Quote of the Day (‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,’ on a Girl’s Most Fervent Prayer)

“‘Dear God,’ she prayed, ‘let me be something every minute of every hour of my life.’”

—Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)

The image accompanying this post comes from the marvelous 1945 film adaptation of Betty Smith’s novel, with Peggy Ann Garner as young Francie Nolan and James Dunn, in a heartbreaking, Oscar-winning performance, as her loving but troubled father. Director Elia Kazan, in his Hollywood debut, molded a coming-of-age feature of uncommon sensitivity.

This Day in Theater History (Brando Rides Williams’ ‘Streetcar’ to Fame)

December 3, 1947—When A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, it did more than thrust Tennessee Williams to the front of a new generation of American playwrights, or confirm Elia Kazan as the most important theater director of his generation. 

In Marlon Brando, Broadway discovered the exemplar of the new, more naturalistic "Method" style of acting.

When the 23-year-old actor made his way up to Cape Cod, Mass., where Williams was staying, to audition for his career-making role as Stanley Kowalski, he had to his credit only three small, albeit scene-stealing, Broadway credits, in I Remember Mama, Truckline Café and Candida. 

But when Williams saw the actor (who fixed the plumbing and wiring at Williams’ house before he sat down to read for the role), he knew instantly that he had found the embodiment of the coarse but sexually charged brother-in-law of Blanche DuBois.

That latter quality—sexuality—is essential to the role. But amazingly, at least one production I saw forgot that. 

In 2005, the Roundabout Theatre Co. cast John C. Reilly as Stanley. (I wholeheartedly agree with Ben Brantley’s dismissal of this mistake: “Imagine Karl Malden playing Ralph Kramden in ‘The Honeymooners.’")

Let's be kind and grant, though, that greater minds than those at the Roundabout missed why Stanley's animal magnetism--which, of course, not only leads wife Stella to stay with him but, at the end, to distrust Blanche's account of his rape of her--is so important. After a tryout of the play in New Haven, playwright Thornton Wilder was asked for his opinion of the show. 

"It was like having a papal audience," Williams remembered in his memoir. "We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley."

     

The earthy Williams immediately thought that the older playwright had never known the kind of experience that Stanley provided Stella.

  

One fascinating instance of alternative casting at the time of the original production would have come closer to Williams’ intent, at least. 

Irene Mayer Selznick, in her Broadway debut as a producer, wanted some box-office insurance, and pushed for John Garfield as Stanley. She undoubtedly remembered his role opposite Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice when she thought of the erotic heat he might generate. 

Moreover, the actor, at 33, was closer than Brando to Stanley’s age as conceived by Williams, and as a fellow member of New York’s legendary Group Theater with Kazan, he would have shared a kind of shorthand with the director.

But the film star’s insistence on non-negotiable items (e.g., more lines and a short time commitment) led Selznick, Kazan and Williams to look elsewhere. That led to an opening for Brando, and an opportunity to showcase the "Method style" of acting then beginning to gain traction in New York at the newly formed Actors Studio. 

Originally formulated by Russia's Konstantin Stanislavski, then promulgated by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Elia Kazan at the Actors Studio, "The Method" called for actors to internalize the experience of the characters they portrayed.

What might that original Streetcar have looked like? The closest facsimile is, of course, Kazan’s translation of the play into his 1951 film, which not only had him at the helm but also three of the original quartet of principal roles—Brando, Kim Hunter as Stella, and Karl Malden as Mitch. 

The one difference, though, was an essential one: Vivien Leigh rather than Jessica Tandy as Blanche.

Kazan would have had no problem eliciting tension between his two film co-stars to mirror that between Blanche and Stanley. 

As production began, Brando grew annoyed at Leigh’s fussiness, and felt frustrated, in a Stanley-like way, by her charms. He admitted to friends that he wanted to sleep with Leigh so badly that his teeth hurt, but couldn’t do so because of the on-set presence of her husband, Laurence Olivier.

In the case of the Tandy-Brando relationship, Kazan had to work harder. While guiding and prodding Brando, his student at the newly formed Actors Studio, at every turn, he offered Tandy virtually no tips on how to approach her role. Maybe he figured the 38-year-old English actress was an old pro and would figure it out.

(On the other hand, it wouldn’t have been beyond him to artificially create an adversarial relationship between his stars. Five years later, on the set of Viva Zapata!, he approached Brando and Anthony Quinn separately, telling each how much the other actor loathed him. When it came time for their climatic fight, the realism was something to behold.)

Brando’s unconstrained sexuality (onstage, he drew constant attention to his lips by constantly chewing gum, swilling from a beer bottle, or smoking a cigar) allowed Williams to begin to develop one of the central motifs of his career: the stud as destroyer. “We’ve had this date from the beginning,” Stanley leers as he begins to rape Blanche. 

The character represented the last step in the downward spiral begun by her sexual adventurousness—a trait that lost her a job as a schoolteacher for seducing a student. 

The equation—Eros equals death, or at least psychic obliteration—would be repeated in the novella and film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (again starring Leigh) and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.

Streetcar marked the point when Williams was still in most control of his material and his life. With a 30-minute standing ovation at the conclusion of the show at the Barrymore, not to mention the first of his two Pulitzers, the play brought the playwright to an emotional high. 

For Brando, it marked the point when he rewrote the rules for stage acting. Then he decamped for Hollywood, where he could use his skills before millions more, and for millions of dollars more—all the time relying on his improvisational skills and cue cards to cloak his rebellious refusal to learn lines.

Broadway lost something when he left, but so, it turned out, did the star.

(The photo of Marlon Brando, taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1948, while the actor was still in Streetcar, is now part of the Van Vechten Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.)

This Day in Theater History (Wilder’s ‘Skin of Our Teeth,’ Comedy of Chaos, Opens)

November 18, 1942—When The Skin of Our Teeth premiered at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre, the comedy with tragic undertones spoke directly to an America that had barely survived the Great Depression, only to find itself in a two-front worldwide war against totalitarianism. Re-reading Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play today, I was struck by its immediacy in another area: the citizens of New Jersey and Long Island experience sudden, terrifyingly inexplicable climate change (albeit, in this case, the onset of an ice age in August, rather than two hurricanes in successive years).

At the time, the public and critics might have viewed the cataclysmic climate conditions of the play simply as another biblical-style trauma in a work filled with them, rather than as a far-sighted environmental warning. On the other hand, for theater professionals who heard “storm” in connection with this production, they were likely, because of industry gossip, to associate the word with the show’s temperamental featured actress, Tallulah Bankhead, who clashed repeatedly before the opening with inexperienced producer Michael Myerberg and director Elia Kazan.

How much did the playwright use Bankhead’s bombastic persona in the play? Audiences at the time would have recognized an allusion to a prior performance by the actress (“look at me now—I…I who’ve played Rain”). When her character, the maid Sabina, addresses the audience, it could be interpreted as a Pirandellian trick by Wilder (“I can’t invent any words for this play, and I’m glad I can’t. I hate this play and every word in it”). Or, given Wilder’s habit of sending everything up, such pronouncements are all the better not to sound too preachy. In this regard, perhaps Wilder figured that Bankhead would put extra, unfeigned convention into these lines.

Starting with the title itself from Job 19:20, The Skin of Our Teeth shows repeatedly that the predicament of modern man is as old as the Scriptures. (Wilder’s Christian name came from his grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who served under Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War.) The main characters, George and Maggie Antrobus (played by real-life couple Fredric March and Florence Eldridge), had once been gardeners, “but left that situation under circumstances that have been variously reported.”  Their son, Henry (played by a young, already intense Montgomery Clift), a bit too handy with throwing stones, bears a mark on his forehead, a visible reminder to the world of his killing of his brother. Allusions to the Pentateuch continue to pile high, as the Antrobuses take in the refugee “Judge Moses,” and later, pack in enough animals on a ship to survive a great deluge engulfing Earth.

After the show premiered, a number of theatergoers were so cnofused by what they saw that they left after the first act, not returning. I think most of my readers will agree that these biblical references are so numerous that it’s hard to miss the point of the allegory.

Maybe what bamboozled the audience was the freewheeling nature of the play. Bankhead might have been a pill to work with, but she made the most of one of the most challenging roles of her career, one that called for her to act as a put-upon maid, temptress, Miss America contestant, and intermediary for playwright and audience.  She became the medium through which the play’s tragic and comic elements were kept in exquisite equipoise, and won the Critics Circle Award for her quick-change, quicksilver performance.

A silly controversy developed when a couple of critics, perhaps taking note of Wilder’s publicly avowed adoration of Finnegans Wake, accused the playwright of plagiarizing James Joyce’s novel. There was, perhaps, another influence that went largely unremarked: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The “notice” at the start of Mark Twain’s novel waggishly tries to convince the reader that this most moral of novels has nothing at all to do with such matters (“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”). Wilder makes a similar disclaimer—what critic Bruce Bawer, in an essay on him in the Autumn 2008 issue of The Hudson Review, called “self-referential absurdism”-- in the person of Sabina (“Ladies and gentlemen! Don’t take this play serious. The world’s not coming to an end.”)

For playwrights, The Skin of Our Teeth meant enduring lessons in how to break out of conventional forms, to show that it was possible, in the blink of an eye, to go from prehistoric times to contemporary America. For audiences, Wilder taught about the institutions and inclinations that help the human spirit endure—freedom of inquiry, curiosity, a mother’s fierce love. Every one of the seven deadly sins might afflict the human race, bringing it to the brink of extinction, but there’s a reason that the name of the Antrobuses’ suburban New Jersey town is Excelsior. Paradoxically, despite and because of human beings, their aim is always “ever upward.”

(The photo here, by Carl Van Vechten, comes from August 1948, when Wilder was appearing as Mr. Antrobus in summer-stock productions in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The photo is now part of the Carl Van Vechten photograph collection in the Library of Congress.)

Flashback, September 1955: Blacklisted Actor Philip Loeb Dies in Suicide

The next time Ann Coulter rants about how there were no blacklist victims, somebody should stop her and ask how it came to be, then, that Philip Loeb, a 64-year-old actor chronically underemployed after being fired from the hit sitcom The Goldbergs, killed himself in New York City on September 1, 1955.

Yes, Ms. Coulter might retort that no single thing drives a person to suicide. Yes, she might point to Loeb's ongoing depression from the death of his wife and the institutionalization of his schizoid son.

But no honest accounting for why Loeb swallowed barbiturates in the Taft Hotel, can leave out the fact that several years before, General Foods, the sponsor of The Goldbergs, was so alarmed that he’d been fingered as a Communist that they demanded his ouster from the long-running radio and TV hit; that not even the show’s shrewd and resourceful star, Gertrude Berg, could get them to relent; that Loeb had been reduced to infrequent, less remunerative work; and that anguish over his family’s medical bills (and his own) was compounded by his inability to pay for them.

In the months before his death, Loeb’s despair was palpable to close friends. Another blacklist victim, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, wrote in his memoir, Inside Out: "I never saw Loeb smile, even when Zero (Mostel) was at his hilarious best."

Mostel and wife Kate allowed Loeb to live for awhile with them before he died. Two decades later, the larger-than-life actor would play a character, Hecky Brown, whose tragic fate mirrored Loeb’s in a movie that Bernstein wrote, The Front (1976), starring Woody Allen.

For a long time, I wondered why so many Hollywood liberals sat in sullen silence as director Elia Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1998. Yes, “Gadg” might have owned up to regret about turning informer during the Red Scare of the 1950s, but many leftists had been equally unapologetic about conceding their own errors from the period, such as excusing the excesses of Stalin's Soviet Union.

Then I found out that Kazan had named Loeb, as well as seven other friends from his days as a union activist, before the House Un-American Activities Committee in April 1952. The director could justify his action by saying that everyone he’d named had been previously cited by someone else.

In Loeb’s case, that was true: five years before his death, he’d been listed in the rabidly anti-Communist magazine Red Channels as a Communist. Several aspects of his background made him vulnerable: his union activism with Actors Equity, his 1938 defense of Stalin’s “show trials,” and even his religion. (One-third of the 151 people listed as communist by Red Channels were Jewish.)

But Kazan’s testimony could have slowed, at least, the momentum of this campaign. Even if you don't buy Victor Navasky's overly broad whitewashing of the motives of Communists and former Communists targeted by McCarthyism in Naming Names (1980), you can't help but understand their visceral anger over the loss of a life.

Additionally, Loeb was not a Communist, he was at pains to say so repeatedly, and the J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI would clear him only a few days after his death. But it came too late for the actor.

After his termination from The Goldbergs, Loeb returned to the stage, where he had worked for three decades before his stint as the lovable father on the sitcom. But his last job came in 1953, in a revival, for $87.50 a week.

After this point, his prospects, already dim, became bleak:

* Supporters who initially sent him small checks stopped writing;

* He was forced to accept a $40,000 settlement from The Goldbergs that was less than half what he’d originally rejected;

* He developed cataracts;

* He was fired from a job teaching at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts;

* New York taxation authorities notified him that he owed $1,000—but he had less than $300 in the bank.

Loeb didn’t leave a suicide note, but it was obvious to those who knew him at the time—just as it should be to anyone reading about his life now (including Ms. Coulter)—what had caused his death. A letter to The New York Times expressed it best: he “died of a sickness commonly called the blacklist."

One other note: the particular form this particular “sickness” took was different—and, in some ways, more virulent—than the more famous blacklist emanating from Hollywood. The East Coast-based radio and TV industries employed more entertainment professionals at the time than the film studios, according to David Everitt’s A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television. This meant that the reach of potential smears was greater.

Moreover, rather than originating from the House Un-American Activities Committee, the virus for this “sickness” was spread by a cabal involved with Red Channels: three former FBI agents, an upstate New York grocery chain tycoon, and an ex-naval intelligence officer.

In other words, a completely unofficial body had the power to affect actors’ employment—and, in the case of Loeb, life itself.