Word: cliffords
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...January 1935 a one-act play about a taxi strike had its premiere in a shabby downtown Manhattan theatre. At its conclusion, a Left Wing audience put on the kind of demonstration that What Price Glory? had known, uptown, ten years before. The play was Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets. Two months later. Lefty was running full blast in one Broadway theatre, Odets' Awake and Sing! in another, and critics were writing elaborate Sunday articles about the author. The Left theatre had become an exciting reality for people in no wise Left-minded, and when 28-year...
Growing Pains. "I was a worker's son," says Odets, "until the age of 12." His father had sold papers, peddled salt; his mother had worked in a factory. During Clifford's childhood the family shuttled back & forth between Philadelphia-where he was born in 1906-and The Bronx, where they settled down. The father slowly rose in the world, ceased to be a worker, today is very well...
Says Odets: "I was a melancholy kid, I guess." He quit high school at 15 because "it was a waste of time." He took to writing poetry, and his father angrily smashed his typewriter. Indignant, Clifford cried: "You can't harness me to a truck-can't you see I'm not a truck horse?" "Believe me," he says today, "there were some very gloomy evenings...
...father finally told the boy to go ahead and be an actor. Clifford started with amateurs in The Bronx; then joined a cooperative group and earned about $20 a year. He wrote radio plays and went on the air; he worked, like Playwrights Arthur Kober and Moss Hart, in summer camps...
MILDRED MIEL CLIFFORD San Francisco, Calif...