ELIA KAZAN : AN EXCERPT ON WHEN BARBARA'S SON WAS BORN

 

I was unable to obtain this book, copyright 1988, to read it cover to cover but was able to excerpt due to Google Books. - Missy

"On the second of January, 1962, I flew to Stockholm to publicize a film I'd recently completed, Splendor In The Grass.  The big studios were still doing things in style in those years, and we stayed at a hotel where we were attended by servants who looked as if I should be serving them.

On the day after our arrival I received a cable from New York  City informing me by a prearranged code, that I'd had a new son by a woman not my wife.  I can't remember that I was flustered. I went to a press conference and did my best to "push" my film."

At the time, Barbara continued to be married to her first husband, Larry.  The relationship with Kazan was a bit off and on, but ultimately, after the death of his first wife, Molly, who had been married to Elia for many years, he was free to marry Barbara.  Despite his having had many affairs of shorter duration while married to Molly, and while involved with Barbara, Elia married Barbara.

Missy here: Ultimately I feel that Elia Kazan was not a man who could be faithful to any one woman. He had earned respect as a film director and certainly met a lot of women, famous and not. I keep wondering though how much the sexual revolution and a new urge for sexual exploration and "loving the one you're with" had to do with the choices that these people made to accept what would have been considered to be marital infidelity or adultery just a few years earlier.

Are we "liberated" by having sex with whomever we wish? Does a man prone to Mistresses get a new one after he marries one?  I'm not sure we have the answers to these questions a half a century later.