Welcome back to significant others. In yesterday's episode we learned about an

ill-fated marriage between two great theatrical minds. I'm so happy to have

journalist, author, and biographer Mark Harris join me today to talk about the

legacy of Elia Kazan, the impact he had on the industry, and the particular

nature of marriage between two artists. Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

You are one of the foremost scholars of this area in Hollywood and this

industry, and I'm wondering have you run across Molly Day Thatcher at all? Well,

when they told me about this interview I thought of two books immediately where

I had run across her besides Kazan's autobiography, which I admit that I

don't remember fantastically well. Well, 900 pages of it, you mean? Exactly. And you know

when you read an autobiography like I was mining that book when I was reading it

for really specific things that didn't necessarily have to do with her, but she

shows up quite a bit in Richard Schickel's Kazan biography. And also in John

Lars' biography of Tennessee Williams. Yeah. So that's sort of like what I know

about her other than sort of scatter shot articles or something is largely from

those books. So do you, I mean, he in his autobiography, I can't tell if he's

trying to posthumously credit her or kind of hide behind her, you know? It's such a

weird thing. I mean, I'm married to a playwright and screenwriter and and as you

know, spouses of artists have their multiple uses. Sometimes we are cover stories,

sometimes we are the bad cop, sometimes we're the good cop, sometimes we're just

the last word in the ear before bed or the first word in the morning. Often we

are viewed with deep suspicion by any, right, any of our spouses colleagues, you

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