Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (29 page)

On a summer afternoon he played a similar game at City Hall. Muni's principal biographer, Jerome Lawrence, reports that the actor went through the final naturalization ceremony as if it were a play. Bent over, apparently from years of arthritis, he spoke in “a halting and heavy
mittel Europa
accent, squinting his eyes as if he didn't quite understand each question.” During the interrogation he gradually straightened up, and his accent diminished. The final answer was delivered in impeccable English. Muni smiled at the astonished judge. “Your honor, it's remarkable. Now that you've made me a citizen, I can speak perfectly!”

Praise from family and friends was ratified by professional critics. By the mid-1920s Muni had enough encomia to fill several scrapbooks. For no matter how minuscule the role, he always managed to draw the most curtain calls, the closest attention of reviewers, and the wariest regards from fellow actors. Only a few months into the first season with Muni, Maurice Schwartz came to regret the thumbs-up decision at the Hebrew Actors Union. Luther Adler put it succinctly: “Muni was too visible. He would walk onstage and Schwartz would disappear, as if you'd turned off the light on him.”

Schwartz assigned minor parts to Weisenfreund—and, to his surprise, the younger man was happy to play them. Somehow, even in
walk-ons, Muni would manage to use up all the oxygen on the stage. And he seemed to do it effortlessly. A fellow actor complained, “This bastard is underplaying me to death!” Schwartz thought there was a different reason for Muni's charisma: makeup. When the period piece
Hard to Be a Jew
was staged, he cast himself as Shapiro, a patriarch with a long beard and slow speech. Muni was assigned the role of the cleanshaven Russian gentile, Ivanov. In the play Ivanov attempts to pass as a Hebrew in order to understand what the Jews are going through in the czar's country. Muni was terrified. “I've never been to Russia. I'll be a terrible flop. It'll ruin the play and ruin me. I've never played a part with my bare face hanging out. My God, I'll catch cold!” During rehearsals he turned into an insomniac, endlessly complaining to Bella, “A Jew playing a Christian playing a Jew—I won't know who I am!”

On opening night he knew very well who he was; so did the audience and the journalists. Even the hard-bitten Abraham Cahan suggested that Second Avenue's “Heroic Era” had been given a premature obituary. “Muni Weisenfreund put his name in the Golden Book of the Yiddish Theater,” he wrote. This Ivanov “makes him one of the most talented actors our theater has ever had.” A few weeks into the run, Schwartz changed his mind and summoned Muni to his dressing room. “Weisenfreund,” he stated, “you were quite right. You are far better suited to the part of old Shapiro. You can have your wish, beard and everything. And
I
shall play the part of the young Ivanov.”

Muni stepped into the new role without complaint. Actually, he welcomed the chance to play behind heavy makeup once again. The reviewers were ecstatic about the new Shapiro and only lukewarm about the new Ivanov. Whereupon Schwartz made his most drastic anti-Muni move. He produced and directed Romain Rolland's
Wolves,
a vivid panorama of the French Revolution. The impresario cast Weisenfreund as Du Arun, an overdressed aristocratic snob. For the entire evening, the actor would not face front. His performance was to be played upstage, a symbol of decadence in retreat.

According to Lawrence, “At first Muni was appalled at the idea. How could he play a role when the audience never saw his eyes? He boiled inside, certain he was being tossed to the wolves by a jealous and vindictive actor-manager.” In the brief respites between rehearsals he contemplated revenge. As he and a colleague sat on a park bench, he suddenly exclaimed: “Watch! I'll sit that way, and I'll arch my back, stiffening it when one of the scum passes in front of me.” He slapped
the seat of the bench. “By God, I'll do it! I'll keep my back to the audience during the whole goddamn play, and I'll take it away from Schwartz anyway.”

The thievery began when the curtain rose and found Muni facing away from the seat holders, and climaxed when Schwartz, as leader of
la Révolution,
demanded Du Arun's sword, ripped the epaulets from his uniform, and ordered him to the guillotine. “Swine!” Schwartz shouted contemptuously. “You swine!” Muni's back went rigid. He quivered. His neck seemed to extend as he faced the back wall in defiance, disdaining to ask for mercy. He remained in that position as the curtain fell, and when it rose he
still
refused to face forward, bowing to the rear of the stage. It was a true
coup du théè¢tre,
duly noticed and lauded. Muni was not asked back for the next season. After he departed from the Yiddish Art Theater, a story went around that Schwartz had taken the part of Du Arun, playing as Weisenfreund did, with his back to the audience. He abandoned the role when the questions of a Second Avenue habitué came back to him: “Schwartz has a pimple on his face, he doesn't want us to see it?”

By this time Muni's reputation had reached Broadway, but no offers came in. To put food on the table, and his name on the marquee, he agreed to appear in a series of Yiddish-language operettas at the National Theater. Musical comedy was not his strong suit; it seemed a long, sad way down from his dramatic turns at the Yiddish Art Theater. Yet it was Sigmund Romberg's
The Student Prince
that supplied the break he needed.

In the part of an elderly and infirm waiter, Muni incorporated some Chaplinesque bits, walking gingerly across a polished floor as if he hardly dared to set foot on it, dandling a plump waitress on his lap until her weight nearly crushed him. The crowds loved his clowning; they had never seen the actor do this sort of farcical turn. At the urging of colleagues, the uptown producer Sam H. Harris decided to summon this comedian, this Weisenfreund that everyone was talking about. Perhaps he could play a part in
We Americans,
a Broadway play currently in preparation. When Muni showed up at his office, Harris felt he had made a horrible mistake. “Too young,” he snapped at the playwright and the director. “Are you out of your minds? He's just a kid.”

Muni had an answer. He approached Harris's desk with infirm steps and palsied hands. “Oh sir.” His voice quavered. “We old bastards
shouldn't let any of those young punks into the theater. What do they know—still wet in the diapers?”

Amused, the producer turned to his director. He received a twoword response: “Sign him.”

He turned to the author. “You want him?”

“Very much. I think he'll be a sensation.”

The next day, Muni pleaded his case with his employers at the National, and won a release from their contract. And so it was that the thirty-one-year-old followed his destiny uptown. Under the new name of Paul Muni he would establish a second reputation as an “American” stage actor, and a third as an international film star. He would never return to the old arenas. Not everyone understood or forgave, but most did. The
Forward
offered the most sympathetic rationale: “Weisenfreund is an actor, first and last. On the Yiddish stage, his scope is naturally limited. Here, if you are not a star-manager you have to limit yourself to roles offered by the director who is susceptible to whims and caprices.” Nevertheless, Muni never failed to acknowledge his roots, and gallantly saluted the man who had so often tried to suppress him. “Schwartz was daring on many occasions,” he insisted. “There was always something new and different, an adventure, a challenge. Most of all, he trouped; he helped promote theater. Sometimes working with him was a struggle. But he was an artist.”

A JEWISH PETER PAN

A
T ABOUT THE SAME TIME
Muni Weisenfreud was learning his craft, the daughter of a Yiddish Theater costumier was growing up in Philadelphia. Like most Jewish girls, Molly Picon deeply respected her mother, who was raising her family alone. And like most Jewish girls in the ghetto, she enjoyed the local sport: making fun of her elders. Indeed, Molly built a stand-up routine from her mother's malapropisms and gaffes.

“In Italian bakeries, there was often a priest in the store. The
baker would say, ‘Mama Picon, I want you to meet Father.’ And Mama answered, ‘Hello, Father, how is Mother?’”

At the funeral of a producer, the mourners walked solemnly past the casket and mumbled a few words of respect. “Mama was the last one.” She was expected to add some folk wisdom about death. “In a voice clear as a bell, she said, ‘Yes, Edelstein, there's a first time for everything.’”

Molly strung some of her best bits together, along with comic songs, and began entertaining between reels at the nickelodeons. From there she went into Yiddish vaudeville, and after the Great War took up with a touring company of actors. In the winter of 1918 she got off the train in Boston only to find the city in the throes of the influenza epidemic then sweeping the nation. Schools, stores, and theaters were shut down by the city's board of health. But one venue had escaped: a place so decayed that the inspectors hadn't bothered to look within. The seedy old Grand Opera House under the El quietly went on with its program of wrestling matches on Tuesdays, boxing on Thursdays and Fridays, and “Jewish Theater” on Saturdays. Molly wangled an interview with the manager/director/writer, an immigrant named Jacob Kalisch.

Luck was running her way; he had once seen Miss Picon perform in Philadelphia, and found her a job with the little troupe of Yiddishspeaking actors at the Opera House. It turned out to be an extraordinary group. Muni Weisenfreund was in it, along with a new comedian named Menashe Skulnik, and the Bernardis, a family of character actors. There was also a hanger-on, Sheike, a somewhat retarded mute, who served as the company gofer, forever getting food and coffee and helping with the props. Sheike fancied himself an actor, and after the final bows had been taken and the theater emptied of customers, he would look out at the unoccupied seats, go to center stage, and make the gestures of a star in mid-performance. Kalisch had once thought to take advantage of the man's love of theater. He communicated with him in deaf-and-dumb language, requesting a group of some twenty of Sheike's friends to act as supernumeraries for the opening night of a period comedy. On the appointed evening, Sheike appeared with the requisite crowd of friends. Kalisch handed out costumes, and as they put them on, gave instruction: “When the King makes his appearance, raise your hands high and shout, ‘Hail to the King! Hail to the King!' Now go!” He shoved them onstage. A few moments later the King
entered. The extras remained in place, silent. In the wings, Kalisch frantically flailed his arms and yelled: “Shout. Shout! ‘Hail to the King! Hail to the King!’” The extras copied his gestures, but no sound issued from their mouths.

Sheike had invited every one of his mute friends.

In the midst of this chaos and improvisation, Molly thrived. She was now twenty and had reached her maximum height of four foot eleven, thus making her a natural for juvenile roles, male and female. In one production the twenty-two-year-old Muni played her father, and she had a chance to watch him as he developed a character in rehearsals. The actor, she noted, “never enjoyed his success. He was never good enough for himself, and was always digging into himself for more and more. I don't know why he couldn't get more joy out of acting.” Molly, on the other hand, was quite happy with her own work, and this blithe attitude turned out to be a liability. No Yiddish Theater producer in New York made an offer because her reputation had already been established—professional showfolk considered the young woman a comedienne rather than an actress.

Molly stayed on in Boston, the one place that guaranteed steady work. Two seasons later she married Kalisch. The transplanted Romanian knew his bride had talent and energy to spare; he also knew that as long as she stayed in America she would always be considered a piece of fluff. Molly resisted change. Europe was what the American Jews had fled. Going back there would be a retreat, a surrender. When she got pregnant, her arguments took on new force. Why raise a child anywhere but here? And then she miscarried. She went into a steep melancholia. Kalisch could not stand to see her suffer. One day he put on a bright face and told her: “I'm turning the theater over to new management, and I'm taking my little star to Europe, where she will become a big star.” She was too weak to argue.

Over the next two years, Molly slowly recovered. Applause helped. She played Paris, Lodz, Vienna, Bucharest, most often in
Yonkele,
a play Kalisch shaped to her tomboy talent. She took the role of a Jewish Peter Pan, with, as she put it, “a slight difference. Whereas Peter Pan doesn't want to grow up, Yonkele desperately wants to grow up and make a better world for our people.” In 1923 the maturing actress ventured into the new medium of silent movies. Codirected by Sidney Goldin, an experienced filmmaker,
Ost und West
(East and West) was a
comedy of colliding cultures and mistaken identities. It was accurately publicized as “The adventures of an American girl in Poland.”