Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  The prologue opens on an Amsterdam street, outside the Franks’ home. It’s Anne’s thirteenth birthday, and she and her friends, Joop and Lies, are discussing her gifts. The conversation shifts to Anne’s flirtation with a certain Harry Goldberg, and Joop asks if Harry is taking Anne to the Zionist meeting. The girls discuss the restrictions that the Nazis have imposed on the Jews and the dangers of violating curfew. One says, “Quite a triumph, to get yourself sent to the concentration camp in Westerbork for ten minutes extra in the company of Harry Goldberg.”

  Otto Frank appears, carrying a parcel that he claims to be giving to Dutch friends for safekeeping from the Nazis. He and Anne discuss the possibility of going into hiding. There’s a long conversation about the onset of menstruation, and Mrs. Frank laughs at Anne for hoping that her first period might arrive as a birthday present. Then the call-up notice comes, spoiling the amiable mood, and Mrs. Frank says, “We must go into hiding at once.”

  Cut to the secret annex, where Margot is telling Miep about the guilt she feels for endangering her family by ignoring the summons; she mentions her dream of someday moving to Palestine. The rest of the family arrives, there are intimations of Anne’s conflict with her mother, followed by a romantic scene between Anne and her father in which Anne speaks of her desire to be alone with him in the world.

  The entrance of the Van Daans is more artfully handled than in the Goodrich-Hackett version, in which we are meant to accept the preposterous notion that the two families are meeting for the first time. In Levin’s play, as in life, they have a history. There’s a nice moment when Mr. Koophuis asks Mrs. Van Daan to remove her high heels, so as not to make any noise, and she says, “Never let a man choose a house.”

  Likewise, when Dussel appears in the second scene, his characterization is closer to what we know of Fritz Pfeffer than is the buffoon who stands in for him in Goodrich and Hackett’s drama. As the others wait for Dussel to show up, Mrs. Van Daan says that she hears he’s the biggest Don Juan of all the dentists in town; perhaps his delayed arrival means his female patients are reluctant to let him go. There’s an argument in which Anne objects to letting Dussel share her room, and another about which books children should be allowed to read—a disagreement that appears in the diary.

  The extended debates about spirituality and Palestine (“It’s part of being something more than yourself…. It’s making a free life for ourselves,” says Margot) point out the strength and weakness of Levin’s play. Anne is given at least some of the intelligence she displays in the diary, and which the Goodrich-Hackett heroine lacks. In one scene with Peter, she quotes Plato about men and women having once been united, then splitting into two halves, each struggling to find completion. One can hardly envision the Anne who pouted and pranced her way across the Broadway stage citing The Symposium. Yet the long passages of dialogue with which Levin delineates Anne’s character contribute to the static, discursive—unstageworthy—quality that troubled the producers. One can imagine potential backers cringing when Anne and Peter talk about how to determine the gender of a cat.

  Throughout, Levin’s play makes one realize how little “action” is in the diary, and how much is domestic, interior, and psychological. Having failed to discover the rhythm of crisis, danger, and (relative) relaxation that would engage the audiences who attended the Broadway production—a tension that Goodrich and Hackett labored, in draft after draft, to sustain—Levin relies on frequent mentions of Westerbork to create a sense of threat. The break-in downstairs is more discussed than dramatized, though there is one tense moment when a bomb falls nearby.

  In a scene between the Franks, Edith—whose piety becomes so oppressive that you can understand what irritated Anne, though this seems not to have been Levin’s intention—wonders if God is punishing them for not having taught the children more about their religious heritage. When Anne announces her plan to write a book entitled The Hiding Place, her sister replies, “I suppose it could be exciting. All the times we’ve been nearly caught, the robbery in the front office, and that nosey plumber”—events that Levin fails to exploit for their drama, though later, during the Hanukkah party, we see two thieves picking the downstairs lock.

  For Levin, a long scene in his play—in which Anne explains her religious feelings to Peter—conveys the soul of Anne’s book. In the diary, Anne’s first doubts about Peter, misgivings that upset her even in the heady phase of their romance, occur when he remarks that life would have been easier had he been born Christian. In later entries, Anne’s reservations about Peter often surface following spiritual discussions; she is troubled by his distaste for religion in general, and for Judaism in particular.

  Hans, the object of Cady’s romantic feelings in Anne’s novel-in-progress, Cady’s Life, is more religious than she is, and offers her this guidance (in a scene that goes on even longer than the conversation in Levin’s play) when they meet near the sanitarium where she is recuperating:

  “When you were at home, leading your carefree life…you just hadn’t given God a lot of thought. Now that you’re turning to Him because you’re frightened and hurt, now that you’re really trying to be the person you think you ought to be, surely God won’t let you down. Have faith in Him, Cady. He has helped so many others.”

  One can imagine Levin being less than thrilled by the pantheistic (or animistic) beliefs that Hans expresses: “If you’re asking what God is, my answer would be: Take a look around you, at the flowers, the trees, the animals, the people, and then you’ll know what God is. Those wondrous things that live and die and reproduce themselves, all that we refer to as nature—that’s God.” In fact, this conflation of nature with God runs close to the core of what Anne appears to have believed during her final months in the annex.

  In any case, if Anne and Peter’s extended metaphysical discourse seemed less gripping to others than it did to Levin, that may have had less to do with his play’s “excessive Jewishness” than with the producers’ pragmatic realization that, if an audience is going to watch two teenagers on stage, it’s not because they’re having a conversation about God.

  Like the play that ran on Broadway, Levin’s drama ends with the quote about people being good at heart, but, unlike the Goodrich-Hackett version, it puts the line back in context, amid the dialectic between Anne’s hope and her terror that the world will turn into a wilderness. The stage goes dark, the sounds of combat come up.

  “End of the diary,” declares the narrator. The stage directions specifiy that the battle noises grow louder, but reading the play, one may be more likely to hear the responses of the producers to whom Levin showed his drama: Dark. Depressing. Jewish. Gloomy. Insufficiently universal. The polar opposite of commercial.

  EVEN if Cheryl Crawford had admired Levin’s script, it would have been hard for her to ignore the siren song playing in everyone’s ears. Lillian Hellman believed they could get a playwright who was not only more famous but classier than Meyer Levin.

  Among the classiest names being mentioned was that of Carson McCullers, who had adapted her novel, The Member of the Wedding, for the stage, to great success and acclaim. The fact that its heroine was a teenage girl was one of the reasons, Barbara Zimmerman told Otto Frank, why McCullers was the perfect choice. Frank Price, at whose Doubleday Paris office the diary had been rescued from the rejection pile, contacted McCullers, then living in France with her husband, Reeve.

  Carson McCullers wrote Otto Frank, “I think I have never felt such love and wonder and grief. There is no consolation to know that a Mozart, a Keats, a Chekov is murdered in their years of childhood. But, dear, dear Mr. Frank, Anne, who has had that…gift of genius and humanity has, through her roots of unspeakable misery, given the world an enduring and incomparable flower. Mr. Frank, I know there is no consolation, but I want you to know that I grieve with you—as millions of others now and in the future grieve. Over and over in these days I have played a gramophone record of the posthumous sonnets of Schubert. To me it has become An
ne’s music…I can’t write an eloquent letter but my heart and my husband’s heart is filled with love.” She added that she hadn’t given much thought to the idea of writing a play based on the book. “I have only read the diary and am too overwhelmed to go any further.”

  Otto and his second wife, Fritzi, visited Carson and Reeve. Soon after, McCullers wrote Fritzi, “We have no formal religion but there are times when one understands a sense of radiance—and that feeling was with us when Otto was in our home. What is this radiance, this love? I don’t know, I only want to offer our joy that you and Otto are united and this carries all our love to you.”

  Two months later, Carson McCullers decided not to proceed with the project. “In spite of our deep feeling about Anne’s diary, it requires more technique in the theater than I can command…You see it is different doing a solitary work—that is all I have done—than adaptation on others’ books. Consequently I feel the result might lead to unhappiness to all concerned.” Later, she would claim she feared that immersing herself in the diary might damage her already fragile health, and that the mere prospect of it had caused her to break out in hives.

  In April 1953, Cheryl Crawford, alarmed by Levin’s increasingly litigious threats and demoralized by the financial loss she’d sustained staging Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, withdrew from the negotiations. That fall, Kermit Bloomgarden signed on to produce. Though Bloomgarden showed little interest in Levin’s adaptation, Levin behaved as if Bloomgarden’s involvement signaled a new beginning. When Levin realized that Bloomgarden was not the ally he had hoped, his behavior further deteriorated. In a letter to Otto, Levin claimed that his passion for his play was exactly like Otto’s feelings for his daughter, and expressed his conviction that neither the play nor the child should have been killed “by the Nazis or their equivalent.”

  It was around this time that Bloomgarden first contacted the husband-and-wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They’d had glamorous careers in Hollywood, where their hits had included Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Virginian, and Easter Parade. “The Hacketts of Hollywood,” Levin called them. They’d come with the highest credentials, recommended by Lillian Hellman who, as we have seen, felt that the diary needed just the sort of light touch that the Hacketts could provide. As the authors of Father of the Bride, they had demonstrated their ability to write about adolescents, just as the experience they’d had in doctoring the script of It’s a Wonderful Life had proved that they were able to brighten “dark material.” Who could balance charm and suspense? The adapters of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.

  Goodrich and Hackett hesitated, but were at last persuaded by the possibility of leavening the tragic story with “moments of lovely comedy which heighten the desperate, tragic situation of the people.” They saw it as a “tremendous responsibility” and were flattered by the invitation to be associated with a book that a major figure like Lillian Hellman considered serious literature. They even agreed to take a pay cut and to accept a fee far below that which they were accustomed to receiving for screenplays. In fact, they were working “on spec,” an almost unheard-of situation for professionals of their stature. They would get a thousand dollars if, and only if, Bloomgarden picked up the script.

  They wrote Otto Frank to say that they felt honored to have been chosen to bring his daughter’s spirit and courage to the stage, and Otto wrote back, pleased that they had been so moved by the diary and offering his help. The Hacketts were less successful with their conciliatory note to Meyer Levin, which elicited a four-page, single-spaced disquisition on how badly he had been treated. When the Hacketts began their research, visiting Jewish bookstores and a rabbi in Los Angeles, the frosty receptions they received made them worry that Meyer Levin had managed to turn the community against them.

  On January 13, Meyer Levin placed the following paid advertisement in the New York Post:

  A Challenge to Kermit Bloomgarden

  Is it right for you to kill a play that others find deeply moving, and are eager to produce?

  When you secured the stage rights to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl you knew I had already dramatized the book, but you appointed new adapters…and shoved my play aside. The Diary is dear to many hearts, yours, mine, and the public’s. There is a responsibility to see that what may be the right adaptation is not cast away.

  I challenge you to hold a test reading of my play before an audience.

  A plea to my readers.

  If you ever read anything of mine…if you have faith in me as a writer, I ask your help. Write to Mr. Frank and request this test.

  My work has been with the Jewish story. I tried to dramatize the diary as Anne would have, in her own words. The test I ask cannot hurt eventual production from her book. To refuse shows only a fear my play may prove right. To kill it in such a case would be unjust to the Diary itself.

  The question is basic: who shall judge? I feel my work has earned the right to be judged by you, the public.

  Write or send this ad to Otto Frank…as a vote for a fair hearing before my play is killed.

  Levin’s plea had the unintended effect of finally alienating Otto. Bloomgarden wrote the Hacketts, telling them that he would refuse to dignify Levin’s challenge with a reply. As further evidence of Levin’s disreputable character, Bloomgarden cited the fact that Levin had reviewed, in the New York Times, a book that he was representing, as its agent.

  The Hacketts began work on the play. Writing eight drafts would involve great strain for both writers, elicit copious tears from Goodrich (weeping she ascribed to guilt over not having known and done more about what happened to Anne and others like her), and spark numerous marital squabbles, some private, some public. In addition, they wondered whether, at a time when the United States was interested in cultivating Germany as an ally in the Cold War and as a market for American investment abroad, anyone would want to stage a drama that accused the Germans.

  They scrapped the second draft when they realized that their fear of making the characters unsympathetic had kept them from making them human. Encouraged by having found an apparently workable ending, they sent their fourth draft to Bloomgarden and Hellman, both of whom hated it. Their spirits were further dampened by a letter from Otto Frank, who said that he could not approve a play that ignored Anne’s idealism, her moral vision, and her desire to help mankind. Oddly, what Otto seems to have wanted was something more like Meyer Levin’s rejected version. Otto complained about the “snappish” characterization of Margot, criticized the downplaying of Anne’s friction with her mother, and doubted that their adaptation would appeal to young people.

  Meanwhile, royalties from the sales of the book had allowed Otto and Fritzi to move to Switzerland, where some of Otto’s family lived, having taken refuge there before the war. Despite his reservations about the Hacketts’ early efforts, he was relieved that the project was going forward. He reconciled himself to the fact that some of the changes he proposed—during the Hanukkah scene, the men should wear hats—were approved, while others—the actors should sing the solemn, traditional hymn in Hebrew rather than the raucous party song in English—were ignored. Bloomgarden also chose not to follow Otto’s suggestion that the theater program contain a note stating that the play was based on actual events. Later, Otto would hear from a Dutch acquaintance that at one performance she had sat beside an American woman who had seen the play three times without having any idea that the actors were portraying real people.

  Otto’s fragile peace was regularly broken by progressively more disturbing communications from Meyer Levin. For a while, Otto continued to defend himself on the subject of the play’s Jewish content, but later, probably on the advice of his lawyer, he circulated a statement expressing his confidence in his own ability to interpret and stand up for his daughter’s ideals and example.

  Levin was unconvinced. He wrote to Otto questioning his right to decide how Anne would have wanted to be portrayed, accusing him of fois
ting his own interpretation on an unsuspecting public, and invoking Anne’s hatred of injustice to suggest that she might have sided with Levin, the victim of injustice, against her father, the perpetrator. Though he admitted that Otto might have known her as a daughter, Levin insisted that Otto could not have known her as Levin did, the way one writer knows another. That deeper intimacy, Levin claimed, should give him the right to decide—in Anne’s name—who should adapt her diary. And he was the person to do it.

  Meanwhile, Otto continued to send amiable letters to Levin’s wife, who seems to have hoped, as did Otto, that the two friends could be reconciled. Levin responded with the most direct attack so far, claiming that Otto’s treatment of him was typical of the “cavalier” way in which Otto used and discarded his allies; Levin cited the example of one of the diary’s early translators, whose work Otto had decided against.

  Even as we recoil from Levin’s claim to speak for Anne, something keeps compelling us to see things from his side, or at least to understand what made it so hard for him to give up. In his writings, he repeatedly emphasizes that he was present when the camps were liberated, and that the memory of the dead prevents him from standing by and witnessing Anne’s transformation into just another teenage girl. But of course Otto Frank also had direct experience of the camps, not as a liberator, but as a prisoner—a fact that Meyer Levin appeared to forget as his obsession spun further out of control.

  IN September 1954, as they struggled with the fifth draft of the play, the Hacketts consulted Lillian Hellman, who made a number of structural suggestions that Frances Goodrich called “brilliant.” Garson Kanin, whose triumphs included the popular Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy films Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib, and the Broadway hit Born Yesterday, was hired to direct. It was Kanin’s idea to end the play with Anne’s statement about people being good at heart and to ramp up the tension by adding threatening noises—footsteps, sirens—from outside the attic.