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By Root 457 0

J. Cobb and Rod Steiger. One of the reasons Gadg was an effective actors’ director was because he was able to manipulate people’s emotions. He tried to find out everything about his actors and participated emotionally in all the scenes. He would come up between takes and tell you something to excite feelings in you that fit the scene. Still, he did create mischief with his technique. In Viva Zapata! I played Tony Quinn’s brother, and Gadg told Tony some lies about what I had supposedly said behind his back. This intensified Tony’s emotional state and was very good for the picture because it brought out the conflict between the brothers; unfortunately, Gadg never bothered to tell Tony afterward that he had made up those remarks. I didn’t learn about it until fifteen years later on a talk show, where Tony expressed himself on the subject. I called him up and told him that I never said those things, and that Gadg was just manipulating him. It was a relief to be able to clear up this fifteen-year deceit. From then on, Tony and I started speaking again.

Gadg was wonderful in inspiring actors to give a performance, but you had to pay the price.

People have often commented to me about the scene in On the Waterfront that takes place in the backseat of a taxi. It illustrates how Kazan worked.

I played Rod Steiger’s unsuccessful ne’er-do-well brother, and he played a corrupt union leader who was trying to improve my position with the Mafia. He had been told in so many words to set me up for a hit because I was going to testify before the Waterfront Commission about the misdeeds that I was aware of. In the script Steiger was supposed to pull a gun in the taxi, point it at me and say, “Make up your mind before we get to 437 River Street,” which was where I was going to be killed.

I told Kazan, “I can’t believe he would say that to his brother, and the audience is certainly not going to believe that this guy who’s been close to his brother all his life, and who’s looked after him for thirty years, would suddenly stick a gun in his ribs and threaten to kill him. It’s just not believable.”

This was typical of the creative fights we had. “I can’t do it that way,” I said, and Gadg answered, “Yes, you can; it will work.”

“It’s ridiculous,” I replied. “No one would speak to his brother that way.”

We did the scene his way several times, but I kept saying, “It just doesn’t work, Gadg, it really doesn’t work.” Finally he said, “All right, wing one.” So Rod and I improvised the scene and ended up changing it completely. Gadg was convinced and printed it.

In our improvisation, when my brother flashed the gun in the cab, I looked at it, then up at him in disbelief. I didn’t believe for a second that he would ever pull the trigger. I felt sorry for him. Then Rod started talking about my boxing career. If I’d had a better manager, he said, things would have gone better for me in the ring. “He brought you along too fast.”

“That wasn’t him, Charlie,” I said, “it was you. Remember that night at the Garden you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘Kid, this isn’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson’? Remember that? ‘This ain’t your night.’ My night! I could have taken Wilson apart. So what happened? He gets the shot at the title outdoors at a ballpark and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville. You was my brother, Charlie, you should have looked out for me a little bit. You should have taken care of me better so I didn’t have to take the dives for the short-end money … I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charlie …”

When the movie came out, a lot of people credited me with a marvelous job of acting and called the scene moving. But it was actor-proof, a scene that demonstrated how audiences often do much of the acting themselves in an effectively told story. It couldn’t miss because almost everyone believes he could have been a contender, that he could have been somebody if he’d been dealt different cards by fate,