In the Company of Legends

by Joan Kramer

  “The next morning, my secretary buzzed: ‘Governor Clinton is calling.’

  “‘Hello, Governor.’

  ‘Mr. Wasserman. You can’t invite that many people. Hardly anyone knows me. And you can’t charge so much money. And are you kidding? Barbra Streisand? Steven Spielberg? They won’t come.’

  “I said, ‘Governor, I don’t mean to be rude, but the event is now twelve days away and I’m busy. I’ve got a lot to do. So I can’t stay on the line. Have your guy call me if you need anything else. Otherwise leave it to me. Have a nice trip, enjoy the scenery and I’ll see you in LA.’

  “My phone was buzzing again. And again, that same guy was outside my door. I said, ‘Get in here. I just spoke to the Governor so I don’t have anything to say to you. Don’t come back here. I’m busy.’”

  And then Wasserman interjected, “And by the way, this time his outfit was a little better, but not by much. Clinton called once or twice more, but his guy never showed up again, thank goodness.”

  He paused for a few seconds, and then said to us, “Eleven days later, the fundraiser made 1.7 million dollars.

  “So, as I said at the beginning, if it weren’t for me, he’d still be on the bus.”

  DH He obviously loved telling stories and we were an enthusiastic audience. It wasn’t an act. We found him captivating.

  He almost never consented to on-camera interviews, so we were surprised when he agreed to do the one for The Universal Story1. And then a few years later, for another project2, he allowed us to record a long audio interview with him. In short, he was clearly comfortable with us.

  JK It was during our very first meeting that he told us about his personal collection of Universal memorabilia, which he kept at home. That was all I had to hear. I must have asked him at least three times, “Mr. Wasserman, can we come and rummage in your closet?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  We were more than ready, and soon were spending hours in his screening room/den as he pulled scrapbooks from the shelves, including one of a stag party he threw for Jimmy Stewart right before Stewart’s marriage.

  DH A few weeks later, we returned to photograph the parts of the collection we needed for the show. This time he wasn’t there. It was his wife, Edie, who let us in, and I realized immediately that she expected us to be there for about fifteen to twenty minutes. I knew it would take me at least an hour, so it became Joan’s job to keep her occupied while I set up lights and took pictures. Fortunately Edie was happy to give Joan a tour of the house, showing her paintings, hand-written notes by John F. Kennedy outlining the plans for what would become The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, etc. Joan kept asking questions to divert her from checking her watch. I think she also enjoyed the tour.

  JK The last time we saw Lew Wasserman was on May 10th, 2002. It had been three years since our last visit. When we walked into his office that morning, he said, “Where the hell have you two been? I thought you’d forgotten me.”

  I said, “My mother’s been ill and I couldn’t travel.”

  “Don’t blame your mother. You’re probably the one who made her sick.”

  We were there about forty-five minutes and it was getting close to noon.

  He said, “I have to throw you out now. I have a lunch date. Do you want a table in the commissary?”

  For some reason, I chose that moment to make a request. “Mr. Wasserman, I’ve never asked you this before. But I have a camera in my bag. Would you let us have a picture with you?”

  He pushed his intercom button, “Get in here. You’re going to take a photo.”

  His assistant, Melody, said, “I’m terrible with cameras. Let the driver do it.” (Wasserman was showing his age by then. He had a chronic knee problem, and used a driver to bring him to the studio and back home.)

  I said, “We can’t use the flash with that big window behind you. Would you please swivel your chair so we can have a different angle?”

  David and I then stood on either side of him and the driver took two pictures. One is better than the other.

  Twenty-four days later, Lew Wasserman died. We believe those are the last photographs ever taken of him.

  The final speaker at his memorial service was Bill Clinton, who told the mourners, “If it weren’t for Lew Wasserman, I never would have been elected President of the United States.”

  David, Lew Wasserman, and Joan.

  Universal City, CA, 2002. Authors’ collection.

  The John Garfield Story narration session. Recording engineer John Heffernan, Julie Garfield, Joan, and David.

  New York, 2002. Authors’ collection.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Garfield—The Good Die Young

  His rise to fame in Hollywood and eventual crash-landing was a compelling story. However, the idea for a program about John Garfield wasn’t ours. The head of Turner Classic Movies, Tom Karsch, proposed it. And the initial idea wasn’t his either. Garfield’s daughter, Julie, had written and suggested it to him. Tom admitted to us later that his mother had always loved Garfield and his films. She wasn’t alone. Many women used to say, “He can put his shoes under my bed any time.” And men admired him too. He was handsome without being pretty, rugged without being brutish, and vulnerable without being soppy.

  We met Julie Garfield in her apartment in New York. She is an actress, acting teacher, and painter. She looks very much like her father, and is the only one of his three children still alive. Her older sister, Katherine, died at the age of six, and her brother, David, died when he was in his early forties. We felt an instant connection to Julie and apparently she felt the same towards us.

  John Garfield made an immediate impact when he appeared on screen in his first film, Four Daughters, winning an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. But his life was a roller-coaster, and it ended when he was just thirty-nine years old.

  JK His story is well-known among actors and many of them are passionate about his films, his performances, and his personal code of ethics. During the communist “witch hunts” of the 1950s, he became a victim of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), when he was summoned to testify. He refused to “name names” and particularly wanted to protect his wife, Robbe, who had once been a member of the Communist Party, as he knew that the Committee was in possession of her expired Party membership card. As Richard Dreyfuss said, “By taking that position, he must have known he was committing professional suicide.” Indeed He Ran All the Way, which was released the same year that he testified, was Garfield’s last film.

  It was not unexpected that almost everyone we asked to participate in the program willingly agreed. Among them were—in addition to Dreyfuss—Joanne Woodward, Danny Glover, James Cromwell, Ellen Adler, Phoebe Brand, Patricia Neal, Harvey Keitel, Norman Lloyd, Hume Cronyn (his last interview before his death at the age of ninety-one), Joseph Bernard, Lee Grant, and a classmate of Garfield named Michael Coppolo. They each had a unique perspective on either his acting or his personal life—and sometimes both. Some had known him for many years; some had been his co-stars; and some, unfortunately, had been blacklisted.

  Danny Glover said of John Garfield, “You watched him mold the internal life of his characters through the silences, through the moments.”

  New York, 2002. Authors’ collection.

  JK and DH We weren’t too far into production before we realized that the host for this show should be Julie. Tom Karsch gave his approval with the proviso that the script be written to avoid any over-the-top sentimentality. Julie completely understood that and struck just the right balance.

  She was also an invaluable colleague. Not only did she let us borrow her personal collection of photos, news clippings, etc., but she also pitched in to help us find materials that were hard to come by. Among them was footage of her father’s funeral.

  When he died, she was only six-and-a-half, and she remembers being surprised that her mother didn’t cry. She said, �
�I knew she was strong, but wondered how she could keep herself from falling apart, and thought that it must have been to protect my brother and me. But the night of his funeral, after I’d been put to bed, I couldn’t sleep, so I sneaked out of my bedroom and into a corner near the living room. That’s when I saw my mother crying. She was sobbing on the shoulder of a friend as news film of the funeral was playing on television.”

  DH Obviously Julie had been profoundly affected by the scene she’d witnessed, and hearing her tell it affected me too. I then realized that incidentally there was an additional nugget of information here: that there had been news coverage of the funeral. I had already seen a New York Times headline saying that the turnout had been the largest in the city since Rudolph Valentino died back in 1926. Garfield’s death must have had a visceral impact on many people. We needed to find that film.

  Since Julie’s mother had been watching television late in the evening, she had to have been tuned to a local news broadcast. So Joan and I called all the New York area television stations, only to be told that none of them had any record of the film in their files. I was stumped, but decided to ask our researcher in Washington, DC, Cindy Mitchell, to check the National Archives to see whether any of the national newsreels had shot the funeral. They hadn’t. However, digging further, Cindy found a card indicating that WPIX, Channel 11 in New York, had donated some of its news film collection to the Archives, but that access to it was restricted. The card suggested that the footage we were looking for might be there, but Cindy was not even allowed to screen it. We discovered that Tribune Entertainment had bought WPIX some years earlier, so Joan called the main office in Chicago. No one there knew anything about the collection in the National Archives, but told her to contact a WPIX lawyer in New York.

  JK Roger Goodspeed confirmed that the station had indeed deposited much of its news film with the National Archives. However he reiterated that the no-access policy was still in place. I had a feeling that there might be room to maneuver, so I told him more about John Garfield’s story, Julie’s involvement, and how everyone we had contacted was being very co-operative. Eventually he said, “Why don’t you have Julie herself write a letter to me telling about how she saw the news coverage when she was a child? And also say who else is letting you have footage.”

  We helped her compose the letter and she concluded it with a plea to reconsider our request. It went immediately to WPIX by messenger. The next day, Julie came to our office and called Mr. Goodspeed. She said, “I’ll get down on my knees and beg if I have to.” He replied, “That won’t be necessary. We’ve decided to let you use the film.”

  It is this funeral footage that opens the program.

  DH Another hard-to-find piece of film was related to Humoresque, about a violin virtuoso. John Garfield had never played a note on the violin in his life, but wanted to immerse himself in the character, so he asked the studio for help. Warner Bros. had already hired Isaac Stern to perform the soundtrack, and shot special footage of him playing so that Garfield could study an accomplished violinist, especially his arm and finger movements. Warners and Turner Entertainment Co. searched their libraries, but neither could find any reference to it.

  I asked Julie if her father had had the film. She’d never seen it, but told me she’d donated his entire collection of 16mm movies to New York University’s film department. Fortunately NYU had made an inventory—and it included one unlabeled can. It was a long-shot, but I decided it was worth going to screen it. And there it was—the footage of Isaac Stern that Garfield had used to prepare for his performance. Stern’s widow gave us permission to use it in the program, and we sent her a cassette for her own archives.

  JK We also enlisted Julie’s help in asking Harvey Keitel for an interview. She had appeared with him in a stage production of Death of a Salesman and, more recently, in the film, Mortal Thoughts. Even though he usually turned down such requests, he agreed as a favor to her. He lived in New York, but was going to be in Los Angeles at the same time that we would be there, so we arranged to tape him at the home of one of his business associates. He was delayed, and by the time he arrived, was obviously pre-occupied. For some reason he was testy and irritated by almost every question. It was one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever done. He refused to sign the release we needed, and for quite some time, it looked as though we wouldn’t be able to use any of his comments.

  Once we returned to New York, he asked to look at the footage we’d shot of him, and David went with Julie to his office. After another special request from her, he did agree to let us use one—and only one—of his on-camera statements. In it, he explains Garfield’s audience appeal: a combination of tough and vulnerable. It’s succinct and to the point, and while quite short, we were happy to have those few seconds in the show.

  Richard Dreyfuss, Joanne Woodward, and Julie Garfield.

  New York, 2002. Authors’ collection.

  Completely opposite were our experiences with Joanne Woodward and Richard Dreyfuss, whom we scheduled to be taped on the same day. Both of them were able to tell us why they felt so strongly about John Garfield as an actor.

  Joanne described his performances as “subtle; whatever he chose as the inner life of his characters we’ll never know. But in each one of his films, he had an ‘interior dialogue’ that he used to inform every nuance of his performance.” Like him, she was trained in “The Method.” But as a young student, she told her acting teacher, Sanford Meisner, that she didn’t understand it and therefore didn’t know how to use it. He replied, “Joanne, ‘The Method’ is whatever works for you.” She said, “Garfield certainly had a method, and whatever it was, it worked for him.”

  Richard Dreyfuss arrived just as Joanne was about to leave. They knew each other slightly, but hadn’t seen each other in many years. At the time, she was the Artistic Director of the Westport Country Playhouse. When Richard embraced her, he said, “I’d love to do a play for you.”

  She said, “Terrific. I’ll be in touch.” Indeed, the following summer he starred in All My Sons there.

  Dreyfuss was in the midst of filming his television series, The Education of Max Bickford, frequently working fourteen-hour days, when I contacted his assistant, Audrey, and told her we’d love to have his “take” on John Garfield. But she said he’d told her he couldn’t do anything else because he was just drained by the end of each day. The next morning she called me back. Apparently Richard had said, “If it’s for Joan and David, I’ll be there.” He was indeed, and gave us an insightful interview.

  He’d spent many late nights as a kid watching Garfield’s movies on television, and knew every one of them. His ability to recall the plots and then analyze specific scenes was extraordinary. And he pointed out a quality not just in Garfield, but in many actors who play romantic leads.

  He said, “They all have an off-stage wound. And it may not ever be explained to the audience, but you just know that something in the character’s back-story causes him to act and react to the circumstances in the film the way he does. Often the wound is caused by a lost love; other times it’s because of racism or war or some other traumatic event. But all the great actors—Brando, Bogart, Tracy, Stewart, Fonda, Flynn, and Garfield—have a wound. For instance, just look at Humphrey Bogart when you first see him in Casablanca. His wound is all over his face, and it’s irresistible. And when Garfield encounters an anti-Semitic drunk in a restaurant in Gentleman’s Agreement, he has a knee-jerk reaction. In one second, he goes from having a light-hearted conversation during dinner with some friends, to an enraged victim of racism. And it’s because he has that ‘wound’ that he’s in that guy’s face faster than you can spit.”

  The following week, Audrey called again. Richard was in the hospital, being treated for exhaustion. Not, by the way, as a result of the interview he did for us.

  DH Most of our New York filming was in my loft. Although I have a fairly large space, we needed almost all of it for the camera set-ups, so I had
to clear away all my personal belongings, and the only place to pile everything was the bedroom, which started to look like a disheveled storage warehouse.

  Signing her interview release, Patricia Neal with Joan.

  New York, 2002. Authors’ collection.

  Patricia Neal, who had played opposite Garfield in The Breaking Point, arrived early and was fascinated by the loft, insisting on a complete tour. When we came to the doors that lead into the bedroom she asked, “What’s in there?” “It’s my bedroom,” I told her. “But it’s a terrible mess right now.” However, try as I might, nothing I said would deter her; she had to see inside. When I reluctantly opened the door, she realized my description was no exaggeration. I was embarrassed, but she didn’t seem to care.

  JK After the interview, she admired the blouse I was wearing and asked where I’d bought it. When I told her it was from a neighborhood store not far from David’s loft, she said, “See if you can find another one for me.” I indeed did find it and brought it to her apartment overlooking the East River.

  “How much do I owe you?” she asked.

  “It’s a present to thank you for participating in our program.”

  “Stay right there,” she said, and went into another room. When she returned, she handed me a first edition of her autobiography, As I Am, which she inscribed for me.

  “Now perhaps we’re even,” she said.

  “I think I’ve wound up with the better end of the deal,” I replied.

  JK and DH John Garfield had been a member of The Group Theatre in the 1930s, so we knew about his acting training, thanks to the five years we spent producing Broadway’s Dreamers: The Legacy of the Group Theatre1. Although a number of the original members we’d interviewed during the 1980s had died in the years since, a few were still alive and living in New York. Among them was Phoebe Brand, who came in her wheelchair and gave us a first-hand account of working with Garfield in several Group Theatre productions.