Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers

by Stewart F. Lane

  Unfortunately, despite the enormous fame and monetary success from Death of a Salesman, Miller would soon find himself shocked and saddened by the actions of one of his closest associates. Just three years after the debut of the play, Elia Kazan, who had directed the classic drama, and with whom Miller had been close friends for many years, went before the HUAC and provided the names of others whom he believed to be Communist sympathizers, including Hellman, Odets and Edward G. Robinson. Miller, who in good conscience could never risk destroying the careers of those around him, could not forgive Kazan, and they did not speak for many years.

  The episode with Kazan, and the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, however, set Miller on the path to writing his next play, which, like Salesman, would emerge as a literary classic, and also a must read for American students, even today. As mentioned earlier, Miller likened the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s with the Salem witch hunts of the late 1600s, and the result was The Crucible, which opened in 1953 and won a Tony Award for best play.

  Also as noted earlier, The Crucible infuriated those on the anti–

  Com munist crusades and eventually brought Miller before the Committee under the agreement that he would answer questions pertaining only to his own activities. Nonetheless, the Committee still asked Miller to name names of other Communist sympathizers, and, unlike Kazan, he refused. For this, Miller was denied a passport, fined and sentenced to 30

  days in prison. The ruling, however, was overturned because it was determined that the Committee had misled Miller, essentially telling him that there would be no repercussions for his appearance at the hearing.

  Throughout the ’60s, Miller would continue to bring plays to Broadway, including After the Fall, Incident at Vichy and The Price. He would then open plays in other parts of the country while also writing for television, as well as screenplays. Until his death in 2005, at the age of 89, Miller was still writing. While he never again could achieve the acclaim and success of Death of a Salesman or The Crucible, Miller was a master of modern tragedy, bringing intense social dramas, often based on true stories, to the stage through characters wrestling with social and personal conflicts. Miller was very aware of social injustice, as evidenced 98

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  in his works and in his life. He was adept at articulating his social, moral and political convictions. He even denounced anti–Semitism in a 1945

  novel called Focus, which he did not turn into a play.

  Miller also generated attention for his marriage to film legend Marilyn Monroe in 1956. The two had met some six years earlier and reportedly had an affair while Miller was married to his first wife, Mary Slattery, to whom he was married for 16 years. Of course as Stephen J. Whitfield noted in his article titled “The Cultural Cold War as History,” those in disfavor of Miller wrote headlines such as “Pinko Playwright Weds Sex Goddess.” Nonetheless, Monroe, who converted to Judaism shortly before marrying Miller, stood by him, risking her own career, through the congressional hearings and subsequent sentencing. Their marriage lasted only five years. He would subsequently marry Inge Morath just a year after he and Monroe separated. Miller and Morath would remain married until her death some 40 years later.

  Not only was Miller the most important playwright of the 1950s, but arguably the most significant American playwright of the 20th century. Miller’s works earned him the Pulitzer Prize and seven Tony Awards.

  He holds honorary doctorate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. Above and beyond this, his works continue to have significant influence. They have been (and still are) discussed, debated, translated and interpreted by students worldwide.

  Zero Mostel

  Along with Hellman and Miller, another of the many blacklisted celebrities was one of the most talented and respected performers ever to grace the stages of Broadway.

  The son of Jewish immigrant parents, Samuel Joel Mostel was born in Brooklyn in 1915. However, like many stars of Yiddish theater, vaudeville and Broadway, he and his seven brothers and sisters would grow up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mostel’s father, a rabbi, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Mostel, however, was interested in art and began painting and drawing at an early age. His love of art would continue for years, and after college he would be accepted to NYU’s challenging Master’s art program. Mostel, however, also had a gift for comedy 99

  Jews on Broadway

  and began performing at private parties and various functions in New York, which soon led to nightclub performances and radio shows. In the early 1940s, Mostel even landed in a couple of Broadway revues in small roles before heading overseas during the war to perform for the U.S.

  troops.

  By the 1950s, Mostel’s comic genus was generating attention, not only from audiences, but from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It seemed that Mostel mocked the red scare and the seriousness of the anti–Communist investigations. Of course this only angered those chasing down Communists. But it was one of his own, show business col -

  league Jerome Robbins, who actually went so far as to name Mostel as a Communist. The result was that Mostel was brought before the Commit -

  tee. Unlike Robbins, he refused to name names while also denying that he was a Communist Party member. While no charges were ever leveled at Mostel, he was blacklisted in the industry and denied work for several years. As a result, to make ends meet, he sold paintings and found work in smaller Off Broadway productions where “blacklisting” was irrelevant.

  Mostel would finally find his way off the blacklist when he was asked to perform in the play Rhinoceros, written by absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, in which almost everyone in the cast is transformed into a rhi-noceros. There have been various interpretations of this thought-provoking work which to some portrayed the universe as being ultimately meaningless, irrational, and absurd. Others saw it as an allegory for the spread of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. While the play sparked much philosophical debate, it brought Mostel a Tony Award and drew the attention of producer Harold Prince, who asked Mostel to be in his upcom ing musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

  There was one problem with casting of Mostel in the show. George Abbott was directing along with Jerome Robbins. Mostel and Robbins had not been in contact since Robbins named him as a Communist.

  Mostel, however agreed to work on the show even though it meant working with Robbins. Rumor has it that at the first rehearsal, the tension was thick as the two entered the same room. “Robbins made the rounds of the cast, shaking hands. When he got to Mostel, there was silence.

  Then Mostel boomed, ‘Hiya, Loose Lips!’”2 This evoked laughter from those on the set and served to minimize the tension.

  Forum opened in May of 1962 and played nearly 1,000 perform-100

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  ances. The tremendous team of Stephen Sondheim, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, plus Harold Prince, along with Abbott and Robbins produced this comedy, inspired by the works of Titus Maccius Plautus who wrote humorous plays in ancient Rome back around 200 B.C. The lead role of the slave Pseudolus went to Mostel, who supposedly wasn’t the first choice. Apparently both Phil Silvers and Milton Berle were ahead of Mostel in line for the role. Mostel would not only shine in the role, but won his second Tony Award.

  Of course Mostel would go on to greater heights, and another Tony Award in Fiddler on the Roof, which will be discussed in greater length in the next chapter. Zero Mostel, who died in 1977 of a heart attack while working on a musical called The Merchant, based on the famed Shakespearian character Shylock from The Merchant of Venice, was one of the most extraordinary performers in Broadway history. His command of the stage, ability to handle a dramatic or comedic role with the same exuberance and his resounding singing voice won him consistently high acclaim from critics, applause from audiences and respect from his peers, three goals of any actor.

  Jack and Madeline Lee G
ilford

  Both Jack and Madeline Lee Gilford also saw their careers derailed by the anti–Communist express. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1908 on the Lower East side of Manhattan, Jacob Aaron Gellman had a knack for impressions from an early age, especially odd ones like pea soup coming to a boil. In time, he would develop his own night club act and soon became the emcee at a café in Greenwich Village where Zero Mostel (with whom he became good friends) and jazz great Billie Holiday performed.

  Gilford went on to make his Broadway debut in the musical revue Meet the People in 1940 and followed it with They Should Have Stood in Bed in 1943. It was also in the ’40s that he met his wife to be, Madeline Lee Lederman. Both were married at the time, and they divorced their respective spouses to be together. Madeline Lee, some 15 years younger than Gilford, was also an up and coming performer, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx.

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  It was, however, just as Jack was making headway on Broadway and Madeline Lee was building her own following in radio and on stage that the brakes were put on their respective careers. Jerome Robbins named the Gilfords as Communists, based on their passion for social change and their strong support for labor unions. For most of the decade, Madeline Lee and Jack struggled to get work. Gilford did make the best of his Off Broadway status, drawing attention for his roles in The World of Sholom Aleichem and Once Upon a Mattress, in which he teamed with Carol Burnett. While Gilford, like his buddy Mostel, found low-paying work in Off Broadway shows, he did manage to land a Broadway role in The Diary of Anne Frank. But such roles were hard to come by. It took Gilford nearly a decade to re-emerge from his blacklisting and finally hit his stride on the Broadway stage in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with Mostel . That success was followed by Cabaret. While Gilford went on to film and television roles for years to come, Madeline Lee was essentially out of the business for years, in part because of the blacklisting and later to raise their three children. She returned in the 1990s as a producer.

  Who Were They Really After?

  As it was, many Jewish-American artists were, and still are, to the left on political matters. While the hunt for Communists was not aimed at any one cultural or religious group, the liberal-minded Jews were among those most clearly targeted.

  From the early years of film, first in Astoria, Queens and New Jersey, and later in Hollywood, California, it was evident that the Jewish people played a significant role in the entertainment industry. It was a new industry in the United States and as such, not controlled by a particular ethnic group. So, when the anti–Communist crusades began after the Second World War, with a major focus on the entertainment industry, the question was raised as to whether the House Un-American Activities Committee was really after the Communists or after the influential Jews in show business. It was evident that many Jewish writers and performers were then, and still are, outspoken about social issues, but were they Communists? And if so, were they actually dangerous?

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  The question was, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?” Some, like author Michael Freedland, whose book Witch Hunt in Hollywood ( JR Books, 2009) explores the subject in detail, believe the question could have been “Are you now or have you ever been a Jew?”

  Freedland is among those who point to the attack on Hollywood celebrities as an opportunity to get the Jews who were so prominent in the entertainment world. And while non–Jews were certainly called to testify, the number of Jews was disproportionately high considering the over all Jewish population in the nation at that time. The first ten Hollywood writers, known as the Hollywood Ten, were jailed for not providing the names of their alleged Communist peers. Six of the ten were Jewish.

  Freedland points out in his book that Congressman John Rankin made a speech denouncing Communism and consisting almost entirely of Jewish names. He read many of the real names of those changed by Jewish performers, as if to implicate some secret agenda, as opposed to not wanting to appear too ethnic for fear of not getting work. Freedland also mentioned Larry Adler, a blacklisted musician who recalled a letter from Rankin that started with the words “Dear Kike,” a derogatory term for Jews, which emanated from the Jewish immigrants who used to sign their name by drawing a circle, rather than an “x” which was too much like a cross. The Yiddish word for circle was keikl, so they became known as Kikes, much as other minorities were given other names, most of which were later considered derogatory.

  While Broadway was not a direct target, being much smaller than the Hollywood studios, the effect was felt by the absence of performers and playwrights. However, unlike the studio system, where the Jewish executives were being scrutinized and feared for their own businesses, Broadway producers had greater freedom to hire as they chose. As a result, blacklisting, while having an effect, did not have the same impact as it did in Hollywood.

  Nonetheless, the question still persists: were the anti–Communists going after the Jews? While stories of anti–Semitism were less prevalent in the 1950s than they were in the 1930s, there are several valid statements and numbers to support such arguments that the Hollywood Jews were indeed very much a target of the witch hunt and that blacklisting was a means of getting prominent Jews out of the industry, even if only temporarily.

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  Mega Hit Musicals

  Despite McCarthyism and the Cold War, the 1950s featured some of the most triumphant musicals in Broadway history, and the Jewish influence upon these shows was quite significant.

  The decade was ushered in with the smash hit, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which opened in December of 1949 at the Ziegfeld Theater. It ran for over 700 performances and featured Carol Channing. Jule Styne, born in London to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants, wrote the music for the show. Styne took to the stage at the age of three and learned piano on a rental. By the time he was ten, his family had moved to Chicago, and Styne had become quite accomplished on the piano and was performing with major symphony orchestras. After attending Music College in Chicago, he would embark on a music-writing career. Styne, despite being an early protégé, had his first Broadway hit while he was in his 40s, teaming with Sammy Cahn on a show called High Button Shoes starring Phil Silvers.

  Two years later, he would collaborate with Leo Robin on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, from the 1926 Anita Loos novel about the roaring 20s, with Robin providing lyrics. Styne would write music for Peter Pan, My Sister Eileen and Bells Are Ringing in the ’50s, and continue a long career writing for Broadway and leaving a legacy of over 1,500 songs including

  “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,”

  “Every thing’s Coming Up Roses,” “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and the Streisand hit from the early 1960s, “People.”

  Less than a year after Gentle Prefer Blondes, in November 1950, Guys and Dolls opened its run of over 1,200 performances with George S.

  Kaufman directing. While the show did enjoy great success, it did not hit Broadway as originally planned. Guys and Dolls was originally supposed to be a serious romantic musical based on a short story. However, after Frank Loesser wrote the music, and 11 librettists tried unsuccessfully to pen the lyrics, producers Cy Feuer and Earnest Martin brought in a radio/television comedy writer named Abe Burrows. The result was a musical that evolved into the comedic classic. Burrows went on to win a Tony Award. He also went on to direct Cole Porter’s classic Can Can in 1953 and write the book for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, again winning both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize. A prolific writer, 104

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  with a knack for comedy, Burrows was also called in as a script doctor on a number of other Broadway shows.

  The mega-hit musical of 1951 was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, with Jerome Robbins as choreographer. The show ran for 1,246 performances.
While Can Can trumped all musicals from the class of ’53, Weill’s Threepenny Opera opened in ’54 and posted more than 2,600 performances, featuring over 200 actors in the show’s 22 roles during its long run. Another major musical of the era emerged in 1955

  as an adaptation of the Douglass Wallop novel, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. The story of a middle-aged Washington Senator’s fan who sells his soul to the devil to beat the New York Yankees ran for over 1,000

  performances under the name Damn Yankees and defied the long-standing theory that a show about baseball would never last. The Jewish team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross supplied the music and lyrics for the show, which featured a book by George Abbott. Learning from their men tor Frank Loesser, the young writing team went from obscurity to success with the song ironically called “Rags to Riches,” a chart-topping hit for Tony Bennett in 1953. They would move on to Broadway in the same year, first with a revue and then with the hit musical The Pajama Game which opened in 1954, featuring the proactive show-stopper

  “Steam Heat.” The team moved right to Damn Yankees, which debuted on Broadway a year later. Sadly, their collaboration would come to an abrupt end with the sudden death of Jerry Ross at just 29 years of age.

  Adler continued a long successful musical career, but never quite enjoyed the notoriety of the two Broadway musicals he had written with Ross.

  In 1956, Weill’s Threepenny Opera would be topped by a record-set ting 2,717 performances of My Fair Lady, directed by Moss Hart and produced by Herman Levin, a Jewish Philadelphia-born attorney who turned to theater in his 40s.

  The musical, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, was first offered to Rodgers and Hammerstein, who turned it down. It would later go to the musical team of Lerner and Loewe. The classic story was that of a professor, Henry Higgins, teaching a poor flower girl, Eliza Doo little, how to speak proper English, while making a lady out of her, only to see the student excel beyond the hopes of the teacher. That, however, was only part of the tale. The romance that ensues was the last piece of the puzzle added to Shaw’s original work, and the rest was his-105