by Studs Terkel
Some months later, one of the men at MGM151 came to me very, very upset. “I have something here that I am ashamed to give you.” It was a call-down about having mixed my politics with my work: How about watching out for this? He said, “What do you want me to do with this?” I said, “Tear it up.”
When the Depression came, I had a very good job in Hollywood. It was just at the beginning of my career. It was really distant to me. Everybody around me was working. You get up at five-thirty. You’re in the studio at seven. You’re made up and ready at nine and work until six. They now call those The Golden Years of the Movies. Perhaps they were. People needed films, needed some diversion. I wasn’t deeply involved in politics myself. I kind of dialed out. I didn’t come to life until Roosevelt….
I was told I was F.D.R.’s favorite actress. I had never met him. Later on, when I was in Washington, at a cocktail party, Henry Morgenthau152 said, “The old man thinks we’re keeping you away from him. You’ve never come to see him. Tomorrow morning, put your hat on the dresser, and I’ll call for you.” The next morning he called to tell me the President had gone to Canada.
Later on, they sent for me to attend his birthday celebration. I bought myself a John Frederick hat. I came tootling into the White House with a big bunch of violets and this black hat. I looked down the hall and I saw Mrs. Roosevelt. I walked up to her. She said, “Oh, my dear, my husband is going to be so distressed.” He had gone to Teheran. (Laughs.) Here was this glamor girl all done up. I fell in love with her then and there. I was very lucky to have spent quite a lot of time with her. I miss her very much. There aren’t too many people you miss that way….
BOOK FIVE
The Fine and Lively Arts
Hiram (Chub) Sherman
At sixty, he is an established Broadway actor. Much of his time, whether “at liberty” or while engaged in a play, has been spent on the Council of Actors Equity.
I LEARNED in the Twenties that you could exist on very little. To paraphrase Tennessee Williams, you can depend on the kindness of strangers. When the Depression actually began in ‘29, I was just on my way to New York. It wasn’t any demarcation point in my life. There were no stocks to be lost, ’cause we didn’t have them.
There were no jobs in New York. I worked in summer stock and touring companies. In 1931, I played a season in Newport, Rhode Island. It was as if the Depression had never existed at all. All the functions were duly reported as going on at the Viking Hotel and the Casino Theater. Sitting in the middle of the Casino, covered with flowers, were Mrs. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Moses Taylor, arriving in their limousines. I hadn’t seen men in panama hats, blue blazers and white shoes since. There was discreet drinking in china cups during Prohibition in all the best hotels in Newport. One could sit there nursing a teacup filled with bootleg gin or whiskey. But it was all elegant. In teacups, china cups.
It was rock-bottom living in New York then, it really was. Cars were left on the streets. There were no signs about restricted parking. (Laughs.) If somebody had a jalopy—a few friends you know would have some old car—it would sit there for months on end neither molested nor disturbed. It would just fall apart from old age.153
You didn’t count your possessions in terms of money in the bank. You counted on the fact that you had a row of empty milk bottles. Because those were cash, they could be turned in for a nickel deposit, and that would get you on the subway. If you took any stock in yourself, you looked to see how many milk bottles you had, because that counted. Two bottles: one could get you uptown; one could get you back.
I remember being employed once to stand in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, Easter morning. With a clicker in each hand. A fashion woman had engaged me to note the acceptance of patent leather purses and white hats. Each white hat I saw, I clicked my right hand. And each patent leather purse I saw, I clicked my left hand. Then I had to go home and tote up what the clickers said. White hats were in that spring, patent leather purses were out.
I remember also what you’d pick up odd dollars doing. There were sightseeing buses—see Chinatown, see the Bowery, see New York. They were lined up right on Times Square. If you’ve ever noted a sightseeing bus, there’ll be a couple of people sitting on the bus. And they’d say: It’s leaving right away, guided tour, just leaving for the Bowery and Chinatown. Well, the people inside were usually shills. They’re engaged for a quarter or fifty cents to sit there and look eager. I shilled in Times Square sightseeing buses. (Laughs.) As people came on, you got off: “Excuse me for a moment.” And then you got into another bus. It’s a sitting job.
The summer always provided work for actors. I don’t know why this happened, I can’t explain it. But there was a great proliferation of turning barns into summer theaters. During the Depression, that’s when it came.
In 1936, I joined the Federal Theater.154 I was assigned to Project 891. The directors and producers were Orson Welles and John Houseman. The theater we had taken over was the Maxine Elliott. A lot of theaters went dark during the Depression, and the theater owners were happy to lease them to the Government.
One of the marvelous things about the Federal Theater, it wasn’t bound by commercial standards. It could take on poetic drama and do it. 155 And experimental theater. The Living Newspaper made for terribly exciting productions.156 Yet it was theater by bureaucracy. Everything had to go to a higher authority. There were endless chits to be approved. There were comic and wasteful moments all over the country. But it was forward-thinking in so many ways. It anticipated some of today’s problems. The Unit I was in was integrated. We did Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Mephistopheles was played by a Negro, Jack Carter. Orson Welles played Faustus.
Our next production was Cradle Will Rock, words and music by Marc Blitzstein. And we rehearsed those eight hours a day. We worked every moment, and sometimes we worked overtime because we loved it.
Cradle Will Rock was for its day a revolutionary piece. It was an attack on big business and the corruption involved. It was done à la Brecht. We had it fully rehearsed.
On opening night, when the audience was assembling in the street, we found the doors of the Maxine Elliott closed. They wouldn’t admit the audience because of an edict from Washington that this was revolutionary fare. And we would have no performance. Somebody had sent down the word.
Well, when you have an alert company, who are all keyed up at this moment, and a master of publicity such as Orson Welles, this is just grist for their mills. (Laughs.)
It’s a nice evening in May—late May or April. Balmy evening. An audience not able to get into a theater, but not leaving because the directors of 891, Orson Welles and John Houseman, were haranguing them in the street: “Don’t leave!” They expected to get a reversal of the edict. We’re told not to make up. We’re told not to go home. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
No reversal came from Washington. So Orson and John Houseman got their friends on the phone: What theater could we do this in? Somebody suggested the Jolson Theater. An announcement was made to all these people, without benefit of microphone: if you go to the Jolson Theater you will see the show. And we marched. Walking with our audience around into Broadway and then up Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street, we acquired an even larger audience.
Walking down the middle of the street?
Oh yes. Walking with no police permit. (Laughs.) Just overflowing the sidewalks. Obviously something was afoot. The Jolson Theater hadn’t had a booking for months and was very dusty. But it was open.
Word came from Actors Equity that proper bonding arrangements had not been made. The actors would not be allowed to appear on the stage. Because now you’re not under the aegis of the Federal Theater. You’re under some obscure private management. You don’t know what, because you haven’t found out yet.
This didn’t daunt us. We had a colloquy right in the alley. We decided, well, if we can’t go on the stage, we could wheel out the piano and Marc Blitzstein could do what he had don
e in so many auditions: describe the setting and such, and we’ll all sit in the audience. Equity didn’t say we couldn’t sit in the audience. When our cues come, we will rise and give them. So, that we did.
The theater filled. I don’t know how the extra people, who didn’t hold tickets for the opening, how they got in. I’ve often wondered. Did the box office open or did they just say: come in for the laughs? But it was packed with people.157 The stage was bare, the curtain was up, and you suddenly missed all your fellow actors. You couldn’t find them. We were in different parts of the house.
Eventually the house lights lowered a little. Marc Blitzstein came out and laid the setting and played a few bars and then said: “Enter the whore.” I didn’t know where Olive Stanton, who played the whore, was. Suddenly you could hear Olive’s very clear high voice, from over left. A spotlight suddenly found her and she stood up. She was in the lower left-hand box. One by one, as we were called up, we joined in. We turned around if we were down front, and faced the audience. People were scattered all over. It was a most exciting evening. The audience reaction was tremendous.
One of those summers, ’38, ’39, I don’t know which—Marc Blitzstein corraled most of us who’d been in the original company and asked us if we’d give up Sunday to go give a performance of Cradle Will Rock in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I thought this was marvelous. Because we’re now going to take Cradle Will Rock to the workers, to the people for whom he wrote this piece. We were all corraled into a bus and off we went on a nice, hot summer’s day. I thought, well, pretty soon the mills will close down and the steel workers will pour into this amusement park, as twilight comes, and they’ll hear this marvelous saga. No one showed up.
A few men drifted in, and the first thing you find out is that many of them do not understand or speak English. And this was written in, supposedly, common American speech. Here we were preparing an opera for the proletariat, and the proletariat neither wants nor understands it. It’s a rather shocking occurrence. But you don’t give up.
You’re in a hot, sort of open auditorium. And Will Geer,158 never to be discouraged, scrounging around for an audience. He found a picnic of church ladies over an adjoining hill. They were spreading out their picnic baskets and he asked: “Would you like to be entertained with an opera?” They allowed as how they would, and they packed their gingham table cloths, all the sandwiches and brought them over to this little amusement place. And sat down.
Marc Blitzstein came out and announced the name of this piece was Cradle Will Rock, the setting was Steeltown, U.S.A., and it begins on a street corner at night, and enter the whore. When he said those words, our audience got up and packed up their picnic baskets and left us. We never did do Cradle Will Rock in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
We were to report back to the Federal Theater, to Project 891. We had no assignment at the moment. But all of us in the stock company had to spend eight hours a day in the Maxine Elliott Theater. We could bring no food in the theater. We had a lunch hour. We could read, but we could not write. We couldn’t deface anything, we couldn’t rehearse. We sat. Forced sitting, with nothing to keep you interested, is one of the most grueling punishments I’ve ever been through. I’ve never been in jail as yet, I expect to. But prisoners are paid for work.
I don’t know if I’m partisan to the underdog or whether I’m the underdog. My political convictions were my own. But this is not the case in life. You’re stigmatized, anything you do. I was active in my union, I was playing benefits—there was Spanish relief, you know, the Spanish Civil War. My life was very full. I didn’t sleep very much. I got excited about everything. They were tearing down the Sixth Avenue Elevated and selling the scrap iron to Japan. I was going to protest…. (Laughs.) There was a cause every second.
I was horrified one morning to find that a Congressman from Kansas had stated in the Congressional Record that I was one of the seven Communists that dominated the Council of the Actors Equity Association. I thought that was unusual. So I sent the Congressman a wire and I said: I read this news story, and if you’ll repeat your accusations outside the halls of Congress, I would sue you for loss of employment. I never heard from him again.
I found the Equity Council in an uproar and I was asked to resign. I said I have no intention of resigning because a man has made such a statement, and he’s never answered my telegram. “If you don’t like me, don’t elect me next time to the Council. But I’m certainly not walking out.” Several councillors walked out in protest to me being there. I was so politically naive, I wouldn’t know then how to go about joining the Communist Party. I wouldn’t know just how to do it. (Laughs.)
There comes a time when you cannot think seriously about Left and Right. And people would come up to you, your dearest friends, and say: “Listen, tell me, really, are you?” I’d say: “Am I what?” They’d say: (whispering) “Are you a Communist?” Now if you say no, you’re immediately accused of lying. I don’t know why this is. But as soon as you say no, they look at you as if—oh boy! If you say yes, you’re also lying, because no Communist says yes when asked. I found myself in this terrible bind, being assailed at every corner by people asking me.
One old Equity member—I was really at the breaking point—during a recess in the Equity Council meeting said: “Look, I really want to know.” And I just couldn’t care less at this time. He said: “I want to talk to you.” And I said: “Yes?” And he said: “Tell me, are you a Communist?” I thought: I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. I said quickly, I said: “We’re not allowed to tell.” And there wasn’t a laugh on his part at all. It was just as if I’d sealed my death warrant, being facetious. It haunted me for years, that remark. (Laughs.)
I remember going into a theatrical office looking for work. You’d go up and say: who’s casting today? And the sign hanging over the railing: NO COMMUNIST NEED APPLY. It was hanging there. Indignantly, I ripped off the sign and went to the girl at the desk and said: “Why don’t you reduce this to the basic fact that no actors need apply? You’re not doing anything anyway.” Making the little gesture. It probably got hung back on the door again.
So then the war broke out and the Depression, as we know it, ended….
It didn’t for me.
I enlisted in the navy—I was a bit too old for the immediate draft call. After being vilified in the halls of Equity I was told I was a marvelous human being and that my seat on the Council would always be waiting for me. Five years later, I got out and went back and said: “Where’s my seat?” And they said: “You’ll just have to run like everybody else.”
I had incurred a few debts before the war with high Depression living, and they were still waiting for me after the war. Not the seat, the debts.
The average actor clings to whatever job’s providing money, the longest time possible. I’ve now come to an age where I can’t do that any more. I find I want very little in the way of possessions out of life. Here we are in a hotel room, and there’re unanswered letters piled up on my desk. And that’s my life. I don’t care. I’ve got a suit on, and that’s about all I want. I’d like to answer the letters before I die. (Laughs.) But I don’t know that I will.
Neil Schaffner
It is a comfortable trailer home in Wapello, Iowa. He and his wife, Caroline, both retired, spend their winters in Florida.
Though both had “trouped” from childhood, the Schaffner Players were organized in 1925, and “we never missed a year—come war, catastrophe, the Depression—till a heart attack laid me low” in the late Forties. It was a tent dramatic company, touring the towns of Iowa. After its first ten years, other Midwestern states were “trouped.”
The Schaffner Players were among the more celebrated of such companies that performed in the rural areas of the country, since before the turn of the century.
The fare was primarily comedy, though a serious theme was occasionally part of the “repertore.” “All these plays always had a good moral, a thought to carry away.” In most of them, he app
eared as Toby. With red wig and freckles, he was the rural comic hero, who always outwitted the city slicker. Whether he appeared as a GI, an FBI man or a country editor, he always was Toby. His wife was, invariably, Susie, recognized by her pigtails, freckles and equally pungent wisecracks.
The company would usually work a week in one town, a different. play each night. Their regular appearance was always a major event in the entertainment life of the community. “Crowds would line up sometimes two, three hours before the performance was scheduled to start.” The box office was always busy….
WHO TOLD EVERYBODY the Depression was on on the sixth day of July, Nineteen Hundred and Thirty? In the middle of May we opened our season in Wapello. We had heard talk of hard times being back East. We couldn’t see it. We had normal crowds at the show. A normal amount of candy and popcorn was being sold. We ended up our usual big week on the Fourth of July at Ollie, Iowa. We moved down to Fairfield, where we had always had big crowds.
On the night of July sixth, we played to about $30 gross business. That week, we took in $200 with a show costing us $1500. We couldn’t understand it. Somebody must have told everybody to quit going to shows. Well do I remember that day.
I jumped into a car and drove to Belle Plaine, where J. Doug Morgan had a show. He said, “I did the smallest business in the history of the Morgan Show.” How everybody found out the Depression was on that day I’ll never understand. All of a sudden, the plug was pulled out of the bathtub.
I have a wife, a baby and a mother-in-law. All I’ve got to sell is my ability as an entertainer. But it appeared nobody had any money to buy. The audience had become benumbed. They just accepted it as a horrible thing. You’d accept anything you couldn’t do a thing about. The show was an escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday scratch for existence. The company had to survive. It was a ground hog case—root hog or die. We had to keep going, and that’s all there was to it.
