by Studs Terkel
9
The Actor
People have asked what might I have been had I not become what I am. Well, I would not have been a lawyer because it just wasn’t there for me—I passed the bar, but it was more Sullivan and Cromwell than Clarence Darrow.
I have been an eclectic disk jockey; a radio soap opera gangster; a sports and political commentator; a jazz critic; a pioneer in TV, Chicago style; an oral historian and a gadfly.
How come I did not became a lawyer? I had attended the University of Chicago law school and received my degree.
It is difficult to explain; allow me. I did so in a response to the registrar of the University of Chicago law school asking certain alumni of their experiences. It was several years after I had covered the waterfront and had became something of a minor celebrity. Chicago was my home of course.
My three years at the U of C law school (class of ’34) were the most bleak yet fascinating of my life. It was not the fault of the good professors; they did the best they could with me. Mine was a hopeless case. I was shamefully inattentive; my mind and heart were elsewhere.
During those years when I should have kept my gimlet eye on the Grail—Winston, Strawn and Shaw, or Mayer, Meyer, Austrian and Platt, and such home-and-hearths as Lake Forest, Kenilworth and Glencoe—I was lost in a world of daydream and fantasy. I had become a movie and theatre aficionado, and, most passionately, a lover of the blues.
I saw in Judge Hinton who taught procedure a bespectacled Lionel Barrymore. I saw in Professor Kent, who taught contracts, the portly Edward Arnold, who in movies best portrayed tycoons. And years later, whenever I saw the Brit actor, Alan Bates, I saw Charles Oscar Gregory who taught torts.
It was Sheldon Tefft, teaching Equity, who most impressed me. What I remember is not anything that he said, since, sadly, nothing memorable was said in torts, contracts and procedure. It was his voice that overawed me. His was a basso profundo, one octave lower than Feodor Chaliapin’s. It was not Mussorgsky’s Boris I envisioned in him; more of a basso buffo.
One day he called on me. (It was the only time I was ever called on during my three-year tenure, nor did I ever volunteer—perish the thought. I had successfully concealed myself behind a tall student until I heard Tefft’s sepulchral voice call out my name.)
I hadn’t the foggiest idea what the case was about, something in re a spite fence. I didn’t like the smell of the decision, though I had no idea why. I said, “This is no court of equity, it’s a court of iniquity.” There may have been a nervous snicker from two or three of the class. (There were about two hundred of us males, three women.) I shall never forget the Dickensian touch in Tefft’s righteous retort: “Not very amusing. Zero, of course.” Of course, he was right.
What is so singular about my attachment to my alma mater is that the jewels in the crown among its present faculty, those most publicly profiled, are of a slightly more conservative bent than I, somewhat Scalian in nature. (I imagine it was something of an honor to have had Mr. Justice Scalia on our faculty at one time. It was years after I had departed. I imagine myself in his class, fantasizing again; seeing him as Puccini’s Scarpia, Rome’s fearsome police chief. What a rogue and peasant slave am I, to think such dark thoughts.
True, there are malcontents and congenital naysayers who look upon the U of C law school as an adjunct to our Nobel-wreathed school of economics, an institution that has succeeded admirably in proselytizing our new religion: Free Marketry. Yet, I realize the intemperance and unfairness of this note, because there are faculty members, past and present, and fellow alumni, whom I have come to respect and in some instances revere.
Those I know and especially remember with admiration and affection are Leon Despres, one of our city’s finest public servants; Malcolm Sharp (I was in his very first class, Corporations); Abner Mikva, who has held to the highest standards; and, of course, the most beloved of all our law school teachers, Harry Kalven, gallant and learned advocate of the First Amendment.
Oh, yeah, I flunked the first bar exam held in June ’34. They were yes-or-no questions. I had neglected to take the Baker or Evans quiz courses designed for the occasion. It wouldn’t have helped anyway. I did pass the bar exam held in November. They were yes-but-on-the-other-hand essay questions. I was good at that.
Despite all of the above misadventures, I love the U of C law school and treasure those three years of attendance. Allow me to explain.
Never having driven an automobile, I was a streetcar student, traveling from the Near North Side to Hyde Park. It involved three trolleys. One point of transfer was in the black belt, known as Bronzeville. It was there while waiting that I heard recorded music—blues songs—blaring out of the gallimaufry stores; everything secondhand was for sale. Even used phonograph records. I fell deeply in love and bought them by the score, a nickel or a dime each. It may explain why I was so often late for class.
So it was that I came to listen to and learn from some of my most memorable mentors: Big Bill Broonzy; Memphis Slim; Tampa Red; Memphis Minnie; Roosevelt Sykes, the Honey Dripper; Duke Ellington’s scratchy “Black and Tan Fantasy,” Louis’s “West End Blues” in which his horn and his mouth are fused, and even from Peatie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law.
Were it not for the U of C law school, where would I have been? What would have become of me? Those three years altered my life for the better. I think. And for that reason, I am deeply grateful.
INSTEAD OF LAW, I might have found myself doing something involving hotels. Deep down my dream might have been to become a theater critic—I did review a couple of plays for Friday, a short-lived liberal magazine. Remember, I started seeing plays when I was very young because of the posters put up at the hotel by the press agents.
Nobody at the hotel attended plays, but the press agents came to town a couple of weeks ahead of any play and they’d put up posters in the big hotels around the Loop. Since the Wells-Grand was in the vicinity, what the hell, they put up a sign: In Abraham’s Bosom, by Paul Green, with Rose McClendon, a great black actress; or Burlesque , with Hal Skelly and Barbara Stanwyck. Burlesque is about an old hoofer and his faithful partner, a theme that’s been done a million times. Skelly plays the old-time hoofer whose girl sticks with him even though a very rich guy, a good guy, wants to take her away. Toward the end, the old hoofer says, “You had this good guy and instead you’re with me. Why are you doing that?” They’re doing a soft-shoe as the curtain is descending.
She says, “Well, I married you for better or for worse.”
He says, “Yeah. Better for me and worse for you.” That’s how it closes. I remember those last lines.
The Theatre Guild was an important group in American theatre. They traveled around, but they were based in New York. Lunt and Fontanne were members of the Guild, and they would do Lunt and Fontanne plays, such as George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man and Pygmalion. The Theatre Guild was a great theater company.
I remember seeing a play by the two Czech brothers, the Capeks. It was called RUR, Rossum’s Universal Robots. It’s about a robotic revolution. Here’s this factory that’s spreading the idea of robots all over the world. The human beings are being served, but the robots revolt and take over and the human beings are out. The play is about a young couple of robots who have something called heart. These two robots, like Ferdinand and Miranda in The Tempest, discover each other. She’s the one who says, “What something perfect this human being is.” She’d never seen one before. They see each other. And that’s how it ends, on a note of hope that the human being might come back. Never has RUR been as apropos as it is today.
FORTUNATELY, during my aimless search for a career, I met a man named Charlie DeSheim, who was also working for FERA. As a result of that meeting, I became an actor . . . entirely by accident. Charlie DeSheim was brilliant, quite a good actor, and a director.
After I met him, I’d get two tickets and see plays with Charlie, and all the time we’d talk theater. Charlie had a labor theater group and one day
he said, “Don’t be such a dilettante, why don’t you come down and see us at work?” So I did. Today in Chicago we’ve got terrific acting, with many groups at work. But then it was very unusual; this was the only theater outfit of its kind. The group was originally called the Workers’ Theater; eventually it became the Chicago Repertory Group. Those ten years, during the thirties and forties, when I was involved with the Rep Group, may have been the turning point of my life.
We were a farm club of the Group Theater—we used the same technique. Read the same book, An Actor Prepares by Konstantin Stanislavski. We’d work from a painting, say, The Poker Players by Monet, two guys playing poker. You know which one’s the winner and which the loser. You take off from that picture and improvise the scene.
My first roles were small and offstage. In Waiting for Lefty, the theater is a union hall—the idea is that the people in the audience are union members. Actors were planted throughout the house and would say their lines from the audience. One of those turns out to be a phony, a fink. I lay into him and he starts running through the auditorium. This was during the time of a taxicab drivers’ strike in Chicago, and we were performing at a strike meeting with cabdrivers in the audience. What do you think they did when this guy started running? They started smacking him! I hollered: “It’s a play! It’s a play! Don’t! Don’t! He’s an actor!” The audience finally got the idea. The guy says, “I’m not doing this role any more.” So I did his role (but that was nothing like being onstage).
I was sitting there one night, as a spectator, waiting for Waiting for Lefty to start. A guy gets sick and doesn’t show up for a big part, so I pinch-hit. Joe. Right up on the stage, never been on stage before in my life. This is opening night at the Civic Opera House. I’d had no dress rehearsal for technical matters, lights, nothing. The lights go on, and I get up and start talking. In the play, I return home and the lights dim. I never had lights dim. Charlie told me in advance, “Keep talking. Even though the lights dim, they’re not going out.”
I remember I got a funny sort of feeling, but I kept on talking. I come home, and the place is empty. And then the woman playing my wife appears and I say: “Where’s all the furniture, honey?”
“They took it away. No installment paid.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“They can’t do that.”
“They can’t? They did.” That’s how my life as an actor began. That experience, doing that role, being in that theater group, altered my life.
Suddenly I had a way to earn a little money. Soap operas in Chicago ! Charlie said, “There are loads of soap operas. You’ve got a rough talking voice; why don’t you try out?” I became a sporadic soap-opera villain.
It was a catch-as-catch can existence. I’d appear as someone named Pete or Bugs or Bullets or The Chicago Kid. At times, my well-deserved end came in more bloody fashion. I was run off the cliff by some local constable; I was shot by a companion; in all instances, I was disappeared. In despair, I once asked the director if I couldn’t play a good guy for a change, the hero perhaps. Ruefully, he explained, heroes had pear-shaped tones; mine were apricot-shaped. 23
10
Observer to Activist
The Chicago Rep Group was a center.24 Its audience was made up of teachers and social workers and cabdrivers. It was the Great Depression and this was the theater of then: Waiting for Lefty, Cradle Will Rock. We’d perform street theater at picket lines and soup kitchens; we regularly appeared before unions, performing Waiting for Lefty as various strikes were being organized—performing in Union halls, Finnish halls, Polish halls, Czech halls. Chicago was full of vitality. High, low . . . roller coaster. This was the world I was engaged with and it was exciting.
When the Newspaper Guild was being organized in 1937, we did a special sketch for the occasion: COMPANY UNION SUITS HEARST in the soup kitchen. No one had ever thought of organizing newspapermen. Newspaper guys thought: Union? We’re not blue collar . . . The guy who got them thinking otherwise was Heywood Broun. The big memory of 1937 is the steelworkers’ strike and the Memorial Day Massacre. Though I wasn’t present at the event, I was there the day after.
The steelworkers were being organized, it was succeeding, and the big steel companies recognized the union—Carnegie, US Steel, and Bethlehem all had agreements. But one holdout in Chicago was the Republic Steel Company. The virulently anti-union head of the board, Tom Girdler, hired Chicago policemen, led by Captain Mooney, to protect the scabs and keep the union guys out during a strike at the plant. The strike was on, but this was not a strike day, it was Memorial Day.
The workers and their families decided to have a picnic on the grounds: chicken and potato salad, and baseball. They were playing games, making speeches, and in the afternoon, a spontaneous parade took form. Someone threw a rock at someone else, next thing you know Captain Mooney orders: Shoot! The cops shot ten guys in the back.
The next day, I and a few other Rep Group members took a streetcar to Sam’s Place, which was a bar where the union guys all met. This was a scene out of Matthew Brady’s photo just after Gettysburg. Guys with wounds, bandages, beaten and bloody. Harry Harper, as handsome as David Niven, was shot in the eye. He wore a black patch and resembled the Hathaway shirt man in the celebrated ad.
About a week later there’s a huge rally at the Opera House, overflowing with steelworkers. This was a bitterness rally after the Memorial Day Massacre. (My wife later told me that the Chinese had gatherings called bitterness meetings, in protest of wrongs.) I’m way up in the balcony next to a steelworker, and Carl Sandburg is taking a year-and-a-half to get a sentence out. Sandburg was a ham, and when he talked it took forever just for him to introduce a guy. “And, ah, they say . . .” and you’re waiting, going crazy, “. . . there was a riot. And they say . . .” And you sigh. “. . . the strikers used sticks . . . and stones . . .” and the steelworker next to me says, “Come on!” Finally, “Now may I introduce the pres-i-dent of the brother-hood of . . . sleep-ing car porters . . . A. Phillip Randolph.”
The chairman of the rally, Robert Morse Lovett, a beloved teacher of American Studies at the U of C, gets up and says, “Mooney is a killer, Mooney is a killer, we’ve got to stop these killers!”
The next day, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the brand-new young chancellor of the U of C, is in his office. All kinds of calls are coming in, members of the board are saying, “Fire Lovett. We’ve lost five million in funds!”
Just then a popular old professor appears, James Webber Linn. The old professor says to the young new chancellor, “If you fire Bob Lovett, you’ll have on your desk the resignations, signed and sealed, of twenty tenured college professors.”
Hutchins says, “No, I won’t. My successor will.” That was the spirit of the times.
11
A Bouquet from the Colonel
After I returned to Chicago from Washington, I kept up with the Rep Group and again acted as a gangster in Chicago soap operas. By this time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) had begun. There was hammer-and-shovel work—millions repairing and building roads, construction of low-income housing and public buildings. There were the arts projects: painting, dance, music, theater. Out of the Federal Theater Project came a new style called the Living Newspaper. It was an invention of the columnist Heywood Broun, founder of the Newspaper Guild.
Living Newspaper was multimedia theater: It might be a piece of newsreel, a narrator, a dramatic scene, a bit of music. It always involved the social issues of the day. There’s a bit of that in Citizen Kane—at the beginning you have The March of Time. Roosevelt’s second inaugural address had a core phrase: “I see one third of a nation ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed.” One Third of a Nation was a Living Newspaper about the lack of housing. New York had a production, but Chicago had its own adaptation, about wooden two-flats rather than tall tenements. I played Angus K. Button-cooper, the “little man” narrator.
Meanwhile, I had applied to the WPA Writer’s Proje
ct, submitting something in longhand about Tecumseh, the Indian chief, and his eloquence as a speaker. A new endeavor came out of the Writer’s Project—the Radio Division. There were six writers; Barry Farnol was our chief. We did a series in collaboration with the Art Institute. We’d consult their curators—I spoke with the French curator for a script on Daumier; the American curator for one on Albert Pinkham Ryder; the Dutch curator for one about van Gogh.
The scripts aired on WGN, with a director and professional actors. WGN Radio (along with the Chicago Tribune) was owned by Colonel Robert McCormick, known to all Chicago as “the Colonel.”
One day Barry Farnol comes in and says, “Would you believe what I’ve got? This letter went to the head of our project, Curtis McDougall: ‘I have just listened to your fine program about great artists on my station and it was wonderful. I’m so proud to have you with us, and I want to thank you for enriching Chicago’s culture.’ ” Signed “Colonel Robert M. McCormick.”
I’m convinced that the Colonel fell asleep long before the program ended, and certainly before the credits came on. The credits? “Written by: [say] Studs Terkel [or Arnie Freeman, or Richard Durham], under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Harry Hopkins, Director.” And if there was one person the Colonel hated more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was Harry Hopkins. He had to have been sound asleep when those credits hit the airwaves.
The Colonel had something called the Saturday Evening Symphony Hour on WGN, heard throughout the country. Win Stracke was a member of the chorus. His friend Fran Coughlin produced the show and said to Win: “I’ve got a problem. The Colonel has to speak at one time or another in the show—five minutes about his adventures, and knowledge of the war, and the military. My problem : The Colonel has potatoes in his mouth. People automatically turn him off. The audience gets cut to a third. I gotta figure out how to do this. I won’t have him on at a certain time, I’ll keep changing it around so people can never be certain.”