A Flag Is Born was the work of a believer: Hecht was determined to stage the facts of the unparalleled horror perpetrated upon European Jewry and hopeful that a play could carry an unambiguous political message while retaining its capacity to enlighten and entertain. Moreover, he felt American Jews needed to mourn the demise of their brethren and atone for their passivity in the face of it. What better forum than theater for this collective expression of grief and atonement? Hecht’s confrontational purposes are clear from the prologue: “Of all the things that happened in that time—our time—the slaughter of the Jews of Europe was the only thing that counted forever in the annals of man. The proud orations of heroes and conquerors will be a footnote in history beside the great silence that watched this slaughter.”67
The play is set in a European graveyard where three survivors of Treblinka gather. Paul Muni played Tevya, an old inhabitant of the shtetl; Celia Adler was his wife, Zelda; and Brando, a cynical youth named David, was convinced that “the dead and the living have the same ears for the Jew—dead ears.” The still-devout elderly couple convenes a modest Shabbat ceremony on the cemetery grounds. When Tevya calls upon the kings of ancient Israel for guidance, a cavalcade of Jewish history is brought to life behind him—a splendid synagogue service in Tevya’s native village (Berini as cantor is accompanied by an eight-man choir) and biblical scenes of Saul and David in Solomon’s temple.
The political heart of Hecht’s play, and the key to its successful fundraising, was the analogy between the struggle for a Jewish homeland in Palestine and the American Revolution. This was a mainstay of Bergson Group rhetoric: Their ads and pamphlets characterized the members of the Zionist Irgun militia as “modern-day Nathan Hales” and declared, “It’s 1776 in Palestine.” Attempting to convince a world court of his people’s rights, Muni’s Tevya draws on the same analogy. The red, white, and blue theater program reinforced the claim, by picturing a trio of American revolutionary figures above an image of Palestinian Jews with gun, hoe, and flag, as did the play’s sponsoring committee, featuring First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and other prominent Americans.
Original program for A Flag Is Born. The Newberry Library, Chicago.
Hecht’s strategy of sanctioning Jewish insurgent violence in Palestine by way of America’s original insurgents contained a subtler message for American Jews. Identification with the doomed Jews of Europe had required an admission of vulnerability, even self-imperilment. Identification with the Palestinian freedom fighters meant alignment with American power. The money the play raised through donations and ticket sales, close to a million dollars by some estimates, confirmed Hecht’s shrewd appraisal of the postwar Jewish situation.68
That situation was of lifelong interest to Marlon Brando, who had grown up identifying with suffering. When he began meeting Jews in the theater world and intelligentsia, he encountered a people that had prevailed over centuries of persecution. Though he would not be loyal to the Jewish—or any—women with whom he slept over the years, his love affair with the Jewish people endured. That attitude has sometimes been misunderstood. He read widely about Jews and their history for much of his life, and sometimes he spoke as if he were “a member of the tribe.” Brando’s collection of books on Jewish subjects, which ranged from philosophical works by Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem to popular histories and studies of Yiddish humor, was surpassed only by his collection of books on American Indians.69 While it was acceptable for Jews such as Neal Gabler (Brando owned multiple copies of Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood) to discuss the “power of Jews” in the film industry, such statements were forbidden from a Gentile like Brando. He was roundly criticized for such comments and forced to apologize publicly, though Jewish friends came to his defense.70
Anyone who knew Brando, or heard him discourse at length about Jews, was convinced of his sympathy, admiration, and extensive knowledge of Jews and their history. Like a religious convert, he knew more about Jewish history than many born into the faith. Noting the great diversity of Diaspora Jewry, and the high rates of intermarriage, he concluded that Jewish achievements were based in culture rather than genes. In taped conversations for his autobiography, Brando spoke about his early experiences with Jews in Manhattan and his convictions drawn from reading about their history.
They gave me a sense of education and of the value of education. If anything is Talmudic, it is the regard for learning. And for years and years and years I was puzzled by the extraordinary accomplishments of Jews. And I thought of all these theories it must be a genetic feature . . . but then that didn’t work because after the Diaspora the Ashkenazi Jews physically were much different, and the Sefardic Jews that didn’t joint the Diaspora, that stayed in Palestine, looked different. . . . The only thing that survived intact from the earliest of times, certainly after the Diaspora, was the Jewish religion and the regards for the Torah and Talmudic thought. It changed from place to place, before you didn’t have much variation in Jewish thought, certainly there were sects early on, but they didn’t vary as much as the Conservative and Reform groups of Jews do today, but nevertheless there’s enough left. If you have to say who were the most intellectual people in the last two hundred years, you’d have to say it was Einstein, Freud, and for better or worse, Marx. In every form, in art, in science, in jurisprudence, in commerce, an extraordinary influence. I think the Jews have been improperly criticized. I think that they should be criticized as every people are criticized. . . . Because of the suffering, extraordinary, incomprehensible that the Jews have gone through, you forget that the Jews are also human and that they also have done the very things that have been done to them. And this entire business of hanging onto conquered territories at any price, I think is crazy. And you have Jewish fanatics that are all the equal of any Palestinian fanatic groups, and like all people they say they’re doing it in defense of this cause. The cause is to ensure the fact that what happened in Germany will never happen again, and you can’t blame them for that. If they were going to kill people of Irish extraction and they set about to do it, and I survived, you can be sure I’d be a fanatic, especially if they killed my family.
Brando rejects the notion that “Zionism is equivalent with racism,” referring to a 1975 meeting he had with Hollywood producer Dore Schary and others committed to Israel, including Senator Jacob Javits and Nobel Prize–winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, to discuss the prospects for an Anti-Genocide Bill.71 Brando confessed: “If I were a Jew in Palestine having lost my family, who knows what I would think. Who knows what I would think if I were a Palestinian who had their house blown up because one of their children had behaved in a militant fashion toward what they believed to be the enemy. . . . It’s very hard to explain to the Palestinians that the Jews have the right to be someplace, that this is their homeland. It’s just as difficult as it is to explain to Americans that the Indians want their land back. There would be blood in the streets.” Still, “there are many Jews who believe that all this conflict should come to an end. There are many Palestinians who are willing to recognize the rights of the Jews to live. And there are many Jews who want, more than we recognize, to give the land back.”72
In his account of A Flag Is Born, Brando calls it the starting point of his “journey to try to understand the human impulse that makes it not only possible but easy for one group of people to single out another and try to destroy it.”73 He could not have had a better vehicle for this initiation than the character of David, nor a better cohort to explore it with than Celia and Luther Adler and Paul Muni. Those present at rehearsals agreed that, in the role of Tevya, Muni was preparing one of the great performances of his career. But Brando’s usual restraint worried everyone prior to the opening. In order to reassure the cast, Muni in particular, Luther Adler challenged the young actor. “Marlon uncorked,” Adler recalled, and “was incredible: flash, violence, electricity. My sister Celia has owl eyes, but when she opens them in astonishment, they’re
like saucers. When Marlon started to perform, Celia’s eyes became soup bowls. Muni turned scarlet; his lips began to tremble; then he got a kind of foolish grin of approval on his face.” Muni retained his admiration for Brando, later marveling, “How the hell can an actor like that come from Omaha, Nebraska?”74
A Flag Is Born with Paul Muni and Celia Adler. Eileen Darby/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Brando’s point of entry was a second-act speech, delivered under glaring spotlights, directly to the audience. “Where were you—Jews? Where were you when the killing was going on? When the six million were burned and buried alive in the lime pits, where were you? Where was your voice crying out against the slaughter? We didn’t hear any voice. There was no voice. You, Jews of America! You, Jews of England! Strong Jews, rich Jews, high-up Jews . . . you were ashamed to cry as Jews! A curse on your silence! That frightened silence of Jews that made the Germans laugh as they slaughtered. You with your Jewish hearts hidden under your American boots. You with your Jewish hearts hidden behind English accents. . . . And now, now you speak a little. Your hearts squeak—and you have a dollar for the Jews of Europe. Thank you. Thank you!” With this role, according to a reviewer, “Marlon Brando adds another notch to his performance gun,” and the result for those in attendance was explosive.75 At one performance, a distressed woman shouted back at Brando’s David in a heavy Yiddish accent: “Vere ver yu!?”76
Both the guilt and the outrage were feelings with which Brando could empathize. He expressed outrage in letters over the British maltreatment of the Jews in displaced-persons camps—barred from entering Palestine and imprisoned behind barbed wire in Cyprus. He expressed guilt in noting the hypocrisy of American racism against blacks he witnessed while helping raise money in DC for the American League for a Free Palestine. Nor, as his remarks above show, was the subsequent Israeli injustice toward Palestinian Arabs lost on him years later. Through all of these experiences, he took his role as a citizen seriously, in the complex terms outlined by Hannah Arendt: active where his conscience demanded but aware that every political action had inadvertent consequences.
For this reason, Brando was never a radical, no matter how independent his thinking. Still, even at this early point in his career, his appetite for good works was palpable—as was, relatedly, his sense of the limits of acting. Of his cross-country fundraising for the American League, he wrote his parents: “It is a tougher and vastly more responsible job than anything the theater could offer. . . . I’m really stimulated more than I’ve ever been.”77 For the rest of his life, Brando would strive to balance his devotion to humanitarian causes with the demands of his calling, selecting roles and film projects based on their capacity to reconcile these aims. Such selectivity required a fame that he could never have imagined was so close.
In 1946, all paths led to Streetcar, no matter how meandering Brando’s steps toward that destiny. Elia Kazan describes how he gave the young actor twenty dollars for bus fare to Provincetown, so he could audition for the play’s author, Tennessee Williams. It took Brando three days to get there because he used the money to eat and then hitchhiked to Cape Cod. When he finally arrived, Williams’s reaction to Brando’s reading for the part of Stanley Kowalski was “ecstatic,” his “voice near hysteria,” as he described it by phone to Kazan. Brando’s odyssey of acting fame and fortune had begun.78 Though he quibbled ever after about how much he had wanted these things, no one who saw his Broadway performance in Streetcar could doubt the presence of burning desire.
CHAPTER THREE
BUILDING THE REPERTOIRE
Brando’s breakthrough theatrical performance under Elia Kazan in A Streetcar Named Desire provided the foundations for the Brando hero of 1950s film: the erotic masculinity qualified by vulnerability; the lyrical brooder whose face and gestures made silence eloquent; and the protagonist who becomes a victim or cultural sacrifice. During that decade, Brando built a body of work that set the standard for acting, while helping to codify a series of cultural transformations that have become commonplace. The sensitive male type, which evolved over the next few decades, originated, at least partly, in Brando’s revolutionary portraits of men. Furthermore, Brando advanced a broad humanitarianism: adopting various ethnic identities, pioneering the discussion of racial intermarriage in Sayonara, and insisting on humanizing his Nazi character in The Young Lions. From the start of his stage and film career, Brando’s artistic ambitions and his idealism were inseparable, but it all started with Streetcar.
STREETCAR ON BROADWAY
Out for an evening to see Montgomery Clift in a Chekhov play, Marlon Brando treated his date to a lesson in technique. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to Clift slouching on stage, hands in his back pockets—a gesture inappropriate for an upper-class Russian of Chekhov’s time.1 It was May 1954 and Brando had already toppled Clift from his predominance as the young star of American theater and film. Brando was probably there more for his friend Maureen Stapleton, who was playing Masha in this Broadway revival of The Seagull. Reading the limitations of a rival, however, must have been sweet from his high position in 1954, with two acclaimed movies directed by Kazan behind him (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951, Viva Zapata!, 1952), another on the way (On the Waterfront, 1954), and two big performances with different directors that showed his dramatic versatility released the previous year (Julius Caesar and The Wild One, both 1953). Audiences adored Clift, but they saw something fresh in Brando, even though they couldn’t have explained what was so right about his acting. Most people, whether or not they knew anything about acting, believed that Brando’s gift was his ability to “be himself” on stage. They were convinced that he profited from roles as rough, inarticulate types because they fit his own personality. Many decades after he had memorialized the Streetcar character on stage and screen, Brando complained, “Even today I meet people who think of me automatically as a tough, insensitive, coarse guy named Stanley Kowalski.”2
When Brando arrived in Manhattan in 1944, Montgomery Clift had been on Broadway for more than a decade and had recently established himself as a star through a leading role in Lillian Hellman’s 1944 play The Searching Wind. Though he was largely untrained, Clift relied on sound intuitions and had done good work under directors as different as Alfred Lunt (There Shall Be No Night, 1940) and Elia Kazan (The Skin of Our Teeth, 1942). Clift could convey emotions with a naturalness that was rare in conventional male acting. He specialized in vulnerable adolescent men who were boys to their maternal lovers—his romantic interest in A Place in the Son (1951), played by Elizabeth Taylor, refers to herself as “Mama”—troubled men, always longing for more than they could have.
Clift’s ease on stage and screen was critical to his appeal, but there was little variation from role to role. Brando’s debut in Streetcar on December 3, 1947, altered the map, radicalizing prevailing notions of what actors could convey in theater. Recalling his reaction to a preview performance in New Haven, playwright Arthur Miller characterized Brando as “a tiger on the loose, a sexual terrorist. Nobody had seen anything like him before because that kind of freedom on the stage had not existed before.”3
What such a perspective missed was Brando’s knowledge of technique. Combining research and reading with his own powers of imagination, he created his characters—specific accents, gestures, gaits for all of them—from a profound understanding and conceptualization of their environments. He seems to have viewed human beings as vast and heterogeneous. His genius was his ability to access so much of this variety, to locate within himself the makings for different roles. When he took the stage or entered a film set as Eugene Marchbanks or Terry Malloy, Brando knew his character from infancy to the grave. He knew how the man presented himself to the world, in repose and in anger; how he stood, lounged, walked; whether he touched others when he greeted or spoke to them; whether he arched his brows pompously or apologized for himself with perpetually downcast eyes. Brando understood people’s expressions as combining the instinctive an
d the learned. From childhood, he recognized them as specific to the various stations people occupied even in a democratic society—farmhand, salesman, banker, secretary—inculcated by parents, teachers, religious authorities through apprenticeship, professionalization, and, above all, through imitation. The ways people revealed themselves in the smallest movements fascinated Brando. By the time he had signed on to appear in Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire under the direction of Elia Kazan, they had become a staple of his vocation.4
Brando’s habits of observation gave him a valuable repository of the human theater, which, together with his powerful imagination, proved highly conducive to his work. From Stella Adler’s classes he learned a disciplined approach to what he needed for a role, just as his Stanley Kowalski performance would gain immeasurably from Elia Kazan’s direction. Kazan was Brando’s ideal director, because he, like Stella Adler, sanctioned his instincts. “When you start giving too much direction to an actor like Brando, you are likely to throw him off the track he’s instinctively found,” Kazan commented. “Sometimes the best direction consists of reading an actor’s face and, when you see the right thing there, simply nodding to him. . . . Then wait for a miracle. With Marlon, it often happened.”5
Brando was only twenty-three when rehearsals began for Streetcar in the fall of 1947, but he was sufficiently well read to recognize Williams’s new play as destined for classic status. “We had under us one of the best-written plays ever produced, and we couldn’t miss,” Brando noted in appreciation of the playwright’s sensual poetry and dark humor.6 The play’s modernity was equally hospitable to him, particularly what we would now term its “multiculturalism,” which was reflected in the jazz score and the racially mixed cast. “In this part of New Orleans you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played with the infatuated fluency of brown fingers,” Williams writes, sketching the neighborhood of the Kowalskis. Typical of “a cosmopolitan city,” there is “a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races.” What made the language of Streetcar unique was that it combined Southern gentility and working-class dialects with an up-to-date urban colloquialism. When Blanche DuBois, for instance, inquires of the poker-playing quartet in scene 3, “Could I kibitz?” she may be the first Southerner in American literature to invoke Yiddish slang. Stanley’s cold reply, “You could not,” demonstrates that he too, like the actor who memorialized him, was familiar with the “mama loshen.”7
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