Perhaps, to be honest, the board liked the idea of adding an American Negro or two. The school had none in the beginning, and as I soon realized on my first day, I was the only one in my class. I introduced myself to my fellow students, and they introduced themselves to me. Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando. Also, one Bernie Schwartz, later known as Tony Curtis. The names meant no more to me than mine did to them.
The one name that stood out was Piscator’s. He was a giant of twentieth-century German theater, whose brutal experiences in World War I as a draftee in the German infantry had shaped his artistic vision. After the war, he’d joined the Dadaist movement, staging plays that embraced the Dadaists’ message of nonsense and formlessness as the only response to war’s absurdities. When he’d sensed Dada’s limits, he’d moved to Berlin to start a proletarian theater, staging plays by Maksim Gorky, among others, that played in workers’ halls and granted free admission to the unemployed. The plays dramatized political issues of the day, with bold new visual elements that addressed his audience directly: relevant facts flashed on a small side screen, for example, as the actors spoke their lines, or war footage shown behind them. Because these devices were like a Greek chorus, filling the audience in, Piscator and Bertolt Brecht called their approach “epic theater.” Hitler’s rise drove Piscator to Moscow as a political refugee; Stalin’s rule of terror led him to flee again, this time to Paris. In 1939, with Hitler’s invasion of France imminent, Piscator needed yet another political haven, and found one at the New School. And so began one of the most exciting and influential experiments in American theater.
The great director didn’t hold acting classes. He gave lectures, which I attended, but I saw him up close only when he hurried past me in the halls. I knew not to break his stride with small talk; if you had something to say to Mr. Piscator, it had better be important. Yet the workshop bristled with his energy and sense of mission, and all of us were inspired by it. Drama was serious; it was a tool to speak truth to power, to change society and, especially, to show the folly of war. There was no light fare or screwball comedy at the Dramatic Workshop. And no stars, at least not in theory. We were all workers of equal standing in Piscator’s dramatic collective. In that spirit, we learned not just acting but stage design and set-building, lighting, directing, and playwriting. I might be an actor in one production, but then up on the catwalk, manning lights, in the next. Some of our plays we wrote as collective efforts. But Piscator’s reputation also brought us new plays by world-class writers. Jean-Paul Sartre let the workshop stage the first U.S. production of The Flies while I was there, and he came to the opening. Robert Penn Warren gave us his first stage adaption of All the King’s Men, his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Inspired, I read these and every other play that Piscator mentioned, and all the classics I could get my hands on. In those first months at the Dramatic Workshop, I felt my whole world opening up.
Almost as soon as I enrolled in the workshop, I moved down to the Village. My mother, like Marguerite, was horrified I’d blown my G.I. Bill money on drama school, and my living with her and her new family in a cramped Harlem apartment had put us all on edge. The ANT director Charles Sebree invited me to share his Bleecker Street apartment for free until I found a place of my own. His generosity came at a price, I soon learned; Charles was gay, and had hopes that I might move from the living room to the bedroom. That got awkward. As soon as I could, I found a better setup through another ANT colleague, a songwriter named Alan Greene. Alan and a fellow songwriter shared a large basement apartment in the Eighties off Central Park West. They were both harmonica players and had a pretty good act. They proposed that I pay just $9.50 a month, quite a bit less than a third of the rent, and make up the difference by serving as the group’s cook and cleanup man. For that, I still needed a part-time job, so I found one back in the garment district, pushing racks of clothes.
Both of my new roommates were white, and cooking and cleaning up for them might have made me feel like some black retainer. But it didn’t. For the first time in my life, I felt no racial distance. Always with white people, I’d had my guard up, waiting for the next racist slight, unconscious though it might well be: the white woman in the elevator, tensing as I got on and pulling her handbag tighter under her arm; or the white guy in a suit and tie talking in what he thought was black lingo, to show how liberal he was. Here there was none of that. Alan and his roommate were free of prejudice and, by no coincidence, passionately left wing in their politics.
All over postwar Manhattan, but especially on the West Side and down in the Village, everyone was talking politics. Socialism, communism, Progressivism—the fault lines among these were never very clear, at least not to me in 1947, for everyone seemed to share the same idealistic goals. At parties, cheap wine and booze fueled long bull sessions on how to achieve a classless society, not just in America but around the world. Writers from John Steinbeck to Ernest Hemingway, playwrights from Arthur Miller to Clifford Odets, even poets like Dylan Thomas—all were writing, and speaking publicly, about how to reshape capitalism, and Russia, still our ally in victory against Hitler, seemed to be leading the way. Race issues were very much in the mix of all this: In whatever brand of utopia was being promoted, there would be a full embrace of racial equality and civil rights for all. I went to lectures at the Jefferson School on Sixth Avenue, which openly billed itself as an institute of Marxist thought affiliated with the American Communist party. At one, I remember, journalist I. F. Stone spoke. There were lectures, too, at union halls, where young leftists mixed with hard-core laborers. Socialists and communists alike embraced the working class as the bedrock of a new political order. They railed at the federal government for its strike-busting laws, and vowed to overturn them. I liked the spirit of brotherhood that those meetings nurtured. But I never signed on as a member of the American Socialist or Communist party, or even viewed myself as a fellow traveler, as the jargon of the day had it. Perhaps the notion of joining anything held me back. The only group with a political agenda I’d joined was the U.S. Navy, and I was thrilled to be out of that.
For fun, I often hung out with Tony Curtis. He lived in the Bronx with his family; why live downtown, he’d say, when he could live uptown for free? And who cared if they still greeted him up there as Bernie Schwartz? Tony knew just how talented he was, and how handsome—pretty more than handsome—and he didn’t need to live in the Village to prove himself. We went to a lot of parties together. Occasionally we went with Elaine Stritch, who swore more colorfully than any sailor I’d known, and Bea Arthur, who’d start matching wits with Elaine until the two of them had everyone in uncontrollable laughter. They were a gorgeous, sexy, vibrant pair, Bea the blunt Jewish comic, Elaine the diva. Walter Matthau, who lived in Hell’s Kitchen, was wonderful company, too, though even then he cared a lot more about betting on horses than going to parties. I can remember one time, distinctly, when two or three jowly-looking types in raincoats came to visit him at school because he owed them money.
The classmate we all wanted to be with more than any other, though, was Marlon Brando. By the fall of 1947, Brando had made a name for himself as a stage actor, mostly for his brooding portrait of a troubled veteran in Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, which had gotten him notice as “Broadway’s Most Promising Actor.” He’d gone on to co-star with Katharine Cornell in her latest production of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida, and then to star with Paul Muni in an unabashedly political play, A Flag Is Born, advocating the creation of a new Jewish state in Palestine. Now he’d landed the lead in a new play called A Streetcar Named Desire. He’d never attended classes very much at the Dramatic Workshop, and with Streetcar in rehearsals, he came to even fewer.
But whether he showed up in class or not, Marlon had a huge impact on us. All of us, without quite realizing it, began acting with a Brando-like intensity. When he did come to class, he always seemed brimming with emotion, and we never knew which way he’d
go, joyful or sullen. Afterward, I’d sometimes catch a ride with him on his motorcycle, wrapping my arms around his sweater and hanging on for dear life as he roared down the Village streets with his cycling soul mate, Wally Cox—all of us bareheaded, of course (no one wore a helmet back then, at least no one remotely cool). I was on the verge of buying a bike of my own and becoming part of this cult when I stepped back and thought harder about it. My instinct for survival turned out to be stronger than my desire for peer approval.
Soon after we met, Marlon and I discovered that both of us came from alcoholic families. That was a powerful bond. We talked about our fathers, and what their drinking had done to us; we understood each other’s internal vocabulary. We also realized, right from the start, that we both liked women a lot. Which was also to say, we liked a lot of women. I think our alcoholic families had something to do with that; we were always in search of more approval and love. To be honest, we knew we cut the mustard. We didn’t have to do much looking for women. They came looking for us.
Before long, Marlon and I were doing a fair amount of double-dating. I’d never met a white man who so thoroughly embraced black culture. He loved going with me to jazz clubs. I tended to chat with the black musicians between sets, and I could bring Marlon into those circles. Soon, of course, he’d need no help from me, but at that particular point, before Streetcar opened, I was a way in for him. What Marlon loved even more than black musicians was black women. My God! He’d found a whole bevy of beautiful ones at the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, and eagerly enrolled in Dunham’s dance and drumming classes. He was passionate about drumming—Chano Pozo, the great Cuban drummer, was one of his idols. I’m sure he bedded some of his fellow drumming students, but he focused on a lead dancer named Julie Robinson. I didn’t know that at the time, but I did see Julie when she came, with a couple of other Dunham dancers, to give a performance at the New School. She was so lithe and sexy, I was instantly smitten. But I didn’t actually meet her. I certainly had no idea that I’d end up marrying her one day.
Marlon was a prankster; if he saw you napping, he’d tie your shoelaces together. We did that to each other, more than once. But as a friend, he was bedrock loyal. Not long after our respective careers took us to Hollywood, I hooked up with him to go to a black after-hours joint in L.A. While we were there, the place got raided. Suddenly customers were being pushed up against the wall at gunpoint, frisked and handcuffed, and led off to paddy wagons. Marlon was a rising star—thanks to Streetcar, which had also come out as a movie by then—and the police recognized him. They took him aside and quietly told him to ease out the back door. “I’ve got a friend with me,” he said, pointing to me. I wasn’t famous yet; no one recognized me. “Look,” said a policeman with some irritation to Marlon, “you’re lucky we’re letting you out on your own.” Marlon shook his head. “No, I’m sorry—I can’t leave without him.” Finally, in exasperation, the police let both of us go.
From Marguerite, at this time, came bad news. She was dating a black reporter from The New York Times, and the romance was getting serious. Though she enjoyed our friendship, and wanted to keep seeing me, she also wanted to give me back my locket. I was still supporting myself by pushing racks of clothes in the garment district, so my own career trajectory—and marital prospects—looked pretty flat. But I hadn’t given up hope of changing that with some breakthrough role, then dazzling Marguerite into matrimony. So I was relieved not to see an engagement ring on her finger. I’ve still got running room, I thought.
I had an unexpected ally in the Bethany Day Nursery’s director, a tall, very Ivy Leaguish woman named Mrs. Bears. She turned out to be as politically progressive as I was. She nodded approvingly, pursing her lips as I told her about union meetings I’d gone to lately, and what I planned to do to support Henry Wallace in his presidential campaign for the new Progressive party. I could see Marguerite struggling to grasp that her new boss agreed with my crazy political views.
Somehow, in filling me in on all her siblings’ latest degrees earned and honors won and job offers received, Marguerite let slip a little detail about her father that floored me. Mr. Byrd was still handling all the money for that fancy real estate law firm. Only his job wasn’t quite what she’d implied. He was the law firm’s handyman. The janitor! He kept the place in order! Every Friday, as one of his duties, he carried the week’s checks in a big bag to the bank, deposited them, and brought back the deposit slip. That was the money he “handled.”
Here was another lesson for me in what it meant to be black in America—in what lay at the heart of the outwardly comfortable black middle class. The segregated black middle class, with all its own social delineations. To be accepted by that middle class of lawyers and doctors and accountants, Mr. Byrd had to act as if he was already there. And his children, consciously or not, had to burnish his image with all their friends—which was to say: lie. Not everything Marguerite told me about her family was exaggerated. Her father had put his five children through college; even if scholarship money had helped, that was quite an achievement. And he did maintain the house at 501 T Street. But he was not, in any true sense of the phrase, the one who handled the money.
The New School had two theaters for its productions—a large, former Yiddish theater on East Houston Street we called the Rooftop, and a smaller but better equipped uptown theater on Eighth Avenue at Forty-eighth Street, where the most ambitious of our plays were staged. Marguerite came to see me perform at both, though she remained baffled by where this acting might lead me. Of the two, I preferred the uptown theater, so much so that if I didn’t have an acting role in an uptown production, I’d volunteer to do props or lighting there. I still liked the manual work. Even more, I liked heading over after the last curtain call to the Royal Roost, one of the best New York jazz clubs ever. Marguerite had almost no interest in jazz, so when I went to the Roost, I was on my own.
Swells took tables and ordered expensive drinks. I stayed by the bar in back, behind a glass divider, where, for fifty cents, I could buy a bottle of beer and stand as long as I wanted, hearing all the greats, from Charlie Parker to Ella Fitzgerald, from Miles Davis to Lester Young. I got to know the waiters well enough that on a slow night, they’d let me move to a table up front. The best jazz in the world for fifty cents! I was in heaven. And then, little by little, I began hanging out with the musicians between sets, getting them a beer or just being a good listener. They talked about everything: the struggle with tough times, local or world politics, issues of race, and, of course, Joe Louis’s latest fight, and how Jackie Robinson would do in his early days with the Brooklyn Dodgers. But mostly they talked about the music and musicians they knew, and the trouble that this one or that one was in, with drugs, or a woman, or both.
I loved them all, but a special favorite was Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist whom Billie Holiday had named the “Pres,” for both his brilliant playing and his absolute cool. Here’s how cool Lester was: He’d invented the word! It was part of a private language he shared only with his bandmates and close friends. A “molly trolley” was a rehearsal, “bread” was money for a gig (“Does the bread smell good?” he’d say), and a player’s keys, or his fingers, were his “people.” Lester had played with Fletcher Henderson, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie. He’d backed Nat King Cole as well as Billie Holiday. Recently he’d started touring with Norman Granz’s ever-changing Jazz at the Philharmonic ensemble—it had started at the Philharmonic but kept the name when Granz took it on the road—but between those dates he’d occasionally play the Roost with a backup band that included, at various times, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and pianist Al Haig. By 1948, a lot of jazz buffs, including me, considered him the greatest saxophonist in the world.
Lester kept to a tight circle. An outsider might turn out to be a narcotics detective—a “Bob Crosby,” in Lester’s private language—which Lester and his bandmates had reason to fear, as I would come to learn, given the amount of cocaine they consumed offst
age. Even if not, chances were a stranger wouldn’t be cool. So I wasn’t entirely sure if Lester was accepting me, or challenging me, when he turned to me one night between sets and said, “What is it, exactly, that you do?”
I told him I was a student. A drama student.
“What in drama do you study?”
Acting, I told him.
He paused for a moment, perhaps giving safe passage to his most recent snort of cocaine, then said, “And how do you do that?”
I’d never been asked that question, and to this day I cannot answer it. I told him I didn’t know, but it must work, because we were putting on pretty good plays.
“How do you know they’re good?”
“Well, Lester,” I said, “why don’t you come on by and see for yourself?”
So Lester, his sidemen, and the club’s young promoter and booking agent, Monte Kay, came to the Forty-eighth Street theater one night to see our production of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I played the Troubadour. There is, of course, no character named the Troubadour in Of Mice and Men. The director had invented this mystical figure to appear between scenes, singing snatches of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly tunes to evoke the story’s time and place, and to give the stagehands time to change sets. I never would have had the nerve to present myself onstage as a singer. But as the Troubadour, I was an actor, singing in character. That made all the difference for me.
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