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Chapter Thirty-Six: “I Had Planned For a Long Time”
An event of
monumental importance in the private life of Maurice Schwartz (who
all but proclaimed the lack of one) took place in 1947. The year
began routinely enough with his tour of Europe, the first he made
since the war’s end. Not to the usual and familiar playhouses of the
past, but alone, presenting monologues and songs, in the jerry-built
social halls of the Displaced Persons camps, entertaining the
remnants of Europe’s Jewish population, who’d somehow survived all
attempts to erase it from the earth. A quarter of a million barely
alive, homeless, rootless Jews were housed in makeshift barracks,
waiting to be transported to Palestine (soon to become Israel),
America, or, in a few rare cases, back to where they once lived, as
if not quite convinced that Europe had been turned into the world’s
largest Jewish cemetery, and that their once richly-populated lives
would be there waiting for them.
The American
Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), the overall dispersing agency
for monies gathered by a consortium of Jewish-American organizations
for foreign relief, had its busiest period after the Second World
War, helping to rebuild the lives of the death camp survivors,
sending food, clothing, teachers, medical personnel and social
workers to the temporary shelters. Entertainment soon followed for
those who yearned to hear a familiar song, a klezmer tune, or
passages from a Yiddish play they’d once seen.
Maurice was
one of the many Yiddish performers to make this very special errand
of mercy, his tour confined to France and Belgium. While there, for
some inexplicable reason, the Schwartzes were taken to a combination
old age home and orphanage outside of Brussels, run by the Christian
Brothers, where about 30 Jewish homeless and parentless boys
resided. During the war, it had been the only one permitted by the
Nazis, as part of the deal worked out with King Leopold in his
surrender agreement. Schwartz had planned for quite a while to adopt
two children while overseas, and at the orphanage he asked to see
some of their charges. “The boys were brought to me, and while I was
there, looking over their charts, a third boy insisted that the
attendant show his chart. He was blond-haired and so excited and
eager to please that I took all three out to the nearest candy
store” (Lehane 12 Nov. 1947).
Schwartz
decided to adopt the three, even if the blond boy was slightly
cross-eyed. He learned however that since this poor child had a
sister still alive and living closeby, adoption was impossible,
unless of course the Schwartzes also took the little girl, too.
Anna’s heart at once went out to the nine-year old waif, whose name
was Moses, the same as Maurice’s before he changed it. In Yiddish,
Maurice raised his objections, which Anna quickly refuted: “What’s
the matter?” she asked reproachfully. “You can’t stand to look at
him? You have lots of pity for everyone else. I want this boy”
(Chafran 30 Nov. 1999).
And so Anna
won out. After all, it would be she doing most of the parenting,
while Maurice was off on tour, away for months at a time. Anna
wanted the cross-eyed boy and the younger sister he hadn’t seen in
six years and probably had forgotten entirely. Their parents,
Abraham and Chava Englander, Polish Jews, had been deported in 1940
to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Whatever possessed the
Schwartzes to consider adoption in the first place, a childless
couple approaching the age of 60, theatre people constantly on the
go, is one of the great mysteries of this story. In a way, being
responsible for two young lives, with no prior experience or
training in raising children, is even more daunting than raising the
Art Theatre from birth to old age. At least Maurice had been an
experienced actor, with 15 years of seasoning behind him, before he
opened the Irving Place theatre. Being a father is an immense
undertaking that is learned only on the job by flexible youngsters,
and punctuated by lots of mistakes that might be even more costly
than producing the most expensive flop.
About the
sister, the Schwartzes were told only that Fanny was two years
younger than her brother, and lived about 35 miles south of the
orphanage, having been placed there by the Belgian underground for
her safety with a Christian family, to be reared as one of their
own. For the child, it was a most extraordinary and traumatic day
when she was reunited with the brother she no longer remembered. She
was living in the tiny village of Quaregnon, presumably the daughter
of Maurice and Denise Vandervoordt, and speaking only French. Until
the visit of a well-dressed woman from Brussels, who informed them
that it was time to let go of Fanny. The Vandervoordts in turn let
her know that she wasn’t their real daughter, and that her parents
had perished in the Holocaust.
Denise
Vandervoordt dressed Fanny in her best clothes and allowed the woman
from Brussels to take away her child of four years, to the orphanage
in Wezembeck, where she was introduced to a nine-year-old boy named
Moses, her true brother. Here, she would remain for weeks, until her
departure for the United States, where her third set of parents
lived.
With the
adoption process for Fanny and Moses Englander begun, and the round
of appearances at the DP camps completed, the Schwartzes returned to
America on July 16th, to sweat out the balance of the
necessary paperwork and bide their time. And to make preparations
for the new season.
On the evening
of October 16th, brother and sister were place aboard a
Sabena DC-6, due to arrive the next day at LaGuardia Airport on
Flushing Bay in Queens, New York. The plane was three hours late
because of turbulence over the Atlantic, and a fog that covered New
York like a quilt. Maurice and Anna had been up since dawn,
listening to the weather reports, and eager to get to the airport.
At LaGuardia, a nervous and sweaty Maurice had paced like a caged
tiger, as if the airport were a theatre and this was opening night.
More than 100 interested parties were also there, waiting to greet
the new arrivals: friends, family, members of the Art Theatre, and
of course, a cadre of reporters and photographers to capture this
most newsworthy happening, which certainly wouldn’t hurt ticket
sales for the recently opened Shylock and His Daughter.
The tardy DC-6
at last touched down and taxied to the tarmac. The photographers,
determined to get it right, positioned themselves to catch the
poignant moment: the two orphans meeting their adoptive parents.
Fanny and Moses, descending the plane’s staircase, were instructed
by the oddly gesticulating men with cameras to go back up the steps
then down again, many times, until the angle was perfect. The shot
that made the dailies shows the Sabena in the background, with two
decidedly foreign children, halfway down the steps. The boy, tall
and fair-haired, is sporting a dark, Danish sailor’s cap, short
pants supported by suspenders, matching jacket, and white shirt. He
is peering down. Carefully measuring his descent, probably because
of his eye condition. He is not wearing his glasses.
The girl is
obviously Semitic, with huge, dark, lively eyes. Intensely pretty,
she’s dressed in a domed, wide-brimmed, peasant hat, dark dress
fringed with a white scalloped collar, and white knee-high socks.
Fanny glances directly at the parents she’s never seen before and
appears about to laugh or cry. Maurice stands alongside the
staircase, to the right, the best side for the camera shots, his
arms thrown out to embrace his new daughter, though she was being
adopted only because Belgian regulations demanded it. A foot behind,
at her usual place on the periphery, is a more reserved Anna,
dressed in a conservative suit that is partially covered with a fox
stole.
Fanny and
Moses were then spirited away to the apartment on E. 10th
Street. Its only bedroom was ceded to the children, while the
parents-in-training moved to the living room couch, a discomfort
they willingly, happily accepted. Almost immediately, Maurice
changed their names to Frances and Marvin, hoping perhaps to end one
existence and begin another. He hired two tutors, one in English,
one in Yiddish, though being Maurice Schwartz, he closely supervised
their education.
Maurice threw
himself into parenting like one possessed, the idea of filling these
empty vessels driving him, as had every other project he undertook.
During mealtimes, he also instructed them in English and Yiddish,
pointing to a container of milk, a slice of bread, an orange, naming
it twice, once in each language. And, as their comprehension grew,
he’d read Yiddish stories to them and act out all the parts, in
voices from deep bass to quivering falsetto. The happiness he
derived performing for them was immeasurable. It seemed that besides
his dramatic talents, he had a penchant for fatherhood.
Their first
Saturday evening in America, Maurice took the kids to the Public to
see what Papushka—their name for Schwartz—did for a living. After a
performance of Shylock and His Daughter, he threw a party in
the playhouse to officially welcome them to America. They were
placed on top of a large table center stage and Maurice’s entire
crew circled the children in warmth and curiosity. At first, Marvin
and Frances were enchanted with the world of make believe and their
father’s place in its middle. As the glossy patina wore off, they
discovered the seamier side of fame. Maurice would have to devote
inordinate amounts of time to keep his image before the public. He’d
drop in at cafes after a performance; there were endless rehearsals
for the next production; he’d have lengthy sessions with those
arranging his tours after the regular season was over. And he would
never avoid the chance to appear on radio and TV to promote, always
to promote. As the audiences dwindled, he’d work all the harder to
remain in the forefront. And above all, there was the constant and
pervasive concern about covering payroll and meeting other expenses.
Coming of age
in the art theatre, at its tail end, the children saw Maurice as no
one else could: not the constant optimist, the sanguine tower of
strength, but as an all too human and vulnerable individual, who
would repeatedly grumble about inadequate actors, thieving theatre
managers, money-hungry playwrights, and critics, more concerned with
building their own reputations than honestly assessing what he was
trying to do. And finally, the union, for its tendency to foist more
actors and stagehands on him than he needed, thus inflating the
costs of productions prohibitively. Yet, despite these and other
restrictions, he had to maintain a calm and dignity, never daring to
risk his reputation by disclosing what was eating at his composure,
his very soul.
While preparing
himself for fatherhood, after his return from Europe, Maurice was
working on Shylock and His Daughter, the only scheduled
production for the 1947-1948 season. He’d done Shylock before of
course, in 1930, as part of a nine-act vaudeville bill. But after he
read a new novel with its sympathetic treatment of the moneylender,
written by Ari Ibn-Zahav, a literature professor at Hebrew
University in Palestine, and translated by Julian Meltzer, Jerusalem
correspondent of the New York Times, he became interested.
Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice had as its basis, an
original tale told by the 16th Century Italian priest
Giovanni Fiorentino. A work of fiction, for there wasn’t a single
incident recorded of a Jewish moneylender demanding a pound of flesh
as security on a loan.
What Ibn-Zahav
also determine after five years of scouring the Vatican library and
other sources, was that no Christian court of law would have
permitted such a contract to be written, much less enforced.
Moreover, “as Shakespeare made no special effort to understand or
familiarize himself with Jews of his age [. . .] he made use of
material essentially strange to him. There had at the time been no
Jews in England for over 300 years” (Ibn-Zahav Oct. 1947). The
Palestinian professor’s Shylock, as the center of his novel, is
fully sketched out, with ample evidence of his humanity, his high
standing in the Ghetto, a charitable and loving individual incapable
of demanding human flesh as security. Here, it is Antonio who
sarcastically proposes the bargain and Shylock who reluctantly
accepts it.
The play
opened on September 29th, while the Schwartzes were
engaged in the final details of overseas adoption. Lester Bernstein,
back reviewing Yiddish Theatre for the Times, was most
favorably impressed: “What the new Yiddish play has done is to give
Shylock something of the goading provocation that Shakespeare gave
Hamlet. As enacted by Mr. Schwartz, in one of his most eloquent
portraits, the character achieves a real measure of tragic status”
(Bernstein 30 Sept. 1947). Every mainstream critic reported
basically the same impressions. Reported the New York-Journal
American: “In his impersonation of the new Shylock, Mr. Schwartz
is at the peak of his illustrious powers. By lowering his fulsome
voice and restricting his generous gestures, his Jew of Venice is
the most impressive on-stage portrait he has drawn” (Garland 7 Oct.
1947).
Needless to
say, the Yiddish press was as well high on the piece, pleased to
promote a work that so earnestly attempted to correct the hideous
libel that made of Shakespeare, in their eyes, an antisemite. But of
greater importance than the critics’ bouquets, the audience adored
the play. It ran for 147 performances before closing in January, to
take to the road with bookings across Eastern America and at His
Majesty’s Theatre in Montreal, Canada. The Art Theatre was doing the
hit in Chicago when the telegram from Buenos Aires came, inviting
them once again to the Soleil. His reputation never greater, Maurice
packed up Anna and the children, and left for Argentina. From his
troupe, he took only Charlotte Goldstein, knowing he would have
little trouble putting together an adequate local company to do the
Ibn-Zahav play.
Chapter Thirty-Seven: “The Greatest Thing We’ve Done To Save Our
Lives”
For the season
of the Art Theatre’s 30th anniversary, Schwartz announced
a modest agenda. There would be four productions, six weeks each,
beginning in late October with The Voice of Israel,
concluding the middle of April with Sholem Aleichem’s Yosele
Solowey. The full schedule would re-institute the old
end-of-season to around Passover. His publicity staff sent out a
three-page circular to the assorted Jewish organizations of Greater
New York and New Jersey, shamelessly appealing for box office
support by tying the Art Theatre to the embattled State of Israel.
Maurice strongly urged the many labor, social, religious and
fraternal groups to use his theatre for fundraising campaigns to
financially bolster the political entity that had been created in
November, 1947, by the United Nations in its temporary home in Lake
Success on Long Island.
American
Zionists, who took a vital interest in the tiny besieged nation,
would surely be interested in a play about Israel’s intense labor
pains and subsequent birth. On October 25th, The Voice
of Israel opened, even as the battle for Jerusalem was raging.
The work was written by Elias Gilner, himself one of the founders of
the Haganah, the Israeli resistance army. This timely and stirring
drama begins during the British occupation, but after the UN has
voted for partition. The Haganah is waging a war on two
fronts—against the English, soon to depart, and against the Arabs,
chafing to strangle the newborn state. In addition to directing the
work, Maurice took for himself the heroic role of Nathan Ometz, a
former American, who’d sold his textile business and moved the
entire family of four sons to Palestine. Two sons have already paid
the ultimate price, fighting for nationhood, but Ometz is prepared
to sacrifice the other two and himself, in the noble cause.
Months
earlier, the play had been tried out by Schwartz in Buenos Aires,
following Shylock and His Daughter, and simultaneous with the
British withdrawal from Israel. The Gilner piece was not favorably
accepted by the Soleil audiences. Perhaps they hadn’t the same
Zionist convictions as American Jews, who’d poured millions into the
new state and sent their children to fight in the war.
Brooks
Atkinson, though sympathetic to the Israeli cause and an ardent
Schwartzite, was disappointed: “The Voice of Israel is less
exhilarating than the plushier dramas more common to the Art
Theatre” (Times 26 Oct. 1948). He confessed to doting on the
old Yiddish classics rich in folklore and religious rites. Other
mainstream critics were more favorably inclined. Thomas Dash of
Women’s Wear Daily declared it “a stirring and blistering battle
cry and a paean to those fighters of Haganah, pioneers and defenders
of the settlements, who are ready to lay down their lives for the
cause of independence” (26 Oct. 1948). None of the positive
reviewers were foolish enough to label Voice a work of art,
though none condemned it as purely propaganda. Whatever the play was
however “large sections of the first-night audience were stirred to
tears” (Biancolli 26 Oct. 1948).
As advertised,
The Voice of Israel ran its six weeks, followed on December 6th
by the second heralded offering, Hershel the Jester, the
brand of Yiddish Theatre strongly favored by Atkinson. Its
larger-than-life (and most fiction) hero Hershel Ostropoler, was
based on a legendary character who supposedly lived at the end of
the 18th Century. Penniless, he roamed from town to town
in the Russian Ukraine, telling his stories in the marketplace and
the tavern—wildly comic stories, some with the sharp edge of satire,
that poked fun at the rich and well-situated Jews in the small towns
and shtetls, many of them rabbis. The subtext of these
stories was the refreshing disregard and disrespect for authority in
all its manifestations, both religious and secular, an attitude Jews
the world over could appreciate.
In the Moshe
Livshitz reincarnation, Hershel is the court jester to an extremely
dour rabbi, his prime task to make the religious leader laugh from
time to time. An exhaustive search of the references has turned up
no such writer as Moshe Livshitz, and it can be reasonably assumed
that he was none other than Maurice Schwartz up to his old tricks,
creating non-existent playwrights along with their plays.
The title role
in this bit of good-natured buffoonery was aptly suited to Maurice,
and a salutary change for the Art Theatre after the strident
contemporaneity of The Voice of Israel. John P.
Shanley, who reviewed it for the Times (and eventually rose
to assistant editor of the paper’s drama department) thoroughly
enjoyed himself despite the language barrier: “There is little
subtlety in the humor of Hershel. But it is composed of ingredients
that make for unrestrained merriment” (14 Dec. 1948).
Regardless of
Schwartz’s stated policy of running a work for six weeks, to make
room for four plays, Hershel the Jester continued for two
weeks longer than planned, closing on January 30th, 1949.
The season ended as well, with Harry Kalmanowich’s Our Neighbors
and Sholem Aleichem’s Yosele Solowey left in the lurch.
As usual, lack of money was the deciding factor in the abrupt
termination of the season.
One extra bit
of theatre did take place that season before the Public closed until
next fall. For the 30th anniversary of the Art Theatre,
Schwartz presented a special event, two performances only, of the
first acts from a quartet of his favorites: The Great Fortune,
The Golden Chain, The Blacksmith’s Daughter, and
The Dybbuk. Held on January 10th and 11th,
the presentations interrupted the regular run of Hershel the
Jester. Charlotte Goldstein recalls the occasion’s
bittersweetness, how she’d always leave a single red rose in
Maurice’s dressing room before each opening night, but on this
special evening she’d been running late and couldn’t stop at the
florist. “Somehow, no one else did either. Later he complained
morosely to me: ‘Thirty years in the Art Theatre and no one brought
a single flower.’ It was a terrible blow to his ego. He launched
into a lament about how ungrateful the audience was. How quickly it
forgot” (Chafran 24 Dec. 1999).
The incident
was proof positive to Maurice that Yiddish Theatre, his kind anyway,
was deteriorating through loss of interest and/or ingratitude. Was
his resentment justified? He was after all, offering less and less
to fewer and fewer, and there were no longer any enamoured rich
patriotten inclined to put hard- earned cash into his show,
especially with Skulnik, Yablokoff and Molly Picon gobbling up most
of the shrinking audience.
But if the
handwriting was on the wall, writ large, Maurice chose to ignore it,
continuing in the same old manner, as if the world hadn’t moved on,
as if times and tastes hadn’t changed. Early in February, he took
the company on the road, its usual circuitry over Eastern America
and up into Canada. It was taken without Anna and the
children—Frances and Marvin were attending public school in
Manhattan--, the first extended period of separation from his
freshly minted family. Maurice missed them terribly, an emotion once
foreign to him. On February 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, he
wrote a pair of letters from the Statler Hotel in Boston, the first
in English to his children, the other in Yiddish to Anna.
To 10-year old
Marvin and his sister, younger by two years, he told of how much he
missed them and couldn’t wait to see them again. He implored them to
be kind and helpful to Anna. “She works so hard every minute of the
day, and when you both do not practice the piano or make your Hebrew
lessons, she suffers because she knows how hard I work to earn the
money to pay the teachers” (Schwartz letter 14 Feb. 1949).
This is
Maurice Schwartz, behaving like any other middle-class father urging
his kids to do well, even as he instills guilt over what it costs to
educate them. Maurice hustling to make a living and take care of his
family, is indeed a reborn person, who’d heretofore cared only about
feeding the Art Theatre. But responsibility for one’s young is a
powerful stimulus, and this most unfatherly of men is marching to
the same humdrum drummer as legions of other wage earners.
Though not
completely in lockstep, as he also urged Frances and Marvin to
“think of the honor paid to me by so many thousands of people. You
can get the same when you’ll be worthy of being Maurice and Anna
Schwartz’s children” (Schwartz letter 14 Feb. 1949). He’d pricked
them to strive and achieve, not for riches and fame, but in an
unguarded moment of pure egoism, to uphold his name.
To Anna, he
revealed a more human vulnerability, a soft underbelly kept from
everyone but her: “My dear Annie: I came home tired, broken, alone
in my room. Your departure
With the children left me in a bad
mood. I watched as the taxi drove away and thought that my one bit
of happiness is leaving me, my reason for living in this world”
(Schwartz letter 14 Feb. 1949). He’d been wound tight because of
financial woes. The day before, the family had come to Boston to see
him, and he and Anna had quarreled bitterly, probably over some
particularly flagrant infidelity of the moment. Perhaps she’d had
enough of his romantic entanglements, especially with the children
in their lives. And now, the painful separation, so he might make up
the Art Theatre’s deficits of the past season.
Anna had
questioned his love for her during the bickering, and it bothered
him greatly that she thought he’d stopped loving her.. On the
contrary, he wrote, he loved her even more, especially after she’d
accepted so willingly the obligations of motherhood at both their
advanced years. “But when I look at you and your face beams with joy
and serenity because of the children, I feel it’s the greatest thing
we’ve done to save our lives, because we have a reason to live and
work—and hope. In our old age, we will surely have joy from them [.
. .] and we must thank God each minute for the happiness with which
he has blessed us” (Schwartz letter 14 Feb. 1949).
By Passover,
Maurice was thrilled to be back in New York, and with his family. At
the Parkway theatre in Brooklyn, he performed Hershel the Jester.
That summer he packed up the three Schwartzes and took them to South
America, where he played the Mitre Theatre in Buenos Aires. As an
indication of the state of Yiddish Theatre worldwide, the Mitre was
but one of the two remaining Yiddish playhouses in the Argentine
capital.
Chapter
Thirty-Eight: “We Will After All Still Do Great Things.”
The 1949-1950
season kicked off reasonably enough with the Sholem Aleichem work
omitted from last year’s proposed agenda. Yosele, the Nightingale,
supposedly based on the life of a remarkable artist from the Russian
province of Mazepevke, is from a novel of the writer’s first
creative period (1883-1890). Titled Yosele Solowey, it
concerns a talented 16-year-old cantorial singer from a small
village, who is inveigled into deserting his roots and his
sweetheart for fame and wealth. But neither satisfies Yosele, and he
returns home to marry his Esther. There, he succumbs instead to the
charms of a rich, enticing widow, quickly marrying her and leaving
Esther at the altar As the widow’s pampered new husband, he no
longer cares to sing, becoming instead, indolent and idle. After a
short period of disillusion, during which his voice vanishes, he
returns to Mazepevke to find Esther married. The sheer waste of his
life drives Yosele mad.
The plot’s
skeleton resembles Stempenyu, another early Sholem Aleichem
work. Both novels have the same Jewish bohemian hero and
run-of-the-mill heroine, set against a background of rigid small
town Jewish existence. For the folk comedy, Schwartz once again
blended the time-tested Art Theatre veterans with a handful of
newcomers. In the first category was Sholem Secunda, who wrote the
music. (Rumshinsky had already been engaged by Molly Picon and her
husband Jacob Kalich, to prepare the score for their runaway hit
Abi Gezunt.) Bertha Gersten took a major role, as did Lucy
German, Charlotte Goldstein, Vinogradoff, Mestel, Yudel Dubinsky,
Julius Adler, Gustav Berger, and Ola Shlifko (as the seductive
widow).
Among the
freshmen were Bella Didja, formerly of the Metropolitan Opera House
ballet company, who did the choreography, and in the title role,
Moshe Zamar, a singer/actor from Paris, whom Maurice had hired sight
unseen, over the telephone. Meeting him in New York for the first
time, Schwartz sorely regretted his hastiness, as Zamar was short,
slight, and without stage presence. It would be the Parisian’s only
engagement in Yiddish or any other Theatre.
Schwartz
dramatized and staged the novel, and took the plum part of Gedalye
Bass, the Nightingale’s unscrupulous mentor. Staged in two parts and
16 scenes, the play opened on October 20, 1949. Reviewing it the
next day, Atkinson declared Yosele the Nightingale to be “the
freshest item Mr. Schwartz has staged in recent years. Both he and
it manage to have a sense of humor [. . .] Yosele is a sound
piece of comic theatre by an experienced craftsman” (Times
21 Oct. 1949). For his efforts, Maurice received some of his best
notices ever from both sets of critics, and the play ran for two
months.
Competition
that fecund season was stronger than ever, composed of an
outstanding number of instant classics such as Death of a
Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, Mr. Roberts
and South Pacific. The Art Theatre’s strongest rival however
was Molly Picon, directly across the street at the Second Avenue
Theatre. Ridiculed to the same extent by the anti-shundist
Yiddish press and Schwartz, Abi Gezunt incorporated the
Broadway musical into the Yiddish operetta, and used a good deal of
American idioms. Picon and Kalich—their fingers on the Yiddish
pulse—had known for years that they’d have to bastardize the
language of their fathers to keep their audiences. Not that much
later, even the Picon addicts stopped coming to see her, because no
matter what she tried, the material was simply too passe, the
left-overs of a world that was no more.
The fourth
year after the war’s end would be the Art Theatre’s last at the
Public, its lease expiring, with neither side interested enough in
discussing a renewal. By January 1, 1950, Maurice was at His
Majesty’s theatre in Montreal, performing Yosele and other
favorites. After an unspectacular cross-country tour, drawn like a
flower to sunshine, they arrived in California, at the Biltmore
Theatre on Grand Street in downtown Los Angeles. The troupe settled
in for a month’s stay, beginning on May 8th, with
Shylock and His Daughter, moving on to Hershel the Jester
on the 16th, concluding with a week of Riverside Drive.
The core of his company had made the tour with Maurice, as did the
managerial staff of Relkin, Mercur and Morris Strassberg, who was
Stage Manager as well as a performer.
Riverside
Drive marked the debut of Marvin Schwartz, at the age of 12, as
Mortimer, the wisecracking grandchild, who, by play’s end, comes to
respect his European grandfather. In it, according to Charlotte
Goldstein “he was quite charming and showed great promise” (Chafran
24 Dec. 1999). Both Marvin and Frances were gradually absorbed into
the Art Theatre, first one, than the other. Besides the usual
American education, the children were instructed in Hebrew, the Old
Testament, and the piano. Frances learned all the ingenue roles, as
an understudy. She began her career gradually, without Maurice’s
consent of knowledge, encouraged by the Art Theatre troupe, each of
whom secretly knew that Schwartz would be delighted. Maurice had
probably dreamed of a dynasty like the one sired by Jacob Adler, and
for years it seemed as if such a result was possible with the tiny
lives entrusted to him and Anna. In the end, part of that dream
would turn to vinegar.
On the road,
wherever the company stopped for a night, a week, the major topic of
discussion (besides the usual shoptalk) was the Holocaust. Its full
impact had descended on Yiddish communities throughout the nation,
as the refugees came to America burdened with their horrific
experiences, and as reporters visited the death camps and wrote
their stories. There wasn’t a Jew in America with friends or family
who’d not been imprisoned, tortured and starved by the Nazis. Many
of the actors had lost loved ones. At each stop on the circuit, the
wondrous, beautiful story of the adoption of those two darling
orphans would find its way into the press, or into the general mix
of conversation.
Of course, it’s
a given that Maurice would utilize this most personal of private
matters as the hook for his planted news items, as he’d done so
blatantly in the past, in order to nourish that other cherished
child of his: the Yiddish Art Theatre. The two flesh and blood
children, Frances and Marvin, might with ample reason, have resented
being used in this manner, but they adored their adoptive parents in
spite of it, especially Maurice, because of his creative nature, his
unique sense of humor, and his sensitivity to their condition. After
all, he too had been parentless during a critical time in his youth.
Maurice had taken them from the hopelessness and sterility of an
orphanage, from the colorless life in a middle class Belgian home,
into a world of culture, beauty, art, travel, music, and a coterie
of actors who were adored by thousands.
After the
final performance of Riverside Drive, Maurice announced to
the company very dramatically that he was disbanding it, and
wouldn’t be returning to New York in the fall. After 32 years, the
Yiddish Art Theatre as an institution was no more. Though the king
would surely survive, his kingdom was gone. “Time and circumstance,”
he told an interviewer, “make a man’s decisions for him. Young
people don’t speak Yiddish anymore [and] production costs rose to
such heights that putting on an artistic play becomes almost
impossible” (Jameson 6 Aug. 1950). For all intent and purpose, the
Second Golden Age of Yiddish theatre was now history.
But Schwartz
was not. Transplanted in California soil, if only for a month, he
was entranced again about becoming a movie star like his former
employee, Paul Muni. Twice before, he’d tried and failed. The third
opportunity and temptation arrived in the form of Delmar Daves, a
writer/director/producer at 20th-Century-Fox, who’d come
to a performance of Shylock and His Daughter, then went
backstage to offer Schwartz a role in a film soon to be shot in
Hawaii. Daves, whom film critics never considered among the better
directors, made over 50 films between 1944 and 1963, only one of
them exceptional, Dark Passage (1947), and only becaue its
stars were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. An experienced
technician, Daves had recently completed Broken Arrow with
James Stewart, a western about the Apache chief Cochise.
Schwartz
claimed that he insisted on being tested for the part of the Kahuna
in Bird of Paradise, a remake of the 1933 King Vidor film
that starred Joel McCrea and Dolores Del Rio. If Maurice truly
believed he had a future in the motion picture business, an ingenue
at 62, after almost half a century in another art form, then he
certainly had to realize that he’d made a horrendous mistake in
playing a South Seas shaman, who parades around half-naked and spews
cartoonish dialogue. But his back was against the wall, with no
plans for the future and four mouths to feed. And so, like many a
Hollywood hopeful, Schwartz rented an apartment in town to
concentrate on becoming a movie star. It was a measure of his
desperation (and the lowly state of Yiddish theatre) that Schwartz
felt blessed at another chance at the brass ring. His vivid and
fertile imagination conjured up parlaying his role of the Kahuna
into a shot at adapting King Lear for the screen, followed in
short order by a big budget treatment of Moses, thus predating
Cecile B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments by six years.
The shooting
on Bird of Paradise would start the first week of August on
the island of Hilo, Hawaii. Until then, Maurice bided his time,
enjoying family life and keeping abreast of Second Avenue doings
through William Mercur. To him, Maurice floated the possibility of
perhaps going east in the fall, should—God forbid—Delmar change his
mind or the powers in charge cancel the film. “I’m ready to give a
season in Yiddish,” he wrote Mercur. “The plan [. . .] must be for
Yiddish Theatre in our style, with a new dramatization, or an
original play, not just to work the National” (Schwartz letter 29
May 1950).
Waiting, adjusting to his
apartment on North Whitley Avenue in Hollywood, he read manuscripts,
dozens of them by unknowns and some by the most respected
playwrights in America, and dreamed of past glories. At the
beginning of August, he half-heartedly parted from Anna and the
children and left for Hilo, to join a cast that included the
charming Frenchman Louis Jourdan, the Brooklyn-born Jeff Chandler,
the darkly exotic Debra Paget, and that outstanding character actor
Everett Sloane, who’d once been part of Orson Welles’s Mercury
theatre, and a key player in the 1941 movie gem
Citizen Kane.
The inane plot
of Bird of Paradise involves the unlikely marriage of Paget
(as a saronged native beauty) to the Gallic sophisticate Jourdan,
and the dire consequences that result. Schwartz, who would receive
cast credit in the reviews, played a tribal elder statesman. If
Maurice didn’t know how rigorous an art filmmaking can be, he
swiftly found out. Daves would have them working at five or six in
the morning. Schwartz and Jeff Chandler would wrap themselves in
blankets, and Debra Paget piled on sweater on top of sweater in the
bracing frigidity of early morning. Good soldiers all, no one
complained.
After the long
days of shooting, there was little to do on Hilo but retire to the
bar of the Hotel Naniloa and drink. Not one of Maurice’s pastimes,
he’d tell the bartender to pour him ginger ale from a liquor bottle,
and, applying his thespian skills, he’d pretend to get so plastered
that he had to be helped each night to his room. Consuming large
quantities of alcohol was the ticket into the movie brotherhood, and
soon he was treated like one of the boys.
Schwartz’s
umbilical cord to Yiddish Theatre remained intact through his
correspondence with William Mercur. The news from Second Avenue was
hard for him to digest: “At a time when the director and the actors
here are showing me such friendship and respect for my work at the
Art Theatre, my own friends, alas, stand ready with sharp knives.
But what can they slash at now? They’ve already cut up everything”
(Schwartz letter 17 Aug. 1950). Nevertheless, he implored Mercur to
send along every scrap written about him and about the current
season. “It’s important for me to know anything that happens. We
will after all still do great things, and I mean in Yiddish
theatre” (Schwartz letter 17 Aug. 1950).
By
mid-September, Daves had finished shooting. Bird of Paradise
opened six months later at the Roxy theatre in New York to scathing
reviews that neglected to mention Schwartz’s name. Bosley Crowther
labeled it “a rambling mishmosh of South Sea romance and travesty,
of solemn high-priesting and low clowning, of never-never spectacle
and sport” (Times 15 Mar. 1951).
Back in New
York by October 14th, Maurice did a round of promotional
interviews for the film, while observing first hand what was
happening in Yiddish Theatre. Two weeks later, he hurried back to
Hollywood, prepared to take on a role completely foreign to him:
that of mother. Anna had completely worn herself out, tending to the
children alone, while he was away on location. She’d always suffered
from a chronic sinus condition, and had developed a serious cough in
the raw, wet Los Angeles autumn. Schwartz immediately sent her for
rest and recuperation to a hotel in Arizona, where the sun was
omnipresent and therapeutic, where she could be, above all, free
from the daily cares of child- rearing.
The returned
father became father became mother and father to the children.
Writing almost daily to Anna, he told her: “I prepare big glasses of
orange juice for them. Pack their lunches with pleasure. I put my
soul and heart into those sandwiches. It’s a strange joy, exactly
like feeding baby birds” (Schwartz letter 26 Oct. 1950). The
children became the sum total of his days and nights, with so much
time at his disposal, and no one interested in doing Yiddish theatre
of a certain high quality. And as often happens to such parents, the
children were beginning to resent being hovered over. Maurice would
show up at school and Marvin would see him and hide. He was no
longer a baby, he’d tearfully inform the man who’d become his
father.
Maurice
learned not to do that again. Instead, he’d wander downtown Los
Angeles, looking for a theatre. And found one “with 385 seats, a
good stage and all the amenities. Naturally I told the landlord that
it would have to be repainted, new carpets laid, and softer seats
installed. And he’s ready to make the investment. But I’m afraid the
neighborhood isn’t such a good one [. . .]. A wonderful theatre
though. It could be a real home” (Schwartz letter 27 Oct. 1950).
Whether he
was serious or just going through the motions, Maurice asked for a
lease. The landlord obliged, and Maurice sent the document off to
Anna in Arizona, for her approval, she being the business half of
the partnership. He asked her to write her instructions clearly so
he’d know how to handle the negotiations. He reminded Anna that here
was nothing for them in New York, and that, except for looking after
the children, he had little to do in Los Angeles either. Whatever
money the Schwartzes may have had was being rapidly depleted from
keeping up the apartment on E. 10th Street and the one on
North Whitley. Then there was the hotel room in Arizona, where Anna
continued to slowly improve. Of course, he’d arrange to do
something, even the strong possibility of yet another sweep of
Europe or South America, though if every year it was getting more
and more grinding to pack up and go gallivanting, especially now,
with two children to raise properly.
First of all,
Anna had to get better, no matter the cost. “You should stay as long
as possible—even if the children come to stay with you, because your
health comes before everything in the world. It hurts me to see you
in that condition, especially your coughing. Remember: you have only
one life, the children have only one mother, and I only one wife who
is more than a wife, my only friend and companion in life”
(Schwartz letter 28 Oct. 1950).
Schwartz did
strike a deal, not to run the shabby playhouse in downtown Los
Angeles, but to play the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia from
December 29th through January 6th, eleven
performances only. Maurice contacted and contracted many of his old
compatriots for a reunion of sorts, to do Riverside Drive. No
longer did he have a place to call his own, even on a fleeting
basis. The Art Theatre from here on would exist only as a makeshift
caravan, journeying from oasis to oasis over the world, even if he’d
strenuously objected to so tentative an arrangement. No matter: he’d
be doing theatre, except not on his terms or turf.
Chapter Thirty-Nine: “Our Enemies,
Burning Like a Fire.”
It must have
been disorienting and more than a little sad for Maurice to return
to the East Coast in the winter of 1951, without the usual
excitement a new season would always provide. No stimulating play to
introduce or revive, to digest, master, comprehend, deconstruct then
reassemble. No landlord to haggle with over lease terms. No
menagerie of actors to browbeat into shape. Neither composer nor set
designer to bend to his will. No benefit managers to hustle or
pander to, trying to convince them that their organization’s dollars
would be best spent with the Art Theatre. No unions to cross swords
with. No newspaper critics to answer to, those haughty purists he
could never appease, since adhering to their impossible standards
would only be a form of box office suicide. He loved all this, and
he hated it, but more to the point—it was gone forever.
Almost shorn
of the hectic whirlwind pace he’d known for 32 years, Maurice began
1951 by completing his short engagement at the Walnut Street Theatre
in Philadelphia on January 6th, and opening the very next
evening at the Gayety in Washington, DC, on 9th Street,
in the same Riverside Drive, a relatively inexpensive piece
to mount, requiring only a dozen characters and no musicians.
Touring the Eastern seaboard for the remainder of the winter, he
made all the time-worn stops, among them the Plymouth in Boston,
where he presented his modernized version of another Kobrin work,
the post-First World War One opus, Back to His People, under
its updated title The Return to His Nation.
Come March, he
returned to New York (to his nation of sorts) doing
Riverside Drive at Brooklyn’s Parkway Theatre. His
publicists touted the play as “a bilingual Yiddish-English comedy,”
to attract a younger crowd, indirectly acknowledging the loss of
their past audiences (Times 2 Mar. 1951). Featured as the
grandson, was Marvin Schwartz. The publicity shot for the dailies,
shows Maurice as the Old World grandfather, garbed in funereal
black, including the wide-brimmed Chassidic hat and window-shade
beard. Marvin is in a fashionably American suit and bright two-toned
tie. His face too is very American: apple-cheeked, smiling,
confident. Gone is the haggard, pitiful mien of but four years
earlier.
With the boy
approaching 13, the Jewish male’s age of confirmation, plans were
joyfully made to have Marvin called to the Torah, in Israel, at the
Yeshurim Temple in Jerusalem. It would be the culmination of his
private tutoring in Hebrew. If Maurice had given up the Art Theatre
and its enthrallments, there were other consolations and
compensations, Marvin’s Bar Mitzvah in Eretz Israel being one of
them. While there, who could blame him for also arranging 21 solo
concerts at the Ohel, as well as Hirshbein’s A Secluded Nook,
done with local talent and in Yiddish and Hebrew?
No mention is
made of the celebrating family’s experiences in the fledgling state
that had won an armistice in its baptismal war against the Arabs,
but the Schwartzes must have visited Isaac’s grave on the Mount of
Olives. It would have been the first time for Maurice, a visit
fraught with profound emotion.
The ancient
right of passage observed in the Jerusalem temple, and his
theatrical obligations satisfied, Schwartz spent the next five
months performing in Europe and South America. He made one stop only
on the Continent because the Iron Curtain had come crashing down,
sealing off Poland and the Slavic States from the rest of Europe.
Then it was off to his beloved Argentina for more of the same
concerts and plays, using a full contingent of Buenos Aires
performers. All the while, Maurice and William Mercur kept a
dialogue going via airmail letters. Gone from Second Avenue for half
a year, even if shorn of his Art Theatre, Maurice had to know
nevertheless what was going on. He was preparing for a sort of
return, in early December, and told Mercur to get together with
Eddie Relkin, and map out another winter’s tour of the regular
places. The publicity campaign, he informed them, like a general to
his colonels, must be done logistically perfect to succeed. Nothing
must be left to chance. This was all he had, the only source of his
income—his and his family’s.
Schwartz didn’t
return to America empty-handed. While in Rio de Janeiro he’d met
37-year-old Pedro Bloch, a medical doctor, who was as well the
country’s most respected playwright. From him, Schwartz bought the
rights to two plays: Silver Rain in the Night, and The
Hands of Eurydice, the latter earning Bloch wide acclaim
throughout South America and Europe, running for two smash years at
the Teatre Regina in Rio.
Mercur and
Relkin prepared a satisfactory schedule of appearances for the
winter of 1952, and Maurice dutifully honored it, doing his songs
and monologues, while at the same time preparing The Hands of
Eurydice for the stage. Claude Vincent had translated the piece
for him from Portuguese, and Maurice gave it a more serviceable
title: Conscience. A single character play, it would be done
entirely in English. Schwartz’s account of the work’s pre-premiere
history seems highly perfumed for the unsuspecting theatre-goer, who
seldom knows how a work proceeds from author to stage, the many
unexpected twists and turns, the petty and major disasters along the
way. He distributed to the public the story about bringing the
translation one evening in March to Lee Shubert, who ordered Maurice
then and there to sit and read the entire piece to him, engrossed
from the first sentence to the last. The redoubtable Shubert whose
previous experiences with Schwartz were not the most rewarding,
exclaimed, according to Maurice, that he intended to produce
Conscience immediately, and phoned his managers Joe Kipness and
Jack Small, to take the play to his Booth Theatre on W.45th
Street. Kipness and Small were no lightweights, having helped to
bring High Button Shoes and La Plume de Ma Tante to
Broadway.
Schwartz was
well aware that with the Bloch play he’d be giving his foes in the
Yiddish world even more ammunition. If its rigid fanatics had never
forgiven him for straying into spectacle, they’d certainly condemn
his defection to do an English-language work. But Maurice had little
choice in the matter. There no longer was an Art Theatre, and he’d
never stoop to shund, never try and compete with Picon and
Skulnik, who’d been dubbed by the Yiddish press as the ‘king of
comedy,’ a title that irritated the former king no end. To make
matters worse, the tours (both home and abroad) were no longer
viable, nor even profitable. Perhaps English-language theatre was
indeed a Hobson’s choice, but at least it was an honorable option.
Regardless, he did hope to work again in the future with the steely
Shuberts.
Gearing up his
publicity machine, Maurice urged Mercur to go over the heads of the
critics in the Yiddish newspapers “who are our enemies, burning like
a fire when things aren’t done to their liking” and go directly to
the public (Schwartz letter 11 Apr. 1952). The critics, he was
certain, would never understand the piece anyhow, even if it were
presented in their mother tongue.
A playhouse
assured, Maurice set about absorbing the script, all 72 pages. He
studied day and night to learn the part, an impossible task, but one
that gave him enormous pleasure because of the high quality of
Bloch’s prose and ideas. The only other creative talent involved in
Conscience was Ralph Alswang, who did the scenery and
lighting, conjuring up the illusion on stage of an opulent home.
Alswang had studied with the famous Robert Edmund Jones, and had
worked on Home of the Brave (1945). He would remain on
Broadway well into the 1960’s.
The 90-minute
tale Schwartz strenuously wove, centers on Robert Burgos, a failed
writer married to the daughter of a noted Egyptologist. Burgos has
deserted his wife and two children, to run off with another, less
shrewish woman, who then gambles away his few dollars. The play
opens with the chastened writer returning home to seek forgiveness,
only to discover that his family is gone and the house is empty.
What follows for an hour and a half, is Burgos bearing his soul to
the audience, even trying to involve it in his travails.
As was the
Broadway custom, Conscience opened out of town, on April 28th,
at the Plymouth Theatre in Boston, then on May 5th, for a
week at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia, both Shubert
houses. The Boston critics were of one mind: interesting Schwartz,
poor vehicle. Wrote one reviewer: “Since Maurice Schwartz comprises
the entire cast, he plays with the skill of a dozen mummers. But his
talents cannot raise the script above the tedious personality of its
lone figure” (Taylor 28 April 1952).
Word must have
spread south about the Boston turkey, because at its New York
premiere only Brooks Atkinson, of all the local critics showed up at
the Booth. His report confirmed the opinion of the out-of-town
reviewers: “There ought to be some more social way of making use of
Mr. Schwartz’s considerable talents” (Times 16 May 1952).
Little wonder
that Conscience closed after four New York performances.
That spring,
Maurice’s film agent Ted Wilk lined him up for a role in Columbia
Pictures’s Salome, a biblical epic about King Herod’s lively
stepdaughter. Schwartz was greatly impressed with its outstanding
cast of Rita Hayworth, Stewart Granger, Charles Laughton and Judith
Anderson. The very sketchy reference in Mark and Matthew of the New
Testament was transformed into a script unlike the scenario created
by Oscar Wilde in his play. This piece of revisionist pap absolves
Salome of any blame for John the Baptist’s beheading. Its
director would be William Dieterle, one of Hollywood’s busiest, most
respected professionals, who’d worked with Max Reinhardt on the
ethereal Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), and with Paul Muni
in Juarez (1939). Listed eighth in the cast credits, Schwartz
would portray Ezra, the nagging conscience of Herod. He would appear
in only four scenes, but was the moral underpinning of the film.
No one in
Hollywood doubted that the movie, released in March, 1953, was
strictly a showcase for the abundant charms of Miss Hayworth.
Crowther called the ouevre “a flamboyant, Technicolored romance [. .
.] a lush conglomeration of historical pretense and make-believe,
pseudo-religious ostentation and just plain insinuated sex” (Times
25 Mar. 1953).
Over the
summer, with Anna and the children, Schwartz made his first
appearances in Mexico. He played the Iris Theatre in Mexico City,
presenting his word concerts and the Jonas Rosenfeld play
Competitors, which was so ahead of its time in 1922. Its new
title Velvel the Housewife, hardly did justice to the work.
The Schwartzes
returned to Los Angeles on September 26th, and a week
later Maurice was involved in another film for Columbia, a second
biblical farrago called Slaves of Babylon. Directed by
schlockmeister William Castle, with dozens of low grade, low budget
films to his credit, the flick starred Richard Conte and Linda
Christian. Schwartz was given the minor role of Daniel in the court
of Nebuchadnezzar and received third billing, but not much else.
Variety deemed it “a plodding programmer for routine playdates.
Other than Technicolor, there’s not much in the way of marquee
help” (17 Sept. 1953).
Maurice could
not have been the least proud of his three demeaning attempts to
break into the movies. It must have rankled the director of the
famed Art Theatre to look back and measure his decline since first
setting up shop at the Irving Place theatre. Involved of late in
employing the Bible, no matter how disgracefully, he might have
recalled a passage from the Second Book of Samuel, the one beginning
with “How the mighty have fallen.” Undoubtedly, he had past glories,
a multitude of them, to sustain him, but for a man like Maurice
Schwartz, they would be woefully insufficient. |
