Foremost among the places of higher learning was the New School for Social Research on Twelfth Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Funded by the heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney, the institution was established in 1919 and staffed by such prominent American academics as philosopher John Dewey and economist Thorstein Veblen. But by the early 1940s it had become an outpost of refugees—to such a degree that wags referred to it as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The school represented a broad spectrum of political and economic thought: Hannah Arendt lectured there; so did John Maynard Keynes and Karen Horney, Wilhelm Reich and Leo Strauss. The man who ran its drama department was Erwin Piscator, a radical German director who had collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on “epic theater.” Working together, they had broken down the “fourth wall” separating the actors from the audience, exhorting ticket holders to go out into the streets and bring politics into their everyday lives. The two had been well on their way to transforming the European stage when the Nazis took over. Both were resolutely anti-Fascist, but Piscator had an additional reason to flee: His wife, the dancer Maria Ley, was Jewish. They entered the United States in the late 1930s. Brecht headed for California, where he wrote scenarios for B pictures like Hangmen Also Die! Piscator disdained Hollywood; Manhattan was his kind of town.
The young Brandos felt the same way. E. B. White’s insight pertained to all three of them: The true New York is the “New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something…the city of final destination, the city that is a goal.” Frannie had settled down in Greenwich Village, where she studied painting with local artists. Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others were just beginning their careers in the downtown bohemia; for a painter it was the place to see and be seen. As critic Lionel Abel put it, the Villagers didn’t know whether an artist or thinker was right. They only judged by one thing: “To be interesting was to be right. Certainly to be uninteresting was to be wrong.” Frannie made sure she and her work were never less than provocative.
Jocelyn, already embarked on an acting career, lived in the Village, where she made a great show of independence. But she kept an eye on her kid brother, and, through letters and phone calls, assured Marlon senior and Dodie with a straight face that their son was dying to take courses in performance and movement. The school where she had studied, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, was perhaps too rigid for Bud, but she had heard wonderful things about Erwin Piscator’s classes. And the professor was only one of many distinguished teachers. On his New School faculty were Herbert Berghof, a German exile who had worked with the great impresario Max Reinhardt; John Gassner, an anthologist and historian of modern theater; and a second-generation actress named Stella Adler. The place sounded very stimulating and different; just right for Marlon junior. The senior Marlon felt ill at ease about bankrolling one more scholastic failure. At the same time he was impressed by the fact that Jocelyn had already found acting jobs. Finally he gave in. For a while at least, he would foot the bill for Bud’s tuition at the New School.
During the delicate negotiations Jocelyn had been unfailingly positive about her brother. She never mentioned his intoxicated condition. Bud was not high on booze; he was drunk on New York. All he had done since his arrival was wander the streets, subwaying up to Harlem at night, then sleeping all morning, either at Frannie’s place or on a bench in Washington Square Park. Others complained about wartime shortages; not Marlon. What did he care that cigarettes were in short supply? Or that makers of adult beverages had diverted much of their output to industrial alcohol? Or that you had to wait on long lines to get meat and butter? He had appetites for other things. One of his sharpest cravings was a need to meet people unlike himself, with different vocabularies, different approaches to life, different skins. Back in Illinois, his jazz idols had been the white drummers Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich. But one night he stepped into a ballroom on Broadway. As he remembered it, “I almost lost my mind with excitement when I discovered Afro-Cuban music.” Most of the people on the floor were Puerto Ricans, and they moved in a manner he had never seen before. It took his breath away, and he thought about becoming a modern dancer. After hanging out at the club, he changed his mind, bought a set of conga drums, and considered making a living as a percussionist in a Latin band. Then he went up to Harlem. There had been a race riot the year before, but it seemed to have been forgotten by the residents. The streets were filled, and the nightclubs presented musicians with something new to say. It was there that Marlon heard the first strains of bebop played by fresh talents like Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, artists on their way up. Miles Davis was a Juilliard student in 1944; he described the scene: “The way it went down at Minton’s was you brought your horn and hoped that Bird and Dizzy would invite you to play with them up on stage. People would watch for clues from Bird and Dizzy, and if they smiled when you finished playing, then that meant your playing was good.”
Intrigued by the heady atmosphere, Marlon kept returning to Harlem. On a summer evening he took his conga drums up to a small nightclub on 132nd Street and asked the proprietor if he could sit in with the band. His request was met with stone silence. He sat at a table, ordered a drink, and listened respectfully. He spotted a young black woman leaning against a far wall. What followed was a mix of fresh sexual desire and old yearning. The woman seemed dislocated, unhappy, like one of those sad girls of his childhood—the ones he would date because he felt sorry for them.
But along with these feelings was something entirely new: the wild idea of an interracial romance, unthinkable back in Libertyville. He made a welcoming gesture to the woman. She sidled over to his table and introduced herself as Sugar. Did he want to dance? As Marlon put his arm around her waist he noticed a man staring at them: “a black icebox with eyes like two .45’s.” The icebox introduced himself as Leroy. Marlon whispered to the girl. He suggested that they go downtown, drop by some places where they could hear bands, maybe dance a little.
She was agreeable. Marlon put some money down and went to the cloakroom. As he put on his coat, he heard a scuffle. A body flew past him horizontally and slammed into a pile of chairs and tables. It was Sugar. He pivoted on his right foot, opened the door, and headed south down Broadway, running hard, dodging autos at intersections, heading for the subway stop in the white neighborhood at 110th Street. He took the stairway down to the platform four steps at a time. After what seemed an eternity he heard a clattering of many footsteps on the same stairway just as he boarded the train. No pursuers got on with him. But what about the other cars?
The terrified nineteen-year-old had a nightmare vision of himself lying in a pool of blood. There was no way to quiet his heart. At Fifty-ninth Street he rushed off the subway and looked around him. Marlon was the only person to exit. He felt chagrined by his out-of-towner’s racial fears and misgivings. And he knew he would have to return to Harlem, not once but many, many times. For in these few hours Marlon had become besotted with what fashionable academics called “the Other.” These uptown people were of a race not his own. In his mind they were darker, wiser, more open to experience. Unlike whites, particularly whites from Middle America, they seemed in close touch with their bodies and souls; they had a profound, instinctive feeling for the rhythms of life. He had first attributed these romantic notions to Ermi, the Brandos’ half-Indonesian housekeeper. Now he distributed them to any and all black folks, young, dark-skinned women most of all. That appeal would last a lifetime.
To visit the jazz clubs, as well as to pay his share of the rent, Marlon needed money. He took odd jobs, running an elevator at Best & Co. and working as a hamburger slinger. Acting lessons were the farthest thing from his mind. He claimed to be smitten with Frannie’s neighbor Estrellita Rosa Maria Consuelo Cruz—he remembered her as “olive-skinned, fetching, extremely artistic and a great cook.” Then he took up with another neighbor, Celia Webb. He moved into her apartment for a while, but the truth is that h
e was only in love with freedom. Jocelyn brought her brother back to earth: He could go to school on his dad’s money or he could turn into a vagrant with no training and zero future. There were no alternate choices. He got the message and registered at the New School as a full-time student.
Despite the freedom he savored in New York, the need for parental recognition still gnawed at Bud, and he continued to write home with a pathetic mix of schoolboy excitement and anxiety. He described a “crazy” New York in detail, went on about his efforts to find an answer to the meaning of life—and then, to assure his parents that he was still a good, open-faced midwestern kid, he concluded,
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.
Heartfelt, no doubt, but also prompted by the prevailing wind of nostalgia sweeping the country. In this third year of global conflict, films spent an inordinate amount of time looking in the rearview mirror: Meet Me in St. Louis, National Velvet, Gaslight. And popular songs earned big royalties by lamenting the wartime situation of men without women and women without men—“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me),” “Long Ago and Far Away,” “Sentimental Journey”: “Never thought my heart could be so yearny,/Why did I decide to roam?/Gotta take that sentimental journey,/Sentimental journey home.”
Whatever wistful feelings Bud felt about home and hearth—and they were few—vanished upon his entry to the building on Twelfth Street. Not exactly a warm, welcoming place, but a serious one. Here, parental demands were replaced by professional ones. Piscator, a martinet with gray hair, cobalt-blue eyes, and a harsh German accent, insisted on an austere, worshipful attitude toward the theater. He hated Broadway pap. In his view, the war was responsible—pining and escapism had become the opiates of the people. The big musicals, for example, were trivia personified. Lady in the Dark, boasting Ira Gershwin’s first lyrics since the death of his brother George, concerned the psyche of a neurotic female editor; The Vagabond King and The Merry Widow were operettas celebrating a vanished epoch; One Touch of Venus, with a score by Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash, didn’t have a thought in its head, nor did a revue, Artists and Models, starring Jane Froman and a former standup comedian named Jackie Gleason. Piscator pointed out that when the new team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II came up with their breakthrough musical, Oklahoma!, they made sure to focus on the there and then, not the here and now. Like everyone else, the professor was amused by the lyrics for “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City,” with an awed hick singing about the fabulous mechanical improvements he has just seen with his own eyes. These include gas buggies that seem to go by themselves, a Bell telephone that allows people to communicate for miles around, a bawdy burlesque theater, a skyscraper that towers seven stories high, and best of all, heated privies.
But the smile froze on the professor’s face if he caught an acting student going for easy laughs the way they did uptown at the St. James Theatre. Piscator continually reminded his acolytes that their workplace was called the New School for a reason. There was nothing like it anywhere in the United States. Acting was treated as an all-encompassing vocation. Classes began at ten in the morning and frequently ran well into the night. There were lectures, workshops, and seminars in movement and dance, fencing, makeup, psychology, and history, as well as lessons in diction and performance. Word had gotten out about the drama department, and applications came from as far away as Oregon and Maine. The management was not interested in schleppers; every student had to show some ability, and Bud’s class was an especially gifted one. In the group were Elaine Stritch, Harry Belafonte, Shelley Winters, Rod Steiger, and Kim Stanley.
Predictably, Bud had a difficult time with Piscator’s rigid approach. Almost immediately he started to do skillful impressions of the professor behind his back, portraying him as Hitler to an audience of tittering students. Word got back to the lampooned, and the nineteen-year-old might well have washed out in his first few weeks had it not been for the guidance of a teacher more to his liking: Stella Adler. He had never met anyone remotely like her. No one had.
Now in her early forties, Stella could be just as imperious as Piscator, albeit with a different style and manner. Greasepaint was as familiar to her as lipstick. She had been born into the most prominent family in the Yiddish theater and maintained a lofty, aristocratic mien wherever she was. Once, it was said, as she was being shown a frock at Bergdorf Goodman’s, the saleslady asked if she was British. “No,” Stella replied frostily, “just affected.” Her mother, Sara, had been a leading diva, her father, Jacob, the most celebrated leading man on Second Avenue. In 1903 he became the first Jew to play Shylock on the New York stage, appearing in the Second Avenue version of The Merchant of Venice. His forceful interpretation electrified the Lower East Side—but then, it was supposed to. What he could not have predicted was the clamor outside the Jewish neighborhood. In a reference to the nineteenth-century actor/impresario, Theater magazine dubbed Jacob “The Bowery Garrick,” and a Broadway producer was so impressed he brought the star uptown. In this unique production every actor except Jacob spoke Shakespearean English. He gave his interpretation in Yiddish, just as he had done on the Lower East Side. Merchant was showered with raves. Adler never appeared again on Broadway, but it didn’t matter. He had vaulted the boundaries of the ghetto and shown his children the way to escape its psychological and physical confinements. Celia, a daughter by his second wife, worked onstage and in film. Luther, a son by Sara, Jacob’s third (and last) wife, became a major Broadway and Hollywood character actor, and his sister Stella outdid them all, not as a player but as the most influential acting teacher of her time.
In the 1930s Stella joined the powerhouse Group Theatre and eventually married one of its founders, Harold Clurman. But she never felt comfortable with the Group’s politics (“I could live in any communist country if I could be its queen” was one of her oft-quoted statements). Her objection to the Old Left was based on aesthetics rather than politics. Historian Richard H. Rovere, very familiar with the party line of the 1930s, was to say later on that the American intellectuals who fell hardest for communism were people “not of aristocratic tastes in art but of tastes at once conventional and execrable. The cultural tone they set was deplorable because it was metallic and strident.” In brief, not the sort of people with whom Stella could be comfortable. She felt just as uneasy with the company’s worshipful but distant view of Konstantin Stanislavski. In 1934 Stella had sailed to Europe to meet the great Russian acting teacher, found him in Paris, and asked for lessons. He preferred to address theater companies and groups, but made an exception for this American firebrand. She was the last actor to study with him privately, and she let everybody know it.
Upon her return to New York Stella ignited a feud with Lee Strasberg, Stanislavski’s primary advocate in America. Strasberg believed that actors should examine their pasts—dredging up wounds, joys, and passions and reproducing them onstage. Stella felt that this was a misreading of the master. Actors had to range beyond their emotional memories (the Strasberg method called for summoning up the loss of a childhood pet, for example, when a character is called upon to cry). She asked her students to find a new kind of realism: “Don’t act. Behave.” Above all, performers had to pay attention to the text, plumbing its deepest meanings, becoming the playwright’s collaborator. In her celebrated textbook The Art of Acting, Stella insists that the actor start “with words, but then must go beneath them. Texts must be examined. They have a secret under and around the words. An actor is one who uncovers and incorporates the secrets of words.” To her, anything less would be autobiography masking as interpretation.
Stella soon found the Group Theatre’s mix of global and office politics unbearable. She quit New York for Hollywood, altering her name to Stella Ardler and shortening her nose to a more photogenic size. Her timing could not have been worse. There we
re plenty of Jewish actors in 1930s Hollywood—Paulette Goddard (née Marion Levy), Sylvia Sidney (Sophia Kosow), John Garfield (Jacob Garfinkle), Edward G. Robinson (Emmanuel Goldenberg), Melvyn Douglas (Melvyn Hesselberg), and many others. In every case, however, they played against their ethnicity, and their backgrounds were generally unknown to the public. Not so Ms. Ardler, whose Yiddish-theater background was a matter of record, and who in any case was not the leading-lady type. She appeared in two films, Love on Toast, playing opposite a newcomer, John Payne, who got all the notices; and Shadow of the Thin Man, a vehicle hoisted by the charm of William Powell and Myrna Loy. Again Stella was pushed to the background. She talked herself into an office job at MGM, where she functioned as an assistant producer on B films. After six years she realized that she had made a wrong career move and headed back to New York to perform and direct. But it was when she joined the faculty of the New School as a temporary instructor that she found the role of a lifetime. Here she gave fiery readings of the Stanislavski approach, delivering lectures that turned into showpieces. She invited her students to come backstage in her memory: “My first feeling of self, my first true consciousness, was not in a home, not in a room, but in a dressing room.” This was Jacob’s true dwelling place. “One almost did not dare to penetrate the loneliness there. The loneliness came from my father, putting on his makeup. There was a special quality in this choosing of his colors and placing them, like a painter, one next to the other, an almost religious sense of something being created.
“I watched this creation. I watched a man change into another man.”
The audience of students sat enthralled as she described her childhood, her career, her approach to the art of acting. “She challenged the imagination,” recalled Shelley Winters. “Above all else, Stella never wanted us to bore an audience. That would be the greatest of sins.”
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