An Entertainment Legacy–Act One
The elevator doors opened and a young man stepped out into the lobby. His name was Edward Chodorov, and let no one say that luck does not play a large part in the fashioning of any career. It’s true, and you’ll pardon me if I say there’s something elegant in the way those lines are written. I can say that because I didn’t write them. They’re from Moss Hart’s autobiography, the playwright who shared a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, and the man he wrote them about was my grandfather.
Edward Chodorov was my mother’s father, and a big part of my entertainment legacy. It’s funny to think how much he influenced my professional life, since I never talked theater with him. He died when I was 9 years old. In a way, that was the first time I got to know something about who he was, because of the stories I heard at the memorial. Stories about how he bluffed his way into being named director of a little theater company with no experience. Stories about how he worked with the legendary Sam Spiegel, even doing some work (uncredited—more on that in a minute) on the script of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA.
And also someone read from Moss Hart’s autobiography. There’s a whole chapter on him in the book, where the Pulitzer winner credits my Papa Eddie with inspiring him to stay in the theater. He also describes the adventures my grandfather led him on, how they snuck into Broadway shows, how Eddie got them appointed entertainment directors of a Summer camp in the Catskills, and just generally how amazingly bold, popular, charismatic, and talented he was. Here; here’s a sample:
“But did you ever direct a little-theatre group before?” I asked a little breathlessly.
“No,” he answered. “What’s that got to do with it?” He looked at me eagerly, his eyes alight with pleasure at the prospects of windmills in the distance.
“Well, neither have I,” I said. “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”
Again the impatient finger was being shaken under my nose. “You’ll get nowhere with that attitude, my boy,” he sighed, in the theatre or out of it. We must improvise—improvise!—play it by ear. These people are amateurs.”
“But so are we in that field, Eddie,” I protested.
“And who’s going to tell them that,” he cried triumphantly, “unless you do. All you have to do tonight is to sit there and look bored. You can do that, can’t you?”
“And what about afterward—what happens when we have to get up on our feet and put these plays on? Won’t they catch on to us?”
He laughed aloud. “Right now,” he said, “standing here unemployed on the corner of Forty-third Street and Sixth Avenue, either one of us is a better director than Philip Moeller or Robert Milton. Want me to prove it?”
“No, no,” I said hastily, for I well knew he could convince me that the moon was green. “Just tell me what to do so I don’t make a fool of myself. Perhaps if we told them the truth…”
“The first thing you’ve got to do,” he said severely, “is to stop being so damned ethical. All right—we’ve never directed little theatres before. Well, we’re doing it now. Why advertise it? We just go ahead and do it. The point is,” he went on, “you can’t hock moral scruples. If you could, we’d all be eating more regularly, and you’re not exactly in a position to be this finicky, are you?”
He was an intimidating figure, in other words. All the more so when I heard the stories about the blacklist. See, he had quite a career going. I know very few people have heard of him now, but he was out here in the early days of Hollywood, producing movies when he was younger than I am now, and writing them too. And he had plays on Broadway. This is around the time my mother was born, and she took the train across the country so often as a girl that the conductors knew her by sight. He wrote political plays during World War II, powerful anti-Fascist dramas, had people like Katharine Hepburn in his movies in the 40s (like this one), and in the early 50s wrote one of the first plays to deal seriously with psychoanalysis.
And then that same year, at the height of McCarthyism, the famed choreographer and director Jerome Robbins named him and his brother (my great-uncle Jerry) as communists in testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and that was the end of his film career. He worked some, but not as much, and not under his own name. That’s why you won’t find his name in the writing credits for LAWRENCE. He denied being a communist for the rest of his life, but it made no difference. And he became even more of a legend to me.
A legend with talent, guts and principles. Who I also have memories of being funny and strong and wearing a pointy paper hat on his 85th birthday. Quite a lot to live up to. So much so in fact, that I’m splitting the entry on him into two parts. Maybe it’s appropriate that Moss Hart titled his autobiography Act One.
Enjoy intermission.