This year marks the centennial of the birth of
Robbins, the taskmaster and perfectionist who left indelible marks on both
Broadway and American ballet. He had already collaborated with the equally
young composer Leonard Bernstein on the jazz-infused dance piece Fancy Free and the Broadway musical that
sprang from it, On the Town. As a
dancer, he had enthralled New York City Ballet audiences in George Balanchine’s
Prodigal Son and Tyl Ulenspiegel, as well as with his choreography of such works as The Guests, Age of Anxiety, and The Cage.
His innovative choreography for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I lent an unexpected element to that musical.
Another choreography assignment, this time for Wonderful Town, brought Robbins further
success. But only three months after that musical premiered, Robbins ended up
informing on that show’s book writer, Jerome Chodorov.
In later years, Chodorov was forgiving toward his old
theatrical collaborator: “I never was bitter about Jerry, because I figured in
those days a homosexual was very vulnerable...Jerry was a weakling, but he was
a very talented weakling. And I don't think he did it out of viciousness. He
did it out of fear. That's my personal feeling. He didn't want to hurt anybody.
He certainly didn't want to hurt himself."
But Chodorov was unusual in his live-and-let-live
attitude. More typical was Robbins’ sister and brother-in-law, who were so
appalled by the testimony that they would not speak to him for more than two
decades.
To understand the depth of the bitterness Robbins
aroused, it should be remembered that he not only informed, but, unlike several of the so-called "friendly witnesses," did not warn those friends he named before the committee. Moreover, he informed on an
unusually large number of people—some being what HUAC craved the most: new
names not identified before. In addition to Chodorov, the eight included:
* Madeleine Lee Gilford, an actress and activist, who had taught Robbins “the lindy” as he was
preparing Fancy Free;
* Lloyd Gough, an actor;
* Elliot Sullivan, another actor, in the hearing
room at the time of the testimony;
* Edna Ocko, a dance critic who had been his friend
ever since she had favorably reviewed his Frankie
and Johnny in 1938;
* Lettie Stever, who worked in the office of Robbins’
agent Dick Dorso and had recruited the choreographer into the Party;
* Lionel Berman, a filmmaker;
* Edward Chodorov, Jerome’s brother, and a
playwright, author and film producer in his own right.
After testifying, Robbins, sitting on a sofa, said
to playwright Arthur Laurents, “It’ll be years before I know whether I did the
right thing.” Laurents, his best friend, was much more certain: “I can tell you
right now, you were a shit.”
However stung he may have felt initially by the
remark, Robbins’ feelings about the matter later tended to agree with Laurents.
In his journal he wrote, “Maybe I will never find a satisfying release from the
guilt of it all.”
While there were some who felt that Robbins was
primarily motivated by ambition in informing, the general consensus followed Jerome
Chodorov’s line that Robbins wanted to conceal his sexual orientation from the
public. Edward Chodorov, not as forgiving as his brother, was one. Told by
Jerome that Robbins had named them (remarkably enough, without any prompting
from the committee), Edward responded cynically: “Stabbed by the wicked fairy!”
What were Robbins’ alternatives to informing? He
could have simply remained on Broadway as he had been doing. A number of
blacklisted actors, writers and directors were able to choose this route
because theatrical funding was more diffuse than in Hollywood and, thus, less
likely to boycotting by pressure groups such as the newsletter Red Channels.
But work in the theater was more sporadic and not as
well-paying as the movies. If Robbins hoped to make it to Hollywood—as he would
do, triumphantly, in the not-so-distant future—the film world would be closed
out to him. Aging out as a performer, with choreography jobs harder to come by, he might have had to become simply a dance teacher.
But exposure of his homosexuality was simply
nerve-racking to him. An engagement to dancer Nora Kaye (with whom he was then living) would have helped only
temporarily in providing protective cover for his orientation. But Ed Sullivan, who was
sympathetic toward HUAC, had already threatened him with exposure in his newspaper
column for his lifestyle.
In those pre-Stonewall days, public knowledge of his
true orientation would have wrecked Robbins’ career. The impact of being “outed”
(a term not used at the time) could readily be seen outside the entertainment
industry, for instance, in the “Lavender Scare” of the time. Though running
parallel with the “Red Scare” at the time of Robbins’ testimony, it extended
longer and caused more lasting damage to those in national security positions. Thousands of workers were driven from the federal workforce from the late 1940s into the 1960s because of their sexual orientation.
So Robbins testified. As a result, Madeleine Lee Gilford, and her husband, the comic
actor Jack Gilford, saw their film
and TV work disappear through the end of the Fifties, forcing them to survive “mostly
on unemployment insurance,” she said later.
Over a half century later, the Gilfords’ travails would
be chronicled, in thinly fictionalized terms, by their son Joe. Robbins (who,
before he died in 1998, burnished his Broadway legend as director of both West Side Story and Fiddler on the Roof) appears in the script as “Bobby Gerard.”
The play’s title gives a sense of the opprobrium
that Robbins, despite his reputation as a dance genius, earned for his
testimony: Finks.
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