On the Waterfront

by Budd Schulberg

  In Bohegan, it was true, the hearings had shaken up City Hall, and Mayor Burke had just announced that he would not stand for re-election. That meant the end of Donnelly too. There was talk of a new reform ticket. Interstate had been fined five thousand dollars for commercial bribery and had lost its license to operate on the docks. But it had quickly rebounded as the National Stevedore Company. An Interstate vice-president had resigned and a pier superintendent had been given a six months’ sentence, suspended.

  But to Father Barry the most mystifying fact of all was that Johnny Friendly had been tried merely for perjury and given a year in the State Prison. He’d be back in seven or eight months, Moose and Pop had told the priest. Meanwhile everybody in Bohegan was in on the secret that he’d go right on running his docks from inside the pen.

  The national labor federation had expelled the longshoremen’s union as “hopelessly gangridden,” but the Johnny Friendlys and the Jerry Benasios, with the tacit support of Tom McGovern and the shipping association, hung on to those docks. Longshoremen like Moose and Pop and Jimmy and Luke, in nearly every part of the harbor, were trying to buck them. But they were still on the outside looking in.

  Just the same, Father Barry’s handful had grown to a hundred. And for each one who showed up at the meetings there could easily be ten more ready to follow, when they thought they had a chance. I call that progress, the Pastor had said. Maybe so. Maybe progress was to be measured not in hundred-yard dashes, as Pete had tried to do, but in mere centimeters, painfully crawling forward.

  Restlessly, Father Barry went down into the church to meditate, to examine his own conscience, since he was finding so much fault with others’, and to ask for guidance. The small church was empty, but in the flickering, shadowed light of the altar and the shrine candles it seemed very large, and Pete Barry, on his knees in front of his favorite Saint Xavier, seemed very small. If there was any figure in the whole great gallery who would understand and intercede, it was the hollow-cheeked Basque who administered to the souls of the 7,000 Paravas pearl divers with a loving heart while venting his rage on the baptized Portuguese who swindled them out of the harvest of pearls for which they had risked their lives and health in the depths of the oyster beds.

  That’s the kind of saint Pete Barry wished and prayed he had the courage to be, the spiritual courage to be, a man who didn’t merely intone “and the last shall be first,” but lived it, dangerously, every day.

  He knelt for an hour, and his mind wandered, but the intensity of his feeling remained concentrated. He prayed for his friends, and he prayed for his enemies, and he prayed for the dead, and he prayed for surcease from the stalking evil of Bohegan. And finally he prayed for forgiveness for hating Tom McGovern and Willie Givens and Johnny Friendly. At the same time he was sure his Xavier would like to see Johnny Friendly get more than eight or nine easy months. And greedy merchant princes and worldly princes of the Church could—and did—make even a saint lose his temper. O Xavier, worn out with too much living and loving at an age when lesser men are coming into their prime, make me see so that I may make others see that our Church is not for the O’Hares and McGoverns taking the easy way, but a Church that suffers as Christ suffers when they crucify Him on a tenement roof or in the hold or on the stringpiece or in the stinking Jersey marshes.

  It was midnight. Father Barry listened to the familiar tone of the chimes. He wondered if he was going to be able to function within the Pastor’s benevolent but somewhat limiting restraints. For a moment he felt a twinge of self-pity. Then he caught hold of himself. Hang on, Pete. What have you got to beef about? What was the name of that old Cardinal who said, “If you say nothing and do nothing, you will escape criticism”?

  Hell, he hadn’t been accused of heresy as Saint Basil was before Pope Damascus. He wasn’t condemned as a heretic and then deposed as Saint Cyril was by a council of forty bishops. He wasn’t accused of witchcraft like Saint Athanasius. Or burned like Saint Joan. And he hadn’t been charged with vile immorality like Saint John Chrysostom. No, and he hadn’t been reviled and rejected by the Holy See like Saint Joseph Calasanctius who died in disgrace in Rome at the age of ninety-two. And he wasn’t thrown into a windowless prison, persecuted by Pope Clement and deprived of the consolation of saying Mass, like the great Father Ricci Xavier’s noble successor. Somehow those bearers of the cross survived all that, or their memories did, and waited for the Church to catch up with them. And the Church had been richer for their daring.

  Solaced, he made the sign of the Cross, rose and genuflected. Then he walked out of the church and crossed the street into Pulaski Park. Now the early winter sleet had given way to snow and there was a white hush over the park. It seemed for a moment as if all the turmoil of Bohegan had finally come to rest. The snow was falling softly, a pure white cloak under which the ugliness of Bohegan might hide—for a little while.

  Peering through the grille work at the far end of the park, Father Barry looked out across the majestic waterway of the Hudson to the most powerful harbor city in the history of the world. From the darkened faces of the buildings on the opposite shore, ten thousand yellow eyes twinkled and stared back at him. Having eyes, they see not, he thought to himself. Hang on, Pete, inch along.

  Down river a ship sounded its whistle in a melancholy, echoing farewell as it eased down the Narrows. Slowly, Father Barry turned away from the old North River—Johnny Friendly’s silent partner still—and walked back to answer some of those letters in the rectory.

  New Hope, Pennsylvania, July, 1954

  Princeton, New Jersey, April, 1955

  A Biography of Budd Schulberg

  Budd Schulberg (1914–2009) was a celebrated screenwriter, novelist, playwright, and journalist best remembered for his classic novel What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and his Academy Award–winning screenplay for On the Waterfront. Schulberg was the first major American novelist to grow up in Hollywood, a town with which he had a complex and sometimes contentious relationship.

  Born Seymour Wilson Schulberg on March 27, 1914, in New York City, Schulberg and his family relocated to Los Angeles a few years later. His father, Ben “B. P.” Schulberg, became one of the most prominent movie producers in the 1920s and ’30s, so Schulberg grew up among movie stars and powerful studio executives. His mother, Adeline Jaffe, was a talent agent who later became one of the first female literary agents. Both of Schulberg’s parents valued authors and literature, and cultivated Schulberg’s literary ambitions throughout his childhood. More than acting, though, Schulberg revered boxing; his father introduced him to the sport and to some of the era’s champions. His fascination with boxing would influence much of his writing career, including his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall.

  Schulberg attended Dartmouth College and graduated in 1936. He then worked in Hollywood as a writer (collaborating with F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others) while working on his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? Once it was published, the book set off shockwaves with its frank exposure of the dark side of Hollywood’s golden era. The novel angered real-life industry heads and damaged his own father’s career. Schulberg was fired from his scriptwriting job with Samuel Goldwyn and nearly blacklisted in the filmmaking business.

  During World War II, Schulberg worked for the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA. In 1945, director John Ford tasked him to help assemble film evidence of the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to be used during the Nuremberg trials. This was the first time that film evidence was used in a trial to convict. He compiled footage shot by German filmmakers, including Leni Riefenstahl, who was arrested by Schulberg himself and brought to Nuremberg to help aid the prosecution.

  In 1951, Schulberg was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his former involvement with the Communist Party. Though he had been a member of the party for six years, he had quit after a bitter disagreement with party members who wanted to vet his script for What Makes Sammy Run?. During his testimony, he identified several
fellow Hollywood figures as Communists. The HUAC trials caused another rift between Schulberg and the film industry, with many feeling that his testimony betrayed friends and colleagues.

  Despite this setback, Schulberg soon had his greatest film success, with his screenplay for On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. The movie, about New Jersey longshoremen whose lives are controlled by the Mob, won eight Academy Awards and also evolved into a novel (1955) and a play (1988), both written by Schulberg. He soon reunited with Kazan, turning the title story from his collection Some Faces in the Crowd (1954) into a screenplay for the influential film A Face in the Crowd (1957), which launched the career of actor Andy Griffith.

  Throughout his career, Schulberg worked as a journalist and essayist, often writing about boxing, a lifelong passion. Many of his writings on the sport are collected in Sparring with Hemingway (1995) and Ringside (2006). Other highlights from Schulberg’s nonfiction career include Moving Pictures (1981), an account of his upbringing in Hollywood, and Writers in America (1973), a glimpse of some of the famous novelists he met early in his career.

  Schulberg married four times and had five children. He died at his home on Long Island in 2009.

  Schulberg’s parents, Adeline and B. P. Schulberg, hold an infant Budd in this early family portrait.

  Schulberg and his fourth wife, Betsy Schulberg, in Westhampton Beach, New York, in 2003. © 2003 Ken Regan

  Schulberg at work on his typewriter. At the top of this photo, he wrote the following note to his son: “For Benn, To a happy and productive life ahead! Love, Dad 8/14/2003.”

  Schulberg’s father, B. P. Schulberg.

  Origin: Culver Pictures Inc.

  Schulberg, B.P. (1892-1957), American film producer and executive

  “This picture is loaned for one reproduction only. Must not be used for advertising without written permission.”

  A portrait of Schulberg in 2003, with the following note to his son at the bottom: “For my dear son and best friend Benn with all my love, Dad 8/14/2003.”

  The Schulberg family in Westhampton, New York. From left to right: Jessica, Budd, Betsy, and Benn.

  From left to right: Schulberg, actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, Elia Kazan, and actress Myrna Loy.

  © Rita Katz

  Rita K. Katz

  40 East 88th STreet

  New York, NY, 10028

  © Rita Katz

  All Rights Reserved

  A letter from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to Schulberg, praising Moving Pictures, dated September 19, 1981.

  Brothers Stuart Schulberg and Budd Schulberg (from left to right) on the set of Wind Across the Everglades, a film written by Budd and produced by Stuart, in 1958.

  Budd Schulberg with his second wife, Virginia Anderson, at the pool outside his eighteenth-century farmhouse, Inghamdale, near New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Schulberg’s children David, Steve, and Victoria. This photo was taken around 1949.

  Schulberg with fellow members of the U.S. military, taken during World War II.

  Schulberg with sons David and Steve.

  Schulberg with Geraldine Brooks and pet cat at their family house on Long Island in the mid-1970s.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1955, 1983 by Budd Schulberg

  introduction copyright © 1987 by Budd Schulberg

  cover design by Oceana Garceau

  978-1-4532-6179-8

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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