Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me Part 2

"Sir," I answered, "I guess I'd run like h.e.l.l."

It was not the answer he expected, and it was viewed as insubordination. I was put on probation and confined to my room, which delighted me because it meant I wouldn't have to take part in the extended close-order drill scheduled later in the day. But after an hour or so of being alone in my room, I got bored and decided to go into town. Unfortunately, my unauthorized absence was quickly discovered, and since I was on probation I was expelled.

"Marlon, this school is not meant for a person like you," Nuba the Tuba told me when he broke the news. "We can't put up with you anymore."

Sadly I went from room to room saying good-bye to all my friends. When I got to Duke, he surprised me by saying, "Don't worry, Marlon, everything will be all right. I know the world is going to hear from you."

I'll never forget his words.

My eyes suddenly filled with tears as he embraced me. I put my head on his shoulder and couldn't stop sobbing. I hadn't realized that I had been holding back a desire to be loved and reaffirmed. I guess I didn't even realize it then. It was the only time anyone had ever been so loving and so directly encouraging and concerned about me. I looked into Duke's eyes and saw that he really meant it. Even now, as I recall that moment, I am moved and touched by how much he meant to me.

When I got home, I looked at the faces of my mother and my father and sensed their hopelessness and disappointment. But I was used to it by then.

About two weeks later a letter arrived from Shattuck: "Dear Cadet Brando," it said. "The Student Body and all the officers in the entire battalion have been on strike because we feel you were unfairly treated. We declared we will not go back to cla.s.s until and unless you are reinstated...." After describing the strike, the letter concluded: "We are happy to inform you that we have succeeded in winning your reinstatement. The administration have agreed to let you return to Shattuck and make up the time you lost in summer school." The letter was signed by every cadet in the battalion.

My mother was moved to tears by this, and I was proud. I was unconcerned about how my father reacted and I don't recall his response.

After thinking it over a day or so, I responded with the adolescent reply that I would always remember what the cadets had done and would forever be grateful to them for supporting me, but that I had decided not to return to Shattuck; I had reached a fork in the road and was going to take a different path.

I got a job paying $35 a week with a small construction company digging trenches, laying pipe, setting tile and helping to build houses. For the first time in my life, I had money in my jeans that I had earned myself. I can still taste that first beer I bought with my own paycheck.

There were only three of us at home now because both my sisters had moved to New York. Tiddy, who had done some acting in high school, was taking cla.s.ses at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and Frannie was studying painting at the Art Students League and starting a career as an artist in Greenwich Village.

Despite the bravado of my letter to the cadets, I didn't know what that path I was going to take was or where I wanted it to lead me, but I suspected it wouldn't be long before I was in uniform again. Most of the boys my age in Libertyville were being drafted, and others were volunteering. The army was snapping up students with military-school backgrounds and commissioning them as officers, so I decided to sign up.

At the induction center, a doctor asked me if I had any physical problems.

"Sometimes my knee bothers me a little," I said.

I'd injured it in a football scrimmage at Shattuck when someone tackled me from behind and snapped the semilunar cartilage, which had been removed. The doctor grabbed my leg and pulled it sideways, causing my knee to spin a little like a ball in a socket.

"Sorry, son, you've got a trick knee," he said. "You're 4-F."

My parents bravely sat me down and asked me what I was going to do now. "I don't know," I said, but I had a few ideas. The previous Christmas I'd visited my sisters in New York, and afterward I wrote Frannie: "I like N.Y. and I am going to live there when I start living.... G.o.d, I wish I were there. It is the most fascinating town in the world...."

My mother said it was important for me to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and my father offered to pay for my education to learn a trade. Since the only thing I had ever done except sports that anyone had praised me for was acting, I told them, "Why don't I go to New York and try to be an actor?"

9.

AS I GOT OUT OF the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to my sister's apartment in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1943, I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everybody dead. the cab delivering me from Pennsylvania Station to my sister's apartment in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1943, I was sporting a bright red fedora that I thought was going to knock everybody dead.

I cherish my memories of those first few days of freedom in New York, especially my sense of liberation from not having to submit to any authority, and knowing that I could go anyplace and do anything at any time. No more uniforms, no more formations, no more bugles, no more extended-order drills, no more parades, curfews or masters. I had hated school, and now I was free.

One night I went to Was.h.i.+ngton Square and got drunk for the first time. I fell asleep on the sidewalk and n.o.body bothered me. When I had to p.i.s.s, I got up and relieved myself behind a bush. No one said I couldn't. It was ecstasy sleeping on the sidewalk of Was.h.i.+ngton Square, realizing I had no commitments to anything or anyone. If I didn't feel like going to bed, I didn't. In those first weeks I formed the sleeping patterns of a lifetime: stay up till past midnight, sleep till ten or eleven the next morning.

Once I stayed up all night at a party in Brooklyn and looked out the window at a gray dawn at about six A.M A.M. and watched the streets glow with the headlights of buses, cars and taxis. Then the sidewalks began to fill up with people carrying briefcases and scurrying to their offices. I thought, G.o.d, wouldn't it be awful if I had to get up and go to work like that every day?

Frannie, who lived in an apartment near Patchin Place in the Village, invited me to move in with her. I got a job as an elevator operator at Best & Company department store, then worked as a waiter, a short-order cook, a sandwich man, and at other jobs that I don't remember now.

One afternoon I went to a cafeteria on Fourth Street and Seventh Avenue and sat down beside two men. When we started talking, one man spoke with a thick Texas accent, so I asked him where he was from.

"New York," he said.

"How did you get that Texas accent?" I asked.

"I was in the army."

"But why would you get a Texas accent in the army?" I'm sure I had a look of puzzlement on my face.

"It was protective coloration," he said, "because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan." He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn't broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer and the other man said he was Jimmy Baldwin.

Although Mailer, who was as yet unpublished, and I never became good friends, Jimmy Baldwin and I became close after that meeting in Hector's Cafeteria. It was a special relations.h.i.+p, and one of its hallmarks was an absence of any sense of racial differences between us, something I have seldom experienced with other black friends. Neither of us ever felt we had to speak about race. Our relations.h.i.+p was simply that of two human beings with no barriers between us, and we could tell each other anything about ourselves with frankness. I was working at a dull job and so was he; he hadn't written much yet and I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going.

Unfortunately, Jimmy became one of the many friends I've loved since I left Libertyville who had much to offer but died senselessly and tragically long before they should have. He never told me he was dying, and I didn't learn about his cancer until after he was dead.

In the apartment next to my sister's lived a woman named Estrelita Rosa Maria Consuelo Cruz. I called her Luke. She was Colombian and ten or fifteen years older than me; she was olive-skinned, fetching, extremely artistic and a great cook. Her husband was overseas with the marines, and one night she invited me for dinner; there was a fireplace, candlelight and wine, and I lost my virginity.

Luke was extremely pa.s.sionate and s.e.xually unconventional. She never wore underpants, and we'd often walk down a street in New York, duck in an alley and have at it. At the ballet one night, she put her hand on my p.r.i.c.k and I put my hand up her dress. We both came, and she yipped and t.i.ttered so loudly that others in the audience must have wondered about her. After her husband came back from overseas, he learned about our affair and divorced her. Our friends.h.i.+p lasted for many years. She was very important to me then, but after her there were many other women in my life.

10.

THE BEST BANDS in the world were constantly coming in and out of Manhattan and making wonderful music in Harlem and behind the neon lights and red awnings of jazz clubs along West Fifty-second Street. I thrived on this feast. In Libertyville my idols in the jazz world had been Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, but one night I went to the Palladium, a ballroom on Broadway, to dance and almost lost my mind with excitement when I discovered Afro-Cuban music. Every Wednesday night there was a mambo contest, and it seemed as if every Puerto Rican in New York got out on the dance floor and released a week of frustration after working as a waiter or pus.h.i.+ng a cart in the garment district. People moved their bodies in ways that were unimaginable; it was the most beautiful dancing I'd ever seen and I was mesmerized by it. Every Wednesday night was a festival, and I looked forward to it each week. The place exploded with joy, excitement and enthusiasm. t.i.to Puente and t.i.to Rodriguez, the very best of the Afro-Cuban bands, played there, and when one finished a set, another took over. I had always been stimulated by rhythm, even by the ticking of a clock, and the rhythms they played were irresistible. Each band usually had two or three conga drummers, and I couldn't sit still because of their extraordinary, complicated syncopations. I had been a pretty good stick drummer-I'd taken lessons-but had never played the congas. After going to the Palladium, I gave up stick drumming, bought my own conga drums and signed up for a cla.s.s with Katherine Dunham, a wonderful black dancer, and for a while thought of trying to make my living as a modern dancer. She had been all over the world learning what was then called "primitive dancing," and I was hypnotized by it, although in cla.s.s whenever I was given the choice of either playing the drums or dancing, I much preferred to play. in the world were constantly coming in and out of Manhattan and making wonderful music in Harlem and behind the neon lights and red awnings of jazz clubs along West Fifty-second Street. I thrived on this feast. In Libertyville my idols in the jazz world had been Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, but one night I went to the Palladium, a ballroom on Broadway, to dance and almost lost my mind with excitement when I discovered Afro-Cuban music. Every Wednesday night there was a mambo contest, and it seemed as if every Puerto Rican in New York got out on the dance floor and released a week of frustration after working as a waiter or pus.h.i.+ng a cart in the garment district. People moved their bodies in ways that were unimaginable; it was the most beautiful dancing I'd ever seen and I was mesmerized by it. Every Wednesday night was a festival, and I looked forward to it each week. The place exploded with joy, excitement and enthusiasm. t.i.to Puente and t.i.to Rodriguez, the very best of the Afro-Cuban bands, played there, and when one finished a set, another took over. I had always been stimulated by rhythm, even by the ticking of a clock, and the rhythms they played were irresistible. Each band usually had two or three conga drummers, and I couldn't sit still because of their extraordinary, complicated syncopations. I had been a pretty good stick drummer-I'd taken lessons-but had never played the congas. After going to the Palladium, I gave up stick drumming, bought my own conga drums and signed up for a cla.s.s with Katherine Dunham, a wonderful black dancer, and for a while thought of trying to make my living as a modern dancer. She had been all over the world learning what was then called "primitive dancing," and I was hypnotized by it, although in cla.s.s whenever I was given the choice of either playing the drums or dancing, I much preferred to play.

There were only two white people in my cla.s.s at Dunham's; the rest were black, including a nurse from Jamaica named Floretta who had a very distinctive look in her eyes. Her eyelids fell deep over her eyes, which make them look almost closed. For some reason, I found this very sensual. After we made love, I realized that she had never been with a white man and that I had never slept with a black woman before, so we shared the kind of curiosity that people of different races have for each other. I don't know why it surprised me, but I found it interesting that there was no difference in making love to a woman of color than to a woman who was white. The only only difference was her color, a symphony in sepia. When I pressed my thumb on her skin, it became luminous around the edges; it was like skin I had never touched before. We had great times together, but eventually we went our separate ways. She left school for some reason, and I never heard from her again. difference was her color, a symphony in sepia. When I pressed my thumb on her skin, it became luminous around the edges; it was like skin I had never touched before. We had great times together, but eventually we went our separate ways. She left school for some reason, and I never heard from her again.

One night, after someone told me about a good band in Harlem, I took the subway to a small, dark club on 132nd Street with a bar out front and a small dance floor in the back where the band was playing. I had a pleasant buzz on, and after listening awhile I walked up to the bandstand and asked the musician who was playing conga drums if I could play a set. I pulled a $5 bill out of my pocket and offered it to him, but he wouldn't look at me. A guy next to him with a big scowl on his face wouldn't look at me either. Then a huge guy with eyes like ball bearings came out of nowhere and said, "I'll take your money, boy. Do you want to play the drums? Gimme your money. I'll see that you play the drums."

"Well, I think I'll just listen now," I said, "and play later."

Suddenly the place was silent. That's strange, I thought. Then it registered on me that the big man was the only person in the club who had made eye contact with me, and I realized that I was the only white person in the room.

As I sat down again, I noticed that several women were sitting at a table behind mine. The band started up again, and I sat back and listened, still happy to be there. Then I heard a voice: "You want to dance?"

I looked up and saw a very pretty woman. "Dance? Yeah, sure."

We started dancing and I asked what her name was.

"Ruby."

"My name's Buddy."

"Buddy. Buddy?" Buddy?"

"That's right," I said, and suddenly a slanted smile stole across her face, a charming smile illuminated by a bright gold tooth. We danced, and when the music stopped, we sat down and started to chat. While I was talking, I noticed her look behind me, and suddenly she said, "My name's still Sugar."

I turned around and looked into the faces of five or six women, then saw a man sitting directly behind me, a black icebox with eyes like two .45s. I realized I'd looked into the wrong face; I had crossed an infuriated cement tank. I got out of my chair, swallowed hard, looked down at the floor, then at my feet, while trying to think of something to say. Finally I turned and walked over to him, my stomach fluttering like the hands of a jazz pianist. I stood beside him with all the girls staring dead-eyed at me, but he didn't look back, just kept staring straight ahead. Trying to appear nonchalant, I said, "Hey, man, I'm just in from out of town."

He interrupted me and very slowly said, "My name is Leroy, L-E-R-O-Y." Those letters are burned into my brain to this day.

"Well, actually, Mr. Leroy," I said, "I was just looking for a good time and trying to dig the music..."

I didn't know much black jargon, but I had heard the word "dig," so I used it as often as I could. "My name's Bud. I'm from out of town," I said. "I just came in from Chicago. I don't mean to be stepping on anybody's toes or anything like that."

"That's cool," Leroy said. "That's cool."

It took him about five seconds to draw out the one syllable of "cool"; in fact, he may have turned it into four syllables. "That's cool cool, my man," he repeated.

I said, "Thank you very much. Are you sure it's all right?"

He looked at me and said "Mmmm, hmmmm." It was a long "Mmmmm hmmmmm." He never once looked at me.

I went back to my seat mentally reciting my catechism, sat down and started talking to the girl again while trying to do something about the tortured smile on my face. "Is that your boyfriend?" I asked.

"Well," she said, moving her head slightly and smiling again, "kind of." "kind of."

"Listen," I said, "why don't we go downtown? I know some nice places there where we could have some fun and dance. Would you like to go downtown?"

"Sure," she said. "Why not, baby? Let's make it."

I put some money down to pay the bill and went to the checkroom, which was near the bar in the front, to get my coat. As I was putting it on, I turned around and looked back toward the doorway and saw a body flying horizontally past me directly into a pile of chairs and tables that had been piled on top of each other. It was Ruby/Sugar. Without stopping to evaluate the situation, I pivoted on my right foot, opened the door and ran like a nine-year-old girl who had just seen her first snake. Behind me, I heard feet scuffling out of the jazz club, so I ran faster, pa.s.sing several guys in a doorway who said, "Where you goin', white boy?" I had so much adrenaline in my bloodstream that I could have outrun Jesse Owens on his best day. At an intersection two blocks away, a car was stopped at a red light; I vaulted over its hood like a high hurdler, then ran toward the subway at 110th Street and down the stairs to the platform four steps at a time. At the end of the platform, I peeked from behind a post searching for my pursuers. After several eternities, a train arrived, and as it did, several guys piled down the stairs. Well, that's it, I thought, I'm going to die in a pool of blood on a subway train underneath Central Park, and I'm only nineteen. I knew that the train wouldn't stop at another station until Fifty-ninth Street, and the trip seemed to last a thousand years. I waited for those guys to come polish me off, sweating from the back of my knees to between my toes, everywhere I had a sweat gland. At Fifty-ninth Street, I rushed off the train and looked around, but n.o.body else got off. Then I realized that n.o.body n.o.body had been chasing me; it was all in my head. had been chasing me; it was all in my head.

11.

FOR ALL THE FREEDOM I savored in New York, a letter I wrote home that fall suggests that I was a confused young man: I savored in New York, a letter I wrote home that fall suggests that I was a confused young man: School starts tomorrow and I'm very glad because I've been plenty antsy for a long time, what with bitter busdrivers, pacifists, philosophers, kooks, funny people, New York and myself.Oh, G.o.d! Round and round I go looking for an answer of some kind. No answer. No nothing. I've tried relaxing, but it's still the same. I've gone nuts thinking about truth and its aspects. I don't get anything. Nothing adds up. There is so d.a.m.n much bitterness and fear and hate and untruths all around me. I want to do something about it. It makes me mad when I get scared of sticking my neck out. If you try to be good and thoughtful and kind and truthful, people call you a liar and suspect you and resent you and hate you. I try my d.a.m.nedest to understand and forgive, but if I were to put into words and actions what I sometimes feel, it would cost me my life almost. Society won't let you be decent because they're so G.o.d-d.a.m.ned afraid all the time. I've tried to be smart and stay on the line but it makes me feel as though I weren't living up to my own ideas and principles.... I'm going to miss the fall at home and the apples and leaves and smells and stuff. I've got a lump in my throat now just thinking about it....

Love, Bud.

I attended the New School for Social Research for only a year, but what a year it was. The school and New York itself had become a sanctuary for hundreds of extraordinary European Jews who had fled Germany and other countries before and during World War II, and they were enriching the city's intellectual life with an intensity that has probably never been equaled anywhere during a comparable period of time. I was raised largely by these Jews. I lived in a world of Jews. They were my teachers; they were my employers. They were my friends. They introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn't know existed. I stayed up all night with them-asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew, learning how inarticulate I was and how abysmal my education was. I hadn't even finished high school, and many of them had advanced degrees from the finest inst.i.tutes in Europe. I felt dumb and ashamed, but they gave me an appet.i.te to learn everything. They made me hungry for information. I believed that if I had more knowledge I'd be smarter, which I now realize isn't true. I read Kant, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Locke, Melville, Tolstoy, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky and books by dozens of other authors, many of which I never understood.

The New School was a way station for some of the finest Jewish intellectuals from Europe, a temporary haven before they left to join the faculties at universities like Princeton, Yale and Harvard. They were the cream of Europe's academicians, and as teachers they were extraordinary.

One of the great mysteries that has always puzzled me is how Jews, who account for such a tiny fraction of the world's population, have been able to achieve so much and excel in so many different fields-science, music, medicine, literature, arts, business and more. If you listed the most influential people of the last hundred years, three at the top of the list would be Einstein, Freud and Marx; all were Jews. Many more belong on the list, yet Jews comprise at most less than 3 percent of the United States population. They are an amazing people. Imagine the persecution they endured over the centuries: pogroms, temple burnings, Cossack raids, uprootings of families, their dispersal to the winds and the Holocaust. After the Diaspora, they could not own land or wors.h.i.+p in much of the world; they were prohibited from voting and were told where to live. Yet their culture survived and Jews became by far the most accomplished people per capita that the world has ever produced.

For a while I thought that the brilliance and success of Jews was the c.u.mulative yield of an extraordinarily rich pool of genes in the Middle East produced over eons by evolution. But then I realized that my theory didn't hold up because following the Diaspora, Ashken.a.z.ic Jews evolved into a group physically much different from Sephardic Jews. Spanish Jews had nothing in common with Russian Jews; in fact they could not even speak to them. Russian Jews were isolated from German Jews, who thought of themselves as separate and superior, and Eastern European Jews had nothing to do with the Sephardic Jews. Besides, there had been so much intermarriage over the centuries that genetics alone couldn't explain the phenomenon.

After talking to many Jews and reading about Jewish history and culture, I finally came to the conclusion that in the end being Jewish was a cultural phenomenon rather than a genetic one. It is a state of mind. There's a Yiddish word, seychel seychel, that provides a key to explaining the most profound aspects of Jewish culture. It means to pursue knowledge and to leave the world a better place than when you entered it. Jews revere education and hard work, and they pa.s.s these values on from one generation to the next. As far as I am aware, this dynamic and emphasis on excellence is paralleled only in certain Asian cultures. It must be this cultural tradition that accounts for their amazing success, along with Judaism, the one constant that survived while the Jews were dispersed around the world.

Traditions pa.s.sed on via the Torah and Talmud have somehow helped Jews to fulfill the destiny they have claimed, a kind of "chosen people," if spectacular success in so many, many fields is proof of that. Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them. They introduced me to a sense of culture that has lasted me a lifetime.

As well as academics and scholars from Eastern Europe, Jewish girls, most of whom were more educated, sophisticated and experienced in the ways of the world than I was, were my teachers during those early days in New York. It was common in those days for girls from wealthy New York Jewish families to rent an apartment in the city and have a little fling before striking out on a career or marriage after they had graduated from college. With my inept, simple ways, I must have seemed to them like an alien from a galaxy beyond the Milky Way. I was a gentile in a Jewish world who had hardly been to school; I rode a motorcycle; I was young, reasonably attractive, full of vim, vigor and s.e.xuality, an exotic specimen if for no other reason than I was different from the boys these girls had grown up with. I didn't follow any of their rules and they didn't follow any of mine. They were fascinated by me and I by them. Many were more experienced s.e.xually than I was, and I was a willing and happy pupil. I remember especially Caroline Burke, a beautiful woman who was about ten years older than I was, in whom I always regretted not making a more permanent investment. She was not only physically attractive and well educated, but bursting with elegance, charm, taste and appreciation for beautiful things. She lived in an apartment filled with antiques and always wore delicious perfume. To her, I suppose I was a kind of b.u.mpkin-a nineteen-year-old farm boy who still worried secretly that he had manure on his shoes, but she taught me a great deal.

I was walking down Fifty-seventh Street with Caroline one day and innocently asked, "Isn't it funny how you see so many women with blond hair and a mink coat?" There was a woman in front of us with blond hair wearing a mink coat and we were talking about her, when Caroline said, "She's Jewish." I asked, "How do you know?" She answered, "Well, it's because...I don't know, she's just Jewish." I said, "You mean to say, just because she has blond hair and a mink-" She interrupted, "Look, I'm a Jew, and I know what Jews are like from the front, back, side or top." "Well, how can you tell a Jew from a non-Jew?" She replied, "Well, you have to be Jewish to know that." I was stunned, and I thought Caroline had remarkable powers of perception.

After several months in New York, I was still interested in becoming a modern dancer, but then I took an acting cla.s.s at the New School's Dramatic Workshop and everything changed. During that fall of 1943, I kept my parents informed of my progress in letters that seem to have been written by a person I barely recognize, a naive kid trying hard to understand the galaxy he had stumbled into and looking for a place in it as well as a purpose in life: Dear Folks:I am fine, depimpled and healthy. I haven't found a room as yet but I think by the end of this week I will have gotten one that I've had my eye on...last week, we did "Tonight We Improvise" by Pirandello and it was good. Piscator liked me in it. It was lots of fun. I have met an interesting girl whose name is Renata (beautiful name). She plays the piano for her work and she speaks German, Italian, French and English. Very charming. She was born in Germany....I am learning that you just can't have a completely frank and sincere relations.h.i.+p with any girl. All most of them do is bore me, truly.... I have been reading the Bible. It is full of beautiful thoughts but they don't mean much to me. Nana, why do they tell you to fear G.o.d? I can't understand...I am writing this on the subway and putting my thoughts down as they come...Joy Thompson (summer theater girl) fell on her head and went to the hospital-fractured skull and concussion. She has gone back to Canada....How goes it at home? Pop, many things you have said are beginning to take shape and content. Ma, how is your cold? I don't understand life, but I am living like mad anyhow. You are all good people and much comfort to me.

All my love Bud Dear Folks:I want to thank you for being so nice about my not writing. Have I forgotten any birthdays? I have been tearing like mad of late.... School is fine. We are doing Moliere in "The Imaginary Invalid" in which I am a young lover of the 18th cent. It's a good part. I am studying the part of the Templar in "Nathan the Wise," which is a very good part for me. My philosophy cla.s.s is real good and Dr. Kaplan in his lectures confirms all I have professed (not openly) about ecclesiastical power and aspects of religion. It is wonderful. I have much to say. I am was.h.i.+ng my stuff now in my wash stand.I don't like my landlady. She gives the young lad too much advice. Much too much.I am beginning to know how to act-learning to act and developing a sense of direction of action and feeling. It is hard work just as anything else but a source of enjoyment for me because I like it.Fran is working like h.e.l.l and having manifestly wondrous results. She is fine.... I am systematizing my budget.

Love to you all Bud

12.

THE DIRECTOR of the New School's Dramatic Workshop was Erwin Piscator, a man of great repute in the German theater, but to me Stella Adler was its soul. During the early thirties, she went to Europe and studied under Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, then brought home his disciplines and techniques and taught them to other members of the Group Theatre, a company of actors, writers and directors who for a decade, starting in 1931, tried to mount an alternative to the commercial Broadway theater, staging productions they felt were the cutting edge of social change. of the New School's Dramatic Workshop was Erwin Piscator, a man of great repute in the German theater, but to me Stella Adler was its soul. During the early thirties, she went to Europe and studied under Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, then brought home his disciplines and techniques and taught them to other members of the Group Theatre, a company of actors, writers and directors who for a decade, starting in 1931, tried to mount an alternative to the commercial Broadway theater, staging productions they felt were the cutting edge of social change.

When I met her, Stella was about forty-one, quite tall and very beautiful, with blue eyes, stunning blond hair and a leonine presence, but a woman much disappointed by what life had dealt her. She was a marvelous actress who unfortunately never got a chance to become a great star, and I think this embittered her. A member of one of the great theatrical families of America, she appeared in almost two hundred plays over a span of thirty years, and wanted very much to be a famous performer. But like many Jewish actors of her era, she faced a cruel and insidious form of anti-Semitism; producers in New York and especially in Hollywood wouldn't hire actors if they "looked Jewish," no matter how good they were.

Hollywood was always a Jewish community; it was started by Jews and to this day is run largely by Jews. But for a long time it was venomously anti-Semitic in a perverse way, especially before the war, when Jewish performers had to disguise their Jewishness if they wanted a job. These actors were frightened, and understandably so. When I was breaking into acting, I constantly heard about agents submitting an actor or actress for a part, taking them to the theater for a reading and afterward hearing the producer say, "Terrific. Thank you very much. We'll call you."

After the actor was gone, the agent would ask, "Well, Al, what did you think?"

"Great," the producer would say, "He was terrific, but he's too Jewish." but he's too Jewish."

If you "looked Jewish," you didn't get a part and couldn't make a living. You had to look like Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Paul Muni or Paulette G.o.ddard and change your name. They were Jews, but didn't "look Jewish" and employed the camouflage of non-Jewish names. Hence Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield, Marion Levy became Paulette G.o.ddard, Emmanuel Goldenberg became Edward G. Robinson and Muni Weisenfreund became Paul Muni. Later this changed when people like Barbra Streisand said, "I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'm going to change my name. I'm a Jew and I'm proud of it." Now Jews don't have to get their noses operated on to get a job, but Stella was part of a different era. She went to Hollywood, made three movies and changed her last name to "Ardler," hoping it would help, but she had a sharp, aquiline nose that gave her the "Jewish look." She had it operated on and the result made her look more like a s.h.i.+ksa; but producers still said she looked too Jewish to offer her the kind of jobs her talent deserved and that would have made her a star.

But while Stella never fulfilled her dream, she left an astounding legacy. Virtually all acting in motion pictures today stems from her, and she had an extraordinary effect on the culture of her time. I don't think audiences realize how much we are in debt to her, to other Jews and to the Russian theater for most performances we see now. The techniques she brought back to this country and taught others changed acting enormously. First she pa.s.sed them on to the other members of the Group Theatre, and then to actors like me who became her students. We plied our trade according to the manner and style she taught us, and since American movies dominate the world market, Stella's teachings have influenced actors throughout the world.

Stella always said no one could teach acting, but she she could. She had a knack for teaching people about themselves, enabling them to use their emotions and bring out their hidden sensitivity. She also had a gift for communicating her knowledge; she could tell you not only could. She had a knack for teaching people about themselves, enabling them to use their emotions and bring out their hidden sensitivity. She also had a gift for communicating her knowledge; she could tell you not only when when you were wrong, but you were wrong, but why why. Her instincts were unerring and extraordinary. If I hit a sour note in a scene, she knew it immediately and said, "No, wait, wait, wait...that's wrong!" and then dug into her large reserve of intuitive intelligence to explain why my character would behave in a certain way based on the author's vision.

"Method acting" was a term popularized, b.a.s.t.a.r.dized and misused by Lee Strasberg, a man for whom I had little respect, and therefore I hesitate to use it. What Stella taught her students was how to discover the nature of their own emotional mechanics and therefore those of others. She taught me to be real and not to try to act out an emotion I didn't personally experience during a performance.

Because of Stella, acting changed completely during the fifties and sixties. Until the generation she inspired came along, most actors were what I have always thought of as "personality" actors, like Sarah Bernhardt, Katharine Cornell or Ruth Gordon. George Bernard Shaw once said, "A character actor is one who cannot act and therefore makes an elaborate study of disguise and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated." A lot of actors believed that by growing a beard, checking out a robe from the wardrobe department and carrying a staff they could become Moses, but they were seldom anything other than themselves playing the same role time after time. To indicate torment or confusion, they put their hands on their foreheads and sighed loudly. They acted externally rather than internally.

There were a few good natural actors from the past. I once saw a clip from a 1916 movie, Cenere Cenere, starring Eleonora Duse, a fine actress whose career was unfortunately overshadowed by her rival, the more flamboyant Bernhardt. Her acting was understated, simple, without theatrical artifice and enormously effective. Other natural actors whose instincts showed in their work were Paul Muni and Jimmy Cagney, but I believe they were exceptions. Until Stella came along, stage acting was mostly declaiming, superficial gestures, exaggerated expression, loud voices, theatrical elocution and unfelt emotion. Most actors did nothing to experience experience a character's feelings and emotions. a character's feelings and emotions.

Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts. Everybody Everybody acts, whether it's a toddler who quickly learns how to behave to get its mother's attention, or a husband and wife in the daily rituals of a marriage, with all the artifices and role-playing that occur in a conjugal relations.h.i.+p. Politicians are among our most flashy and worst actors. It's hard to imagine anyone surviving in our world without acting. It is a necessary social device: we use it to protect our interests and to gain advantage in every aspect of our lives, and it is instinctive, a skill built into all of us. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long. When we don't feel the emotions someone expects of us and want to please them, we act out the emotion we think they expect of us; we're enthusiastic about their project even though it bores us. Someone says something that hurts our feelings but we hide our hurt. The difference is that most people act unconsciously and automatically, while stage and movie actors do it to tell a story. In fact, most actors give their best performances after the camera stops rolling. acts, whether it's a toddler who quickly learns how to behave to get its mother's attention, or a husband and wife in the daily rituals of a marriage, with all the artifices and role-playing that occur in a conjugal relations.h.i.+p. Politicians are among our most flashy and worst actors. It's hard to imagine anyone surviving in our world without acting. It is a necessary social device: we use it to protect our interests and to gain advantage in every aspect of our lives, and it is instinctive, a skill built into all of us. Whenever we want something from somebody or when we want to hide something or pretend, we're acting. Most people do it all day long. When we don't feel the emotions someone expects of us and want to please them, we act out the emotion we think they expect of us; we're enthusiastic about their project even though it bores us. Someone says something that hurts our feelings but we hide our hurt. The difference is that most people act unconsciously and automatically, while stage and movie actors do it to tell a story. In fact, most actors give their best performances after the camera stops rolling.