When Hecht learned what was happening to European Jews, the rich, self-satisfied celebrity transformed himself into a wild-eyed militant. In 1943 he wrote and produced a stage docudrama about the destruction of European Jewry entitled We Will Never Die, with a gripping score by Kurt Weill. The son of a cantor, Weill had firsthand knowledge of the Nazis’ malevolence. In 1927, just as his Threepenny Opera was becoming the rage of Berlin, the Nazis made their first moves to power, placing his scores in their exhibition of Degenerate Art. Following an anti-Semitic demonstration at the opening of his opera Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake), the composer fled to Paris and then came to America, where he spoke of the horror overtaking the fatherland. He was only too glad to join Hecht at Madison Square Garden, where forty thousand people cheered Weill’s music and the playwright’s defiant words, spoken by Paul Muni and Stella and Luther Adler: “Though they fill the dark land of Europe with the smoke of their massacre, they shall never die. For they are part of something greater, higher and stronger than the dreams of their executioners.”
We Will Never Die proceeded to Hollywood, where Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield contributed their talents, and to Washington, D.C., where it was seen by the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as several hundred members of Congress. Deeply moved, the spectators made pledges of money and political aid. But when it came time to collect, feet were dragged and phone calls were not returned. A month later Weill had turned bitter. “What have we really achieved?” he demanded. “All we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique achievement.”
Hecht resolved that this empty spectacle would not recur. Next time out he would hit harder and louder; the survivors of Nazi genocide deserved a homeland, and pace the British occupiers of Palestine they would get it. To that end, he raised money for an unregistered ship to take Jewish refugees from Europe, and made himself the main unpaid publicist for the dream of Zion. The crystallization of his efforts was A Flag Is Born.
Staged at the Alvin Theatre on Fifty-second Street, this melodrama, like its predecessor, featured a stark plot and capital-letter dialogue. The production company, a proto-Zionist group called the American League for a Free Palestine freely admitted that A Flag Is Born was not ordinary theater. It was not written to amuse or to beguile. “Flag was written,” said the press release, “to make money to get Jews to Palestine and to arouse American public opinion to support the fight for freedom and independence now being waged by the resistance in Palestine.”
Set in a European graveyard, the one-act play centered on an elderly couple, Tevya and Zelda, whose family has been murdered by the Nazis. They reflect on the recent catastrophe, and then on the whole of Jewish history. Kings and prophets rise up and speak of the Jews’ ancient claim to the Holy Land. The dreamers represent the tragic past; the new future is represented by David, played by Marlon with unaccustomed passion, a shaken, bitter young survivor of the Treblinka death camp, who strays into a cemetery and remains there to envy the dead.
Paul Muni starred as Tevya and Celia Adler as Zelda. Luther Adler directed, delivering the playwright’s message with hammer-and-anvil effect. But there were differences between Hecht’s sorrowing We Will Never Die and his belligerent postwar A Flag Is Born. Muni was, as always, a standout. Still, he provided no surprises. Audiences, used to his tricks from Scarface, The Story of Louis Pasteur, and The Life of Emile Zola, knew that he got as much out of silence as others got out of speech, cocking his eye, hesitating before delivery of a line, making much of whatever makeup he wore—particularly when he could stroke a beard or play with his spectacles. Marlon, on the other hand, was an astonishment, making David awaken to the Zionist hymn “Hatikvah,” then marching off, resolute and militant, to join the Jewish soldiers of resistance in Palestine.
At the beginning of Act Two Marlon was illuminated by three spot-lights—Luther Adler was not a believer in understatement—as he delivered the play’s message. “Where were you?” he asked in a recriminatory tone. “Where were you, Jews? Where were you when six million Jews were being burned to death in the ovens of Auschwitz?” The effect was overpowering. Wails could be heard at almost all performances, and in some Marlon was accused by audience members: “Where were you…?” Muni, not the most generous of performers, had been critical of Marlon’s style in rehearsals: “He has pauses you could drive a truck through!” But now he experienced a total change of mind. In awe, he asked his wife, “How the hell can an actor like that come from Omaha, Nebraska?”
The project was a phenomenal fund-raiser and a critical favorite. Columnist Walter Winchell, then at the height of his influence, called Flag a “compelling blend of fact and fantasy, worth seeing, worth hearing and worth remembering. It will wring your heart and eyes dry…bring at least eleven handkerchiefs.” Time described the show as “colorful theater and biting propaganda,” and The Hollywood Reporter went it one better: “Ben Hecht has written so moving a pageant that we have been moved to pen not only a congratulatory critique—but to write a check to the American League for a Free Palestine in its repatriation program.” The New Yorker was one of the few publications to disagree with the majority; its reviewer found Flag “a combination of dubious poetry and political oversimplification.”
For Hecht, every knock was a boost. By the completion of the show’s out-of-town tour, the ALFP had raised close to a million dollars, enough to buy a four-hundred-ton former yacht called the S.S. Abril. Renamed the S.S. Ben Hecht, it conveyed a six-hundred-passenger contingent from Eastern Europe to the Middle East. By then U.S. newspapers had recorded another historic event engendered by A Flag Is Born. Responding to political pressure, operators of a segregated venue in Baltimore had agreed to an unprecedented bargain. For a price, the ALFP became the “lessee of the theater.” As such, the color-blind organization would be allowed to put any ticket holder anywhere. “Negroes were seated indiscriminately,” reported a black-owned weekly, “some holding orchestra and box seats, without untoward results.” On opening night Hecht told the audience, “Breaking down this vicious and indecent tradition in Maryland is worthy of the high purpose for which Flag was conceived and written.” It was one of the rare occasions where militant Zionism and black civil rights intersected. That connection was not lost on Marlon.
The cast of A Flag Is Born had been working for union scale—sixty dollars a week—and MCA was relieved when the tour ended. It was time for its client to start earning some real money. Marlon wrote home, informing his parents that he might be cast opposite the one and only Tallulah Bankhead. The play was Jean Cocteau’s The Eagle Has Two Heads, a drama of an aging nineteenth-century queen who falls in love with a young man, unaware that he intends to assassinate her. Bankhead’s reputation for bizarre behavior was a Broadway legend. The beautiful daughter of prominent Alabamans had been wild since adolescence—“I was raped in our driveway when I was eleven,” she told anyone who would listen. “You know, dahling, it was a terrible experience because we had all that gravel.” She began acting onstage in her early twenties, got off to a slow start in New York but wowed London, where she starred in twenty-four plays. When she appeared in The Little Foxes in 1939 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, she had Broadway at her feet. After those triumphs, however, a combination of pills, alcohol, and ego drove her on to all sorts of professional and sexual disasters. By the time she met Marlon she had become something of a caricature, with a husky tobacco-roughened voice and a series of exaggerated mannerisms.
Her Tudor-style estate in Bedford Village, New York, was called “Windows” with good reason: There were seventy-five of them. It was said that as she sashayed around nude, her eastern, western, northern, and southern exposures could be observed from the house’s eastern, western, northern, and southern exposures. Marlon was so wary of her reputation that he consulted Actors Studio founder Bobby Lewis, who lived one town away from Tallulah. Lewis warned him that the lady was hard-used and resentful of her middle age, that she drank far too much, that she coul
d be a termagant, and that his contract had better include an escape clause in case she made his life miserable. Then he dropped Marlon at Tallulah’s doorstep. She eyed the young man and welcomed him in. After some polite exchanges she handed him a script, he read aloud, and was hired on the spot. “I think,” he reflected, “that she was more interested in me for sex than for the part of Stanislas.” It didn’t take much thought to arrive at that conclusion. Tallulah tried to invade his trousers that very afternoon. Speaking about it later, Marlon told Lewis that he was interested in her actions “from an engineering point of view.” She entered at the cuff, and “I wanted to see if it was possible to get all the way up through that route because people usually unzip your fly. But you know, you can.”
Rehearsals were a nightmare. Tallulah began to invent excuses for her costar to visit her rooms at the Elysee Hotel. Seduction was the first thing on her mind, and the very last on Marlon’s. He found her unattractive and, in a strange way, frightening. For once he resisted the advances of a female. He took to chewing garlic before their staged embraces. When that failed to dampen Tallulah’s ardor, he made a show of gargling with mouthwash in the wings after every kiss.
The end of this not-quite relationship was quick and final. Stories vary; a stagehand recollected that Tallulah, angry with Marlon for his remoteness, whacked him with a riding crop during a scene in the first act. Furious, Marlon pursued her up a staircase, and when his costar suddenly found there was no exit, she retreated down the stairs, taking part of the curtain with her. Another account says that Marlon, weary of the star’s hogging of the stage, turned his back and urinated onto a potted plant during one of her long speeches. She heard the audience buzz, turned around, finished the play, and sacked him that night. In any case, she told the producers Marlon was all wrong for the part; he was dismissed after six weeks on the road. Luck was still with him. The Austrian actor Helmut Dantine replaced Marlon and The Eagle Has Two Heads opened at the Plymouth Theatre on March 19, 1947. It closed twenty-nine performances later.
The play and its stars were not missed; Broadway was enjoying a renaissance of great performances and fresh ideas. Having struck it rich with I Remember Mama, Rodgers and Hammerstein stayed in their producers’ chairs and found backers for the musical Annie Get Your Gun. Jerome Kern had been scheduled to write the score; when he died suddenly of a stroke in 1946, Irving Berlin took his place and wrote one of Broadway’s all-time smashes. The show was headed by Ethel Merman, the loudest diva in Broadway history. “I had to write a good lyric,” Berlin remarked. “The guy in the last row of the second balcony was going to hear every syllable.” Dynamic as she was, Merman was old news. Judy Holliday grabbed everyone’s attention; the twenty-five-year-old had become an overnight celebrity as the enlightened “dumb blonde” in Born Yesterday, replacing Jean Arthur out of town when the film star got sudden attacks of stage fright. Tigers were at the gates, and among that group were two young, ambitious black actors: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee debuted in Jeb. The play addressed the plight of another army hero, this one returning to a still-segregated nation. Two months later Jackie Robinson would break into the minor leagues, and José Ferrer, then starring in Cyrano de Bergerac, would use his own fame to advance the cause of the African American performer. In an article for Variety he wrote of playing Iago to Paul Robeson’s Othello. Their company toured places where the two stars had to stay at different hotels, and Ferrer took a public vow that he would never appear at any venue that assigned blacks and whites to different sections. He urged colleagues to follow his lead.
A green playwright named Arthur Miller had one Broadway failure behind him. With All My Sons, an examination of a wartime profiteer, he reestablished himself—thanks not only to his Ibsenesque dialogue but to the vibrant direction of Elia Kazan. Broadway was pushing the boundaries in 1947, advocating social change, introducing compelling new personalities. Marlon wondered if he had made the wrong choices in life as in art, if the parade had passed him by. It certainly looked that way. In addition, his financial outlook was bleaker than ever. After leaving Tallulah and her awful play, he had fallen asleep on the train ride back from Boston. When he awoke, his wallet was gone—eight hundred dollars, all the money he had earned from the Cocteau play, had been lifted. He was close to insolvency, and five months away from legend.
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Meager savings kept Marlon going through the late spring and early summer. Feeling an acute need for privacy, he traded his room in Dodie’s flat for one in the Park Savoy Hotel on West Fifty-sixth Street. The place served as a way station for actors on the come or on the way down; rooms were twenty dollars per week. There, amid other hopefuls, Marlon set up as a bachelor about town, and welcomed a steady stream of young women. There was no mystery to his physical attraction; his sensuous, feline grace was a magnet for female residents and for young women he met at social gatherings. Along with his appearance Marlon employed a devious psychological approach, an anger distilled from childhood experience. It rarely failed him. “I circle around and around,” he explained. “Then, gradually, I come nearer. Then I reach out and touch them—ah, so gently. Then I draw back. Wait a while. Make them wonder. At just the right moment, I move in again. Touch them. Circle. They don’t know what’s happening. Before they realize it, they’re all entangled, involved. I have them. And suddenly, sometimes, I’m all they have.” He could sense the emotionally impoverished across a crowded room: Years of watching Dodie had informed him well.
But the game of predator and prey was soon to be interrupted. Like most readers Marlon believed the theatrical reportage in the Times and Herald Tribune on August 1. They stated that Tennessee Williams’s new play, A Streetcar Named Desire, formerly titled Poker Night, would be directed by Elia Kazan and would star Jessica Tandy and John Garfield. So producer Irene Selznick had informed reporters; however, only two thirds of her story was accurate. Garfield, originally enthusiastic about the script, began to have second thoughts. Advance word on his new film, Body and Soul, was terrific; he felt sure it would put him back on top. Flexing his muscles, he demanded a rewrite; the character he was scheduled to play, Stanley Kowalski, was eclipsed by the play’s centerpiece, Blanche DuBois. That would never do. Furthermore, the curtain lines would have to be changed to give Stanley greater impact. Williams refused to touch his text. Garfield walked. The next choice, Burt Lancaster, had prior commitments. Streetcar was due to go into rehearsal at the beginning of October. As the clock ticked down, Edie Van Cleve seized her opening. She collared Kazan and reminded him of Marlon’s phenomenal stage presence: Look what he did in that turkey Truckline Café. Gadge protested that Garfield and Lancaster were both in their thirties. Marlon was twenty-three. Yet that night the director reflected that there was no reason why Stella and Stanley Kowalski couldn’t be in their early twenties and Blanche in her mid-thirties—if Williams would go along with the idea of a younger cast. He decided to roll the dice. Williams was holed up in Provincetown; Gadge got hold of Marlon, advanced him twenty dollars for the bus ride, supplied the Cape Cod address, and hoped for the best.
Three days later he called Tennessee and asked him what he thought of the actor he had sent. Williams was bewildered; no one had appeared. The next day, as Kazan started to ransack the casting directories, Marlon showed up at Williams’s place. He was dressed in his customary outfit of T-shirt and jeans and in the company of a girl he had picked up en route. He had spent Gadge’s money in New York, and hitchhiked some three hundred miles to the end of the Cape—hence the delay. The guests in Tennessee’s rented Provincetown house included his lover as well as the theatrical director and producer Margo Jones, a Texan who had codirected The Glass Menagerie. They were amusing and cultured folk, and not one of them knew a thing about plumbing or electricity. A pity, because the toilet had given up flushing and the fuse had blown. In the evenings they read by candlelight, an experience that palled after a few days. When they needed to relieve themselves they were forced to use an outhouse. That h
ad frayed tempers to the breaking point. Marlon’s entrance was welcomed less because he was an actor than because he knew how to handle household crises. He had been taking care of such things since Omaha, when his sisters were preoccupied with school and friends, his father was on the road, and his mother was drunk. He immediately put a penny behind the dead fuse, and the lights snapped on. Then he cleaned out the toilet tank, freeing a blocked pipe. Marlon was a hero before he’d read a line.
A day later Kazan received a call from the playwright in a voice bordering on hysteria. Brando’s reading of the dialogue “had overwhelmed him.” Margo Jones pronounced it “the greatest reading I’ve ever heard—in or outside of Texas!” By the time Marlon returned to New York, sans the pickup girlfriend, Williams had written his agent, Audrey Wood, “I can’t tell you what a relief it is that we found such a God-sent Stanley in the person of Brando. It had not occurred to me before what an excellent value would come through casting a very young actor in this part. It humanizes the character of Stanley in that it becomes the brutality or callousness of youth rather than a vicious older man.”
Rehearsals got under way on the morning of October 6, 1947. The New Amsterdam Theatre on West Forty-second Street had once been the glittering venue of the Ziegfeld Follies, but by the end of the war it had become an echoing, grungy movie house—emblematic of the play’s decaying centerpiece, Blanche DuBois. On the morning of the first day Gadge introduced each member of the assembled group, including stagehands, the stage manager, the producer, and the jittery, chain-smoking author. “This is the company we are going to stay with,” the director said firmly. “Anybody gets fired it’ll be me.” This was customary Kazan bravado, a way of giving assurance to a deeply insecure gathering. As they all knew, the director was the only marquee name Streetcar had to offer. His first film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, had been a critical and popular hit, and his most recent stage production, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, had burnished his reputation. Williams’s The Glass Menagerie had been a sensation. But it was the star, Laurette Taylor, who got the rave notices, not the playwright. Jessica Tandy, who would play Blanche DuBois, had been on the English stage from the age of sixteen, working with the likes of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. In the United States, though, work had been difficult to find. For the last several years she had played small and conventional supporting parts—viewers could spot her as a housemaid in the overheated movie Forever Amber. Kim Hunter, who would play Stella, Blanche’s sister, had also come up empty in Hollywood. She had begun acting in regional productions and that, according to Hunter, was what convinced producer Irene Selznick to select her: “She took my going back on the stage as a sign that I wanted to become a ‘serious’ actress.” Karl Malden, a blunt actor with a face like a closed fist, was cast as Stanley’s working-class pal Mitch. He had been in Truckline Café and All My Sons; Kazan considered him talented and reliable but hardly a box-office draw. Rudy Bond, an Actors Studio veteran, was hired to play Steve, the Kowalskis’ upstairs neighbor, because Kazan liked his roughhewn style. Just how rough Gadge was to learn when the actor palavered with a street musician, took the man’s violin in hand to show him how to play a riff—and promptly got hauled into the local police station for panhandling. Allowed one telephone call, Bond dialed Selznick. As he explained the situation he heard the distant voice of Tennessee: “Ah hope he’s in for murderin’ a critic.”
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