The method, p.27
The Method, page 27
He had plenty else to be proud of. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the great American film directing debuts. There’s no sense of a theater director still obeying the spatial logic of the proscenium. Instead, the camera moves all over the Nolan apartment, even diving into their airshaft to capture a needed shot. Kazan, in true Method fashion, wanted A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to feel more real than other movies. The film bristles with the difficult details of impoverished life in New York, where people are too poor to live far enough apart to have any privacy and everyone knows everyone’s business. The sense of a neighborhood—a couple of blocks, really—as an entire world in microcosm gives the film an unexpected depth and texture.
By the time A Tree Grows in Brooklyn opened, Kazan had eclipsed the rest of the Group. Odets had found success, but his best work was already behind him. Stella Adler, who was born into a kingdom, now worked with Arthur Freed as a producer for Louis B. Mayer, helping to develop Madame Curie and Du Barry Was a Lady. Her trademark, according to press coverage at the time, was giving every character in a screenplay “something so real he’d be remembered all through the picture.” Clurman worked as an associate producer at Columbia Pictures and even managed to direct one film, 1945’s Deadline at Dawn, for RKO. “What I remember best about the enterprise,” he wrote, “is the appearance of someone from the Johnson (censor’s) office to protest that Susan Hayward, the film’s leading lady, was showing too much cleavage.” Strasberg fared worst of all. The private codes and rituals of Hollywood remained mysterious to Lee, and after a short stint directing screen tests, he returned to New York.
While Gadge and Garfield established a beachhead for the Group’s method with their success, Clurman and Adler became absorbed in the new Hollywood intelligentsia. The staggering wealth of the movie studios acted like a dense solar body, pulling the artists, writers, thinkers, and composers of the world into its orbit. August figures including Aldous Huxley, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, even Arnold Schoenberg, the father of atonal serialist music, all relocated to Los Angeles. During their free time, they also found themselves, along with Adler and Clurman, at the home of Berthold and Salka Viertel, a husband (Austrian) and wife (Polish Jew), both writers. Salka was the go-to scribe for films starring her close friend Greta Garbo. One of these, The Painted Veil, was even directed by Richard Boleslavsky. Theirs was not the only salon in town. Over at the Odets house, Clurman spent time with the composer Hanns Eisler, the set designer Boris Aronson, and the actor Charles Laughton. At Franchot Tone and Joan Crawford’s house, Harold and Stella ate and drank and reminisced about the Group. Clurman was still preaching the method gospel to anyone who would listen—he even sent Tone a copy of An Actor Prepares—and the Group’s ideas about acting must have found some currency within all these social circles.
Eventually, Harold and Stella met the legendary director Max Reinhardt and cooked up an idea for a repertory theater in New York. Stella still longed to be a great actor on the stage, like her mother and father. The list of plays the trio dreamed of producing included Hedda Gabler, Saint Joan, The Women, and The Little Foxes. This fanciful project was never to be, but it brought Stella back to New York. For months, she and Harold lived on opposite coasts and wrote each other letters in which they dreamed of a possible future together. The time apart, and Stella’s romantic imagination, seems to have led her to relent and agree to marry Harold. He returned to New York, and on September 29, 1942, the two wed at his parents’ house in Brooklyn. Aaron Copland was his best man. In a sign of things to come, after the ceremony, Stella jokingly asked the rabbi if he would also officiate the divorce.
Harold would spend the next few years back in Hollywood making a living in development hell at RKO before returning to New York for good in the mid-1940s. By then, Stella’s acting career had stalled, but her teaching career was taking off. Soon she was teaching with Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School. One of her students was a beautiful and rebellious young man, born in Nebraska but raised in Illinois, named Marlon Brando.
Acting was never Marlon Brando Jr.’s passion. The man who, despite his protestations, would define Method acting in the public imagination for the next thirty years dreamed instead of being a jazz drummer. “There is something in him that resents acting,” Harold Clurman, who came to know him better than most, wrote. “Yet he cannot help being an actor.” Brando’s gifts were a kind of curse; he was so natural as an actor that he never needed to take it very seriously, and so gifted that he could never escape it.
Escape—from digging ditches, from his fragile, alcoholic, narcissistic mother, from his overbearing, abusive, controlling father—was on his mind when he moved to New York in the 1940s. As a child, he responded to the fraught world of his parents with a mischievous sense of humor. But as he became a teenager, his refusal ever to do as he was told got him in trouble again and again. Even though his parents eschewed bourgeois values—openly discussing politics and sex, opposing racial prejudice, encouraging Marlon’s older sister Jocelyn to live with a boyfriend prior to marriage—Marlon Brando Sr. expected obedience from his family, good behavior from his children, the outward appearance of the American ideal.
One problem fed another. His mother’s drinking, depressive spells, and habit of hitting on Marlon’s friends kept him socially isolated. His dyslexia led to problems at school. Both only made his anarchic streak more pronounced. Eventually he washed out of high school and wound up at Shattuck Military Academy, which his father had also attended. There someone finally noticed his potential: Earle Wagner, the head of Shattuck’s English department (and a barely closeted gay man) who directed the school’s plays. Everyone called him Duke.
Duke directed Brando in A Message from Khufu and was impressed. He wrote Marlon Sr. to say that Brando had real potential, both as a student and in the theater, but in order to realize that potential, he should be held back a year. Marlon Sr. would not hear of it, writing back, “I feel he must be in college in the Fall 1943.”
Having failed to convince the father, Duke took the son under his wing, casting him in plays and tutoring him in English. The two had a mysterious falling-out in 1943, one that Brando refused ever to explain. There was speculation, at Shattuck and beyond, that either Duke made a pass at Brando and was rebuffed or the two began a relationship that soured. Either is possible—Duke was known to take advantage of his students at Shattuck, and Brando had affairs with men as well as women. Brando would not last much longer at Shattuck. In May, he decided to sneak off campus and was expelled. Students went on strike, demanding his reinstatement, but Brando had decided to make his own way in the world. His sister Jocelyn was already in New York, studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Marlon persuaded his father that he could make a go of it too. On Jocelyn’s recommendation, he applied to Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop. Marlon Sr. agreed to pay for one year.
Piscator’s school looked a lot like the American Laboratory Theatre. Students trained in all areas of the theater, attended lectures by guest artists, and were urged to be active, engaged, scholarly citizens of the world. In his native Germany, Erwin Piscator had been an artistic partner of Bertolt Brecht, and together they pioneered the epic theater movement. Expressly political and opposed to realism and emotional catharsis, epic theater is perhaps most famous for the alienation effect, acting techniques and aesthetic gestures that deliberately kept the audience from identifying with the characters and their situation. Piscator’s taste in plays tacked toward revolutionary politics, and classes at the Workshop were extremely serious. “There was no light fare or screwball comedy at the Dramatic Workshop,” Harry Belafonte, who studied there in 1951, recalled. “And no stars, at least not in theory. We were all workers of equal standing in Piscator’s dramatic collective.” The Dramatic Workshop sold itself by advertising its heavy production program. “Perform what you learn!” read one ad. “You can get professional training and a chance to perform before the critics and talent scouts.”
Brando, as individualistic an actor as ever trod a New York stage, was an unlikely fit for Piscator’s approach. But Piscator’s power was waning at the school. The workshop chose fewer and fewer plays fitting his theories, and Stella Adler, a living embodiment of everything that Brechtian theater was not, had recently replaced Piscator’s wife as head of the acting program. Stella was now responsible for teaching the first-year students the basics in a course called Technique of Acting. The course catalog outlined her approach and outlook:
The actor is his own material; he must learn to control it so that he can use it at will. When the actor has trained himself in the fundamentals of action, imagination, improvisation, characterization etc. he has done the basic work, and is prepared to proceed with the study of a role, to analyze it from the standpoint of the play as a whole and of its own main line of action.
In a few simple sentences, this description lays out the basic tenets of her method: the actor as material, action, beats, spine, script analysis, and characterization.
In the basement of the New School building at 66 West Twelfth Street, Stella tried, by force of will, to shape her students into artists worthy of what to her was the noblest of professions. Her first tool was her own grand performance. Maria Ouspenskaya had created the persona of a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, monocled Baba Yaga who would flense your ego with her Slavic exactitude. Adler’s persona was that of an aristocrat deigning to give you the secrets of her own nobility, so long as you proved your worth to her. Elegantly coiffed and dressed to the nines, Stella did not enter a classroom, she made an entrance into it. “Man,” a student of hers said, “there was a woman who read her own publicity. I don’t know how to describe it. She was seven thousand feet over the top, and you knew it, and yet it was fabulous beyond words.” After the entrance came the lecture. In her heightened mid-Atlantic accent, she would pronounce a bold aphorism—You must listen with your blood!—and build from there into a stem-winding tour of some aspect of the actor’s art:
Olivier could stand on his head [but] he can’t be you, only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can be you and nobody can reach what you reach if you do it. So do it. We need your … voice, your body. We don’t need for you to imitate anybody because it’s second best.
Stella’s extravagance extended to her criticism, particularly when the student was a woman. Anything less than great acting was a betrayal of the thing she cared about most in the world. Berating students was the norm. “You went back to the crap, the dirt, the filth, the indecency of showing your acting,” she said to one after watching a scene. “It’s worse than being a whore!” She went on, her voice rising, hectoring the student, before turning on a dime to mock sweetness, asking him, “Am I being mild?”
Marlon loved her. Stella “taught me all I know. She took me under her wing and is responsible for any acting ability I have,” he later said. Brando needed looking after, and he needed encouragement. He had been told all his life that he wasn’t smart, largely because of his dyslexia. As a result, he had never nurtured his considerable intellect. He was a Midwestern goy, a taciturn son of a traveling salesman. He didn’t fit into the very brainy, very activist, very Jewish milieu of the New School. “I don’t understand life,” he wrote home at the time, “but I am living like mad anyhow.”
Adler noticed Brando immediately: his gift for mimicry and voices, his protean physicality, his ability to respond to unexpected stimulus while remaining in the moment, and, most of all, his chaotic, oblique response to instruction. In one class, she told him to be a father holding his newborn son. He held the pantomimed baby with casual indifference, looking around the room, then handed the invisible bundle to a female student and walked off. Another story, so often retold that it might as well be on his tombstone, involved a group improvisation in which the class pretended to be farm animals. Brando played a chicken. In some versions of the story, so did everyone else. Either way, at some point in the midst of their walking around an imaginary barnyard, Adler told the class that an atomic bomb was about to fall. Everyone else in the class started running around, flapping their wings, clucking, displaying animal panic. Brando waddled over to his invisible nest and sat on some imaginary eggs. What did a hen know from the bomb?
Adler, taking a page from Boleslavsky, stressed to her students that everyone acts, all day, all the time. She was teaching them a method by which they could do what they already did automatically in a more considered—and more reproducible—way. This approach unlocked something in Brando. He also had been performing all the time, whether he was seducing new friends and sexual partners, telling tall tales and holding court, or engaging in the hijinks he got up to when bored. It was the person-to-person, human level of small talk and simple social graces that eluded him. Acting let him harness his natural performer’s instincts, and because he hadn’t grown up wanting to be an actor, he had not absorbed the clichés of what good acting was supposed to look like.
Soon Brando was dating Stella’s daughter, Ellen, borrowing books from the Adler household, and spending his time with Stella, Harold, and their friends. Money was tight for the Adler-Clurmans and would remain so until Harold returned to directing on Broadway. Adler once complained to Harold that he hadn’t given her any jewelry in a long time. “But, Stella,” Harold said, “don’t you realize that I have debts amounting to twenty thousand dollars?”
“A man of your stature,” she said, “should be in debt for a hundred thousand.”
They might not have been well off, but Stella and Harold’s household was a place where at any moment some jumble of famous composers, intellectuals, writers, and actors might drop by for dinner. It was also home to Stella’s mother, Sarah, as formidable an old woman as could be found in the five boroughs. Clurman described her as “a woman of strong constitution, of energy, will, and hard sense.” When she first met Marlon, she told Ellen “He’s a bum.”
Much as Julie Garfield had when he fell in with the Group, Marlon started buying books on every subject mentioned in the Adler-Clurman household. Unlike Julie, he read them. Adler began talking him up to everyone who would listen, and the industry began to take notice after his performance in a Dramatic Workshop production of The Assumption of Hannele. He even received an offer of a film contract, but Stella cautioned him against going to Hollywood before he could go on his own terms. While Marlon loved studying with Stella, he could not abide Piscator, and the feeling was mutual. In 1944, Piscator fired Brando from a summer theater he ran in Sayville, Long Island, and Brando struck out on his own. Soon, thanks in part to Stella’s championing, he made his Broadway debut in John Van Druten’s I Remember Mama. Within a decade he would win his first Academy Award and become one of the most famous and controversial actors in the country.
Stella wasn’t the only Group veteran to pursue teaching. Lee Strasberg taught at the Dramatic Workshop and gave private lessons. Sanford Meisner had been teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse since 1935. Out in Los Angeles, the Actors’ Laboratory served as an important (and now largely forgotten) West Coast outpost for the method. Founded in 1941, the Lab was a combination of acting school, studio for seasoned professionals, and theater. Group alums J. Edward Bromberg, Roman Bohnen, Art Smith, Phoebe Brand, and Morris Carnovsky were all key members. By 1944, Bohnen was the Lab’s chairman, and Mary Tarcai, an alum of the American Laboratory Theatre, headed its school. Now that they were in charge, Bohnen and his colleagues implemented many of the plans they had proposed within the Group, including a formal constitution mandating that every member of the Lab work toward its flourishing. The company lost money on purpose, requiring more successful members to donate their film wages to help keep it going.
The Lab’s founders were also champion grudge holders. They froze Julie Garfield out of the Lab unless they needed his name to sell tickets. Strasberg approached them about directing a production of Saint Joan, and they told him he would have to pay his dues within the organization and “work from the bottom up” before he would be entrusted with a production. Crawford tried to poach Roman Bohnen for a theater she was setting up back in New York, and he turned her down flat. Clurman delivered some guest lectures at the Lab, but that relationship ended when he published The Fervent Years. His memoir of his time with the Group offended Bohnen in particular with the way it turned the decadelong history of a chaotic, brilliant theater company into the story of the particular exploits of one man. In an unpublished essay, Bohnen bemoaned how the book left out “those artists whose dedication to the essential ‘groupness’ provided the author a ten-year arena in which to exercise his innocence.”
A clear line ran from Boleslavsky to the Group to the Actors’ Lab, which mimicked Boley’s American Laboratory Theatre in both name and curriculum. Students took fencing, dance, and voice lessons, read Acting: The First Six Lessons and An Actor Prepares, and listened to guest lectures on everything from Shakespeare to set design. The Lab’s approach to Stanislavski pulled from Adler’s version of the method, focusing on the given circumstances, the task/problem, and action over emotion and affective memory. They preached the belief, which Boleslavsky, Clurman, and Adler had all espoused, that an actor was a citizen of the world. Actors trained in how to be cultured and aware human beings as well as in how to prepare for a role in a business that devoted precious little on-set time to the actors’ needs. “The Actors’ Lab,” their Statement of Policy read, “is an organization with the primary purpose of developing for actors a real understanding of and participation in the life of our times—based on an intelligent appraisal of the social forces at work in this particular period.” Given this purpose, and the affiliation many members had with either the Communist Party or the popular front theaters of the thirties, the Lab gained a reputation as a leftist organization.
