Credo of a Wrong-Living Man

In Hollywood, Clifford Odets pounded his coffee table with his fist. He jumped up, paced, and pulled at his greying and thinning but still curly hair. His bushy eyebrows rose dramatically to a point and formed a triangle with eyes that flashed fire and looked as if they might come bulleting out through the lenses of his hornrimmed glasses. He was all but shouting: "In the '30s, with all the scrabbling and pain, people had hard, hermetic identities. They knew where they were going. Today the American people don't know who they are or where they're going."

Clifford Odets knows where he is going --to NBC as a television writer. He was the dramatic laureate of the 1930s, when his Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing gave promise of a bright new American theater of protest. For 27 years, he has been a richly rewarded scriptwriter and adapter in Hollywood, and during the same period he has turned out several relatively bland plays--including Golden Boy--for Broadway.

Cussing Gusto. NBC, turning cartwheels as if it had just signed Christopher Marlowe, announced last week that Odets has agreed to participate in a TV series with Star Richard Boone of Have Gun Will Travel that will be quite similar to the old summer stock company on NBC's Robert Montgomery Presents: a different play each week, acted by a regular repertory company but with guest stars. Odets will supervise all the scripts and write at least four of the first 13 shows.

It is doubtful that Odets' own pungency will manifest itself on TV, but there is no doubt that it still exists--if only in the turbulent air above his coffee table, which is often covered with bits of four half-finished plays and the nearly complete libretto of a musical version of Golden Boy, which will star Sammy Davis Jr. on Broadway next season. With almost no prompting, the playwright is ready to sound off with four-letter gusto about almost anything.

"There is the mistaken idea," he says in self-defense, "that if you stay on Broadway and do plays--no matter how bad--this makes you a moral, right-living man. Come to Hollywood, and this makes you a wrong-living man. All the really great artists are professional craftsmen who write everything. But there is this idea in the U.S. that there's something nasty, unsavory or immoral about doing professional craftsmanship.''

So much for people who wonder why he wrote a movie for Elvis Presley.

Some Ideas. Meanwhile, what has been going on in the theater during his absence? "Not a damned thing. There is little significant writing on the burning issues of the day. Working in plays--in a viable form that expresses these things to an American audience so that they get it --is not easy. The theater needs new forms. I think audiences are hungry for new ideas like they never were before." Among his ideas:

-- "Conformity is basically a psychotic state. That is the frontier that has to be opened. To hell with the astronauts. To hell with the moon. There's a whole sky in your chest that's waiting to be explored."

-- "Be decent, we say, don't complain. This is a new kind of Calvinism that allows no individualism. It is a frightening phenomenon and as rigid as any Calvinism ever practiced."

-- "We won't have any American culture until a lot of people stay home and say what is important and good here."

-- "Madison Avenue has taken the enemy out of American life. We don't know who the enemy is with a capital E. This is a frightening thing. Who gives a goddam about moon shots when you see zombies walking around with lost souls? This is why I have to write plays."

Heaven help him when he springs some of those ideas on NBC-no-evil.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.