Stardust Lost: The Triumph, Tragedy, and Meshugas of the Yiddish Theater in America (35 page)

Much was made about the fact that Secunda had been cheated out of a big payday. On radio he appeared with the Andrews Sisters, was interviewed about his unfortunate sale of the song for $30, and was then allowed to conduct the orchestra in a rendition of a new Secunda tune, “Dream of Me.” In addition to his fee for appearing on the
Wrigley Chewing Gum Hour,
he was paid for appearing in a Wrigley ad alongside the Sisters. “How ironic,” he wrote bitterly, “that I am getting a lot more money for letting myself be photographed than I am for composing the song.” In public, however, he put on a face of good sportsmanship. The
New York Post
stated that the composer “isn't worried about the profits. He's a gentle musical soul, free of greed and overweening ambition. He's glad he has a steady job.” The job was with Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theater, though “steady” was not quite accurate.

A LOW DISHONEST DECADE

I
N 1938 MAURICE SCHWARTZ
received some more bad news. MGM had decided to leave Shakespeare to other studios and concentrate on less lofty scenarios. Translation: the Yiddish actor was unwelcome on the soundstages of Hollywood. Meantime, the patrons of Second Avenue seemed to be headed away from the legitimate theater and toward the movie palaces. Were large, loud celluloid images to be the way of the future? Was Schwartz, who had done so much for the Yiddish Theater, to be left onstage, gesturing to half-empty houses?
He retreated to the Café Royal, where he could ask those questions of devoted listeners and fans.

On the Lower East Side, politicians and radicals gathered at the Monopole. The main topic of discussion was the Popular Front, an attempt by communists to enlist liberals to join Russia in the fight against fascism. Aesthetes and
luftmensch,
talkers who would rather bombinate than write or paint, hung out at Goodman and Levine's. But for Yiddish showfolk, as well as those who hoped for a glimpse of their favorites, the Royal was the epicenter. In her autobiography,
Bronx Primitive,
Kate Simon remembered the day she was taken to the café as a child. The place was “dazzlingly lit, as noisy as a market and as brilliantly, gaudily colored as a Gypsy camp.” She recognized several of the actresses, all of them in full stage makeup: “One famous tragedienne wore a tall, blaring-red turban; another, with heavily kohl-circled eyes, sported a yellowed ermine capelet, her hands buried in its matching Anna Karenina muff.”

Agents and producers located their official headquarters in midtown, but the real negotiations took place within the walls of the Royal. “What didn't get spoken or rumored or kicked around there didn't count,” said playwright Oscar Leonard, whose family had been involved in Yiddish Theater productions since the Goldfaden days. “The place was open all night and all day. It never closed. You could always find actors as you walked in, sitting to your right, posturing and gossiping. The writers were seated on your left, scribbling and gossiping. The musicians sat in the rear, humming and gossiping. In a back room pinochle was played in an atmosphere of smoke and intrigue. The place wasn't officially segregated, it's just the way things sorted themselves out.”

Stars and hams alike, he remembered, would strut in wearing black capes and nodding to their
patriotn.
“One comedian, a Romanian named Aaron Lebedeff, had enormous energy and comic timing. He also had an ego you couldn't fit into the Coliseum. He loved to enter wearing a blue suit, white hat, white spats, and an unbuttoned cashmere overcoat around his shoulders. You could hear the murmurs of appreciation a block away. There were also actors who aspired to his status. They would pay the waiters to summon them to the telephone so their names would be called aloud, like celebrities in a Hollywood restaurant.”

The most important of those employees was the headwaiter. Herman was bowlegged and cross-eyed and the odor of garlic wafted from
him. No one seemed to mind; he functioned as a counselor to his celebrated customers. They considered his instincts well nigh infallible. When he refused to invest in a show, they knew they had better back away from it. When he agreed to come in, they were pretty sure they had a hit on their hands. According to actor Joseph Schildkraut, “Often it was with thanks only to his financial investment that a new production could reach the stage.”

Schwartz had very little luck with Herman. Every time he brought up the subject of a new show, the name of Boris Thomashefsky arose. Boris was rarely in evidence these days, and Schwartz wanted to know why. The only answer he got was a sad shaking of heads, and a Yiddish saying:
A knoyl hot oykh en ek—
The biggest ball of twine unwinds. Boris had been the undisputed King of Second Avenue, America's Darling, a
mensch.
A scenery chewer, of course, an egomaniac; but the vitality of the man, the drive, the will to power! What could have happened to him?

Some had one tale, some another. Scandals, theatrical failures, women. It took a while for Schwartz to put the pieces together. Boris and Bessie had divorced after a long and difficult marriage, and in the early 1930s each had published excerpts from their autobiographies in rival newspapers. By then Boris had a storehouse of memories, but not much of a future. He had spent all he had earned over the years, the money ceded in legal settlements with his ex-wife, or frittered away, or given away by a man who was always generous to those down on their luck. He had sold the estate in the Catskills and the house in Brooklyn and moved back to a small apartment on the Lower East Side. More skilled performers had passed him by; younger audiences scarcely knew who he was.

He had tried Broadway one last time, in a play called
The Singing Rabbi.
It lasted one week. Who cares? Boris said; he had seen hard times before. He took a new wife, the young actress Rebecca Zuckerberg, and early in 1938 appeared with her at the Public Theater in a play of his own devising. An exercise in nostalgia and desperation,
Boris and Bessie
starred Boris as himself, and Rebecca as Bessie. They performed it three times a night at an open-air cabaret, interrupted from time to time by the roar of the Second Avenue elevated train.

Long ago Herman had stopped putting his money in Thomashefsky shows. Disconsolate, in precarious health, Boris cadged meals and spoke of big plans. It was said that his weight had ballooned to 230 pounds. The man was never slender, but at seventy he seemed unable
to move without difficulty. This was no longer the star who attracted young females, or for that matter, old ones. Nevertheless he plotted and planned all spring and into the early summer. Then, as the hot weather became oppressive, he stopped showing up at the café. On July 9, 1939, complaining of a vague illness and pains in his chest, he took to his bed. A massive heart attack was under way. In the Thomashefskys' flat at 10 Monroe Street, Rebecca held her husband's hand as he drew his last breaths. The news spread over the Lower East Side in a matter of minutes. At the Royal they talked of nothing else.

The body was laid out on the stage of the National Theater. A line of people anxious to pay their last respects stretched from Houston to 14th streets. On July 12, a greater audience gathered outside the Gramercy Park Memorial Chapel on Second Avenue. The chapel itself could hold only six hundred. The rest of the 2,500 stood outside in silent tribute. A hush reigned—all the better to hear the services within, broadcast by a loudspeaker. The actor was lauded in eulogies by the heads of the Yiddish Theater unions; by Abraham Cahan, whose
Forward
had covered almost the entire Thomashefsky career; and by Maurice Schwartz, who saluted the Jewish colossus, the man who had founded an art form in New York with no training, no sponsor, no mentor—nothing but energy and the belief that an audience of refugees was crazy for theater. Schwartz made it clear that a man had passed on, not an idea, that the Yiddish Theater was still a vibrant, forward-looking enterprise. His listeners nodded, but given the news from Europe and the lack of new immigrants, they could no longer be sure of anything.

DURING THE GREAT WAR
, half a million readers bought at least one Yiddish newspaper every day. By the 1930s that number was nearly cut in half. Assimilation, compounded by a dearth of new immigrants, had done its work. Added to these factors was the financial distress caused by the Depression. Money was scarce and jobs scarcer. Even a few cents for a daily paper seemed excessive. As for the Yiddish The-ater,
tickets were priced beyond the means of all but the most loyal and prosperous followers. “We affirm the sad truth that the Yiddish Theater is on its last legs,” one critic was to observe, “and there is little hope that it will ever get well.”

Theatrical unions had been the mainstay of Yiddish performers, the guarantor of fair wages and decent working conditions. In the 1930s, as historian Nahma Sandrow observes, they served as albatrosses. One operetta producer was forced to hire “at least nine stage hands, ten musicians (a minimum even for nonmusical dramas), three dressers, ten ushers, two doormen for the ground-floor entrance and one for the balcony, two cashiers, a benefit manager, a general manager, a Yiddish publicity agent, a special policeman to keep order in the box office line (even when nobody was buying tickets), superintendents, bill posters, printers, scene painters, 10 choristers, and 16 actors.”

To squeeze out profits, most producers put on a single show per season. The habit of attending half a dozen plays over six months went by the boards, and everyone was the poorer for it. The theater badly needed another rescuer. Hallie Flanagan briefly played the part. The staid forty-five-year-old professor of drama at Vassar had been recruited by her fellow Iowan, Harry Hopkins, head of the Works Progress Administration. He assigned her to the administration of something he called the Federal Theatre Project. It would use New Deal funds to stage comedies, tragedies, and musicals. Professional actors would appear in them, drawing regular salaries for their work. The Federal Theatre paid a mere $23.86 a week, compared with the standard minimum of $40. But the jobs were real, and the productions guaranteed by the full faith and power of the U.S. government.

Best of all for Second Avenue aficionados, the Yiddish Theater was included in the project. Professor Flanagan divided her new empire into large units: a) the Living Newspaper (“Something like the
March of Time
in the movies,” Hopkins explained to Congress), b) experimental theater, c) Negro theater, d) popular-priced theater, with Yiddish, Spanish, and other foreign-language companies.

The Yiddish productions included versions of Sinclair Lewis's
It Can't Happen Here,
about fascism in America;
Day Is Darkness,
one of the first anti-Nazi dramas to be produced in the United States; and newer works including
The Treasure
and
The Tailor Becomes a Storekeeper
by the prominent Yiddish playwright David Pinski.

Inevitably the Federal Theatre became embroiled in controversy,
accused of serving as an
agent provocateur
for criticizing Benito Mussolini of Italy and Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and for espousing leftist causes. In the
Times,
critic Brooks Atkinson disparaged a Federal Theatre production as “Marxism èla Mother Goose.” The
Washington Post
objected to some of the theater's “frilly artistic projects,” and the
San Francisco Examiner
headed a story “Federal Theatre Communist Trend Must Be Eradicated.” Matters came to a head when, after weeks of debate between cast and Congress, Marc Blitzstein's Brechtian satire
The Cradle Will Rock
was canceled on the eve of its debut. The composer fought back, playing his score on the rehearsal Steinway of an empty theater. The actors sang their roles from the audience, simultaneously skirting union rules and thumbing their noses at the WPA.

Flanagan kept vigorously defending her fiefdom, attempting to keep it free from the influence of parties left and right, but the public perception was of a federal program hijacked by radicals. Congress, never happy with the idea of government-funded arts programs, summoned Flanagan before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She addressed the members eloquently, invoking several classic dramatists who maintained their independence, sometimes at great danger to their lives. When the name Christopher Marlowe came up, Representative Joseph Starnes of Alabama leaned forward. “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a communist?” This was met with derisive laughter. Without expression, the witness replied, “Put it in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare.” Her victory was momentary and Pyrrhic. On June 30, 1939, Congress voted 373 to 21 to eliminate the Federal Theatre. All of show business mourned, the personnel of the Yiddish Theater most of all. Overnight, their most significant and influential backer had pulled out, never to return.