Making the Scenes (Part 2)

The many masks of Robert Cordier

5)

I jumped aboard the Liza ship / And traveled on the sea, / And every time I thought of home / I wished it wasn't me! – Eugene O’Neill, Desire Under the Elms

Having turned his back on whatever “comfortably dull future a business school degree would have led to,” Robert took a bus from Philadelphia to New York, thinking from there he’d head back to Paris.

Instead, he went directly to the Empire Theater on Broadway.

“Harold Clurman was casting a new play. He had been in Paris a couple of years earlier, with his wife Stella Adler, and Farley Granger, the actor, and Granger’s lover Arthur Laurents, the guy who wrote West Side Story and Home of the Brave. Laurent and Granger were on the blacklist. I forget why. Some nonsense. Temporarily, it turned out. This was during the Joe McCarthy bullshit.

I was too intimidated to talk to Harold at the time. I barely spoke English. But I knew who he was. He had studied with Jacques Copeau, and he knew Charles Dullin, with whom I was studying. Harold had come to see him work.

Then, just before I quit the Wharton School in Philly, I saw an out-of-town tryout of Harold’s Desire Under the Elms, with Karl Malden and a bunch of other Group Theater members. Seeing it made me wake up – what the hell was I doing in Philadelphia? What the hell was I doing in business school? Theatre was my whole damn world. I decided to head back to Paris, straight into Dullin’s acting classes. But then I heard Clurman was casting for a new play. I called Dullin, who called Harold, and I got an audition.”

The new play was Arthur Laurents’ The Time of the Cuckoo. The part Robert auditioned for was the lead, an Italian shopkeeper who falls in love with an American woman on vacation in Venice.

“There was no way I was going to get the part. I was 19. My Italian accent was a joke. And I wasn’t even in Equity. But Harold let me make an ass of myself just the same. And then he let me hang around, and join his master class. He was barely teaching at the time. The Group Theater that he started with Lee Strasberg and Cheryl Crawford had disbanded. Stella Adler, his wife, was running her own school, and Lee Strasberg was running the Actors Studio. Harold was busy directing and reviewing; he was at The Nation and The New Statesman and by far the best drama critic of the day. But I guess he took a shining to me because he became my mentor, just as he had been to so many others before me, Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets, Marlon Brando. He knew absolutely everybody and was incredibly supportive of everybody, and absolutely inexhaustible, talking day and night to whoever would listen about what made good theatre and what made bad theatre – boring bourgeois theatre, boring naturalist theatre. It was amazing for a young European actor in exile.”

Through Clurman, Robert got socketed into the main circuit of the most electrifying grid ever devised for theatre: 1950s Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway.

“The stock of talent plugged into New York at that time – actors, directors, playwrights, composers, choreographers – was incredible. Eugene O’Neil. Tennessee Williams. Arthur Miller. Rodgers & Hammerstein. Frank Loesser. Lerner and Loewe. Leonard Bernstein. Stephen Sondheim. Jerome Robbins. Plus the imports: Arthur Adamov and Jean Genet, both good friends of mine from back in Paris. Samuel Beckett. Eugène Ionesco. Bertolt Brecht. All of whose plays I would direct in the States and in France.”

Robert also met Clurman’s former “apprentice”, Elia Kazan, who, like Robert, for years had been Clurman’s shadow, hanging on his every word.

“The year before Kazan had directed Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. He was at the peak of his influence, but at the same time, an outcast. This was just a few months after he had named a bunch of Group Theatre members to Joe McCarthy’s Un-American Activities Committee. Including Clifford Odets and Paula Miller, Lee Strasberg’s wife. He didn’t name Lee because Lee wasn’t a Communist. Neither was Harold. He named Odets and Odets named him, that was the deal they struck. Was he a traitor, a snitch, a rat, as Brando says in On the Waterfront, the film he and Kazan made a couple of years later? Maybe, but he was a great artist first, at the peak of his powers, and if he hadn’t he would probably not have got another directing gig for years, if he ever did. So he named people already named. He was as much a victim of that craziness as anyone.”

Robert also met Clurman’s newest mistress, Betty Lou Holland.

“Harold had replaced Julie Harris with Betty-Lou for the touring production of Carston McCuller’s “A Member of the Wedding.” By the end of it, or maybe before it even started, they were lovers. They were together for years.”

Ten years later, Robert cast her in a René de Obadia play he directed for Lucille Lortel's White Barn Theater in Westport, Connecticut.

The following year, on January 30, 1962, he married her. 

Harold Clurman was the best man.

“And then we set sail for Paris.”