Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof

by Alisa Solomon

  In ways that couldn’t yet be assessed, Kennedy’s presidency had been emotionally in synch with the Tevye project. His administration has long been associated with the 1960 Lerner and Loewe musical, Camelot; a week after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy, with some embarrassment, told Life’s Theodore H. White that she couldn’t get a passage from that show’s title song out of her head, a track her late husband had loved to listen to:

  Don’t let it be forgot

  That once there was a spot,

  For one brief, shining moment

  That was known as Camelot.

  The sentimental appeal can’t be denied. Camelot’s king, who seeks a peaceful reign and yearns to know “what the simple folk do” (as one song wonders) and has a beautiful wife (who needs to be “handled,” as he frets in another song), provided a facile pop culture overlay for taking stock of the end of the slain president’s presumed era of “happily ever-aftering, here in Camelot.” But Fiddler ended up having more affinity for the values and domestic policy ideals of the Kennedy White House than the 1960 romantic fable could. Anatevka may not have been as “shining” or as “brief” as Camelot, as the title song describes it, but if “shtetl” had rhymed with “spot,” an adjusted lyric might serve as the true background song for Kennedy’s convictions about his country. “This was the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action,” Kennedy wrote in his 1958 essay “A Nation of Immigrants.”

  Only a few months before the assassination, he made the first nostalgic trip of an American president to his ancestral homeland. During his four-day state visit to Ireland, Kennedy told the people of Limerick, “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I hold the greatest affection.” Kennedy’s trip had been calculated to reopen American hearts—and its doors. And the show in auditions the autumn of his assassination would pull with gentle persuasion on those same heartstrings. Both nudged along the shift in the locus of America’s origin story, as the scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson has put it, from Plymouth Rock to Ellis Island. Kennedy pressed for reform of American immigration law, which from the mid-1920s had cut off the further entry of Eastern European Jews, among others: for four decades, no more tempest-tossed Tevyes had been welcome on these teeming shores. (In 1965, the Johnson administration would abolish the country’s national origin quota system.) As a defender of immigrants, Kennedy was a friend to the Jews. In March 1963, the Anti-Defamation League gave its annual America’s Democratic Legacy Award to the president to honor his “enrichment of our democratic heritage.” Instinctively, Fiddler paid homage to Kennedy’s principles. The show—created by the sons and grandsons of immigrants, now fully assimilated and prospering—at once celebrates the world left behind and the leaving of it for freedom and opportunity in America; it would give audiences an emotional correlative for their murdered president’s vision.

  But at the time of the assassination, that theatrical solace—and the public’s readiness for it—lay nearly a year away. When Tevye auditions resumed on November 26, the national mood remained glum: postwar optimism seemed to have crashed in an instant. Simmering tensions—over civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the emerging counterculture—would rise through the rubble, and also be reflected in Fiddler’s plot. The show—every show—would go on. (Jackie Kennedy came to see Fiddler one year after the assassination and enjoyed it immensely.)

  Robbins kept searching for a special “ordinary” quality for his cast—he didn’t want actors who looked too polished or flashy to be convincing as poor Jews. Yet he and his collaborators also didn’t want actors who, in their view, overplayed some put-on idea of Jewishness. They rejected stereotypical portrayals that showed vestiges of the American vaudeville “stage Jew” with Old Country accents, flailing hands, or singsong intonations; they quickly eliminated anyone who seemed to have arrived at the audition hall directly from Yiddish Second Avenue or the borscht belt (though they did make an arrangement with the Hebrew Actors’ Union—the sixty-five-year-old association of Yiddish performers—to audition some of their members). Robbins’s notes on the show repeatedly sound his contempt for representations of Jews as “lovable schnooks,” and his collaborators shared his concerns. Joe Stein asserted that, especially for Yente, since “the part is written very Jewish … I think we ought to cast away from the obvious Jewish.” While the team’s jottings on audition sheets next to names taken out of consideration reveal the usual negative comments that can grow increasingly snide as long days of casting calls drag on—“DULL, DULL, DULL,” “rotten actor,” “his sullen charm wears thin,” “sang like a parody of a Methodist spinster choir lady”—more notably, they dismiss those who have “too much of an accent,” “Reform rabbi delivery,” “the Jewish quality I find unappealing.” The Jewishness they sought had to well up from character, not sit upon an actor like external trappings—they looked for acting from the inside out, as common theatrical parlance had it, not from the outside in.

  Though less common to the presentational form of the musical than to realistic dramas, this approach reigned in general in the American theater of the period. It was no mere coincidence that “The Method” in its local incarnations had been developed and taught by children of Jewish immigrants (born in the States or brought as youngsters); it rejected “exteriority” and coached actors to dig for psychological reality. Robbins joined its orbit, working backstage in his youth at the Group Theater, studying at the Actors Studio, and taking scene analysis classes with Stella Adler, the youngest daughter of Yiddish theater royalty, Jacob P. Adler and Sara Adler (and sister of the actor Luther Adler, who later played Tevye in Fiddler). Stella Adler had broken with the other pioneer, her Group Theater colleague Lee Strasberg, by emphasizing research and ingenuity over “sense memory” of personal emotional experiences in building character. “Don’t use your conscious past,” she counseled actors. “Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character.” Robbins’s undated notes from the Adler sessions he attended emphasize her teachings along these lines, especially on the difference between “organic action” and “stated action.” He was looking for actors who did not “play Jewish” but who played their characters. His cast members didn’t have to be Jewish—and, it turned out, most of the principals Robbins hired were not—they had to be Lazar or Perchik or Golde or Rivka the Villager, who were Jews. This was a pillar of faith for Robbins, as an artist and as a man. He knew that if he cast well he would not have to waste time in rehearsals explaining the distinction.

  Easier said than done. Though Robbins settled quickly on Pendleton as Motel, selecting the suitors for the other two sisters proved more difficult than if he’d actually been arranging the actors’ marriages. Apart from possessing a strong baritone, the Perchik had to combine the blustery certitude of a militant with the endearing timidity of a romantic neophyte. And, of course, fit well into the growing ensemble and, especially, spark off some chemistry with the Hodel. Over several months, the team saw scores of eager young men, among them Joseph Chaikin (on the verge of founding the influential Off-Off-Broadway company the Open Theater), Elliott Gould, Ron Liebman, Tommy Rall (a Broadway regular who’d played a featured romantic in Milk and Honey and a leading dance role in Juno), Ron Rifkin, George Segal, Sam Waterston, Gene Wilder: every top-grade white actor then in his twenties, it seemed, and plenty more who weren’t so top-grade. None satisfied Robbins. The new year dawned with Perchik still not chosen—and, worse, with the search for Hodel reopened: Anne Fielding had decided two months on the road was too long to be away from her husband and she bowed out before signing a contract. And while the team liked Joanna Merlin, they continued to audition other potential Tzeitels.

  At least Robbins had nailed down his Tevye before the end of 1963. The choice had been obvious, even inevitable. But that didn’t make the
process simple.

  Accounts differ on when, exactly, Zero Mostel was offered the role. And they differ more when it comes to why he took his time accepting it, requiring the team to keep auditioning other actors just in case. Brilliant, riveting, deeply familiar with Yiddishkayt, Mostel was the first candidate anyone thought of, as Stein remembered the deliberations, but because Robbins “insisted on examining every possibility before making up his mind, we auditioned some awfully good actors who would have been fine.”

  Robbins was decisive about one thing from the start, however: “fine” would not suffice. Whoever played Tevye first would have to combine the realness Robbins insisted on in general with the magnetism and virtuosity—the ineffable “it”—that make a Broadway star. The actor would have to live in two places simultaneously onstage: inside the world of the play as a convincing Pale of Settlement patriarch and on the outside of the dramatic action as a crowd-pleasing performer of magnificent feats. And he would have to be equally and constantly lovable in both realms: intimate with the audience and beyond their ken, winning their empathy and their awe. The conventions of the musical require a measure of duality from all the cast members, who shift in and out of representational acting and presentational song, but star power is charged by an extraordinary alternating current that allows a lead actor to run both modes at full wattage at all times. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially, the most popular musicals pointed with glitzy self-consciousness at this very quality, featuring flashy numbers that named and framed the star (“Hello, Dolly,” “Mame”) or that gave her (usually her in these years) a big blowout song (“Rose’s Turn” in Gypsy, “Don’t Rain on My Parade” in Funny Girl). Within the context of a musical drama with an ensemble cast, and without the help of histrionic extravagances (whether campy or not)—a fanfare entrance; finery, feathers, and a bright follow spot; a thunderous eleven o’clock number—Tevye’s star would have to exude theatrical ebullience without breaking the illusion that he was a poor, simple dairyman. There would have to be some madness in his Method. And he would have to balance gracefully.

  Bock and Harnick championed Howard Da Silva, the strapping baritone who had originated the role of Jud Fry in Oklahoma! and delighted the songwriting team as the conniving Republican machine boss Ben Marino in Fiorello!; Bock and Harnick had also seen him in The World of Sholom Aleichem and knew he had an attachment to the material. Harnick was drawn by Da Silva’s “natural voice, sense of nobility, and charisma” but couldn’t persuade Robbins. According to oft-told lore, Robbins said he required an actor “larger than life,” a quality he thought Da Silva lacked. In any event, the actor never auditioned for Robbins; perhaps the longtime activist harbored his own doubts about inhabiting the same rehearsal room as a friendly witness to HUAC. And if Robbins, meanwhile, did not want his show to be thought of as in any way derived from Perl’s work, that would have disqualified Da Silva from the start.

  Da Silva was just one in a first-class lineup of seasoned actors considered for Tevye that fall; others included Danny Kaye, Joseph Schildkraut, Rod Steiger, Eli Wallach. The roster may simply have been a function of the run-around Zero Mostel was giving the creators. Accounts of the initial approach to Mostel vary—not least because the antic actor infamously told interviewers different stories about his life, sometimes simply embellishing the facts, sometimes clearly enjoying how far he could take journalists on a ride. The actor’s family recounts that the first overture came in late 1962, when Stein visited Mostel backstage at A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, bearing an early draft of Tevye, and that the star fumed at home about what “shund” the script was, vowing that he would never deign to appear in such a sentimental bastardization of the great Sholem-Aleichem’s stories, which, Mostel said, his parents read to him in Yiddish when he was a boy, making him “roar with laughter.” Stein maintained that he made no such trip to Mostel’s dressing room.

  In any event, in September 1963, Fred Coe reached out to Mostel, after Robbins was hired. But Mostel put off answering for weeks on end, meanwhile pursuing a TV pilot for a sitcom involving his own family (it never panned out), and the team at least needed some backups. They kept auditioning esteemed actors and spoke with several more, as they waited in vain through September for a response from Mostel. Robbins was growing frustrated. “Would somebody tell Zero that this show will be good for him?” Robbins huffed.

  During the first week of October, Robbins and the authors played the score for Mostel at his apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. Bock and Harnick sat at the piano and sang through a number of songs. Bock, for one, left in high spirits: Mostel loved their tunes. The actor promised that they’d hear from him by the sixteenth. When no word had come by 4:30 on that date, Stein called Robbins to ask: “What’s happening with Zero?”

  Mostel had made money on Forum and wasn’t desperate for work the way he’d been less than a decade earlier, while the blacklist still suffocated him. He could afford to devote himself to his painting—he called acting the side work that supported the art that mattered more to him—but Tevye tugged at him irresistibly. According to family lore, it was Mostel’s wife, Kate, who insisted he take the role. A retired dancer, she had a good nose for a theatrical hit, and even in the audition draft of the script she could smell a winner (and thus she could see the mink coat she coveted, as one of their sons recalls, adding that the couple fought bitterly for weeks over whether Mostel should accept the part). Friends, though, remember Mostel’s excitement over the opportunity and his sense of entitlement to the role. He considered Tevye not only “the greatest Yiddish character ever created” but by all rights his. No one else possessed the background, the affinity, the chops he could bring. Hal Prince—who had pushed for Mostel in Forum as producer of that show—agreed, emphatically enough to offer a then whoppingly generous salary of $4,000 a week against 10 percent of the weekly box office gross (a higher base pay than the $100,000 one-year contract Mickey Mantle was about to sign with the Yankees).

  On the twenty-fifth, Robbins wrote Mostel that he so wanted him for the show that he’d postpone it until the fall of 1964 to accommodate Mostel’s schedule were he not “stuck with” a signed commitment “to go this spring.” He fairly begged in signing off: “Please don’t make me do this without you. Please.” Maybe Mostel had been waiting to hear Robbins grovel. In any event, it worked. (And, it turned out later, the schedule was postponed to accommodate Robbins.)

  On November 1, Prince started cranking out letters to the likes of Red Buttons and Tom Bosley (who’d starred as Fiorello): “I’m sorry that it hasn’t worked out with Tevye,” Prince wrote, politely reassuring them that it was “a very difficult decision” or that “[I] hope and expect that one of these days we’ll do a show together.”

  Mostel and Robbins had worked together briefly before and did not like each other. So Robbins’s eagerness to cast Mostel and Mostel’s zeal for the part spoke to both men’s prevailing sense of artistry—they recognized and respected each other’s talents. Even more, the draw of the Sholem-Aleichem material trumped their mutual distrust and distaste. For both of them, albeit in vastly different ways, this project was personal.

  Their first professional encounter (after crossing paths a number of times over the years) had been in 1962. Prince had called Robbins in to help out with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum when it was in trouble on the road. He reached Robbins in Los Angeles, where he was receiving best picture and codirecting Oscars for the film version of West Side Story, and implored him to catch the next possible flight to Washington, where the show was losing half its audience at every intermission. Prince felt that only Robbins could figure out how to rescue it. He also knew that his leading cast members might object to his number one fix-it man. Not only might Zero Mostel resent the “rat fink”; his costar, Jack Gilford, might hold a particular animus: Robbins had named Gilford’s wife, Madeline Lee. Gilford flared at the news and threatened to quit, but when he phoned home Lee couns
eled him to keep his job: “Don’t blacklist yourself,” she told him. Mostel famously marched up the high road: “We of the left don’t blacklist,” he told Prince. He agreed to work with Robbins. But he added, “You didn’t say I had to have lunch with him.”

  Mostel and Robbins agreed on one cultural and political point: “Naming names,” Mostel had proclaimed, “is not Jewish.” And that, at least as Robbins explained the deed to himself, was why he did it.

  But it wasn’t just the political bad blood that caused Mostel to call Robbins “that sonofabitch” in place of his given name. Two more opposite temperaments are tough to imagine. Mostel was an unstoppable force, Robbins an immovable object. Mostel was confident and free as an actor could be, Robbins a sack of insecurity as a director. Their very bodies exemplified the contrast between them: an uncontainable, jiggling mass on the one hand, an utterly flab-free, erect carriage on the other. If a time machine could put a story about them on the Yiddish stage of earlier decades, charismatic, outsize Thomashefsky would have to play Mostel and haughty, blazing Jacob Adler would embody Robbins.

  Like those brilliant rivals of yore, Mostel and Robbins arrived from opposite directions at a consummate sense of artistic showmanship. Both were alternately considered highfalutin for their pronouncements about capital-A Art and scorned for pandering with base entertainments. In other words, they were masters of Broadway, making popular works with serious ambitions. Fiddler counted on both.