Significant Others - Molly Day Thacher

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Legendary filmmaker Elia Kazan gave us such cinematic classics as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire, but he made himself a pariah when he named names to the government. Without his wife, Molly Day Thacher, he might never have made his controversial decision–nor even had a career to begin with.Starring: Lisa Kudrow as Molly Day Thacher and Paul F. Tompkins as Elia Kazan. Also featuring: Jack McBrayer, Jim Rash, Adam O’Byrne and Larry Powell. Source List:A Life, by Elia KazanElia Kazan, by Richard SchickelTennessee Williams & Elia Kazan: A Collaboration in the Theatre, by Brenda MurphyTennessee Williams, Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, by John Lahr“A Statement”, by Elia Kazan“You Must Remember This” Podcast

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and in this episode, we learn about a woman whose husband achieved not only fame, but also infamy during the course of his career. And it's possible that none of it, the good or the bad, would have happened if they hadn't fallen in love before his work even began. or the bad, would have happened if they hadn't fallen in love before his work even began. Theirs was a marriage that truly lived up to the promise of, for better and for worse. This time, on Significant Others, meet Molly Day Thatcher. Character is destiny. So goes the wisdom of the philosopher and the dramatist. The idea being that perhaps our path in life is not determined so much by what's outside, like fate or chance, but what's inside, the nature of our character and the choices it leads us to make, like Icarus, or King Lear, or Bernie Madoff. But how does this idea apply to a marriage? What do you call it when two people affect each other's lives in ways that

might be more profound than anything that could have happened if they had never met? Elia Kazan was a legendary director of stage and screen. His films are among the best in cinematic history, classics like On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire. He launched the careers of James Dean and Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint. And yet his actions at a very specific moment in history were so divisive that when he was given

a special Lifetime Achievement Oscar nearly a half century later, he was publicly a special Lifetime Achievement Oscar nearly a half-century later, he was publicly snubbed, to his face and on live TV, by some of the most famous people in Hollywood. Kazan's story is the definition of the phrase, character is destiny. As an immigrant, he felt scarred by his otherness and craved acceptance, but was so self-interested and ambitious that he wound up alienating almost everyone who ever cared for him. He also alienated almost everyone in his industry, and his name can still get a charge out of people even now, nearly 20 years after his death.

But through everything he did, from the artistic triumphs to his fateful decision to name the names of friends and colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was not alone. His first wife, Molly, is inextricably bound up in his story, for better and for worse, and yet hardly anyone knows her name at all. The biography of Molly Kazan has yet to be written, which means that, for now, she exists, publicly at least, almost exclusively in the margins of other people's stories. She discovered Tennessee Williams, mentored hundreds of playwrights, and Arthur Miller so valued her dramaturgical input on Death of a Salesman that when the play had its triumphant opening on Broadway, he sent her a copy of the script inscribed,

to Molly for, in effect, saving it. But even viewed through the lens of her husband's highly subjective autobiography, A Life, which was the source for most of the quotes here, we can see that Molly does not fit neatly inside anyone else's margin. However, her own career never flourished, at least in part because of the four children she was forced to parent alone and the restless husband who required more of her

than he was ever able to give back. So to understand her life, we have to look more closely at his. Elia Kazan came to America from Greece with his family at the age of three. Exquisitely aware of what he called his outsider status, he would spend nearly the rest of his life struggling to prove that he did, in fact, belong here. He was so marked by his otherness that when he published his first book, the cover proudly featured a quote from his friend James Baldwin,

which addressed Kazan by his nickname, Gaj. Not many Americans have dared to face the truth of why they came to this continent or what happened once they did. Gaj, baby, you're a Nick too. Kazan's childhood was marked by loneliness and insecurity and intense unrequited sexual desire. He writes that he was a secretive freak, unseen by everyone.

He and his mother were close, but he was wary of his father, who was gruff and misogynistic. Elia was conscripted into the family rug business, which he was expected to take over, but his interests lay elsewhere. He hid novels inside the ledger he pretended to pour over and was a general disappointment, especially in comparison to the family's real pride and joy,

a cousin with a famously long phallus over which customers were taken into a back room to marvel. He escaped into books and movies and came to covet the version of American life he saw in the media. What did I want of life? Nothing noble, but passionately. To be an American. To have what American kids had. A daily life like theirs. To be accepted by them. To enjoy what they were enjoying. Each other's company. Cars. Bell-bottom trousers, summer place, pocket full of pocket money, a varsity letter on my sweater, to dance with a girl, to dance well, to neck with her later.

Nothing very noble, you see. Just the most ordinary, the most common, and the most precious things. Only a film director could sum up American-ness with a list like this. Only a film director could sum up American-ness with a list like this. Molly Day Thatcher, meanwhile, exemplified a once-dominant kind of American ideal. She was what some might call High Wasp. She appears to have had at least one ancestor aboard the Mayflower, and her family had been prominent citizens for generations.

Her great-grandfather was president of Yale, which earlier ancestors had helped found, and her grandfather gave his city a zoo. For Kazan, Molly's pedigree would practically be an aphrodisiac, but in order to meet her, he would have to defy his first destiny. Tradition dictated that young Elia would join his father in the family business, but Elia had a teacher who believed he was special. Apparently, he was not as unseen as he felt. And she, along with his mother, conspired secretly to get Elia into college. For years, he tutored privately, worked odd jobs to save tuition money, and dreamt of an escape from his old world fate.

The betrayal was deep. When the mail came carrying an acceptance letter from Williams College, Elia's father was so angry he hit Elia's mother in the face. But it was all worth it. The deception, the guilt, the lawns mowed, the pennies saved. because at Williams, Kazan thought, he was at last on the right path. The elite were gathering, as he put it, and finally, he thought, he was one of them. When he arrived on campus, he couldn't wait to be rid of his parents with their broken English

and their dowdy, old-fashioned clothing. I'm ashamed to say I was embarrassed by their appearance and eager to have them gone. I wanted to be alone and to jump into the swim with the Anglos. And yet his dream of finding a tribe of affluent Anglos to call his own did not come true. Rejected by all 15 fraternities on campus, Kazan learned that acceptance to Williams was no pass against privilege. Whatever it was that marked him as undesirable, Kazan would never know, though he would wonder about it always. It hurt for four dark, cold years.

And in the blackest part of my heart, I still haven't forgiven the men who rejected me. I remember wondering what the hell was wrong with me anyway. My looks? My goddamn foreign looks? Those Anglos making the choices. What did they think? That I was a Jew boy? Yes, I looked like one. Was that it? Jews and blacks weren't taken into fraternities at Williams in 1926. Or was it something about my character? Was I clearly a freak of some kind? Was it something I couldn't see or understand

that made me so absolutely unacceptable? My jittery sexuality, had they sensed that? Or was it something simple, like my bow legs, my acne, my big butt? From that week in 1926 on, I knew what I was. An outsider. An Anatolian, not an American. So rather than pledge a fraternity, Kazan got a job as a waiter in one instead.

Serving the very club members who had denied him entry, he developed a grudge that calcified over time and became a kind of toxic power source for the rest of his life. Or so he says, having written all of this down as a clear attempt to exonerate at least some of his actions,

it's hard to say how much truth he's really telling. All memoir is an exercise in fiction to some degree, but Kazan in particular had every motivation in the world to lead the reader as much as possible. In any case, while Elia was trying and failing to swim with the Anglos, Molly was at Vassar being educated with the heiresses. She then went on to Yale to study playwriting. There, she met a nice guy named Alan who quickly became her boyfriend.

But a few months later, Molly found she had fallen in love with someone else, Alan's roommate and best friend, Elia. As Molly and Alan spent more time apart, she and Elia grew closer. She cast him in a play of hers, and they took road trips to see shows at off-campus theaters. Kazan remembers it rapturously. A deep and lasting artistic partnership was being born. I came to rely on her judgment and scripts.

She made up for my lacks in taste and savvy. I gave her the energy and drive she needed. She loved me totally. And so, unfortunately for Alan, Elia and Molly became a couple. Elia couldn't believe that Molly liked him. He had fallen for her natural elegance. One diary entry praises how patrician

her long, slim fingers looked as she held her diaphragm. Her intelligence was not lost on him either, especially when it was flexed in support of his talent. But the fact that she was a purebred member of the American establishment meant that her affection for him carried the weight of approval with a capital A. For the first time in his life, Kazan felt accepted by America herself, although this meant that a massive power imbalance had been baked into their dynamic that would haunt their relationship until the end. Though the boyfriend swap seems to have

been Molly's choice, it was the last time she would trade in one man for another. But for Kazan, this was the beginning of a pattern. Years later, he made sense of it by saying that growing up under the domineering rule of his father, he was forced to learn the art of deception. His philosophy was this. What I wanted most, I'd have to take, quietly and quickly, from others. I specialized in taking women away from men, particularly those handsome young fellows who played leading roles in films.

I found many women were working off the same kind of thing I was. They were getting back at squadrons of men and would go to extraordinary lengths to play out their grudges. Sometimes I thought they actually preferred breaking the marriage laws in their own bed. And if an infant, the fruit of the union, slept peacefully through it all in a gaily painted cot at one side, or even in the bed with us. I got a special charge out of it. It proved what I needed to have proved twice over. Don't get mad at me. I'm not really worse than most of you. Admit it. Even sex with Marilyn Monroe couldn't distract Kazan from his competition with other men, especially his good friend Arthur Miller, with whom Monroe was obsessed.

While we were making love, she talked about him. She had Art's photograph on a shelf behind her bed, next to the copies of his plays. And after I'd finished, I'd raised up and looked into his eyes. There he was, looking as if he'd just won the Nobel Prize. But that would all come later.

For now, in 1930, Kazan was still thrilled that any woman would want to be with him at all, especially a woman who was practically queen of the ruling class, the ultimate Anglo. She made me feel completely worthy. When I was with Molly, I wasn't an outsider. Molly came as a miracle. But this miracle still had to convince him to marry her. While they were dating, Molly became pregnant. She didn't want to end it because Anne urged her to have the procedure. At that time, abortion was officially illegal but unofficially allowed. She hated the doctor. His office is dingy and the table covered with dust. I didn't know where to put my bloomers

when I took them off. I hated his hands on me. He didn't wear gloves. I was nervous and mad at being in that position. But she went through with it, paying the $300 fee herself and wondering aloud, I keep thinking of girls with less money. What do they do? Afterward, Kazan put her to bed in a friend's apartment and found himself ready,

reportedly, for sex. It's unclear whether he got any or not. Later, he let her give him train fare to rejoin his summer residency, counted his blessings for having escaped capture by childbirth, and resolved to break up with her. She wrote to him soon after that she was happy she had gone through with the procedure, but later confessed that the episode had actually made her feel suicidal. He did not respond kindly to this, writing back to her,

I'm a companion, not a solution. It gets me sore when you depend on me so. I'm no reason for you to commit suicide, no reason not to commit suicide. You've got to want yourself more than you want me. One of the few things you could do that I detest you for is kill yourself. It may have made him sore when she depended on him too much,

but he had no problem relying on her whenever his confidence wavered. And in the summer of 1932, he was feeling more insecure than ever. I mean, haven't we all known people like this? You're too needy, but by the way, I need you. I live for my art, and you should too. It's easy to wonder what Molly saw in him,

and frustrating we don't have any of her words to explain it. In any case, Kazan had wrangled an internship as a stagehand with the influential Group Theatre in New York, the company founded by Lee Strasberg and Harold Klerman that idolized Stanislavski and his revolutionary Moscow Art Theater. The group brought method acting to the U.S., minted movie stars like Brando and Hoffman,

and launched a thousand acting coaches. Born during the Great Depression, the group aimed to be something like a pop religion, an artistic collective that would articulate the voice of the people. They were enamored of Russian theater artists and deeply affiliated with the Communist Party. This is what would cause all the trouble for the Kazans later on. The group was not a communist organization, but a chunk of its members belonged to the party. In addition to the general russophile

vibe of the moment, the Communist Party had a strong appeal for young theater makers who wanted a guru, especially one who promised to transform them into meaningful artists. As Kazan put it, Only people as full of self-doubt as actors could go for it quite the way our bunch did. as actors could go for it quite the way our bunch did. Someone who didn't go for it at all was Molly, neither the party nor the group. She agreed with their political agenda, but hated their sycophantic tendencies and warned Kazan not to subscribe to any hero worship. Read even just a few pages of Kazan's autobiography, and you'll know how fundamentally impossible it would have been for him to subjugate himself to anyone, but whatever, Molly always called it like she saw it. But the group did give Kazan his first real foot

in the door of the industry and a cohort of collaborators and friends, many of whom he would name to the government 20 years later. But in the beginning, he found them all very intimidating. And as his truest supporter, Molly was becoming, as he put it, his drug of reassurance. After the abortion, Molly kept bringing up marriage. Kazan wasn't into it, not yet. His friend Clifford Odets, another member of the group, opposed it too, advising him, if you have to marry, find a peasant. Clifford was convinced that an artist should never marry. But if he did, it should be to a woman who'd keep house for him, cook for him, bear his children,

then nurse and tend them at the same time protecting her genius from all distraction while he worked. Which does actually sound a bit like what Elia got in Molly, though Odette still thought his friend could do better. Kazan suspected that Molly's real crime, in Odette's eyes, was her failure to revere Odette's himself. And Molly didn't revere anyone. This is probably why her praise meant so much to Kazan. Nothing in her was capable of false flattery.

By the end of 1932, Molly and Elia were married. Her family paid for everything. Then Molly, who still had dreams of becoming a playwright, put her own artistic ambitions aside and went to work, supporting them both as her husband tried to get his career off the ground. The only person in the world who believed in me. She'd come home from Jersey at dusk or through the dark. I remember watching from our window over Cornelia Street, walking slowly in a haze of thought as if she were narcotized. Later, this was how I saw Stella in Streetcar Named Desire.

A few months after the wedding, America's depression worsened. Banks closed and Kazan's father lost his business and fell ill. With a sense of rebellion and vengeance for his father's decline and surrounded by comrades, Kazan made the decision to join the Communist Party. Molly was sympathetic to the aims of the left, but she never joined the party herself. And Kazan wouldn't stay a member for long. Communal living grossed him out, and politically controlled theater went against his very being. I discovered I was not a collective person or a bohemian. I was an elitist.

I thought their collective apartment squalid. I certainly would not have liked sleeping three in a room. Where did they fuck, I wondered. And there seemed to be a meeting every night. I hate meetings. Hated them then, hate them now. In short, groupthink was not for him. And ultimately, Kazan chose artistic integrity

and good old-fashioned American individualism over the demands of the party. I believed then, and I believe now, that a person's agreeing with me politically is not a guarantee of his or her artistic talent. He agreed with his friend Albert Maltz, who decried revolutionary art as a weapon in the class struggle. It was not a useful guide for writers on the left, but a straitjacket. So he resigned from the party a year and a half after joining it. Everyone in his circle blamed Molly for this. No one at the group liked her commitment to independent thought. But the marriage would survive much longer than the group theater, which dissolved around 1940, and Kazan would reach heights of success that far outpaced his

former mentors. But Molly and Elia's life together was rarely harmonious. From the start, fidelity was not for him, and the early years were especially brutal for Molly. Her husband was not only wildly unfaithful, everyone knew it. It was humiliating. She confronted him and he grew defiant. They lived apart for a time. He seems to have been absent through most of his first two children's early years.

In his diary, he refers to them as the girl and the boy. Years later, writing about one of the more difficult periods of their life together, Kazan displays a curious mix of regret and intransigence. In a line that may be a great epitaph for any marriage, he writes, I had no one to blame but myself. Unless it was her. Ah, marriage. Indeed, their union continued to be plagued with this particular

blend of dependence and resentment. In one episode, Kazan writes a piece for the New York Times to protest a movie studio's cut of his film. Molly asks if she can rewrite it. He says, of course. Her version is printed. Kazan is grateful. Then, then almost immediately he holds it against her. The article Molly had rewritten for the New York Times had made me a cultural hero again, but I felt dissatisfied with what she'd done. I thought it temperate and reasonable and balanced, whereas my feelings were intemperate, unreasonable, and probably unbalanced. What is a wife to do with a husband like this? If you're Molly Day Thatcher, you fight.

You freeze him out. You exile him. You move house. You send him your wedding ring in the mail. You even file for divorce, twice, but you never go through with it. You see an analyst called Bella and formulate a plan to wait out your husband's restlessness.

You insist your husband go into analysis too. He is delighted to learn that Bella is a fan. But above all, you stick your marriage out. Even when your husband tells you he would like to stay married to you and keep his mistress. Even when he admits to an affair with Marilyn Monroe, who he slept with throughout her relationship to Joe DiMaggio and practically up until her marriage to Kazan's good friend Arthur Miller. Even when your husband has a child with another woman, if you're Molly Day Thatcher Kazan, no matter how many other women your husband sleeps with or how much he pushes you away, you stick your marriage out. In other words, she may have been the most loyal wife in human history, and she was married to a man whose chronic disloyalty was not only an epic personal failure,

it was about to tank their entire existence. 1952 had been a rough year for the Kazans. Elio was hitting his stride in Hollywood just as the Cold War was getting underway between the U.S. and Russia, and communists had been declared the enemy. Patriotism was a thing, and D.C. was in deep with Hollywood.

Studios were asking artists to sign oaths of loyalty to the United States, and labor unions were dictating dialogue, all of which Kazan refused. Not because of some fealty to communism, but because of what he referred to as the straitjacket thing. No one was going to tell him what kind of art he could or could not make. known that Kazan had had communist ties at one point, even if very few people really knew exactly what they were. So it came as no surprise when he was subpoenaed in February to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Quick sidebar, what is the House Un-American Activities Committee? It's basically been around since 1918 under a few different names. And while it may have

sounded like a good idea, especially during wartime, it does rely on a premise that feels antiquated at best. If you believe that America is good, then anything anti-American must be bad. But who gets to determine what constitutes either of those things? Well, mostly white men, of course. And their record, as far as this committee goes, is spotty at best. Over the course of its 100-year history, the committee has fought the ACLU, promoted internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and interrogated and vilified dozens of artists.

They did root out anti-Semitic Nazis in 1939, but they also became the tool of a Soviet spy in 1934. And while they ultimately did declare the KKK to be un-American, it took them nearly five decades to reach that conclusion. So this is the committee that in 1952 had set its sights on Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten, producers, directors, and screenwriters who refused to testify to Congress in 1947, had done their prison time and been banned from the business, and studio heads like Jack Warner and Daryl Zanuck were just hoping to keep their rosters clean enough to protect the bottom line. were mostly on the hunt for marquee names to add to their stew of scandal. He wasn't wrong. A few years later,

they effectively offered to drop their investigation into Arthur Miller in exchange for a signed photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Regardless, when Kazan received a subpoena to appear before the committee to answer questions relating to whether or not he was or had ever been a communist, he was expecting it. And he had a plan.

Wanting neither to draw the committee's ire nor look like a squeal, he would admit the truth of his own short-lived membership in the Communist Party, but refuse to discuss anyone else's. When the meeting finally happened, it struck Kazan as nothing more than a performance. What these fellows were conducting was a degradation ceremony. When the meeting finally happened, it struck Kazan as nothing more than a performance. What these fellows were conducting was a degradation ceremony, in which the acts of informing were more important than the information conveyed. I didn't doubt they knew all the names they were asking for.

But he was afraid of them all the same. They could ruin his career with one phone call, or so he believed. He had already confessed the truth of his communist past to Daryl Zanuck, who couldn't have cared less, but urged him to give up every other name he could. Name the names for Christ's sake. Who the hell are you going to jail for? You'll be sitting there and someone else will sure as hell name those people.

Who are you saving? In the end, Kazan's plan only brought more pressure down on him. The committee had not been satisfied. They wanted those names. In a proper hearing, on the record, under oath. In the meantime, in what felt like a warning shot from Washington, Streetcar Named Desire was frozen out in the top three categories at the Oscars, where it had been favored to win. The night of the ceremony, Kazan found himself ostracized and alone at the Hotel Bel Air, with nothing but a newly engaged Marilyn Monroe in his bed for comfort.

His earlier resolve was wobbling. He had no interest in protecting the Communist Party, but he didn't want to sell out his friends. At the same time, he was plagued by the idea that someone else might turn on him, as Zanuck had suggested. The ghost of his old outsider status was rattling its chains. He had a deep-seated fear that even now, his found family of fellow American artists might turn on him because he had never really been one of their own. And he had Molly in his ear. Despite her former activism, Molly was less suspicious of the government than he. As a born insider, she had had no reason to fear it.

She was raised on the Pledge of Allegiance. She respected authority. She said to her husband, on the Pledge of Allegiance, she respected authority. She said to her husband, I can't say much for their procedures, but it's the duty of this Congress to find out all there is to find out about the party and what they're up to, and to ask people like you what you know. I hope you tell them the truth. What's more, where she once thought of American communists as somewhat annoying colleagues, she now saw the party as a real threat. When Arthur Miller, who was in his own private panic about the hunt for comrades, outlined his idea for the crucible, which draws an analogy between the Red Scare and the Salem witch trials, Molly had this to say.

What's going on here and now is not to be compared with the witch trials of that time. Those witches did not exist. Communists do. Here and everywhere in the world. It's a false parallel. Molly thought her husband should cooperate with the committee, and he was beginning to agree. So with Molly's help, he reframed the story.

They believed the truth would set him free. Kazan and his friends had been communists, yes, but it had been brief and such a long time ago. They had been young and idealistic and powerless and poor. Clearly, they posed no threat to America. Whereas this committee, with its whispers and interrogations and threats and fear-mongering, that was the real anti-American activity.

What better way to disempower the interrogators, they reasoned, than to just tell them what they wanted to know, what they likely already did know. Once they had, everyone would be able to see for themselves there was nothing worth keeping silent about. It was time to give the committee what they wanted. And so, on April 10th of 1952, Kazan did just that. Professionally, it was a good move. Producers could now hire him without being accused of harboring a communist. He had saved his career. But socially, the backlash was swift and fierce, and that Kazan's life was about to become

a kind of hell. His testimony was published immediately in the paper of record. The minute he showed up in his office, his secretary quit and went to work for Mike Nichols. Immediately after that, Kazan was stonewalled by his longtime partner Kermit Bloomgarten, and Arthur Miller stopped their collaboration. People who knew him flagrantly crossed the street to avoid him. Brando swore he'd never work with him again, though he would reverse that later with On the Waterfront, in a deal that was apparently brokered by Bella the Shrink,

who Brando had been seeing on Kazan's recommendation. Molly took umbrage on her husband's behalf. In the way of a smart person who is used to being both correct and heard, she wanted to defend Elia's decision publicly. Or rather, she wanted him to defend it. So she proposed that he issue a public statement, and then she wrote it for him. She locked herself in her study, and I heard the typewriter, pages being ripped out impatiently, the carriage slammed back to its star position, then more typing.

It wasn't easy, what she was trying to do, and she didn't stop for food. When she came out, it was the end of the afternoon, and she had a single page for me to read. They ran the statement in the New York Times, not on the op-ed page, but as a paid advertisement, entitled A Statement by Elia Kazan. It's too long to read here, but you can find it online,

and we'll put a link in the show notes. It is, not surprisingly, extremely well-written and clear, though we have to wonder how it sat with an oft-betrayed wife to essentially defend her husband's honor like this in public. It lays bare Kazan's true relationship with communism and his wish to aid America's fight against it. It says, among other things, that to be a member of the Communist Party is to have a taste of the police state. It argues that liberals are in fact obliged to collude in the fight against communism Kazan got anonymous letters and hate calls at home. He was called a coward, a rat, a traitor to both sides,

an enemy to the communists, sure, but also to the progressives, who held that a person should be free from prosecution for his political ideology. Progressives saw the committee as anti-American, and anyone who gave them what they wanted was no better. But Kazan wasn't the only target. gave them what they wanted was no better, but Kazan wasn't the only target. Many of the more vicious attacks were aimed at her. At first, I showed them to Molly, but I saw they were getting under her skin, and I stopped. Whenever I was out at night and a few minutes late getting home, I'd find her wretched with worry. She was convinced they'd strike back, either at me or at the children. Our four kids were perfect targets.

Molly decided we must never leave them alone in the house at night. I told her that the fellows she was worried about were talkers, not fighters. I should take debating lessons, not karate. She didn't think this funny. It would be many months before she lived without fear. The Kazans soldiered on, Elia into the most successful period of his career both artistically and commercially,

and Molly into what would be the last decade of her life. She continued to be deeply enmeshed in her husband's career and remained integral to the work of Williams, Miller, Shaw, and others. and remained integral to the work of Williams, Miller, Shaw, and others. Everyone thought of her as the smartest person in the room. But her relationships with writers began to fray as time went on. Unlike her husband, Molly had always felt entitled to speak her mind. She was a smart, educated American woman, a product of the modern era. Why shouldn't she tell people what she thought?

But like with the New York Times piece, her thoughts, fair and true as they might have been, were not always met with a happy reception. Sometimes, as with Odette's, it was simply because she was a woman. But also, she could be a bit too tenacious, and clear-headed, and sure of herself. bit too tenacious and clear-headed and sure of herself. After a particularly galling moment when Molly told Tennessee Williams in front of a group of potential investors that his new play Camino Real was too long, he complained bitterly about her to a friend. I screamed at her all the four-letter words that I could think of. She then sent out circulars to everybody saying that I must cut 45 minutes of the play. Molly is a pain in Gadget's derriere, but he has to make a public show of loyalty to her as the mother of his four children and so forth, while he puts on her more Meanwhile, Molly wrote Williams a letter of her own.

If you lose the sense that you are more than anything you write, you lose your power to see it, and you lose the power to bring it to its own full realization. The future of the play depends only on one thing, on you. As usual, she wasn't wrong, but writers are a sensitive bunch. And Molly didn't always know when to let up with the criticism. Not even with a closeted, neurotic alcoholic on the verge of a breakdown. She wasn't callous. She had nurtured Williams his entire career.

She helped nurse him through his collapse when his lover died. But it's as if she didn't have any powers of persuasion because she thought being right should be persuasive enough. Kazan put it this way. What brought our conflicts into the open was Molly's compulsion to tell the authors whose plays I was directing what was wrong with their work and how they should fix it. She did this carefully, earnestly, and with the greatest sympathy, but I could see that these men, increasingly, pulled away from her, resented her advice, and rejected her suggestions. The bad word, of course, is should. Should is the word that would kill her. I can recall her sitting behind a long table with

Irwin Shaw, working over Bury the Dead. Irwin was a boy then and had a boy's devotion to her. or bury the dead. Irwin was a boy then and had a boy's devotion to her. Molly would mother playwrights if they'd let her, in my behalf. But Irwin didn't show her his next play. Tennessee Williams' talent

had an element of mystery for Molly. How did he get to be that brilliant? So she handled him gingerly. But Arthur Miller was within reach, or so it seemed. Molly fed Art, listened to him, argued with him. Art respected her candor and her frankness for a time. She was overjoyed when All My Sons won the prize

it deserved, and she recognized the stature of death of a salesman immediately. Through all the years, Molly was mothering playwrights, teaching at the actor's studio, helping her husband build his career, making and keeping the family homes, and reading Mark Twain to her children every night at bedtime. She was longing for what all playwrights want most, a production of her own. She had had some brushes with success along the way, but it wasn't until 1957, 30 years after leaving Yale Drama and a quarter century after putting aside her own career to support her family, that she got the real deal. Her play, The Egghead, opened in Cleveland in 1957 and starred Karl Malden. The reviews were positive, but the play did not leave a mark. Her husband had this to say. There was no moment in the play when it appeared that

both sides might be right. Only Molly, the author, was right. In the theater, order, clarity, and goodness are not enough. To be correct is not a sufficient virtue. An audience wants to be shaken and for a time kept in doubt. That's the fun of it. Molly, being absolute about her opinions, had no inner conflicts herself. The conclusion was predictable. In the theater, there has to be a belly of chaos under the event. The audience should be uncertain of the outcome until the end. Only then may a resolution be of dramatic interest.

Molly's critical faculty had choked her creative impulses. An artist needs an anarchist's heart. Kazan also wrote that a man working in the arts must be vain, arrogant, and unyielding. What, then, one wonders, is a woman working in the arts meant to be? Twelve days after her 31st wedding anniversary,

Molly died of an aneurysm. She was 56 years old. In a bizarre coincidence, Molly died hours before the opening of Kazan's autobiographical film, America, America. Molly had resented the project and disliked the film, and he worried that the stress of her emotions had contributed to or even caused her death. My film had made her feel more alone than ever. Had she become tense with anger and hatred of the film and of me in the film? And had this final tension precipitated the break

in the blood vessel in her brain? The doctor told him that wasn't likely, but still, dramaturgically, it would be satisfying. and the blood vessel in her brain? The doctor told him that wasn't likely, but still, dramaturgically, it would be satisfying. And it's hard not to be glad that he suffered some guilt. At the same time, you kind of want to say, hey, Elia, way to make your wife's death all about you. There were 400 people at the funeral.

Her obituary in the Times mentioned that she had been head of playwriting at the actor's studio and written the book for a musical entitled Queen of Sheba. Neither of these pieces of information made it into Kazan's 900-page autobiography. After the funeral, the Times published a tribute by playwright Robert Anderson, which read, She was infinitely more than a playwright. She was an appreciator of other people's plays and talents, and this is something very difficult for a playwright to be. Molly read thousands of scripts by young playwrights and advised, encouraged, and followed up her enthusiasms with action,

which opened the way for many of the playwrights of today's theater. Molly read all of my plays hot out of the typewriter. It was she who carried a copy of my play, Tea and Sympathy, to Gage, then making a film in Europe. We, who were constantly in her debt as friends, have suffered a great personal loss, not just in the plays she might have written, but just in the plays she might have written, but also in the plays she might have read.

Kazan characterizes Molly's death as a painful liberation for him. Her love for him was the ultimate validation, but as such, it would always feel tinged with pity. Among the many complicated epitaphs Kazan offers his first wife in his book, he admits to an entire spectrum of feelings. For many years, I'd clung to Molly. She was the first person who saw artistic potential in me. She was sure I had great talent.

She became my talisman of success. And along with all that, she couldn't wait to get in bed with me. This was a blessing and a miracle. But when you admit another to that position in your life, you give that person power over you. And, naturally, resent her. As for Molly, Kazan believed that his being an outsider appealed to a rebellious streak in her.

The daughter of privilege, she wanted to topple the structure in which her family lived so comfortably. Maybe. But perhaps this is just another convenient reframing of the story. Reader, I don't seek your favor. Kazan writes at the center of his tell-all tome, which could be called an apologia

except for the fact that he doesn't really apologize. He expresses remorse and regret and shame, but ultimately claims that he would have been powerless to act any differently, especially when it came to his relationship with Molly. Nothing could have been different.

Our characters are our fates, and hers was strong. Mine was what it was. It would have all come out the same. Whatever her reasons, it is clear that Molly chose Elia. She dumped her boyfriend for him, convinced him to marry her, and spent the rest of her life being his cheerleader and his conscience. By the end, they hadn't had sex in years,

and she had shared him with more women than she could ever know. She led him to the career that defined him, created the family he prized, and offered him the unconditional love against which he would rebel again and again. Brilliant, stubborn, entitled, deeply devoted to artists, and helplessly in love with a man who was compelled to cause her pain.

Character was Molly's destiny too. Kazan says of Streetcar, Blanche is attracted by the man who is going to destroy her. He also said this about Death of a Salesman. There is an unarticulated tragedy when a woman discovers that the man she married is not what she hoped he was when she married him. Would Elia Kazan still have named names to Congress if he had never met and married Molly Day Thatcher? Who can say? But certainly their marriage, between the conscientious daughter of the American establishment and the egotistical, irreverent, duplicitous newcomer,

the thinker and the doer, the selfless and the selfish, can be described as a unity of opposites. It's the same idea that lies at the heart of communism itself that describes Stanislavski's acting philosophy and that Heraclitus saw as the very logic of the universe. Anything that exists, he wrote, must be contained within the tension of two opposing forces. Molly had no internal conflict. She contained no contradictions. She was an arrow pointing in a single direction, clear and uncompromised. So maybe her husband was right.

Perhaps she needed to lean out of herself to find her opposite. Perhaps with him, she found her balance. Special thanks to Lisa Kudrow and Paul F. Tompkins for voicing Molly Day Thatcher and Elia Kazan. Additional thanks to Jack McBrayer, Adam O'Byrne, Larry Powell, and Jim Rash for also lending their voices to this story.

I'd also like to thank my significant other for only ever taking my advice when it's good. Check back tomorrow for a conversation with journalist, author, and biographer Mark Harris about the legacy of Elia Kazan and whether or not there is such a thing as a happy ending in Hollywood. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I'm not a historian, and I'm greatly indebted to the work of those who are. In some cases, I use diaries or newspapers or court records as sources. But most often, I draw from biographies and autobiographies and articles, which represent countless hours of work by people who are far more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes.

If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples.

Our executive producers are Joanna Solitaroff, Adam Sachs, and Jeff Ross. Engineering and mixing by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel. Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Joanna Samuel Music and Scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown with additional help from Emily Prill Research and Fact Checking by Ella Morton Special thanks to Lisa Berm Talent Booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista