19:54

And we've got to record number six. Well, this is a piece.

Presenter19:59

played by The Rolling Stones and sung by Mick Jagger and what it represents to me and why I would take it along is that a lot of my writing, I began to write books, think about writing books at this time, and a lot of my writing has to do with the sort of underside of American life, the th the kind of spirit that's exemplified by the Rolling Stones in American life.

Speaker 320:34

I can't get nowhere, Santa Factor.

Speaker 320:41

Can you get some more sentence fiction? Cause I try.

Presenter20:49

Mick Jagger and the Roading Stones, I can't get no satisfaction.

Presenter20:52

How many novels have you written now, Richard? I've written five novels and one screenplay made into a book. I didn't publish one novel. It was about my mother, and I thought it wasn't up to the subject. I like my mother a great deal. But the other four have all been bestsellers. This last book, Acts of Love, was on the New York Times bestseller list, too. So I've gotten along well. I mean, better than I should have expected. The arrangement hit the bestseller list for months, to say. 37 weeks, number one. Oh, that's not bad. And that started me off pretty well. And do you think Acts of Love is going to be a movie? No, I don't think so. I didn't write Acts of Love as a movie, but I think it might be. You never say never. I don't know. It may be. It's full of dialogue scenes, intense characters, confrontations, intense confrontations, and so on. It would make a very, very good movie. You seem to have faded out of the theater. You haven't done anything with theater. I didn't fade out. I dropped out. I quit it. I was in the theater as an actor and director for 33 years.

Elia Kazan21:42

Yeah.

Elia Kazan21:46

Uh

Speaker 321:46

I was in the

Presenter21:49

And I saw very clearly that I couldn't write books and continue in the theater. I could do movies perhaps once in a while, but you can't do both. Writing a book is the most intense experience I've ever had, Roy. It's something that's obsessive. You do wake up in the middle of the night and your wife says, what in the world are you doing? Why are you putting the light on? You say, wait a minute, kid. And you take a pen and you start writing in the middle of the night at three in the morning. And then you write for about three minutes or four minutes.

Presenter22:18

And then you put the pad away and turn the light out and you say good night, dear and she says, please try to get more sleep and then five minutes later you put the light on again and you're off again. You know, it's something that obsesses you. So that's what writing did to me. Right. And number seven.

Presenter22:33

Well, number seven is something entirely different. It's Mozart's great opera, Don Giovanni, and it's a song called Give Me Your Hand and

Presenter22:43

This whole opera, Don Giovanni, meant a lot to me. It opened, oh, I don't know, sort of spiritual ranges of thought and feeling and I mean all the the tunes in this, the melodies, the songs in this, have meant a lot to me.

Speaker 323:04

Yeah.

Speaker 323:09

Deridy sing.

Speaker 323:25

Wahoo!

Speaker 323:29

As in your country, sister

Elia Kazan23:29

May your country love to see Spanish.

Elia Kazan23:33

Uh

Speaker 323:41

One young man.

Speaker 323:44

One yellow.

Presenter23:55

A duet from the first act of Mozart's Don Giovanni, Give Me Your Hand, Eberhard Wrechter and Grazielle Schutti.

Presenter24:02

Now we get already to your last record. What's that? Last record is uh the

Presenter24:08

series of quartets that I consider the greatest in the world, and I guess many, many people do. It's not in a unique judgment, but it's the last six quartets of Beethoven, and this is from 132. And uh it has some of the um grandeur of uh Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but to me in a clearer and uh more moving form.

Presenter25:24

An excerpt from Beethoven's Quartet in A minor, opus 132, by the Italian Quartet. If you could take only one disc instead of eight, which would it be? The last one. And we allow every castaway to take one luxury to the island, one inanimate, useless object. Well, it would be of great use to me. I would take twenty tons of pine needles. Twenty tons of pine needles.

Presenter25:49

Well, I would spread them over the island because I like the desert and I like dry climate, but I'm very, very fond of the piney woods. Where I live in Connecticut, I have many pine trees, and sometimes in the summer I go sit under them, and I would take a big boatload of pine needles. Right, 20 tons of pine needles to sit and sniff. And one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare. The last five books of the Iliad of Homer are as great as anything ever written, in my mind.

Elia Kazan25:49

Well spread that right.

Presenter26:18

They're unforgettable and they also have uh depths that uh that you can read it again and again and again and get a lot out of them, get more out of them each time. Great. Homer's Iliad. And thank you, Elier Kazan, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you, Roy.

Presenter26:34

Goodbye everyone.

Elia Kazan26:43

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.