The method, p.28
The Method, page 28
In its prime, the Lab was both a respected theater and an educational powerhouse, teaching everyone from movie stars to veterans returning from World War II. One of those GIs, Joe Papirofsky, studied at the Lab for two years before moving east, changing his name to Joe Papp, and founding New York’s Public Theater. The Lab’s success proved that actors wanted to continue working on their craft between jobs. Providing them with a home and a community of like-minded artists with which to work benefited everyone. Actors were so hungry for the opportunity to improve that successful ones would pay for the privilege to do it. You could use this hunger to start an adventurous theater and a dedicated school, creating a hotbed of acting that would have a transformative effect on the industry. Soon a remarkably similar organization, founded by a different set of Group veterans, sprouted on the East Coast. They called it the Actors Studio.
CHAPTER 16
Our Kind of Actors
In early 1945, Elia Kazan fled a potential seven-year contract directing for Twentieth Century–Fox—and a floundering relationship with a longtime mistress—for the South Pacific. He’d signed on to help soldiers stationed abroad organize theatrical productions. Art, the Army hoped, would keep soldiers occupied and sane until they shipped home. But Gadge did very little work on his assigned project; as always, he hungered for the real, and he spent his time instead soaking up the day-to-day lives of soldiers in the Pacific Theater.
While in Manila, Kazan caught a screening of This Is the Army, an Irving Berlin wartime musical directed by Michael Curtiz and starring, among others, Ronald Reagan. Its upbeat, brilliantine version of the war disgusted him. His values were still those of the Group, and he missed the fellowship of like-minded artists, even if he didn’t miss his old company’s fetid interpersonal miasma. “I determined to take charge of my own life,” he remembered, “to find a way to live professionally in which all artistic decisions would be mine to make.” Now that he had success, control was in his grasp. He could direct plays he believed in, the way he felt they should be done. But that wasn’t enough. Kazan longed for the best parts of the Group, “what it stood for and the life it made possible.” When he returned to the States, he tried to rekindle the groupness within him by launching a producing partnership with Harold Clurman. Together they produced Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, which Clurman directed, and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, directed by Kazan.
Like anyone looking to rekindle a lost love with an old flame, Kazan had blithely looked past his partner’s shortcomings, but soon Clurman’s weaknesses loomed so large as to be unavoidable. Truckline Café, one of those social-issue plays in which a group of strangers with thematically connected problems just happen to frequent the same restaurant, was no good. When it opened, the reviews were scathing. “Maxwell Anderson must have written ‘Truckline Café’ with his left hand and, it is to be feared, in the dark of the moon,” began Lewis Nichols’s pan in the New York Times. Writing for the New York Daily News, John Chapman said it was “the worst play I have seen since I have been in the reviewing business.” Harold was still the best first-week director in town, but he was too self-centered, too ambivalent, and too intellectual to fix the script’s problems. “The play,” Kazan recalled, “had been an occasion for Harold to perform” in rehearsal.
Truckline Café’s lone bright spot was the performance by a then unknown Marlon Brando as a soldier returning from war who kills his girlfriend because he suspects that she has cheated on him. Brando thrilled audiences, particularly during a moment when his character let loose a howl of despair over murdering the woman he loved. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and to explode out of Marlon all the way to the back of the house. It felt like watching a real man actually come unglued. The actor Charles Durning said that Brando seemed like a person they had pulled in off the street, that he was “too good to be an actor.”
That observation was, of course, exactly wrong. He was so good because he was an actor, because he was able to both imagine himself into the given circumstances of the role and bring a piece of himself to it. In real life, Brando wasn’t a jealous boyfriend, but he had been the other man, including to a woman whose husband served overseas. His mother had suffered mental breakdowns, as had he. He knew what uncontrollable rage and sadness felt like.
At the beginning of Truckline’s rehearsal process, Brando had been nervous. He had never cried onstage before and wasn’t sure how to approach the role’s emotional terrain. In the early weeks, he seemed to be doing nothing at all. He muttered to himself, his choices barely registering even a few feet away. “Brando’s indirect and introspective approach to a part, the seemingly interminable time he took to prepare to act (‘project’) it, baffled and sometimes alienated producers, directors, and other actors,” Clurman wrote. But in reality, “Brando [was] a ‘deep one.’ ” Marlon took his time working into a role, accreting it, growing a new skin on top of his own. Clurman coaxed the legendary explosion out of him with an old trick known to any middle school drama teacher: In each rehearsal, he walked farther and farther back in the theater, complaining that he couldn’t hear the lines. Brando invested his choices with enough of his soul and technique that they grew in size to fill the space.
Brando’s performance convinced Kazan that the young man had the goods, but Truckline’s failure reinforced all of his prior misgivings about Clurman. He didn’t need a production company, he needed to build an organization that would train “our kind of actors,” which is to say, Group actors. Method actors.
At some point during rehearsals for All My Sons, Clurman began discussing founding an acting school with Kazan, with Stella as one of the teachers. While Kazan would warm to Stella much later in life, in the 1940s he resented her. He resented her for her grand style, and he resented her for all the times Clurman had let her interfere with his performances in the Group.
“I’m not going ahead with our partnership,” Kazan wrote Clurman. “I know that you sense this. You are intuitive and I must have been transparent … In breaking off our partnership I want to make clear that it’s not just that I’m disgruntled with the N.Y. Theatre. I mean I beef about it, but I like it and I intend to go on producing and directing in it … It is our partnership that didn’t work out for me.” Kazan wrote that their producing company obligated him to raise money for plays he neither liked nor was directing, and it thus held him back from realizing his ambitions. “And also in regard to a school, I really don’t want to be associated with Stella. You are completely committed in this respect. At the moment of issue I wouldn’t have stood for it. It’s better to skip it now.”
Kazan loved Clurman. The two remained close until the latter’s dying day. Gadge admired and respected the man who had given him so much and seen so much potential in him. But they wanted very different things. Kazan was not a conflicted intellectual. He was a driven, exceptionally gifted artist. He didn’t need Clurman anymore; what he needed was a way to find and train the right actors for the kind of art he wanted to make, art that still at the time represented an insurgent, minority movement.
But who actually conceived of the Actors Studio, which soon became the solution to Kazan’s problem, is disputed. Kazan claimed that he came up with it, and then pitched it to Bobby Lewis as the two men strolled through Central Park. Lewis, who would co-found the Studio with Kazan, remembered the walk in Central Park but said that the idea was his. The Studio’s third founder, Cheryl Crawford, believed that she and Kazan cooked up the Actors Studio over lunch at a Greek restaurant in April 1947. In the years since the Group, Crawford had become a respected producer. After Kurt Weill’s One Touch of Venus, she had put on Brigadoon, with Lewis directing. But, like seemingly every other Group alum, she was hooked on its values, on its fervor and ambition, and she tried to re-create it with two ill-fated projects. In 1944, she had launched the American Repertory Theatre with Eva Le Gallienne, the founder of Civic Rep. It folded in 1947. In 1946, she became involved with the Experimental Theatre of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), helping to promote aesthetically daring, noncommercial theater. Despite an encouraging first couple of years, it would close for good in 1951.
“The conversation that day began with mutual congratulations on our current successes, mine Brigadoon, his All My Sons,” Crawford said. “This led, circuitously, to reminiscences of the Group Theatre.” From there, they talked about the problems facing the industry. Crawford felt that young actors never got the opportunity to stretch themselves and develop their craft. If they broke through in a role, they would be asked to re-create its type over and over again in play after play. “They’re only part of the labor pool,” she said.
“It’s not just the kids,” Kazan replied. The established ones couldn’t stretch either. In New York in 1947, actors spent their time between roles milling about a midtown Walgreens, waiting for news of auditions and gossiping about the industry. That was no way to develop as an artist. He had been complaining about these same problems with Bobby Lewis, he said. What if the three created something together? Crawford liked the idea and suggested three actors from the recently shuttered American Rep that they could add to the pool: Julie Harris, Anne Jackson, and Eli Wallach.
No matter which version you believe, Kazan, Crawford, and Lewis founded the Actors Studio to solve the artistic problems the Group had tried to address in the 1930s without the pressures of a permanent ensemble or the guiding light of leftist politics. The triumvirate decided their new venture would eschew commercial concerns entirely. The Actors Studio would have no formal remit to produce plays, no one who worked there would be paid, and admission would be free. After all, it wasn’t a school, it was a studio, like the ones created by Stanislavski, and as with its Russian forebear, the membership would be dedicated to continuous improvement and experimentation. Actors would be divided into two groups. The first, made up of beginners, would be run by Kazan and would meet Tuesday and Thursday from eleven A.M. to one P.M. The other, for advanced actors, would meet Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and be run by Bobby Lewis.
The Actors Studio began in earnest on October 5, 1947, with an event held on the cramped upper floor of the same building in which Richard Boleslavsky had delivered the Creative Theatre lectures, bringing Stanislavski’s ideas full circle. The audience that night included not only the founding members but Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and many other directors, writers, and theater luminaries.
Greeting people at the door, his thousand-watt smile never dimming, stood John Garfield, now at the peak of his Hollywood stardom.
In the nine years since Four Daughters, Garfield had made more than twenty films under his Warner Bros. contract, which ran out as he filmed Humoresque. Garfield was by that point a box office sensation. Humoresque joined Nobody Lives Forever and The Postman Always Rings Twice as Garfield-anchored 1946 hits. When his Warner Bros. contract ran out, the other studios courted him with single-picture deals. He turned down Nightmare Alley and Out of the Past and Cloak of Innocence and Pursued and Moonrise and a biopic about Sophie Tucker to work with a new independent studio called Enterprise. There he starred in and produced Body and Soul and Force of Evil, two of his best-remembered and most influential films. In between, he briefly returned to a Hollywood studio to work with Kazan on Gentleman’s Agreement. He had been so moved by its story of anti-Semitism in polite New York society that he agreed to appear in the film at union scale wages, well below his usual salary, hoping his involvement would help it get made.
After Force of Evil, Garfield went to New York to act in Skipper Next to God, directed by Lee Strasberg. Garfield and his wife, Robbe, were New Yorkers at heart, and they had grown tired of California. Hollywood, in turn, was becoming an increasingly unfriendly place for someone with Garfield’s affiliations. In February 1947, Congress subpoenaed Gerhart Eisler, brother of Hollywood composer (and Clurman friend) Hanns Eisler, under suspicion that he was an agent of the Kremlin. Two days before Gerhart was set to testify, he was arrested as an “undesirable alien.” Now a federal prisoner, he refused to testify unless he was allowed to read an opening statement into the record, and Congressman Richard Nixon charged him with contempt. A legal arm-wrestling match between Gerhart and the federal government ensued. He would eventually flee the country in May 1949, smuggled out in the belly of a Polish freighter bound for East Germany. Gerhart Eisler’s movie industry connections helped make the studios a tempting target for the House Un-American Activities Committee, which began investigating Hollywood in earnest in 1947. Warner Bros., John Garfield’s old studio, was one of its major targets. To help support the war effort, Warners had made films such as Mission to Moscow and Action in the North Atlantic that portrayed Russia in a positive light. Now that Russia was the enemy, HUAC alleged that perhaps Communists had used these and other films to smuggle in pro-Soviet propaganda. Warners quickly buckled under the pressure. On October 10, 1947, five days after the Actors Studio opened, Jack Warner declared in testimony that “ideological termites have burrowed into many American industries, organizations and societies” and promised that “wherever they may be, I say let us dig them out and get rid of them. My brothers and I will be happy to subscribe generously to a pest-removal fund.”
Jack Warner was one of forty directors, writers, and producers who had been subpoenaed to appear before HUAC to testify about possible Communist infiltration and influence in Hollywood. In response, John Huston, Myrna Loy, William Wyler, and Philip Dunne formed the anti-HUAC Committee for the First Amendment, and dozens of movie professionals, including John Garfield, joined. Shortly after Jack Warner’s testimony, Garfield flew to Washington to support Hollywood’s right to make movies without undue government influence. “They should either outlaw Communism and have done with it or stop crucifying people on unsupported charges,” he said to the press when he arrived. He publicly denounced the hearings that week, waving a petition he had joined his fellow famous committee members in signing. “These actors,” he said, “are outraged by the continuing attempts of the House Un-American Committee to smear the motion picture industry.” When asked if he was a Communist, he reminded the press that he had entertained the troops overseas during the war, and that doing so required FBI clearance. “There’s a lot of stupid name-calling going on now on all sides,” he said. “I can’t be scared by it.”
He should have been. Garfield was not a Communist, but his wife had been. He was an alum of the Group Theatre, which had Communist members and Marxist leanings, and Enterprise was a leftist studio. Abe Polonsky, who wrote Body and Soul and wrote and directed Force of Evil, was an avowed Marxist who would soon be blacklisted. On October 27, the day after Garfield flew to Washington, the Hollywood Ten—screenwriters including Group playwright John Howard Lawson—refused to answer HUAC’s questions. Bertolt Brecht, who had written Hangmen Also Die for United Artists, agreed to answer the committee’s questions, and then promptly fled the country. Soon Hanns Eisler, Hangmen’s composer, did the same. At LaGuardia Airport, he delivered this statement to the press:
I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it when, in 1933, the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the evil of the period. I was proud at being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being driven out of the beautiful country in this ridiculous way.
He then joined his brother and Brecht in East Germany, whose national anthem he went on to compose. In November, Congress charged the Hollywood Ten with contempt and began formal criminal proceedings against them. The studios fired the Hollywood Ten; the Screen Actors Guild, led by Ronald Reagan, pledged that its officers would swear oaths that they were not Communists. The blacklist had begun in earnest and would only intensify, as would HUAC’s investigation into Hollywood’s Communist ties real and imagined.
Standing at the door of the Studio, glad-handing everyone on behalf of his old acting teachers, Garfield had no reason to think that these investigations would, within a few years, consume his career and end his life. Like the rest of those in attendance that night, he was filled with optimism about the new venture’s transformative potential. In the audience, ready to refine their craft, sat a crowd that included Montgomery Clift, Anne Jackson, Sidney Lumet, Karl Malden, Patricia Neal, Jerome Robbins, Maureen Stapleton, Eli Wallach, and Marlon Brando. By then, Brando and Malden were already deep in rehearsals for a new play called A Streetcar Named Desire. Written by Tennessee Williams and directed by Elia Kazan, this play would put the Actors Studio and its approach on the map.
Marlon Brando was cast in Streetcar almost against his will, and he was not the first choice for the role of Stanley Kowalski. Originally, producer Irene Selznick had wanted none other than John Garfield for the part, but negotiations broke down over Garfield’s demand to be cast in any future film of the play and his refusal to commit to a long stage run. Bill Liebling, an agent whose wife, Audrey Wood, represented Tennessee Williams, thought Brando was perfect for the part of Stanley but couldn’t reach him to tell him to audition. By the summer of 1947, Brando had drifted away from acting after being fired from a Tallulah Bankhead vehicle. He didn’t have a phone or an easy way to be reached.
Liebling had to put the word out on the street, telling everyone he knew that if they happened to run into Brando, they should tell him to call the office. On August 20, Brando finally auditioned for Kazan, who immediately knew he was right for the role. Irene Selznick, however, was still hopeful they could get Garfield or, failing him, someone else famous. Williams’s last play, The Glass Menagerie, had been a hit, but Streetcar was still a risk. A name star would make the show a surer thing. Besides, wasn’t this kid too young for the part? Kazan persisted. Selznick agreed to cast Brando, but only if they could get him to audition for Williams at the playwright’s house in Provincetown. Brando told Kazan he had no money to make the trip. Kazan gave the young actor bus fare and told Williams to expect him.
