Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [28]
I am learning that you just can’t have a completely frank and sincere relationship with any girl. All most of them do is bore me, truly.… I have been reading the Bible. It is full of beautiful thoughts but they don’t mean much to me. Nana, why do they tell you to fear God? I can’t understand … I am writing this on the subway and putting my thoughts down as they come … Joy Thompson (summer theater girl) fell on her head and went to the hospital—fractured skull and concussion. She has gone back to Canada.…
How goes it at home? Pop, many things you have said are beginning to take shape and content. Ma, how is your cold? I don’t understand life, but I am living like mad anyhow. You are all good people and much comfort to me.
All my love
Bud
Dear Folks:
I want to thank you for being so nice about my not writing. Have I forgotten any birthdays? I have been tearing like mad of late.… School is fine. We are doing Moliere in “The Imaginary Invalid” in which I am a young lover of the 18th cent. It’s a good part. I am studying the part of the Templar in “Nathan the Wise,” which is a very good part for me. My philosophy class is real good and Dr. Kaplan in his lectures confirms all I have professed (not openly) about ecclesiastical power and aspects of religion. It is wonderful. I have much to say. I am washing my stuff now in my wash stand.
I don’t like my landlady. She gives the young lad too much advice. Much too much.
I am beginning to know how to act—learning to act and developing a sense of direction of action and feeling. It is hard work just as anything else but a source of enjoyment for me because I like it.
Fran is working like hell and having manifestly wondrous results. She is fine.… I am systematizing my budget.
Love to you all
Bud
12
THE DIRECTOR of the New School’s Dramatic Workshop was Erwin Piscator, a man of great repute in the German theater, but to me Stella Adler was its soul. During the early thirties, she went to Europe and studied under Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theater, then brought home his disciplines and techniques and taught them to other members of the Group Theatre, a company of actors, writers and directors who for a decade, starting in 1931, tried to mount an alternative to the commercial Broadway theater, staging productions they felt were the cutting edge of social change.
When I met her, Stella was about forty-one, quite tall and very beautiful, with blue eyes, stunning blond hair and a leonine presence, but a woman much disappointed by what life had dealt her. She was a marvelous actress who unfortunately never got a chance to become a great star, and I think this embittered her. A member of one of the great theatrical families of America, she appeared in almost two hundred plays over a span of thirty years, and wanted very much to be a famous performer. But like many Jewish actors of her era, she faced a cruel and insidious form of anti-Semitism; producers in New York and especially in Hollywood wouldn’t hire actors if they “looked Jewish,” no matter how good they were.
Hollywood was always a Jewish community; it was started by Jews and to this day is run largely by Jews. But for a long time it was venomously anti-Semitic in a perverse way, especially before the war, when Jewish performers had to disguise their Jewishness if they wanted a job. These actors were frightened, and understandably so. When I was breaking into acting, I constantly heard about agents submitting an actor or actress for a part, taking them to the theater for a reading and afterward hearing the producer say, “Terrific. Thank you very much. We’ll call you.”
After the actor was gone, the agent would ask, “Well, Al, what did you think?”
“Great,” the producer would say, “He was terrific, but he’s too Jewish.”
If you “looked Jewish,” you didn’t get a part and couldn’t make a living. You had to look like Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis,