The Magnificent Elmer Read online

  ***

  The Tverskaya Hotel at 2 Pushkinshaya Square in Moscow was an old and elegant affair. Security checks were heavy. A sturdy middle-aged Russian woman sat at a desk on each floor, checking the comings and goings. A young KGB agent was our constant companion and he saw that we took no photos of sensitive military installations. Although we, as international guests, had relatively easy access to the festival screenings, tickets for movie-crazed Muscovites were hard to come by. At the main ceremonies, Stanley Kramer was given a special medal by the Soviet government for building a cinematic bridge to peace between the Russian and American people.

  More moving for me was the presentation of an award to a Russian director who had recently been released from a Russian gulag in order to be present at the festival. His release was part of the détente and liberalizing spirit of the Soviet government in the early sixties on the heels of Cuban Missile Crisis. He sobbed about having gained his freedom and described his incarceration.

  When Elmer and I deserted our enormous high-ceiled hotel suite, it wasn’t to attend a screening of Czarne Skyrzdla in the original Swedish. Some of the screenings held scant appeal to even such eclectic souls as Elmer and me. We spent a lot of our time doing what Americans like to do best: sightseeing. We had never visited Moscow before and naturally had to see the stores. Gumm’s was the city’s famous retail emporium, but we were surprised and depressed to see that the massive Gumm’s, like the many less famous stores, were as empty of merchandise as they were of customers. The major outlet for Russia’s manufacturers at that time seemed to contain little beside ball-point pens, picture postcards, and nested figurines.

  The mercantile market had moved outdoors onto Moscow’s grim gray streets. A black market was thriving. Venders who had rescued product from the backs of trucks were busy on the spider streets that grew out of Red Square. That summer the big deal was blue jeans. The citizens of Moscow that had survived Hitler’s armies had just surrendered to the comfort and strength of blue jean fabrics, and this formed a sartorial kinship with their American visitors.

  One evening the visitors to the festival were invited to a nearby movie theater to see another American film that had recently been released to great acclaim in the Soviet Union. It was the American version of the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story. It had been hailed in Russia as a movie landmark. American musicals had usually been attacked by Soviet critics—in story, in literature, in content, they were considered insubstantial. That was the basic criticism in Russia of all things American—a lack of substance. We offered a sports car to the Soviet tractor. But after all, West Side Story was Shakespeare updated to the mid-century world. And it didn’t hurt that it painted a picture of American prejudice and poverty.

  The movie-mad buffs in the Moscow audience were thrilled by the camera work in the film’s opening shot of New York City. It established the slum locale and brought applause from the audience, an ovation before the movie had even begun. Then I heard a whispered commotion begin at the front of the theatre. Heads turned as word spread of something epochal at work. Finally we learned its cause as a thick-set Soviet woman in the row ahead of us turned and whispered to us in an agony of excitement.

  “Bernstein—he’s here!”

  There was evidently some confusion. In Moscow all those Bernsteins looked alike.

  “Bernstein—he’s in the audience!” said a bald, black-bearded Russian in our row.

  I saw Elmer’s hands grip the arms of his seat. I detected a naughty look in his eye that I knew too well.

  “Don’t you dare stand up!” I hissed.

  ***

  On the first day of the festival, I picked up a copy of the New York Times at a kiosk on Red Square and read a story about a speech that President Kennedy had just delivered as a commencement address at American University. It seemed to augur well for our relations with the Soviet Union. Without a recommendation from Congress, Kennedy had announced that America would cease testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. It was a bold unilateral step, and JFK took it, he said, “to make clear our good faith.” America had just lived through a toxic era of McCarthyism. Kennedy had decided to make a speech about peace. We had lived through a lot of warnings of Soviet treachery and imminent destruction. It felt good to hear an American president insist that war was not actually inevitable. He said, in the soaring rhetoric that I would come to miss, “Our problems are man-made, then they can be solved by men… If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is the fact that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”

  “It’s possible,” I said to Elmer. “Maybe he can do something.”

  Four months later, Kennedy was shot down by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM

  “Don’t be humble. You’re not that great.”

  —Golda Meir

  Elmer and I were not the most religious of Jews, but we could not help but be moved by the efforts of the Jews to create a verdant country in the sand. In 1948, the United Nations, with a strong assist from Harry Truman, took a sliver of the desert and created the state of Israel, totally surrounded by angry Arabs.

  By the early 1960s, Israel was ready to declare their culture in a new concert hall in Tel Aviv. Jews had always had a taste for fine music. Dorothy “Buff” Chandler learned this when she set out to raise $18 million to build the Los Angeles Music Center and bring culture to the wasteland. Buffy liked music, which is why she saved the Hollywood Bowl when they threatened to turn it into a parking lot. She found her strongest supporters, it was said, not in the cultural elite of her Pasadena neighbors, but in the show-business Jews of Beverly Hills. Jews know three things: Suffering, good Chinese food, and classical music.

  When the Israeli government was ready to open its beautiful new concert hall it invited the celebrated concert violinist Isaac Stern, and the well known Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein. Elmer and I flew to Tel Aviv from Moscow at the conclusion of the film festival.

  ***

  I grew up in Philadelphia during an era when bigotry against Jews was pronounced. It was W.C. Fields who said, “On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia,” but he wasn’t Jewish, and he was being sardonic. So, as a vulnerable teen, I was always looking over my shoulder in fear of imminent assault. When my parents, my brother and I visited nearby Atlantic City, gateway to glorious Camden, I could not ignore the signs outside certain distinguished hotels that read: “No dogs and Jews allowed.” When I graduated high school and got my first job as a dispatcher at a Philadelphia cab company, the first thing my employer told me, along with the location of the restroom, was that I was the first Jew they had ever hired, and they “would be keeping their eye on me.”

  The events of our arrival at the airport in Tel Aviv must be seen in the context of this life experience. As our plane circled in its approach to Ben Gurion Airport, the cabin was suddenly rich with music. They were playing “Hatikvah.” Two uniformed Israeli army officers met our flight in an olive-drab sedan. In Russia the guard assigned us kept us under surveillance, but in Israel, they were making sure we were secure and protected. Not that there was anything to protect us against. Everywhere there were Jews! The policemen, the doormen, the sales clerks, the children, the teachers, everyone! What a feeling of security and acceptance.

  And what a sense of humor our protectors had. With the border this close, Elmer felt a little apprehensive about the proximity of fanatic groups that might not wish us well.

  “What would you do if the terrorists tried to kidnap us?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Bernstein,” said the guard. “We won’t let them take you alive.”

  The Ben Gurion Airport is on a thin sliver of land between Jordan and the Mediterranean. If the plane had overshot its landing str
ip by a hundred yards, we would either be surrounded by enemies or in the water. And yet, with my new feeling of empowerment, I was sure that if the plane came down at sea, I could get out and walk.

  The schedule gave us two days to get acclimated before the day of the opening of the concert hall. On Day One we found an old Roman road into the Judean hills. We explored the ruins of Caesarea, the ancient Roman capital that Caesar’s legions had constructed. We looked at the wide walls of the aqueduct that the Romans had built to carry water to the village. We visited a kibbutz, a lush communal farm, and tried to learn serenity from the camels.

  On day Number Two we were taken to Jaffa, an artist’s colony south of the city of Tel Aviv. We saw artists, painters, sculptors, potters. But there were no fences. The Arabs seemed to be staring down our throats.

  “Where does Jordan begin?” I asked our guard.

  He pointed. “The brown area is Jordan. The green is Israel.”

  “Shouldn’t we be afraid?”

  “They should be afraid, not us,” he said complacently.

  He was right. Just how right the world would learn four years later during the Six-Day War, when Israel would overpower the surrounding Arab armies.

  The Six-Day War was fought between June 5th and June 10th in 1967. On one side was tiny Israel. On the other were Egypt, the United Arab Republic, Jordan and Syria. The outcome was a swift and decisive Israeli victory in which Israel took control of Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

  ***

  The night before the concert hall opening event, we dined with Isaac Stern. During the day-long ceremony, Stern performed, as well as a choral group that had won a statewide competition among Israeli Kibbutzim (collective farms). Elmer and I sat among a group of dignitaries from the arts and government. One of the dignitaries was an amiable middle-aged woman from Milwaukee who happened to be the Prime Minister. Her name was Golda Meir.

  The modern new hall was filled to the rafters. Golda took the stage and made the awards to Stern, to the chorales, and to Elmer. The hall roared its approval.

  By 1963 Elmer had been nominated for six academy awards and had lost them all, but I suspect that this award was more important to him than the ones that had eluded him on the red carpet. After the ceremonies, a few special guests were invited back to Golda Meir’s home. It was in a row of houses, and aside from a tiny guard shack outside the front door, you would never know that it was the home of the Prime Minister. Inside Golda’s home was a swarm of dignitaries. She disappeared into the kitchen and emerged holding a large tray of soft drinks. She offered it to Elmer and me. “Have a glass of soda,” she said. “It’s good.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ODETS, WHERE IS THY STING?

  “We’re paid as much for obedience as talent.”

  —Ben Hecht

  We had arrived back in Hollywood to learn that Clifford Odets was dying. He was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital suffering from colon cancer and he was not expected to survive.

  We had first met Clifford at a party at the Beverly Hills home of Danny Kaye. When Clifford met me he grasped my hand and said, “We should go to a mountain cabin in a snowstorm. We’ll bring along a lot of steaks and plenty of Beethoven.” It was Clifford’s way of saying hello.

  I had always been easily seduced by Beethoven. When Elmer first said, “I dedicate The Appassionata to Pearl,” I was doomed. And when Clifford mentioned a cabin in a blizzard with the Emperor Concerto playing, I was putty in his hands.

  And now Clifford lay in a small hospital room on Fountain Avenue, fighting for what remained of his life. His chest and arms were wafer thin. A tube led from his side, removing the wastes from his frail body. A nurse rubbed ice on his dry lips.

  “His father was here earlier,” she said dourly. “He seemed bothered by all the attention Mr. Odets is getting from the staff. He said, ‘You know my boy isn’t exactly Eugene O’Neill.’” I had often reflected, as I watched our sons sit in awe of Elmer at the keyboard, that it was tough having a brilliantly successful father. Now I thought: Yes, and it’s tough for some having a brilliantly successful son.

  Clifford kept flexing his fingers, those same long fingers that had invoked the sirloins in our fanciful mountain cabin. His friend Elia Kazan would later recount how the playwright had extended his arm at full length, shaken his fist at the hospital ceiling, and shouted, “Clifford Odets, you have so much still to do!” I suppose he was anxious to redeem the sixteen years he felt he had wasted in Hollywood.

  When Clifford went to the hospital, his fifty-seventh birthday was approaching. He had a bellyache. Of course, gastric distress was not an unfamiliar complaint of Hollywood writers. The scribes were at the bottom of the totem pole. They learned to live with gastric distress. (“We’re paid us much for obedience as talent,” said Ben Hecht.) A third of them became alcoholics. But Clifford was not that concerned when he went into Cedars of Lebanon for some tests. He feared it was ulcers. The red badge of courage for copywriters and screenwriters. It was somewhat worse than ulcers.

  Clifford held court every day in his hospital bed, seeing the array of theatrical and movie royalty who were his friends. As the days stretched into weeks, Clifford grew weaker. He gathered his strength to try for an understanding with his father. They had been estranged for a long time. And with his son struggling to survive, Louie Odets reminded his boy’s caregivers that he never wanted his son to be a writer. “He didn’t choose to follow his father’s good advice,” he scowled.

  ***

  As Clifford’s condition worsened, his friends sat helplessly by. My thoughts roamed back to the summer that Elmer and I met at camp. The staff had staged Clifford’s riveting labor play Waiting for Lefty. We were all profoundly moved by this radical Depression-era play about a taxi strike.

  When they produced Finian’s Rainbow, Elmer played the leprechaun. And in Waiting for Lefty he was a cab driver desperate for a raise. “Strike! Strike! Strike!” he yelled as the curtain fell.

  Looking back across the decades, I can’t help comparing Clifford and Elmer, the man who changed the theatre of the thirties and the man who changed the movie music of the fifties. Both were radical in their thinking, both wanted to swallow the world, both were very appealing to women. But their backgrounds differed. Clifford came out of an unread family and was a high school dropout. Elmer’s parents were teachers and their friends were educated Bohemians. Elmer would often wake up with a poet reading Yeats at his bedside. Clifford would often wake up with a drunk nearby. Elmer’s father thought he was another Mozart. Clifford’s father thought he wasn’t Eugene O’Neill.

  When Clifford died, the obituaries adopted a variety of attitudes, from the dismissive to the panegyric. Time magazine, which had put Clifford on its cover back in the thirties, was having second thoughts about his place in American culture. It dismissed his passing with a few contemptuous lines, “A man of promise had sold out to the fleshpots of Hollywood.”

  When George Gershwin died in his thirty-seventh year, John O’Hara said, “I read that George is dead. I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.” And that’s how I felt about Clifford. America had lost a playwright of real stature, and Elmer and I had lost a wonderful friend.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SWEET SMELL OF HOLLYWOOD

  “I’d like to take a bite out of you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

  —J.J. Hunsecker to Sidney Falco

  Look in the 2000 edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and you will find an expression called “sweet smell of success,” the seductive power of money over principle. It is what they will tell you lured Elmer away from Carnegie Hall, Clifford away from the Broadway theatre, and many other good men from Faulkner to Fitzgerald, to the tinsel of Hollywood.

  “Sweet Smell of Success” is a phrase invented by an assistant to a Broadway gossip columnist. His name was Ernie Lehman and before he graduated to writing such great thrillers as North
by Northwest and such saccharine stuff as The Sound of Music, he wrote a corrosive novella about a malignant gossip columnist in the tradition of Walter Winchell. Ernie worked for celebrity press agent Irving Hoffmann. He knew the sleazy world of nightclubs and cigarette girls, and he serviced the columnists of the time with gossip items. Winchell was a rabid anti-communist who resided in the side pocket of J. Edgar Hoover. Sweet Smell of Success appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1950, ten years before Helen Gurley Brown would turn Cosmo into catnip for working women.

  Clifford had always been cynical about the sweet smell of success in the movie business. So when Ernie Lehman grew sick during the filming of Sweet Smell, Odets was called in.

  Burt Lancaster played the odious columnist J. J. Hunsecker, and he produced it along with his pal Harold Hecht. I always found Lancaster a bit of a bully, conversationally and physically. Ernie Lehman had bowed out of the screenwriting chores of Sweet Smell when he suffered from a tension-induced spastic colon the size of a fist. (It is fitting, I suppose, that writers should have problems involving the colon.) Ernie planned a therapeutic cruise to Tahiti, and Burt Lancaster confronted him. “You’re not that sick! You’re ruining my movie! I’m going to beat you up!”

  “Go ahead,” said Lehman. “I could use the money.”

  ***

  Clifford sat in the back of a prop truck outside New York’s 21 Club on West Fifty-Second Street, a typewriter in his lap, and a blanket thrown over his shoulder for protection against the midnight cold. The street looked like the staging site for the Anzio beachhead. There were equipment trucks, trailers, honey wagons, lights, extras, grips, detail cops, and a nest of cables. In the midst of all this glorious debris, Clifford sat typing his acidic dialog for the next scene in the schedule. “Falco enters club, looks about for J.J.’s table…”