Anne Frank

by Francine Prose

  Kanin advised Goodrich and Hackett to eliminate a conversation in which Peter expresses his outrage at the fact that they are suffering because they are Jews, to which Anne replies that, throughout history, Jews have always had to suffer. Kanin reminded the playwrights that every minority has experienced its share of persecution, and that for Anne to single out the Jews “reduces her magnificent stature.” Without such “embarrassing…special pleading…the play has an opportunity to spread its wings into the infinite.”

  The Hacketts continued to produce drafts that disappointed Bloomgarden, who advised them that the romance with Peter was not intense enough, that the Anne they’d created was not enough like George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc, that the character of Mrs. Van Daan was insufficiently shrewish, that Anne’s relationship with her father needed to be more loving, and that they were turning Anne into a sour and pessimistic young woman. First the Hacketts were told that their play was too dark, and then that it was not dark enough.

  In the fall of 1954, they met Garson Kanin in London, and the three of them spent long days collaborating on yet another draft. In December, they visited Otto Frank in Amsterdam for a week that Frances Goodrich described as “very harrowing.”

  “I thought I could not cry more than I had,” she wrote. “But I have had a week of tears.” A photo shows the playwrights, Kanin, Otto Frank, Johannes Kleiman, and Elfriede Frank standing in front of 263 Prinsengracht. Kleiman and Fritzi wait patiently in the background, while their American visitors look suitably chastened and ennobled by the chance to walk in the footsteps of the girl who had so inspired them.

  Dispatched to do research at the secret annex, a photographer documented every inch of the attic. Recordings were made of ambient street noise and the Westertoren bells. Goodrich described stretching out her arms in the room that Anne had shared with the dentist, while Kanin noticed that one of the pictures Anne had on her wall was a still photo of Ginger Rogers in Tom, Dick and Harry, a film he’d directed. Clearly, the project was meant to be.

  Though the pictures on the walls of Anne’s room are occasionally rotated by the museum staff, the postcards, snapshots, and newspaper clips that decorate the room today are more or less the same ones that the American theater people must have seen. Yet the finished play suggests that the Hacketts and Garson Kanin factored only a few of those images into their version of Anne. They captured the starstruck Ginger Rogers fan, the giddy teen with a fondness for the royal princesses and Deanna Durbin, but seem to have missed the ironic humor of the child amused by the chimpanzee tea party, as well as the adolescent eroticism of the girl drawn to the languid Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pietà.

  Their understanding of Otto was equally skewed and incomplete. “In all my meetings with him,” Kanin said of Otto Frank, “he was unhurried, casual, old-worldish. He talked about the hide-out and the arrest without an ounce of emotion. ‘This is a cold fish,’ I told the Hacketts.” But Kanin changed his opinion on learning that Otto had collapsed after the American theater people left Amsterdam. “He had been crushed, but he had not shown it. He had been as he had been in the days when the Gestapo was outside the door—a tiny, tiny, modern miniature Moses. If he had shown a moment’s fear then, the whole annex would have crashed down.”

  A few weeks after Kanin’s trip to Amsterdam, Meyer Levin, who had found a lawyer willing to take his case, filed suit in New York State Supreme Court against Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank, charging them with breach of contract. He sought a monetary award of $72,500 from Crawford, while from Frank he asked that they forget the damage each had inflicted on the other and return to the point at which it had been understood that Levin would write the adaptation. Otto sent the Hacketts a reassuring letter. How this would have upset Anne, Otto wrote—Anne, who, like him, hated quarrels.

  Otto Frank’s lawyer managed to have the suit set aside (but not dismissed) on a technicality: the summons could not be delivered to Otto, who was in Switzerland. Levin suffered an emotional collapse, but nonetheless found the strength to send Otto a letter vowing to fight the production, a struggle he compared to the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

  MEANWHILE, in New York, the play was being cast. Joseph Schildkraut was chosen to play Otto, despite some hesitation on the part of Bloomgarden, who—according to Schildkraut—could not dispel his impression of the actor as the “flamboyant and dashing” character he had played in previous roles. In her New York Times piece about the production, Frances Goodrich reports having noted, on first meeting Otto Frank, his “uncanny” resemblance to Schildkraut. Susan Strasberg was picked for Anne, while Mrs. Frank would be played by Gusti Huber, an Austrian actress alleged to have acted in Nazi propaganda films. (Echoes from the Past, a documentary about the making of the 1959 Hollywood version of The Diary of Anne Frank that appears as supplemental material on the DVD, explains that Schildkraut and Huber, who re-created their stage roles on screen, were both Austrian and both “had first-hand experience of Nazi anti-Semitism.”)

  Alarmed by the rumors about Huber, the Hacketts wrote Otto Frank, who replied that his Viennese wife had not heard of Huber but was curious about her. Otto seems not to have followed through on his offer to inquire further into Huber’s background.

  Dennis Hopper was the Hacketts’ first choice for the role of Peter, but Warner Brothers, with whom Hopper was under contract, insisted that he remain on the set of Giant, where he was being considered as a replacement for the temperamental James Dean. Lou Jacobi was brought in to play Mr. Van Daan, and Jack Gilford was cast as the dentist, Dussel.

  Rehearsals began in late August, and at the first run-through, Kanin gave his actors an inspirational talk. “This is not a play in which you are going to make individual hits. You are real people, living a thing that really happened.”

  This hortatory speech had only a limited effect on his cast. Strasberg was, it was felt, an ingenue-diva, childish, spoiled, and reluctant to take direction, while Schildkraut had problems tamping his ego down enough to play the gentle, mild-mannered Otto. Initially, the actor resisted the suggestion that he shave his leonine hair so that he would more closely resemble the balding Mr. Frank, but subsequently discovered that this blow to his vanity provided the key that gave him access to Otto’s character. Kanin used his insight into Otto Frank as a “tiny, tiny miniature modern Moses” in the direction he gave Schildkraut. “I told him also, you, too, can collapse the way Mr. Frank did, but only after the curtain comes down. We worked out a Mr. Frank who does not show how he feels. But we hope the audience will sense his strength.”

  The playwrights and the director were troubled by problems with the second act and worried by unpromising advance ticket sales. “Both Kermit and Gar talked their heads off,” Goodrich confided in her diary. “No good. Too serious.”

  They decided to increase the suspense in the second act by inventing a fictional scene in which Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread. This plot turn aroused Otto Frank’s fervent objections, to which no one paid much attention. What disturbed him was not so much its lack of veracity or plausibility, but rather the fact that his former business associate, friend, and roommate had living relatives whose feelings might be hurt.

  A few days before The Diary of Anne Frank opened on Broadway, New York Times reporter Bernard Kalb helped theatergoers understand what they were about to see. The play, he wrote, is “partly” an account of eight Jews in hiding. “Mostly, though, it is the story of one of them—a young girl who refused to be robbed of the adventure of adolescence.” Most of the article draws on an interview with Garson Kanin, in which Kanin describes the trip to see the secret annex and to meet Otto Frank in Amsterdam, and explains why Anne exits smiling. “Well, it seems that Anne’s first reaction on finally leaving the annex was one of joy. At last, she was in the sunshine.” Moreover, he says, when Otto Frank last saw his daughter, on the train on which she was being sent to Bergen-Belsen, she was smiling and waving at the crowd of men, hoping her father might see her.

 
“ That’s the way I last saw her,’ Kanin claims Otto remembered. “Smiling and waving. She never knew that I saw her.’” Kanin continues, “I told this, the last eye-witness account of Anne, to Susan, and that’s why Anne is smiling when we last see her. I couldn’t have thought that up. It would never have occurred to me. Yet that is the essence of Anne.”

  As we know, this was hardly the last sighting of Anne. A production that ended with the reports of the women who saw the emaciated, dying girl at Bergen-Belsen would have been a different play from the one Kanin was directing, which was “not a war play, or even a sad play.” As Kanin told the Times reporter, “This play makes use of elements having mainly to do with human courage, faith, brotherhood, love and self-sacrifice. We discovered as we went deeper and deeper that it was a play about what Shaw called ‘the life force.’ Anne Frank was certainly killed, but she was never defeated.”

  The play opened at the Cort Theater on October 5, 1955. Otto Frank declined to attend the premiere because he feared that it would be too painful to see himself, his wife, and his children portrayed on stage. In addition he had been warned by his lawyers to stay out of New York to avoid being served with a legal summons. As a consequence of Meyer Levin’s lawsuit, all of Otto Frank’s royalties had been put into escrow until the case was settled.

  The drama was not only a critical, but also a popular, success. It ran for 717 performances over nearly two years, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

  Meyer Levin stood outside the circle cast by the brilliant spotlight that could have shone on him. He continued to write abusive letters to Otto Frank, equating the fate of his play with that of the murdered Jews. In December 1956, he again filed suit in the supreme court of New York, this time seeking $200,000 in damages and adding charges of plagiarism to his previous claims of breach of contract. Once again, the contradictions and confusions surrounding the diary in general—and Levin’s case in particular—surfaced as Levin, who had been arguing that the play was a travesty of the diary, now insisted that it was based too closely on his adaptation.

  Even as the judge dismissed the charges of fraud and breach of contract, he allowed a jury to determine the validity of the plagiarism charges. They ruled that Levin should receive $50,000 from Kermit Bloomgarden and Otto Frank. The verdict was set aside by the court, sensibly ruling that plagiarism was difficult to determine when the works in question were based on a common source. Eventually, after Eleanor Roosevelt had offered and then withdrawn her support for Levin, a settlement was reached, and Otto agreed to pay Meyer Levin $15,000. But still Levin kept writing to Otto, charging him with having returned evil for good and having betrayed his daughter. Which is the image that we’re left with at the end of this painful story: a man possessed and maddened enough to write such letters, and a bereaved father receiving them, until at last he reached the point at which he refused to read any more.

  LIKE Meyer Levin’s adaptation, the Goodrich-Hackett play begins with a prologue, though here it serves as half of a framing device that book-ends the central action. The war is over. Broken, widowed, and childless, Otto Frank returns to the attic and, as the Dutch helpers look on, he begins to read aloud from the diary that Miep has just given him. In concert with Otto’s, we hear Anne’s voice, and then her voice takes over, describing the prohibitions, the special schools, the yellow stars, the events that occurred when “things got very bad for the Jews.”

  Shouldn’t this have reassured Levin that Jewish religious and historical context had not entirely disappeared? In fact, the Hacketts went to such pains to explain the reason for the Franks’ incarceration that what is integrated and organic in the diary seems awkwardly expository in the drama. But how could the Hacketts have told the story without Judaism and the final solution? What else were the Franks, the Van Daans, and Dussel doing in the secret annex? Regardless of what song they sing at the Hanukkah party, regardless of what language they sing it in, regardless of whether Anne laments the persecution of her people or of all people, we are never unaware that the characters onstage are Jews.

  When Dussel arrives, we hear (as we do in the diary) that Jews are being rounded up and deported. But a note of unreality creeps into the drama whenever there is a mention of life beyond the attic walls. In the diary, the residents know perfectly well that they are condemned to stay in the attic for the duration of the war. But in the play there’s some talk of the dentist remaining only until he can find somewhere else to go, just as later, after the scene in which Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread, Mrs. Frank suggests that the Van Daans find another hiding place. All of which makes it sound as if they are facing an extreme sort of housing crisis rather than trying to save their lives by evading the Gestapo.

  If the scene in the Goodrich-Hackett play that most troubled Meyer Levin was the one in which Anne’s observation about the sufferings of the Jews was generalized to include the sufferings of the human race, I’d nominate another episode as the drama’s most distressing moment. It occurs early on, and involves our introduction to Anne. Poor Anne, so conscious of her self-presentation as she rewrote her diary to reflect the way in which she wished to be perceived! How embarrassed she would have been to learn that practically the first thing we see her do is remove her underpants, in full view of her fellow actors and the audience. When her mother objects, she replies that she has several more pairs underneath.

  Like so many others, Meyer Levin seems not to have noticed that, if Anne’s spirituality has been omitted, so has nearly everything else about her. Judaism is only one feature that was altered in the makeover that left the character of Anne Frank virtually unrecognizable as the author of the diary. On the page, she is brilliant; on the stage she’s a nitwit. In the book, she is the most gifted and sharp-sighted person in the annex; in the play, she’s the naive baby whom the others indulge and protect. For all her talk about being treated like a child and not knowing who she was, Anne saw herself as an adult and the others as children. In the drama, those relations have been reversed. Anne is always needing the obvious explained; she’s invariably the slowest to grasp the dangers and necessities of their new life. A preteen trickster, she can’t stop playing pranks, hiding Peter’s shoes and saying lines like, “You are the most intolerable, insufferable boy I’ve ever met!” How the real Anne Frank would have cringed at the scene of her spilling milk on Mrs. Van Daan’s precious fur coat, and how that brave girl would have railed against being shown fainting from terror when thieves break in downstairs.

  Most critiques of the play, Levin’s included, seem narrowly focused and myopic, oblivious to the ways in which Anne had been turned into a silly and shallow version of herself. Seriousness and humor were equally important to Anne, who by all accounts was a funny girl. But one can’t quite imagine her being arch and kittenish, as she so often is in the drama.

  For all the attention given to the question of what hymn would be sung at the Hanukkah party, scant mention has been made of the fact that Anne attends the celebration with a lampshade on her head. People who knew Anne describe her as a chatterbox and a showoff, and in her diary, she portrays herself that way. But no one has ever suggested that she was stupid, which is the impression created by scene after scene. It’s hard to picture the real Anne exclaiming the Dutch or German equivalent of “Whee!”, which, in the drama, is the sound she makes at the end of the workday when the annex residents are released from having to tiptoe around in their socks. In the script, many of Anne’s lines end with an exclamation point.

  The process of coming to take one’s self seriously as a writer may be even less dramatic than that of embracing one’s identity as a Jew, and yet one can’t help wishing that the greatness of the diary itself—and the value that Anne placed on her work—had somehow been evoked to counterbalance her youth and innocence. In life, she received the diary several weeks before her family vanished from their old life. But in the play, she’s given the journal when they are already in
the annex. It’s not the tweaking of history that grates so much as Anne’s (and her family’s) response. Delighted by the gift, she’s all ready to run downstairs to get a pencil so she can start writing when her mother forbids her to go to the office. Only then, the stage directions tell us, does Anne understand what it means to have gone into hiding, when in fact we can assume that Anne grasped the implications when her father first mentioned the possibility.

  Anne’s response to a conversation about burning the diary to protect their helpers (“If my diary goes, I go with it!”) is given, in the play, to Peter to say about his cat. (In the film, the line is restored to Anne to say about her diary, so that both Anne and Peter say, “If it goes, I go with it,” a repetition that equates a literary masterpiece with a noisy pet.) When Anne tells Kitty that she wants to go on living after her death and wonders if she will ever be able to write well enough, the honest answer—were one to judge solely from the evidence offered by the play—would be a dubious maybe.

  What could the girl we see in the play manage to write? When she reads aloud from her journal, stalls and ellipses interrupt every cogent reflection or opinion. The prodigiously articulate author can hardly utter a sentence without pausing to collect her scattered thoughts, none of them especially incisive. The pointed accuracy of her observations has been blunted, the delicacy of her perceptions has everywhere been coarsened. The beautiful line about Margot lacking the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions reappears in the play as a banal complaint about her older sister taking everything too seriously.