Hard Times (61 page)

I remember also what you’d pick up odd dollars doing. There were sightseeing buses—see Chinatown, see the Bowery, see New York. They were lined up right on Times Square. If you’ve ever noted a sightseeing bus, there’ll be a couple of people sitting on the bus. And they’d say: It’s leaving right away, guided tour, just leaving for the Bowery and Chinatown. Well, the people inside were usually shills. They’re engaged for a quarter or fifty cents to sit there and look eager. I shilled in Times Square sightseeing buses. (Laughs.) As people came on, you got off: “Excuse me for a moment.” And then you got into another bus. It’s a sitting job.

The summer always provided work for actors. I don’t know why this happened, I can’t explain it. But there was a great proliferation of turning barns into summer theaters. During the Depression, that’s when it came.

In 1936, I joined the Federal Theater.
¹⁵⁴
I was assigned to Project 891. The directors and producers were Orson Welles and John Houseman. The theater we had taken over was the Maxine Elliott. A lot of theaters went dark during the Depression, and the theater owners were happy to lease them to the Government.

One of the marvelous things about the Federal Theater, it wasn’t bound by commercial standards. It could take on poetic drama and do it.
¹⁵⁵
And experimental theater. The Living Newspaper made for terribly exciting productions.
¹⁵⁶
Yet it was theater by bureaucracy. Everything had to go to
a higher authority. There were endless chits to be approved. There were comic and wasteful moments all over the country. But it was forward-thinking in so many ways. It anticipated some of today’s problems. The Unit I was in was integrated. We did Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus.
Mephistopheles was played by a Negro, Jack Carter. Orson Welles played Faustus.

Our next production was
Cradle Will Rock,
words and music by Marc Blitzstein. And we rehearsed those eight hours a day. We worked every moment, and sometimes we worked overtime because we loved it.

Cradle Will
Rock
was for its day a revolutionary piece. It was an attack on big business and the corruption involved. It was done
à
la
Brecht. We had it fully rehearsed.

On opening night, when the audience was assembling in the street, we found the doors of the Maxine Elliott closed. They wouldn’t admit the audience because of an edict from Washington that this was revolutionary fare. And we would have no performance. Somebody had sent down the word.

Well, when you have an alert company, who are all keyed up at this moment, and a master of publicity such as Orson Welles, this is just grist for their mills. (Laughs.)

It’s a nice evening in May—late May or April. Balmy evening. An audience not able to get into a theater, but not leaving because the directors of 891, Orson Welles and John Houseman, were haranguing them in the street: “Don’t leave!” They expected to get a reversal of the edict. We’re told not to make up. We’re told not to go home. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

No reversal came from Washington. So Orson and John Houseman got their friends on the phone: What theater could we do this in? Somebody suggested the Jolson Theater. An announcement was made to all these people, without benefit of microphone: if you go to the Jolson Theater you will see the show. And we marched. Walking with our audience around into Broadway and then up Seventh Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street, we acquired an even larger audience.

 

 

Oh yes. Walking with no police permit. (Laughs.) Just overflowing the sidewalks. Obviously something was afoot. The Jolson Theater hadn’t had a booking for months and was very dusty. But it was open.

Word came from Actors Equity that proper bonding arrangements had not been made. The actors would not be allowed to appear on the stage. Because now you’re not under the aegis of the Federal Theater. You’re under some obscure private management. You don’t know what, because you haven’t found out yet.

This didn’t daunt us. We had a colloquy right in the alley. We decided,
well, if we can’t go on the stage, we could wheel out the piano and Marc Blitzstein could do what he had done in so many auditions: describe the setting and such, and we’ll all sit in the audience. Equity didn’t say we couldn’t sit in the audience. When our cues come, we will rise and give them. So, that we did.

The theater filled. I don’t know how the extra people, who didn’t hold tickets for the opening, how they got in. I’ve often wondered. Did the box office open or did they just say: come in for the laughs? But it was packed with people.
¹⁵⁷
The stage was bare, the curtain was up, and you suddenly missed all your fellow actors. You couldn’t find them. We were in different parts of the house.

Eventually the house lights lowered a little. Marc Blitzstein came out and laid the setting and played a few bars and then said: “Enter the whore.” I didn’t know where Olive Stanton, who played the whore, was. Suddenly you could hear Olive’s very clear high voice, from over left. A spotlight suddenly found her and she stood up. She was in the lower left-hand box. One by one, as we were called up, we joined in. We turned around if we were down front, and faced the audience. People were scattered all over. It was a most exciting evening. The audience reaction was tremendous.

One of those summers, ’38, ’39, I don’t know which—Marc Blitzstein corraled most of us who’d been in the original company and asked us if we’d give up Sunday to go give a performance of
Cradle Will Rock
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. I thought this was marvelous. Because we’re now going to take
Cradle Will Rock
to the workers, to the people for whom he wrote this piece. We were all corraled into a bus and off we went on a nice, hot summer’s day. I thought, well, pretty soon the mills will close down and the steel workers will pour into this amusement park, as twilight comes, and they’ll hear this marvelous saga. No one showed up.

A few men drifted in, and the first thing you find out is that many of them do not understand or speak English. And this was written in, supposedly, common American speech. Here we were preparing an opera for the proletariat, and the proletariat neither wants nor understands it. It’s a rather shocking occurrence. But you don’t give up.

You’re in a hot, sort of open auditorium. And Will Geer,
¹⁵⁸
never to be discouraged, scrounging around for an audience. He found a picnic of church ladies over an adjoining hill. They were spreading out their picnic baskets and he asked: “Would you like to be entertained with an opera?” They allowed as how they would, and they packed their gingham table cloths, all the sandwiches and brought them over to this little amusement place. And sat down.

Marc Blitzstein came out and announced the name of this piece was
Cradle Will Rock,
the setting was Steeltown, U.S.A., and it begins on a street corner at night, and enter the whore. When he said those words, our audience got up and packed up their picnic baskets and left us. We never did do
Cradle Will Rock
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

We were to report back to the Federal Theater, to Project 891. We had no assignment at the moment. But all of us in the stock company had to spend eight hours a day in the Maxine Elliott Theater. We could bring no food in the theater. We had a lunch hour. We could read, but we could not write. We couldn’t deface anything, we couldn’t rehearse. We sat. Forced sitting, with nothing to keep you interested, is one of the most grueling punishments I’ve ever been through. I’ve never been in jail as yet, I expect to. But prisoners are paid for work.

I don’t know if I’m partisan to the underdog or whether I’m the underdog. My political convictions were my own. But this is not the case in life. You’re stigmatized, anything you do. I was active in my union, I was playing benefits—there was Spanish relief, you know, the Spanish Civil War. My life was very full. I didn’t sleep very much. I got excited about everything. They were tearing down the Sixth Avenue Elevated and selling the scrap iron to Japan. I was going to protest…. (Laughs.) There was a cause every second.

I was horrified one morning to find that a Congressman from Kansas had stated in the Congressional Record that I was one of the seven Communists that dominated the Council of the Actors Equity Association. I thought that was unusual. So I sent the Congressman a wire and I said: I read this news story, and if you’ll repeat your accusations outside the halls of Congress, I would sue you for loss of employment. I never heard from him again.

I found the Equity Council in an uproar and I was asked to resign. I said I have no intention of resigning because a man has made such a statement, and he’s never answered my telegram. “If you don’t like me, don’t elect me next time to the Council. But I’m certainly not walking out.” Several councillors walked out in protest to me being there. I was so politically naive, I wouldn’t know then how to go about joining the Communist Party. I wouldn’t know just how to do it. (Laughs.)

There comes a time when you cannot think seriously about Left and Right. And people would come up to you, your dearest friends, and say: “Listen, tell me, really, are you?” I’d say: “Am I what?” They’d say: (whispering) “Are you a Communist?” Now if you say no, you’re immediately accused of lying. I don’t know why this is. But as soon as you say no, they look at you as if—oh boy! If you say yes, you’re also lying, because no Communist says yes when asked. I found myself in this terrible bind, being assailed at every corner by people asking me.

One old Equity member—I was really at the breaking point—during a recess in the Equity Council meeting said: “Look, I really want to know.”
And I just couldn’t care less at this time. He said: “I want to talk to you.” And I said: “Yes?” And he said: “Tell me, are you a Communist?” I thought: I can’t say yes and I can’t say no. I said quickly, I said: “We’re not allowed to tell.” And there wasn’t a laugh on his part at all. It was just as if I’d sealed my death warrant, being facetious. It haunted me for years, that remark. (Laughs.)

I remember going into a theatrical office looking for work. You’d go up and say: who’s casting today? And the sign hanging over the railing: NO COMMUNIST NEED APPLY. It was hanging there. Indignantly, I ripped off the sign and went to the girl at the desk and said: “Why don’t you reduce this to the basic fact that no actors need apply? You’re not doing anything anyway.” Making the little gesture. It probably got hung back on the door again.

 

 

It didn’t for me.

I enlisted in the navy—I was a bit too old for the immediate draft call. After being vilified in the halls of Equity I was told I was a marvelous human being and that my seat on the Council would always be waiting for me. Five years later, I got out and went back and said: “Where’s my seat?” And they said: “You’ll just have to run like everybody else.”

I had incurred a few debts before the war with high Depression living, and they were still waiting for me after the war. Not the seat, the debts.

The average actor clings to whatever job’s providing money, the longest time possible. I’ve now come to an age where I can’t do that any more. I find I want very little in the way of possessions out of life. Here we are in a hotel room, and there’re unanswered letters piled up on my desk. And that’s my life. I don’t care. I’ve got a suit on, and that’s about all I want. I’d like to answer the letters before I die. (Laughs.) But I don’t know that I will.

 

WHO TOLD EVERYBODY the Depression was on on the sixth day of July, Nineteen Hundred and Thirty? In the middle of May we opened our season in Wapello. We had heard talk of hard times being back East. We couldn’t see it. We had normal crowds at the show. A normal amount of candy and popcorn was being sold. We ended up our usual big week on the Fourth of July at Ollie, Iowa. We moved down to Fairfield, where we had always had big crowds.

On the night of July sixth, we played to about $30 gross business. That week, we took in $200 with a show costing us $1500. We couldn’t understand it. Somebody must have told everybody to quit going to shows. Well do I remember that day.

I jumped into a car and drove to Belle Plaine, where J. Doug Morgan had a show. He said, “I did the smallest business in the history of the Morgan Show.” How everybody found out the Depression was on that day I’ll never understand. All of a sudden, the plug was pulled out of the bathtub.