This Day in Theater History (“Anne Frank,” With Own Backstage Drama, Wins Pulitzer)

May 7, 1956—When The Diary of Anne Frank was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the play’s stars, director, producer, and, not least of all, its playwrights, were happy. But it could only have further angered a writer who felt that he had been robbed of the chance—no, the right—to the dramatization.

The disappointed man was novelist Meyer Levin, who had proselytized everyone he could think of about the virtues of the diary of teenage Holocaust victim Anne Frank, then about the necessity of spreading her message even beyond book form. Levin was indisputably right that the musings of Frank were universally applicable even to those beyond the Jewish faith.

Unfortunately, material that might have seemed simple at heart—the need for tolerance in a resentful world—also sparked a decade of ego, theatrical power plays, and enough legal wrangling to fill Dickens’ Bleak House.

Levin might be best known today as the author of Compulsion, a roman a clef about the Leopold and Loeb case (later made into a movie with Orson Welles). But that title might also describe Levin’s own overwhelming need to make the world more aware of how Frank and her family hid in an attic in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation before their betrayal.

As a WWII correspondent in Germany, Levin was among the first to witness what had happened at Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Understandably, the experience seared him, leading him to call it “the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of mankind.”

Five years later, Levin discovered a French translation of Anne Frank’s diary—but none in English had been made. In fact, it had been rejected by 15 English and American publishers. Levin wrote to Frank’s father Otto, offering to do the translation himself, if necessary, to promote it, and even to bring it to other media such as stage and screen. (The latter ideas had not even occurred to Frank.) Frank agreed that Levin should be retained as a consultant for the American edition.

Levin’s plugging eventually succeeded in winning a publisher for the book in the U.S.: Doubleday. The success of the book was practically assured because of Levin’s own rave in The New York Times Book Review. Levin’s failure to disclose his own connection to the book constituted a huge conflict of interest, however.

The enormous success of the diary in the U.S. elicited the interest of several well-known theater professionals, including Carson McCullers, Elia Kazan, and Maxwell Anderson. As Levin objected to each one in turn, it became increasingly apparent that the person he thought would do the project the most justice was himself. In fact, he had already written an adaptation.

The producer hired to oversee the play, Cheryl Crawford, rejected his script, then withdrew from the project entirely. Frank’s attorney was likewise annoyed by Levin’s special pleading, and eventually told Frank that Levin had no legal right to the play.

The new producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, pulled together a creative team of director Garson Kanin, playwrights Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and unofficial script doctor Lillian Hellman. As Levin saw himself increasingly sidelined from the project, he became obsessed to the point of almost comical madness. A lawsuit he ended up filing against Frank, for instance, led even Levin’s friend Harry Golden to advise him that this was a public relations disaster akin to suing Joan of Arc’s father. When the suit was set aside on a technicality, Levin still couldn't leave well enough alone, likening his struggle to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a letter sent to Frank.

As vitriolic, overwrought and self-interested as Levin had become, one of his complaints did have a point: the play hatched by Bloomgarden’s creative talent had leeched much of the strongest content from the book. To be sure, the gentile Goodrich and Hackett—more famous for their Hollywood work (It’s a Wonderful Life, Father of the Bride) than their Broadway plays to that point—had consulted with rabbis and Jewish community leaders, even visited the Secret Annex where the Frank family hid from the Nazis, in an effort to be faithful to the source.

But increasingly they were told by their creative partners: make this universal. In essence this meant injecting more comic relief and de-emphasizing Jewish religious observances. By the eighth draft—the one that eventually netted them the Pulitzer—Goodrich and Hackett had reached something suitably life-affirming (“In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart”), but they had taken a decisive step away from their decidedly dark source material.

In a provocative New Yorker retrospective on the controversy, critic-novelist Cynthia Ozick objected that the result on the stage now represented such "cheap sentimentality at the expense of a great catastrophe" that it might have been better for the diary to have been burned rather than become distorted to such a degree. Ozick ignores the fact that in the 1950s, before deep understanding of the Holocaust and tolerance had taken root, such “cheap sentimentality” might, unfortunately, have been the only way even to begin to spread general consciousness about the best-known personal account of the Holocaust.

In recent years, theatergoers were more likely to see a production of The Diary of Anne Frank that stayed closer to Levin’s intentions than Hackett and Goodrich’s. The U.S. production of the new version by Wendy Kesselman brought early attention to a young Natalie Portman (just as the initial production shone the spotlight on the luminous Susan Strasberg, in the image accompanying this post). I saw this version (with a different cast) in 2000 at the Stratford Festival in Canada.

Kesselman, like Levin, gave more attention to the Franks’ religious practices in the Secret Annex. Moreover, in working with a definitive edition of the diary published in the 1990s, she brought to light material deleted by Frank either at the request of publishers or because of the instrinsically painful nature of the entries themselves: the teenaged Anne’s budding sexuality and her increasing conflicts with her mother.

What might, in effect, have been seen as partial vindication of Levin came too late for the novelist. He grew increasingly embittered as the play not only won the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award but ran for more than 700 performances; as the 1959 film version by George Stevens (that director’s last superior movie) brought additional acclaim; and as the play became an increasing staple of regional and community theaters.

Though he gave up his rights to the play when the suit came to a conclusion in 1959, Levin continued to be agitated by the affair, encouraging bootleg performances of his version and cataloguing his grievances in a memoir entitled, appropriately enough, The Obsession. The whole experience profoundly strained his marriage and relations with his children.

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl may pose continuing questions about tolerance, but the backstage drama associated with The Diary of Anne Frank highlights additional questions about assimilation, identity and the right of members of a particular ethnic or racial group to interpret their own experience.

In the early 1990s, Spike Lee succeeded where Levin had failed, wresting rights to Malcolm X after Norman Jewison had originally been associated with the project. How, he asked, could the white Jewison be expected to bring the right perspective to the life of an African-American?

Levin’s case was a bit more complicated in that Frank himself, a Jew well assimilated into German society before the rise of the Nazis, himself wanted his daughter’s story to be seen as “universal.” But Hellman, a key member of the creative team, was a secularized, even anti-Zionist, Jew with little interest in emphasizing the family’s faith.

Kesselman's version, unlike the one Goodrich and Hackett created under the powerful influence of Hellman, at least allows theatergoers to understand what mattered to the Frank family--and why they sacrificed their comfort and (in the case of all but the sole survivor of the death camps, Otto) even their lives to maintain it.