Stella had learned how to act from observing her father. In her introduction to her father’s memoir, A Life on the Stage, Stella describes her first moment of “true consciousness” as being in his dressing room watching him apply his makeup, like a painter choosing his colors. As he changed into another man, she had an almost religious sense of creation. This drama of self-invention was reinforced by her memory of Jacob playing Shakespeare’s Shylock. On one side of the stage, the Venetians, their rich arrays reflecting judicial and political power; on the other, Shylock, alone, seated on two low steps, sharpening his knife against the sole of his shoes as he awaited the verdict. When it is read, stripping him of everything including his religion, he crumbles. The performance does not dwell on the injustice done to Shylock but on his grandeur in defeat. “Erect, with a backward glance of burning scorn for this court and its justice,” she recalls, “in the full pride of his race, he slowly left the hall. . . . A moment without words, where he summed up, together with his conception of the character, the whole meaning of his life and his theater.”18
Key elements of Brando’s acting glimmer through Stella’s account of her father’s acting. Both men identified with loners—outsiders isolated from the citizenry—whose dignity is based on their embrace of exclusion and embodiment of suffering. Brando conveys anguish as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront’s bar scene with Edie Doyle by compulsively kneading the chin of his crumpled face. Ellen Adler saw her grandfather’s legendary methods at such times in Brando: “The reason why Marlon was so loved by so many is that he would play working class characters in such a way that people recognized themselves, and then he would endow those characters with classical gestures, size and stature.”19 The final moments of Adler’s Shylock and Brando’s Malloy invoke Christ—one as fallen Jew, the other as resurrected Christian. As Shylock lurches offstage, his eyes darting around, everything he sees becomes a crucifix.20 Judaism, Christianity’s precursor, is doubly violated by the image of Adler’s scornful Jew forced to be Christian. At the end of On the Waterfront, Malloy, battered and bloody, walks in the savior’s footsteps, leading the laborers back to the factory.
Like all great actors, Adler and Brando invite the audience into their thoughts, the action beneath the words, in part by exploiting every prop and piece of scenery. The plainest materials become symbols in Brando’s hands. A woolen glove slipped over his hand in On the Waterfront signals Malloy’s aspiration for empathy, the desire to understand the feelings of Edie, the shy Catholic girl who dropped it. Scenes later, the girl covers her mouth in horror, those same gloves on her hands, as Malloy confesses his role in her brother’s death, the tragic threat to their love reinforced by the film viewer’s memory of the glove on Malloy’s hand. Brando’s Malloy is his most Adler-like role, but there would be others that would recall Adler’s career.
Adler and Brando both knew that an actor who could not discover his own humanity in the characters he played was unworthy of the name. Acting was not a mere process of imitation or embodiment; it required bringing to it something of the actor’s own self, in order to breathe a soul into the character.21 Jacob Adler’s empathy, like Brando’s, was bolstered by their shared habit of social observation. Adler loved watching people, especially in the courtroom. He would sit for hours with his then-girlfriend observing trials in his native Odessa, absorbing the drama of witnesses and lawyers, afterward analyzing every detail of what they had seen.22
One of Brando’s favorite dates as an acting student in New York was attending court trials in Brooklyn with Jacob’s granddaughter Ellen. (It’s not clear whether Brando knew that this had also been one of Jacob Adler’s habits.) Cities and stages were substitute classrooms for Adler and Brando, who rebelled against formal education, which each later bemoaned. But each had felt immediate disdain for the institutionalized authority and convention they encountered in their respective schools. “The actor does not swim with the stream,” Jacob noted around 1917; he “enters a world of gypsies, vagabonds, people of questionable morality. A certain fear surrounds him, as though he had entered a secret order. This has not altogether changed even today.”23
When Brando entered this “secret order,” fate smiled on him in the person of Stella Adler. She would help him find his way into acting. Stella Adler observed, “In acting a person can sit for four months and it’s all inside, and then suddenly it will flower. That happened to Marlon Brando. He was not an actor when he came in. He was just a boy.”24
Adler’s methods for helping boys become actors had been honed in The Group Theatre, the most successful of the idealistic American acting ventures of the twentieth century. The Group Theatre—usually dubbed The Group—brought together Marxist and early Freudian theory with Stanislavski, who offered the only systematic formulation of the actor’s craft. Stanislavski’s ideas were inductive, based on the study of great actors.25 The great intuitive actors themselves drew on a universal fund of knowledge about what it meant to assume the experience of another human being and project it outward to an audience. They understood the essential loneliness of that procedure, the way it robbed the actor of a self and risked vulnerability in pursuit of power.
There was no director who knew that condition better than Elia Kazan, who joined The Group Theatre in 1932 as an apprentice fresh out of Yale Drama School and was energized by a theater devoted to the poetry of the commonplace. At this point in his life, Kazan’s sights were focused on acting, and he “worked like a beaver; every morning,” doing his “‘sense memory’ exercises like prayers at dawn . . . trying to impress the people of the Group.” Despite reservations about his own talent, Kazan had some success with roles in Group Theatre productions: Waiting for Lefty, Paradise Lost, and Golden Boy. He eventually recognized that his true talents lay elsewhere, and he used his firsthand knowledge of the craft to become one of the foremost directors. Respectful, ever open to actors’ imaginations and questions, Kazan’s antiauthoritarianism (Ellen Adler remembers him as always on the floor during rehearsals) and reliance on intuition gave him extraordinary access to the actors he favored. This is suggested by his sketch of the young Brando, “soft spoken, deeply independent, smiling, gentle, no aggression, subtly humorous, cat-like, lazy, not easy to frighten, or rush; amused at others, secure and confident.” Corroborating their mutual understanding, Brando compared Kazan to a Japanese masseuse, who knew just where to touch to reach the vital nerve endings.26
The Depression led idealists like Kazan to believe that fundamental change was forthcoming, and Harold Clurman hoped that theater could provide the engine of change. Clurman was an enthusiast who worked for New York’s Theatre Guild (a production company promoting high-quality American and foreign plays), and The Group Theatre was his brainchild, the idea launched in the fall of 1930 in a series of weekly lectures outlining a new type of American theater.27 Clurman’s devotion had been kindled at the age of six by a 1907 Yiddish Theatre performance of Uriel Acosta, starring Jacob Adler. When he met Stella nineteen years later at the American Laboratory Theatre (he was enrolled with Lee Strasberg in a class for directors, and she was a member of the Lab’s acting company), he felt he had met “a living symbol” of everything he treasured, a personification of the old theatrical tradition.28
The Lab, begun in 1923, was run by Russian émigrés Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who had worked with Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). Their curriculum addressed the whole actor, from content classes aimed at intellectual development to training in meditation, movement, and voice. The Lab received valuable publicity from Stanislavski’s 1923–1924 tour of America with the MAT, which featured 380 performances in twelve American cities and included a White House meeting with President Calvin Coolidge. Though American audiences could not follow the language of these Russian dramas, they were enormously entertained by the smirks, stares, pauses, and other expressions of thought and feeling.29
All three founders of The Group (Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasb
erg) were inspired by the realism of the Moscow Art Theatre and disenchanted with the Theatre Guild’s commercial ethos and neglect of the actor’s craft. Clurman, Crawford (a Smith graduate employed by the Theatre Guild as casting director), and Strasberg, who was renowned for his focus on training “as concentrated as a jeweler over the inner mechanism of a watch”—all appreciated the MAT’s democratization of technique. Strasberg was moved by the fact that everyone in MAT productions was equally skilled, even if not equally great. But he recognized that the assimilation of their methods in America required native theorists and teachers.30 Hence the goal of a permanent company as dedicated to cultivating actors as it was to producing quality plays. The actor Franchot Tone, a success on Broadway before he joined The Group and a success in Hollywood after, advised Margaret Barker, “If you want to be a star, don’t come to the Group. If you want to be a good actress, do.”31
Along with Tone, Adler, and Barker, the initial company included Morris Carnovsky, Robert Lewis, Sanford Meisner, and Clifford Odets. Their first production, Paul Green’s The House of Connelly, directed by Strasberg and starring Tone, Carnovsky, and Adler, premiered on September 29, 1931. Most would have agreed with the conclusions of Robert Lewis, who after the demise of The Group became an important teacher of its methods: that the aim of producing contemporary plays reflecting the era’s chief dilemmas, while creating a viable group ensemble, had been met. What couldn’t be overcome was the fundamental contradiction of an art theater in a commercial system. Still, over a decade, The Group produced twenty-three plays, including the major hits (all by Odets) Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!, and Golden Boy, and in so doing created a model for serious theater in America.
The Group’s greatest accomplishment was the legacy it provided actors in the form of technique. Given the strong personalities involved and their profound commitments to acting, it was inevitable that there would be conflict over that legacy. Stella Adler’s relationship to the company had always been ambivalent. Drawn in by Clurman, who couldn’t imagine The Group without her, Adler felt estranged from most of its members. Its principal focus was on the men of the company, and she was increasingly unhappy with the thin roles she was offered. Yet she remained, because it was one of the few places in America where acting was appropriately revered. For Strasberg, The Group was his life, and some doubted that he had one beyond it. No one denied the effectiveness of his direction, his ability to elicit accomplished work not only from mature actors but also from their fledgling counterparts. Lewis found Strasberg “amusingly talmudic,” remembering one of his favorite sayings: “A whole apple is better than half a pear, especially if you want an orange.” His primary contribution was showing “us how to have truthful emotions on stage,” so that “seeing a Group Theatre production was like witnessing a real accident.”32
How best to evoke emotions in performance had long been a matter of controversy among dramatists, inciting a divide between adherents of technique and adherents of authenticity who believed that actors had to summon personal feelings in order to portray those of their characters convincingly on stage. Strasberg subscribed to the latter view—supported, he trusted, by Stanislavski’s theories. He devised “affective memory” exercises for the cast of House of Connelly, insisting that they probe their pasts to authenticate the play’s climactic scenes. Adler directly challenged the demand that actors draw on their own lives, considering it psychologically destructive. She sought out Stanislavski himself to adjudicate their disagreement, spending a month in Paris working with him.
Returning to The Group in August 1934, Adler relayed Stanislavski’s judgment: Affective power inhered in dramatic detail, not in the actor’s private history. Comprehensive knowledge of the playwright and play enabled the actor to imagine the character’s motivation and to generate truthful emotion on stage.33 An actor’s success depended on how deeply he could penetrate the psychology and environment of his character; the richer the actor’s thoughts, the grander his acting. Adler’s own exercises thus emphasized intellectual and mental preparation. Emotion, she insisted, evolved from the complexity of the play’s plot and the character’s motivations within it. Don’t look for the emotion, she instructed fellow actors, for that would drive it away. She urged them to let it come out of what they were doing.34
Since emotional intensity would be Brando’s stock-in-trade as an actor, it was a stroke of luck that Adler was teaching the class in which he enrolled at the New School. By avoiding personalization, and emphasizing script analysis, historical research, and action, Adler saved Brando from excavating his past. A childhood of neglect and loneliness provided plenty of Sturm und Drang, but he might have been unable to handle his emotions had he been pushed to reenact them while a vulnerable student. What Brando did have was imagination, loads of it, and what Adler called “a sense of truth.”35 That sense of truth afforded a deep and subtle understanding of how emotions were expressed. Adler advised subsequent generations of students to watch Brando if they wanted to learn how to show anger in performance. Brando’s explosions were monumental because seven-eighths of their threat was lying underneath them.36
Brando believed that Adler’s contributions to film acting were unheralded, and that few realized how indebted acting was to her, other Jewish actors of the era, and the Russian theater for most of the performances to which audiences by the 1990s had become accustomed. He never qualified his own debt to Adler, emphasizing her gift for teaching people how to use their emotions: “She could tell you not only when you were wrong, but why. Her instincts were unerring and extraordinary.”37 Adler herself emphasized the inevitability of Brando’s genius. “I taught him nothing. I opened up possibilities of thinking, feeling, experiencing, and as I opened those doors, he walked right through.”38
Adler taught that the world offered a perpetual feast for those poised to exploit it. There was nothing more important than the actor’s eyes, she insisted. His goal is to see specifically, to note the difference between kinds of red—the red of a racing car as distinct from the red of a hibiscus or of blood. “Actors are undercover agents,” she declared, describing what it was like to walk down the street with her father, who would never let her rest. He would be calling her attention constantly to details, how this woman walked, how that man used his hands.39
In most situations, including class, Brando took her lessons to heart. He stood apart, taking in people, trying to understand their motivations, the workings of the social world. Animals and inanimate things fascinated him just as much; he could imitate a chicken or even a cash register, as he did in class exercises, and it seemed appropriate that his debut on Broadway in 1944 was as a giraffe in Bobino, Stanley Kauffmann’s play for children.40 Reading was another way Brando satisfied his need to know and understand, and it was another of the inclinations that Adler appears to have guided. For instance, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet was required reading for her students. Brando had multiple copies of the book in his library, and he gave it frequently as a gift. He was also reading Aristotle in the 1940s, marking, for instance, a Euripides poem quoted in a section of Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “Since in this world liars may win belief/Be sure of the opposite likewise—that this world/Hears many a true word and believes it not.” As a masterful liar, Brando cared deeply about truth, and aphorisms like this were bound to elicit his attention. Equally striking is to see the way the rhetorical emphasis on genuine expression appealed to the young Brando: “Now the reason why sometimes it is not desirable to make the whole narrative continuous is that the case thus expounded is hard to keep in mind,” or “say . . . just so much as will make the facts plain, or will lead the hearer to believe that the thing has happened.”41 Brando’s reading in this period ranged far and wide, and another acting student at the New School recalled that he sometimes looked “like a nineteenth-century Russian character out of Chekhov or Turgenev, carrying loads of books.”42
The New School embodied the casual and rebellious ethos of Greenwich Villag
e and suited a nonconformist like Brando, who resisted every institution he entered, from public and military school to Broadway and Hollywood. The courses, faculty, even the architecture were designed to liberate learning, promoting cosmopolitanism and progressive humanism, welcoming everyone into an informal world of inquiry, with few divides between teachers and the mature students the school tended to attract. Begun in 1918 by a group of academic mavericks who sought an alternative to standard higher education, the New School expanded in the 1930s through its embrace of refugee scholars in flight from European fascism, most of them Jews and Socialists. The “University in Exile,” which later became “The Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science,” opposed fascism and racism, religious intolerance, and nationalism. The school became renowned in particular for its “theory of totalitarianism,” which posited basic similarities between fascist and communist regimes and received its most eloquent and systematic articulation in the work of Hannah Arendt, who joined the faculty in the 1960s. It attracted seemingly every major artist and intellectual of the era, from Robert Frost and Aaron Copland to Margaret Mead, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm, providing not only a gathering place for serious minds but also a platform from which they could reach large popular audiences.43
The young acting student, ca. 1944. Lisa Larsen/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
What made the New School unique was its recognition that the aspirations of scholars and artists were interdependent, that academic and artistic expression and freedom were reciprocal. Artists needed learning and scholars needed art. At the same time, the school promoted cultural distinctiveness, featuring international festivals and forums that ensured an incomparable receptivity and access to American, Latin American, and European talent and scholarship. The value of the New School for Brando was its compatibility with instincts or interests that were already established, which is not to deny that it also kindled new ones. He was drawn to what he saw as the strong intellectualism of the school’s Jewish faculty. This was not Brando’s first exposure to Jews; his mother had been close to Bernard and Betty Szold in Omaha, and artists, entertainers, and intellectuals who frequented the family home in Evanston also were Jewish. As a young actor in Manhattan, having gained confidence from the encouragement he received in classes with Adler, Brando was primed to learn, and he couldn’t have been in a more ideal place. He credited a varied group of Jewish mentors at the New School with having “introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn’t know existed. I stayed up all night with them—asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew. . . . They gave me an appetite to learn everything.”
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