Anne Frank (22 page)

The other so-called co-conspirators and dupes—producers, writers, directors—intuited, early on, that the play might turn a profit. Even if the principal architect of the “cabal” against Levin was a Communist, rarely has Communism achieved such capitalist cash-cow success, and it seems unlikely that Hellman and her cohorts conspired to funnel the profits from Broadway to the Kremlin. Regardless of the political views of the players, the drama of the diary’s adaptation was not about Communism but about capitalism working exactly the way it’s supposed to,
cutting the dark stuff, the Jewish stuff, the depressing stuff, emphasizing the feel good—and making money. This was 1950s America, the war was over, the “healing” well under way, and it was time for the sitcom teen, together with Mom and Dad and Sis, to head off to the secret annex.

In early conversations between Lillian Hellman and Garson Kanin, who would eventually direct the Broadway production, Hellman made a telling remark that would probably have been lost on Levin had he heard it. While acknowledging the diary’s literary importance, Hellman explained that she was the wrong person to adapt it. Such an adaptation, she said, would be so depressing that the producers would be lucky if the play ran for one night. They needed a playwright with a “lighter touch.” Later, the chosen writers—Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett—were instructed to emphasize Anne’s humor. “The only way this play will go will be if it’s funny,” advised Kermit Bloomgarden. “Get (the audience) laughing…That way, it’s possible for them to sit through the show.”

Once again, Levin got it wrong. His approach to Anne’s diary may have been “too Jewish” but it was also, more problematically, too serious. Ironically, the ponderousness and sententiousness of his own adaptation meant it might have had a better chance of being produced in the state Socialist system he despised and feared, a climate in which art, however wedded to propaganda, was divorced from commerce, and less dependent on a theatergoing public who could choose to buy, or not buy, expensive Broadway seats. Only in a capitalist society were ticket sales related to a play’s ability to make its audience feel chastened but uplifted, sad but hopeful. The play’s producer and director understood that a drama confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the political ramifications of Nazism, Zionism, and Jewish spirituality was unlikely to pack the house night after lucrative night. Whatever the strengths and virtues
of the play that Meyer Levin wrote, and that can still be read in a version performed by the Israel Soldiers Theatre, levity and humor were not among them.

A
T SEVERAL
points in
The Obsession,
Levin the novelist takes over from Levin the memoirist and Levin the polemicist, and we read scenes, drawn from life, that suggest a different explanation for his disappointments than the one that he is (or believes he is) providing. Several excruciating passages detail his bruising encounters with Joseph Marks, the vice-president of Doubleday, who was deputized to handle dramatic rights to the diary.

In his elegant office, Marks reads a list of famous producers who have made offers and informs Levin that the deciding factors will be the track record of the producer and the fame of the adapter. Obviously, he is saying this to a virtually unknown writer. Levin points out that the diary is his project, and Marks says he understands that, but a “big-name dramatist would virtually assure a Broadway success.” Again, it’s difficult to link this conversation to the Stalinist ideology that, Levin claims, engineered his failure. On the other hand it’s all too easy to imagine the unease of potential backers listening to Levin’s plans for the adaptation: “The very origin of our theater was in religious plays of martyrdom…the play, if done, must be a reincarnation. In the persistence of the living spirit each spectator would feel a catharsis. When the spirit reappeared before him, indestructible, the crematorium was negated…I saw the form almost as a ballet, a young girl’s probing, thwarted at each impulsive moment while she strives for self-realization.”

To read Meyer Levin’s adaptation of the diary is to confront the pitfalls of basing a work of art on Big Ideas: martyrdom, reincarnation, self-realization. As Levin’s drama begins, a
group of mourners in black raincoats chant the Hebrew prayer for the dead. A narrator, employed throughout to apprise the audience of historical developments—the implementation of the final solution, the construction of the camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the German incursions into Russia and Africa, the Allied invasions, as well as the shifts in time between the acts—outlines Otto Frank’s background and his emigration from Frankfurt to Holland.

The prologue opens on an Amsterdam street, outside the Franks’ home. It’s Anne’s thirteenth birthday, and she and her friends, Joop and Lies, are discussing her gifts. The conversation shifts to Anne’s flirtation with a certain Harry Goldberg, and Joop asks if Harry is taking Anne to the Zionist meeting. The girls discuss the restrictions that the Nazis have imposed on the Jews and the dangers of violating curfew. One says, “Quite a triumph, to get yourself sent to the concentration camp in Westerbork for ten minutes extra in the company of Harry Goldberg.”

Otto Frank appears, carrying a parcel that he claims to be giving to Dutch friends for safekeeping from the Nazis. He and Anne discuss the possibility of going into hiding. There’s a long conversation about the onset of menstruation, and Mrs. Frank laughs at Anne for hoping that her first period might arrive as a birthday present. Then the call-up notice comes, spoiling the amiable mood, and Mrs. Frank says, “We must go into hiding at once.”

Cut to the secret annex, where Margot is telling Miep about the guilt she feels for endangering her family by ignoring the summons; she mentions her dream of someday moving to Palestine. The rest of the family arrives, there are intimations of Anne’s conflict with her mother, followed by a romantic scene between Anne and her father in which Anne speaks of her desire to be alone with him in the world.

The entrance of the Van Daans is more artfully handled than in the Goodrich-Hackett version, in which we are meant to accept the preposterous notion that the two families are meeting for the first time. In Levin’s play, as in life, they have a history. There’s a nice moment when Mr. Koophuis asks Mrs. Van Daan to remove her high heels, so as not to make any noise, and she says, “Never let a man choose a house.”

Likewise, when Dussel appears in the second scene, his characterization is closer to what we know of Fritz Pfeffer than is the buffoon who stands in for him in Goodrich and Hackett’s drama. As the others wait for Dussel to show up, Mrs. Van Daan says that she hears he’s the biggest Don Juan of all the dentists in town; perhaps his delayed arrival means his female patients are reluctant to let him go. There’s an argument in which Anne objects to letting Dussel share her room, and another about which books children should be allowed to read—a disagreement that appears in the diary.

The extended debates about spirituality and Palestine (“It’s part of being something more than yourself…. It’s making a free life for ourselves,” says Margot) point out the strength and weakness of Levin’s play. Anne is given at least some of the intelligence she displays in the diary, and which the Goodrich-Hackett heroine lacks. In one scene with Peter, she quotes Plato about men and women having once been united, then splitting into two halves, each struggling to find completion. One can hardly envision the Anne who pouted and pranced her way across the Broadway stage citing
The Symposium.
Yet the long passages of dialogue with which Levin delineates Anne’s character contribute to the static, discursive—
unstageworthy
—quality that troubled the producers. One can imagine potential backers cringing when Anne and Peter talk about how to determine the gender of a cat.

Throughout, Levin’s play makes one realize how little “action” is in the diary, and how much is domestic, interior, and psychological. Having failed to discover the rhythm of crisis, danger, and (relative) relaxation that would engage the audiences who attended the Broadway production—a tension that Goodrich and Hackett labored, in draft after draft, to sustain—Levin relies on frequent mentions of Westerbork to create a sense of threat. The break-in downstairs is more discussed than dramatized, though there is one tense moment when a bomb falls nearby.

In a scene between the Franks, Edith—whose piety becomes so oppressive that you can understand what irritated Anne, though this seems not to have been Levin’s intention—wonders if God is punishing them for not having taught the children more about their religious heritage. When Anne announces her plan to write a book entitled
The Hiding Place,
her sister replies, “I suppose it could be exciting. All the times we’ve been nearly caught, the robbery in the front office, and that nosey plumber”—events that Levin fails to exploit for their drama, though later, during the Hanukkah party, we see two thieves picking the downstairs lock.

For Levin, a long scene in his play—in which Anne explains her religious feelings to Peter—conveys the soul of Anne’s book. In the diary, Anne’s first doubts about Peter, misgivings that upset her even in the heady phase of their romance, occur when he remarks that life would have been easier had he been born Christian. In later entries, Anne’s reservations about Peter often surface following spiritual discussions; she is troubled by his distaste for religion in general, and for Judaism in particular.

Hans, the object of Cady’s romantic feelings in Anne’s novel-in-progress,
Cady’s Life,
is more religious than she is, and
offers her this guidance (in a scene that goes on even longer than the conversation in Levin’s play) when they meet near the sanitarium where she is recuperating:

“When you were at home, leading your carefree life…you just hadn’t given God a lot of thought. Now that you’re turning to Him because you’re frightened and hurt, now that you’re really trying to be the person you think you ought to be, surely God won’t let you down. Have faith in Him, Cady. He has helped so many others.”

One can imagine Levin being less than thrilled by the pantheistic (or animistic) beliefs that Hans expresses: “If you’re asking what God is, my answer would be: Take a look around you, at the flowers, the trees, the animals, the people, and then you’ll know what God is. Those wondrous things that live and die and reproduce themselves, all that we refer to as nature—that’s God.” In fact, this conflation of nature with God runs close to the core of what Anne appears to have believed during her final months in the annex.

In any case, if Anne and Peter’s extended metaphysical discourse seemed less gripping to others than it did to Levin, that may have had less to do with his play’s “excessive Jewishness” than with the producers’ pragmatic realization that, if an audience is going to watch two teenagers on stage, it’s not because they’re having a conversation about God.

Like the play that ran on Broadway, Levin’s drama ends with the quote about people being good at heart, but, unlike the Goodrich-Hackett version, it puts the line back in context, amid the dialectic between Anne’s hope and her terror that the world will turn into a wilderness. The stage goes dark, the sounds of combat come up.

“End of the diary,” declares the narrator. The stage directions specifiy that the battle noises grow louder, but reading
the play, one may be more likely to hear the responses of the producers to whom Levin showed his drama: Dark. Depressing. Jewish. Gloomy. Insufficiently
universal.
The polar opposite of
commercial.

E
VEN
if Cheryl Crawford had admired Levin’s script, it would have been hard for her to ignore the siren song playing in everyone’s ears.
Lillian Hellman believed
they could get a playwright who was not only more famous but classier than Meyer Levin.

Among the classiest names being mentioned was that of Carson McCullers, who had adapted her novel,
The Member of the Wedding,
for the stage, to great success and acclaim. The fact that its heroine was a teenage girl was one of the reasons, Barbara Zimmerman told Otto Frank, why McCullers was the perfect choice. Frank Price, at whose Doubleday Paris office the diary had been rescued from the rejection pile, contacted McCullers, then living in France with her husband, Reeve.

Carson McCullers wrote Otto Frank, “I think I have never felt such love and wonder and grief. There is no consolation to know that a Mozart, a Keats, a Chekov is murdered in their years of childhood. But, dear, dear Mr. Frank, Anne, who has had that…gift of genius and humanity has, through her roots of unspeakable misery, given the world an enduring and incomparable flower. Mr. Frank, I know there is no consolation, but I want you to know that I grieve with you—as millions of others now and in the future grieve. Over and over in these days I have played a gramophone record of the posthumous sonnets of Schubert. To me it has become Anne’s music…I can’t write an eloquent letter but my heart and my husband’s heart is filled with love.” She added that she hadn’t given much thought to the idea of writing a play based on the book. “I have only read the diary and am too overwhelmed to go any further.”

Otto and his second wife, Fritzi, visited Carson and Reeve. Soon after, McCullers wrote Fritzi, “We have no formal religion but there are times when one understands a sense of radiance—and that feeling was with us when Otto was in our home. What is this radiance, this love? I don’t know, I only want to offer our joy that you and Otto are united and this carries all our love to you.”

Two months later, Carson McCullers decided not to proceed with the project. “In spite of our deep feeling about Anne’s diary, it requires more technique in the theater than I can command…You see it is different doing a solitary work—that is all I have done—than adaptation on others’ books. Consequently I feel the result might lead to unhappiness to all concerned.” Later, she would claim she feared that immersing herself in the diary might damage her already fragile health, and that the mere prospect of it had caused her to break out in hives.