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February 16, Education , Community Engagement. The Interview Game 1. What is your full name? Where were you born? Where do you live? Have you lived other places in the world also? Where do you go to school? What is your favorite class? What kind of music do you like? What kind of movies or TV shows do you like? What kind of books do you like? What kind of food do you like? Who is someone that you respect or admire? What is something you are good at doing or like to do? Newer Post A Force of Nature: Lighting Design with Lynne Hartman.
Older Post Naaaaw, No Thanks: Urban Theater Project Winter He thought the pinnacle for a worthwhile man—a successful man—was to be an advertising copywriter. But I finally stopped acting because I was never making a living. I wasn't interested in business. My father had a printing shop, and then he branched out into direct-by-mail advertising and then an advertising agency to which he added something called merchandising counseling.
I was interested in creative things, in the arts. I wanted to learn all about music. I had left school at the end of the second term in high school. I was bored with algebra and learning Spanish. I wanted much more to learn French, which seemed to me the language of poets, but my father thought Spanish was a business language and we were going to do a lot of business with Latin America. It was very easy to be against his values. He was what was then called a Babbitt. So I had this drive to be an actor and a writer. I had left school early, and I messed around with the idea of going to dramatic school, but I couldn't raise the fee, and my father would promise me one day and take it away the next day.
I never did get to dramatic school. There were stock companies—local players up in the Bronx. Every once in a while a Broadway show would play at the Bronx Opera House. I never had the money to go to shows.
That's why they named themselves The Group Theatre. And then we had to disband. You really felt you had a reason for living. Tina Fey, simply put, is one of America's most treasured comedians. Anything can cost you your life—any simple little thing.
I could wrestle up a quarter for the local stock shows, but a show downtown cost at least fifty cents. I used occasionally to go to a Broadway show, and I did see a number of stock plays, but I saw a great deal of movies. Movies were inspiriting and inspiring. Some of the old silent pictures had good acting and some remarkable actors. I saw Nazimova in a famous movie called The Yellow Ticket.
I couldn't quite make out what that was about. I thought the yellow ticket was merely a passport, and I missed the fact that she was a prostitute and had to be registered. I saw her do Salome. I saw her do A Doll's House in a movie. Then I went to the library and got a copy. So the movies were my early inspiration. Was anybody in your family ever connected with the arts? Not that I know of. I don't know of anybody who had any literary talent or was an actor.
My parents came here when they were quite young—little kids, two or three, at most four years old. My mother came from Austria, my father from Russia. What their folks were back there I have never been able to make out. My grandfather was a grain merchant.
When he came here, he became an insurance agent. And on my mother's side—her father ran a distillery in Bukovina, then in Austria, later part of Romania. You never know how many ancestors you have. I was rather shocked and somehow pleased to find that my mother came from a father who had twenty-four children with two wives. My mother was the youngest, delicate child of that father. And what happened to all these uncles and aunts I have no idea. I may have hundreds of living cousins and don't know anything about them. How did you go about implementing this desire to be an actor or a writer?
You must remember that I never started out to be a professional actor or writer. When I went to high school, one of the English teachers took an interest in me. Once in a while a teacher took an interest in me or saw some spark in me, but what that was I don't know. I was a very ignorant boy. Maybe it was just personality or looks or a cut of refinement they didn't see in the average boy. While there were not too many books in my family's house, I had done considerable reading.
There were the public libraries. At twelve I was reading from four to six books a week. They would let you take only three, and, when you brought back the three, you could take another three. Of course, my boyfriends hooted at the idea that I was actually reading all these books. Reading books seemed show-offy. I read anything—without any taste or any insight. It was just spasmodic—from travel diaries of African explorers to an occasional Ibsen play or Sherlock Holmes.
And I began to see they were talking about a world I would like to join. I did join a little theater group called the Drawing Room Players. I used to play leading parts in their bills of three one-act plays that we put on for an evening once or twice a year. Among all my boyhood friends, fourteen or sixteen boys, I had one who had my predilections, and we would go occasionally to a [Lewisohn] Stadium Concert on a summer night. Well, the other kids thought we were really pretentious.
All this was the bum. What's this about Choppin and Brams and all that? Who the hell do you think you are? And God knows this was not a very high place. Always—so far as acting was concerned—I was able to recite. I was an elocutionist. Before I left high school, I won the first prize reciting Robert W.
Service's The Spell of the Yukon. But by then she was convinced she had found a great actor, and she said, Well, can't we register you here? Get your papers from the other school, and we'll just give you enough courses to get you by. So I finally left and didn't play that part. But that's how crazy I was to act. As a matter of fact, when I left school in , I became a semi-professional contestant in amateur contests. You went down to the Moss Circuit office, and you would be assigned to go up to some theater like the Alhambra, which was having a Tuesday or Thursday amateur contest.
Very few local people entered, and for appearing in it you would be given a two- or three-dollar guarantee, and any prize you won was yours. The prize was determined by the audience's applauding. If they applauded the loudest for you, you won the first prize. So I got the three-dollar guarantee, and then I always won the first or second prize. The first prize was ten dollars, the second was seven, and the third five. When my boyfriends, the gang on the block, knew I was appearing in some nearby theater, they'd come and make quite a claque. That way I could make at least ten bucks a night.
Only I didn't get enough nights. I was very good at what I did. I was very arrogant. I walked onstage with enormous self-confidence, self-confidence that I couldn't possibly have if I appeared on the stage today. And for a while I kept myself going that way. In the meantime, since I was about fifteen, my father had been worrying about my future and urging me to find a regular job. By the time I was eighteen or nineteen I detested the man. I couldn't stand him. And to this day—he's still alive—I don't get along with him at all.
Because the man so twisted me, so sent me through a number of psychological wringers that I am sure that some of the damage is still present. By the time I was nineteen, I became a radio announcer of a small radio station in New York. This made me feel very self-important. There were little perquisites, like getting free meals in a restaurant and occasionally from some store getting a jacket or a suit, all for free advertising.
But it was a foolish job. It paid no money. No salary was attached, but it made me feel very important. And what happened was that, although there was no pay, I went around from radio station to radio station and kept selling myself as an elocutionist. I was called The Rover Reciter and used to have as many as ten or twelve bookings a week at various radio stations. I would get a fifteen-minute spot and do one or two things. And I was wild to get my name in front of the public.
I used to send out publicity about myself—things that make me shiver with a kind of shame when I think of them now. You had other jobs in stock companies during that time, including being an understudy for Spencer Tracy in The Conflict Then you got a big break with the Theatre Guild. No one—no actor or actress today, unless they are really old-timers—can have any sense of what it meant to get a job with the Theatre Guild.
The Theatre Guild was the Mecca of any actor. They started putting literature on the American stage. They produced all the great European plays. They created the American theater. They put it into long pants. They had fantastic influence on the level of intelligence in Broadway plays. And to get any part with the Theatre Guild was an actor's dream. On the phone she said, "Are you a big, strong fellow? I went over and met her. She was looking for young, non-homosexual, male actors. Well, I guess I fitted that bill, because in two or three minutes we walked down some stairs, and there I was on the Theatre Guild's stage on West 52nd Street.
Many famous people were there. It was very impressive. In fact, this whole company had been on the road the previous season. They had trouped these shows in certain select localities, and they were now going out for an extended tour: Louis, and so on. The pay was forty dollars, which was a criminal salary to pay even somebody playing bits or walk-ons, because you had to live in strange towns.
You had to pay your weekly rent at a hotel, although a lot of the guys would team up and rent an apartment. Well, you can imagine what it was. Just a lot of walk-ons. Maybe here or there a line. Begging to get some kind of understudy. It made you important to be an understudy. It also might pay you five or ten dollars a week more. But, even though I found myself at the Theatre Guild, I was not in a very happy frame of mind.
I had no family connection, and I was depressed. It was lucky this job came along because I made friends with a few of the people in the company. A very nice man named Earle Larimore kind of took me up and befriended me. He would say to Mamoulian, "Rouben, why don't you give this young man that little bit there? I understudied Albert Van Dekker in one play and an old character actor named Ernest Cossart in another play.
They were all people I was very proud even to look at because I had seen them on the stage. Sylvia Field was the leading woman. She was a beautiful ingenue. I met her last year again and talked to her about a part in a picture I was directing, and there she was—a grey-haired, old grandma. Anyway, that company was out for about five or six months.
And I kept writing back to Cheryl Crawford to keep her remembering I was alive. So, when this company came back and disbanded, I got a bit in another Theatre Guild production, something called Roar China [by S. Tretyakov] , which was directed by then up-and-coming Herbert Biberman. Then the next season [], by putting some pressure on Phil Moeller, the director, I got an important part, a juvenile lead actually, about seventeen or twenty "sides," in a play by Claire and Paul Sifton called Midnight , again with a very distinguished cast.
And I think I was rather good in that part, but the show was not successful. It didn't run for longer than their subscription, which was about six weeks, and then again I was out of a job. But I was getting a hundred dollars a week—an extraordinary fact: I had my own dressing room on the second or third floor. I thought I really had arrived. All these little things led to my getting into the Group Theatre.
And if I hadn't gotten into the Group Theatre, I might have become some kind of playwright, but I would never have become a serious playwright. One Saturday afternoon, after a matinee, a very strange looking man came in to see me, kind of glowering and dark and with long sideburns. It was Harold Clurman. I knew who he was—a very important man with the Theatre Guild. He was one of their two play readers.
He said, "Cheryl Crawford tells me that you have some acting talent. And we are getting together to make a kind of theater, and I want to invite some actors from around Broadway to come to some meetings that we will be holding once or twice a week. So I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes.
I said that I liked Alfred Lunt very much as an actor, and I liked the way he performed with his wife, but that that was not my ideal of acting. And he said, "What is your ideal? And he was looking at me very seriously. We were looking at each other in the mirror as I was taking my makeup off, and suddenly I burst out laughing. He said, "Why are you laughing? If you had gone on with that tosh, you would never have gotten into the Group.
But when you laughed and said you didn't know what you were talking about, I said, 'He's a pretty nice fellow. So they began to have these meetings, and to them were invited all the young, important players from around New York, many playing in shows, playing leading parts. Cheryl Crawford was there. Clurman talked with a great deal of fervor about what was wrong with the theater and how they intended to fix it and what their ideal of a theater was and what their ideal of scripts was and what was their ideal of an acting company. I was listening like a fellow does who just wants to get a job at fifty dollars a week.
Never mind the ideals! Never mind the acting styles or scripts or anything! Just let me get a job so that I won't be hungry. And the months rolled on, and the little money I had saved was gone. I couldn't understand what all the fuss and roar was about. There was discussion and questions and a lot of haranguing back and forth, because Clurman—as indeed he had to—spoke fanatically.
And people kind of resented this arrogating to himself a special knowledge about the current theater: A lot of the people who came to these meetings came a few times and then dropped out. They couldn't be bothered with this kind of nonsense. But I hung on out of a kind of instinct. And because I needed a job.
Because something stirred and stimulated me without my being quite conscious of what he was talking about. I was an uneducated boy who was determined to educate himself. I was an omnivorous reader, and I wanted to know everything there was to know about music—like a twenty-year-old boy wants to know all there is to know about women.
He can't wait to put his hands in her hair. In the same sense I couldn't wait to put my hands on the body of music. The body of art. What's this about Rembrandt? What about French Impressionists?
What was this mysterious thing? What was a symphonic movement? What did that mean—a movement? What did that mean— allegro con brio? Everything was very cryptic and very wonderful, and part of this wonderful whole was also contained in what Clurman was talking about because he was undoubtedly talking about art. And I had never associated art with the theater. I didn't know what that meant. I wanted to make fifty bucks a week. I wanted to make a living.
I could be as poetic as I liked in writing. I could write this kind of short story, that kind of short story. I had even completed a full-length, very bad, very romantic novel. It had an interesting, romantic flare and special youthful ways of seeing things. In the meetings there was a great deal of talk about one of the main pillars of this theater-to-be if it ever came into being. He was not present. He was a mysterious godlike creature somewhere out in the wilderness like John the Baptist: And the time came when this man did finally arrive.
About him was something very serious and very impressive, very rabbinical, something very pure and pure looking. And he kind of awed me too.
By now I had come to know Clurman a little better and some of the people who had begun to clump around with the feeling that they would be in the theater when it was formed. When I was growing up, the schools were keen and competitive, and I was that kind of boy that schools do not teach to think, but simply damage. And in these weekly sessions, where so much talk went on, I, who kind of listened dreamily to all of it, would say to myself, "What does objective , the word objective , mean?
What does the word subjective mean? What does that mean? I can't understand it. I had a very soft, dreamy mind, that had never learned to think. After the meetings those who had the money used to go to a Childs Restaurant on Fifth Avenue, somewhere near 57th Street, and we'd sit and have coffee and pancakes.
I had reached a very unhappy state in my life where I couldn't talk. I was bursting to say things, but I was mute. And I would listen to these other people talk and think how wonderful some of them were and how far away they were in attainment and how some day I might know what they knew.
Clurman was a great talker. He couldn't stop talking. And once or twice he favored me by letting me walk him home. He was living at a place called the Hotel Meurice, and we would walk down 57th Street and around to his hotel on 58th Street, and he would keep on talking, talking a streak. Apparently—he told me later—on one of these strolls I almost lost my chance to get into the Group Theatre.
We passed a house in which lived an artist I knew. I was listening to him talk, and suddenly out of nowhere I said, "You know, sometimes a man must wear a beard because he has a weak chin. Several years later, he told me, "You almost didn't get into the Group Theatre because of that insane remark you made.
I thought you were schizophrenic. You never talked, and suddenly out of you burst an incomprehensible, disconnected remark, 'Sometimes a man wears a beard to hide a weak chin. As we were walking, we passed the house where an artist named Roger Furse once invited me to dinner, and he wore a beard. As we were passing this house, it occurred to me: He has a weak chin.
Little things occur that can alter your entire fate. I think fate's your inner nature as it meets outside circumstances. Your own nature meets the natures of the other persons you are with. These interpenetrations make up your fate. Anything can cost you your life—any simple little thing. That little foolish remark might have cost my getting into the Group Theatre, my becoming a playwright. Now came the magical time when we knew! A couple of meetings had been held at Lee Strasberg's apartment at a place called London Towers down on 23rd Street.
His apartment impressed me. There was a full-size reproduction of a Gauguin painting with women in various colored dresses on a beach. And that Lee would have this reproduction—a great big long panel it was—felt to me much more connected to art than to the theater. By then some of us had begun to feel that, if we were being invited down to Strasberg's house, where we were only twenty-five, while uptown there might be a hundred and twenty-five, that maybe we had some special "in," that maybe we were the people who really interested them.
I myself had great humility because, well, you know, Franchot Tone was there and J. Edward Bromberg and Morris Carnovsky, whom I'd seen act, and they were all wonderful actors. Then we began to know that the Group directors were getting some money from the Theatre Guild and were going to visit old Otto Kahn, who was famous for writing out checks for art ventures. Only later did we learn that we had started this theater in the Depression and that Otto Kahn, though he expressed interest, was no longer signing checks.
Anyway, the summer of arrived. And the people did receive letters saying that the Group Theatre would have its first summer at a place called Brookfield Center in Connecticut, and we would be leaving in cars from such and such a place. I still have that note in my files: At that moment the value of the Group Theatre to me meant consciously that I would get a job, that I would be taken care of, and that I would be in association with companions, with comrades. It had started to give me a sense of family.
A lot of the people felt that way. Unconsciously this adventure had begun to call out in me some kind of ideal, to stimulate the desire to know more, to be more, to use myself more. Although the least talkative of the three, she was present all the time and would make short manifesto statements: To us in the company Cheryl Crawford was the most important person of any of us, because she was still the casting director of the Theatre Guild and a most influential person in the New York theater.
People joined the Group Theatre with mixed feelings. Some had doubts about its value. But I was not that sophisticated. I was not that advanced in the theater. I was not that advanced in my sense of life, although I remember expressing doubts during that first summer when every day one actor or actress wrote a page in the daily diary they were keeping. The members hesitated about putting themselves completely in the hands of these three directors who were telling us time and again that we had to put ourselves in their hands.
They were almost like revivalists who say, "Just put yourself in my hands. Give me your soul. I will make it. I will mold it. I will show you God. I will connect you. We commenced to feel religious fervor. It was more than dedication. Dedication simply is doing a job well. Occasionally visitors would come up, sometimes a blasphemous visitor like photographer Paul Strand's wife. Beck Strand in a kind of sophisticated amusement would say of Strasberg, "Well, how has the little tin Jesus been treating you all? So outside people saw this religious quality.
But it didn't matter to us, because we were giving ourselves so completely. The first play we were going to rehearse was very impressive. Many of us were disappointed: But an actor like myself didn't expect a large part. It was a poetic play, a lovely play—one of Paul Green's best. He spent some of the summer, and I was very impressed and awed to meet him, a real playwright.
By then I knew I wanted to write plays. I had known that for some time. The desire to write plays was stimulated by the fact that I was acting and by the fact that many things impressed me. Yet nothing about my life impressed me really. I knew I was knotted up with many problems I didn't quite understand.
I knew I didn't see things the way other people saw them. I knew I lacked some normal view of things. I had frequently been in suicidal moods and I wanted to work my way to some healthy, secure posture. I wanted to be able to look at life more steadily, with wholeness. I knew something was the matter with me.
I also recognized that something was the matter with a lot of these people around me, because, with all their talent, they were a very neurotic crew with very touchy egos, qualities which manifested themselves more and more as the Group Theatre went on. We were a strange band, but also a dedicated family that felt, "Gee, you were part of the best things in life when you were in the Group Theatre. You were something special. You were different from other actors, and the Group was different from other play companies.
You were bringing something new. About this work there was a morality that did not exist elsewhere in any theater experience I'd had. Somehow I was now in the heartland of art and culture and creativity. Our people worked and concentrated with the activity of the beehive. They ate, slept, and drank nothing but the new approaches the Group Theatre was bringing to acting. The training of the actors working on Connelly , of course, was completely in the hands of Strasberg.
Nobody else touched them. Clurman had two scripts with some possibilities, and he began to do classwork with us who were not engaged importantly in the play. Very early, and perhaps wrongly, the Group Theatre directors began to call us in, one by one, and—I'd almost forgotten this—make rather keen, but perhaps harmful, analyses of each person's personality, their character defects, what they had to work on, where their problems lay.
They wanted to create the "new theater man. Emotionally and psychologically some of these things were quite damaging. But, you see, the whole relationship was that intimate.
We felt that other people cared for you, cared for your problems. They cared about what you could bring to the totality of this theatre. So this was good. That summer you felt you belonged to something quite remarkable. In fact, that feeling stayed for a long time. Maybe four or five years went by before that quality really began to go.
Everybody had his privacy, and yet everybody belonged to the totality, to the whole group. That's why they named themselves The Group Theatre. That's what they felt. They were a group. Did much of what you knew already as an actor fall apart under this onslaught? We ran into bad trouble. We had acquired bad habits from previous acting training and experience. The new thing which Strasberg and Clurman were teaching we scarcely understood.
Those who worked on big parts with Lee Strasberg got big training. Those who worked on smaller parts got very little training, and we felt jealous about that. We were so rapacious. We wanted to know everything. We wanted more classwork, but there wasn't time. Proper classwork did not come until the next summer when the directors started to say, "Let's not go so fast. Let's do more classwork, because a lot of our people need training.
They're talking about things they don't know about. Strasberg was perturbed by people who talked in big terms about things they didn't know anything about. He was very generous and unstinting of his time, but he was sometimes annoyed and sometimes very angry. He had a quick temper. He got very angry at people who would talk in a superior way in our Group Theatre lingo, yet give very conventional performances and present very conventional insights in their acting. Once, a year or two later, it was necessary for Strasberg to chide Phoebe Brand, who in a rehearsal in front of the entire company made some very slighting remark about Helen Hayes.
Strasberg turned on her in fury and said, "This theater is what it is! The way we act is the way we act! But, if you live to be a hundred years old, you will never have Miss Hayes's talent. Never let me hear you talk that way again! When Strasberg got angry this way, he could be extremely corrosive. You would shrivel up with the acid of his tongue. This was a summer of fantastic ferment.
Visitors were coming and going, and a great deal of publicity about our company appeared in the papers. You felt you belonged to something very important and you felt you were here to stay. You were in a family. You had some place in the world to go to. You had some place to be at one with. And with it all took place an actual psychological purge. I think the Group Theatre directors had picked rather well.
They'd picked some interesting people.
And famous people appeared. I had contact with a world I'd not met before. I was very happy to meet and know in a small way men like Maxwell Anderson and Paul Green. As a matter of fact, Max took a shine to me.
And every once in a while—he was a big shy man—he said to me, "I think you need a little money. I must say I needed the money. I didn't even have a dollar for cigarettes. That summer was almost like Walt Whitman's ideal of a school. The Group Theatre, of course, was divided into classes.