Jews on Broadway: An Historical Survey of Performers, Playwrights, Composers, Lyricists and Producers (17 page)

After college, Miller took on several jobs while writing his first Broadway play,
The Man Who Had All the Luck
, which opened and closed in 1944. While the play essentially bombed on Broadway, it did win a Theater Guild Award. It was Miller’s second play,
All My Sons
, that generated significant attention as his first Broadway hit. The play, based on a true story, focused on an imprisoned man who, along with his partner, had sold faulty cylinders to the United States Army, resulting in the crashing of 21 planes. The story illustrated how his family, partner and others in his life coped with his actions, including his son who killed himself rather than living with the knowledge of what his father had done. The dramatic/tragic play not only ran on Broadway for 328 performances, but also won a Tony Award. In addition, it drew the attention of HUAC, concerned about the story of a traitor to the American cause.

Miller’s next play,
Death of a Salesman
, emerged as one of the greatest American dramas ever written — if not
the
greatest. Opening in 1949,
Death of a Salesman
would not only enjoy an initial run of 742 performances on Broadway, but would also be performed at all levels, from major theatrical productions to high school presentations, for decades to come.

It was the first play to win a Tony Award, New York Drama Circle Critics’

Award and Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Willy Loman would become a house hold name as the tragic play later showed up on the reading lists 97

Jews on Broadway

of schools coast to coast. Miller even directed
Death of a Salesman
at the People’s Art Theatre in Beijing, China, in 1983.

Unfortunately, despite the enormous fame and monetary success from
Death of a Salesman
, Miller would soon find himself shocked and saddened by the actions of one of his closest associates. Just three years after the debut of the play, Elia Kazan, who had directed the classic drama, and with whom Miller had been close friends for many years, went before the HUAC and provided the names of others whom he believed to be Communist sympathizers, including Hellman, Odets and Edward G. Robinson. Miller, who in good conscience could never risk destroying the careers of those around him, could not forgive Kazan, and they did not speak for many years.

The episode with Kazan, and the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy, however, set Miller on the path to writing his next play, which, like
Salesman
, would emerge as a literary classic, and also a must read for American students, even today. As mentioned earlier, Miller likened the Communist witch hunts of the 1950s with the Salem witch hunts of the late 1600s, and the result was
The Crucible
, which opened in 1953 and won a Tony Award for best play.

Also as noted earlier,
The Crucible
infuriated those on the anti–

Com munist crusades and eventually brought Miller before the Committee under the agreement that he would answer questions pertaining only to his own activities. Nonetheless, the Committee still asked Miller to name names of other Communist sympathizers, and, unlike Kazan, he refused. For this, Miller was denied a passport, fined and sentenced to 30

days in prison. The ruling, however, was overturned because it was determined that the Committee had misled Miller, essentially telling him that there would be no repercussions for his appearance at the hearing.

Throughout the ’60s, Miller would continue to bring plays to Broadway, including
After the Fall, Incident at Vichy
and
The Price.
He would then open plays in other parts of the country while also writing for television, as well as screenplays. Until his death in 2005, at the age of 89, Miller was still writing. While he never again could achieve the acclaim and success of
Death of a Salesman
or
The Crucible
, Miller was a master of modern tragedy, bringing intense social dramas, often based on true stories, to the stage through characters wrestling with social and personal conflicts. Miller was very aware of social injustice, as evidenced 98

5. From Communism to the Catskills

in his works and in his life. He was adept at articulating his social, moral and political convictions. He even denounced anti–Semitism in a 1945

novel called
Focus,
which he did not turn into a play.

Miller also generated attention for his marriage to film legend Marilyn Monroe in 1956. The two had met some six years earlier and reportedly had an affair while Miller was married to his first wife, Mary Slattery, to whom he was married for 16 years. Of course as Stephen J. Whitfield noted in his article titled “The Cultural Cold War as History,” those in disfavor of Miller wrote headlines such as “Pinko Playwright Weds Sex Goddess.” Nonetheless, Monroe, who converted to Judaism shortly before marrying Miller, stood by him, risking her own career, through the congressional hearings and subsequent sentencing. Their marriage lasted only five years. He would subsequently marry Inge Morath just a year after he and Monroe separated. Miller and Morath would remain married until her death some 40 years later.

Not only was Miller the most important playwright of the 1950s, but arguably the most significant American playwright of the 20th century. Miller’s works earned him the Pulitzer Prize and seven Tony Awards.

He holds honorary doctorate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. Above and beyond this, his works continue to have significant influence. They have been (and still are) discussed, debated, translated and interpreted by students worldwide.

Zero Mostel

Along with Hellman and Miller, another of the many blacklisted celebrities was one of the most talented and respected performers ever to grace the stages of Broadway.

The son of Jewish immigrant parents, Samuel Joel Mostel was born in Brooklyn in 1915. However, like many stars of Yiddish theater, vaudeville and Broadway, he and his seven brothers and sisters would grow up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Mostel’s father, a rabbi, wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. Mostel, however, was interested in art and began painting and drawing at an early age. His love of art would continue for years, and after college he would be accepted to NYU’s challenging Master’s art program. Mostel, however, also had a gift for comedy 99

Jews on Broadway

and began performing at private parties and various functions in New York, which soon led to nightclub performances and radio shows. In the early 1940s, Mostel even landed in a couple of Broadway revues in small roles before heading overseas during the war to perform for the U.S.

troops.

By the 1950s, Mostel’s comic genus was generating attention, not only from audiences, but from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It seemed that Mostel mocked the red scare and the seriousness of the anti–Communist investigations. Of course this only angered those chasing down Communists. But it was one of his own, show business col -

league Jerome Robbins, who actually went so far as to name Mostel as a Communist. The result was that Mostel was brought before the Commit -

tee. Unlike Robbins, he refused to name names while also denying that he was a Communist Party member. While no charges were ever leveled at Mostel, he was blacklisted in the industry and denied work for several years. As a result, to make ends meet, he sold paintings and found work in smaller Off Broadway productions where “blacklisting” was irrelevant.

Mostel would finally find his way off the blacklist when he was asked to perform in the play
Rhinoceros
, written by absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, in which almost everyone in the cast is transformed into a rhi-noceros. There have been various interpretations of this thought-provoking work which to some portrayed the universe as being ultimately meaningless, irrational, and absurd. Others saw it as an allegory for the spread of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s. While the play sparked much philosophical debate, it brought Mostel a Tony Award and drew the attention of producer Harold Prince, who asked Mostel to be in his upcom ing musical,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

There was one problem with casting of Mostel in the show. George Abbott was directing along with Jerome Robbins. Mostel and Robbins had not been in contact since Robbins named him as a Communist.

Mostel, however agreed to work on the show even though it meant working with Robbins. Rumor has it that at the first rehearsal, the tension was thick as the two entered the same room. “Robbins made the rounds of the cast, shaking hands. When he got to Mostel, there was silence.

Then Mostel boomed, ‘Hiya, Loose Lips!’”2 This evoked laughter from those on the set and served to minimize the tension.

Forum
opened in May of 1962 and played nearly 1,000 perform-100

5. From Communism to the Catskills

ances. The tremendous team of Stephen Sondheim, Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, plus Harold Prince, along with Abbott and Robbins produced this comedy, inspired by the works of Titus Maccius Plautus who wrote humorous plays in ancient Rome back around 200 B.C. The lead role of the slave Pseudolus went to Mostel, who supposedly wasn’t the first choice. Apparently both Phil Silvers and Milton Berle were ahead of Mostel in line for the role. Mostel would not only shine in the role, but won his second Tony Award.

Of course Mostel would go on to greater heights, and another Tony Award in
Fiddler on the Roof
, which will be discussed in greater length in the next chapter. Zero Mostel, who died in 1977 of a heart attack while working on a musical called
The Merchant
, based on the famed Shakespearian character Shylock from
The Merchant of Venice
, was one of the most extraordinary performers in Broadway history. His command of the stage, ability to handle a dramatic or comedic role with the same exuberance and his resounding singing voice won him consistently high acclaim from critics, applause from audiences and respect from his peers, three goals of any actor.

Jack and Madeline Lee Gilford

Both Jack and Madeline Lee Gilford also saw their careers derailed by the anti–Communist express. Born to Jewish immigrant parents in 1908 on the Lower East side of Manhattan, Jacob Aaron Gellman had a knack for impressions from an early age, especially odd ones like pea soup coming to a boil. In time, he would develop his own night club act and soon became the emcee at a café in Greenwich Village where Zero Mostel (with whom he became good friends) and jazz great Billie Holiday performed.

Gilford went on to make his Broadway debut in the musical revue
Meet the People
in 1940 and followed it with
They Should Have Stood in
Bed
in 1943. It was also in the ’40s that he met his wife to be, Madeline Lee Lederman. Both were married at the time, and they divorced their respective spouses to be together. Madeline Lee, some 15 years younger than Gilford, was also an up and coming performer, born to Polish-Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx.

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Jews on Broadway

It was, however, just as Jack was making headway on Broadway and Madeline Lee was building her own following in radio and on stage that the brakes were put on their respective careers. Jerome Robbins named the Gilfords as Communists, based on their passion for social change and their strong support for labor unions. For most of the decade, Madeline Lee and Jack struggled to get work. Gilford did make the best of his Off Broadway status, drawing attention for his roles in
The World of
Sholom Aleichem
and
Once Upon a Mattress
, in which he teamed with Carol Burnett. While Gilford, like his buddy Mostel, found low-paying work in Off Broadway shows, he did manage to land a Broadway role in
The Diary of Anne Frank
. But such roles were hard to come by. It took Gilford nearly a decade to re-emerge from his blacklisting and finally hit his stride on the Broadway stage in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way
to the Forum,
with Mostel
.
That success was followed by
Cabaret.
While Gilford went on to film and television roles for years to come, Madeline Lee was essentially out of the business for years, in part because of the blacklisting and later to raise their three children. She returned in the 1990s as a producer.

Who Were They Really After?

As it was, many Jewish-American artists were, and still are, to the left on political matters. While the hunt for Communists was not aimed at any one cultural or religious group, the liberal-minded Jews were among those most clearly targeted.

From the early years of film, first in Astoria, Queens and New Jersey, and later in Hollywood, California, it was evident that the Jewish people played a significant role in the entertainment industry. It was a new industry in the United States and as such, not controlled by a particular ethnic group. So, when the anti–Communist crusades began after the Second World War, with a major focus on the entertainment industry, the question was raised as to whether the House Un-American Activities Committee was really after the Communists or after the influential Jews in show business. It was evident that many Jewish writers and performers were then, and still are, outspoken about social issues, but were they Communists? And if so, were they actually dangerous?

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5. From Communism to the Catskills

The question was, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a Communist?” Some, like author Michael Freedland, whose book
Witch Hunt
in Hollywood
( JR Books, 2009) explores the subject in detail, believe the question could have been “Are you now or have you ever been a Jew?”

Freedland is among those who point to the attack on Hollywood celebrities as an opportunity to get the Jews who were so prominent in the entertainment world. And while non–Jews were certainly called to testify, the number of Jews was disproportionately high considering the over all Jewish population in the nation at that time. The first ten Hollywood writers, known as the Hollywood Ten, were jailed for not providing the names of their alleged Communist peers. Six of the ten were Jewish.