Modern Screen (Dec 1949 - Nov 1950)

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I rushed back to the window, and stared down at the crushed, broken body seven floors below, splattered against a jutting roof. Moments later a siren cried out from the street and the impact of my first encounter with death broke through my mind's numbness. A great sense of shame flooded over me. Why had I gone back to the typewriter? Obviously I was completely preoccupied with myself and oblivious to everything else. I went to the desk, whipped the sheet of paper from the typewriter, picked up my topcoat and walked to the elevator. It was dark now on the street. A whisper of rain fell against my face as I pushed my way uptown against the tide of people. This dead man. If he hadn't jumped, where would he have been going now? To an apartment in New Rochelle? Home to a wife and two kids? Or had he killed himself because he had no wife and no one to love? Was he an embezzler? Was he driven to suicide in the agony of incurable cancer? I let my imagination conjure up a dozen stories. Might make a good play, I thought, in the calloused tradition of struggling actors who turn everything into roles for themselves. Abruptly, I shrugged the whole idea away. After all, thousands of men were unhappy in love, stole money, suffered inhuman tortures, but they didn't kill themselves. This man couldn't take it. He jumped. So he jumped. I had enough to think about without worrying over him. Yet, I did think about him every now and then through the years that followed. In fact, when the editors of Modern Screen asked me to set down my thoughts on faith and philosophy, I thought about him almost immediately. And I knew finally why he had killed himself that day. It was simple, after all. He had lost faith. the eternal question . . . What is faith? A conviction, a creed, a belief in God? How should I know? I'm Kirk Douglas, an actor. Some people like to see me perform. Some would rather watch two old men playing chess. Actors should act and not take on the mantle of psychology professors. The way I look at it, we leave brain operations to great surgeons, educating to teachers and religious matters to the ministers, rabbis and priests. Still, a promise is a promise and I'm going to say a few things my way. To me, faith is not a nebulous thing. One's religion should be the confirmation of that faith. In other words, when you go to church you take the faith with you. You don't go to get it pumped into you. Faith covers a lot of territory. It is a strength within oneself, for one thing. For example, since I was a tiny kid I had faith in my father. He was a junk dealer for a time. Naturally, some brat had to point that out to me in derogatory terms. So, I went to my father and asked him why he did what he did. "Son," he said, "it takes a lot of people to keep this world going. Senators, bricklayers, street-sweepers, presidents. Now, I've got to admit that sometimes I don't like my job, but just imagine what would happen if all the people in the world let this stuff pile up and nobody took care of it. Why, boy, people soon wouldn't be able to move around." Then he winked, slapped me on the fanny and told me to go rustle up some coal down by the tracks. After that it never occurred to me to ask how anybody earned a living. Some people have more, some have less. All I knew was that part of what I had to do every day was pick up coal and coke along the tracks. If I did that we'd have a nice warm house. Did you ever walk along and get the feeling that with each step you took you were walking up in the air, stepping higher and higher? Maybe you can understand what I mean if I explain about the hill above our home. There were fine houses up there, always freshly painted and sitting elegantly behind thick, high hedges. I used to trudge up the hill carrying groceries, but as I moved along I seemed to be walking into the air. I'd : imagine that I could walk alongside the second-story windows, that I could look in on the old lady who had been sick so long and ask her how she was. Or I'd picture myself watching a man in another house sitting alone and drinking as they said he did ever since his wife died. After awhile I could even see myself kissing the beautiful girl who lived in the handsomest mansion of them all, because from where I walked I was a grown man and not a kid years too young to know his heart's desire. i had faith . . . Yeah, I was doing fine. Then I'd hear a car coming. I'd step over to the side of the road while a fancy convertible swooshed by. I remember how I felt then. There was a terrible urgency inside me to get going — to work, to run through life as fast as I could toward the things I wanted. And thanks to my parents I never once shook a fist at those fancy cars, swearing to be rich and famous just to get even. From the beginning I had faith that I'd get where I was going. And even though I delivered groceries at the back door I went in the front entrances of those houses many times. Nobody ever looked at me in my threadbare hand-me-downs and exclaimed, "Pater, who let that little tramp in here?" I didn't have any lasting quarrels with anybody, even when I was puny and kids in my neighborhood used to beat hell out of me. I thought that's what everybody did so I made up my mind to get stronger and beat tar out of a few kids myself. Today I read how I used to heroically get up at 5:00 a.m. to deliver newspapers, come home, gulp down breakfast and be in school by eight, carrying my miserable little lunch of two scrambled egg sandwiches. Know something? Those sandwiches were fine. Nobody could make them like my mom, and there must be a thousand kids living the same way. That's nothing. They work because they have to, and every day as they scratch out their living they dream of how it's going to be. Later on they learn something else — that they've been having a wonderful time and that they wouldn't trade places with the rich kid on the hill because they'd be bored to death in a week with nothing to do. I know now that the one worry I'll have with my own youngsters is that they won't have to go through what I did — and that their toughest competition in life will be those kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Once, when I was a little older and came home pooped from a day in the steel mill, my father looked up over his