They were pretty good seats, too. As a 20-year-old Dartmouth student, Schulberg visited the Soviet Union and was shown its artistic glories. He fell in love with the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Stanislavski’s wayward disciple. Meyerhold loved the older stylized dramatic forms—commedia dell’arte, pantomime—and refused to confine himself to Socialist Realism. So in 1939 Stalin had him arrested, tortured and his wife murdered. He was shot by firing squad in February 1940.
How about that? Executed over a difference of opinion about a directing style. As “persecution” goes, isn’t that a little more thorough than, say, being denied a writing credit on Hellcats of the Navy, as happened to Bernard Gordon? More to the point, if it’s all about “personal loyalty,” then what about the loyalty owed to Meyerhold by all those young American artistic lefties he befriended and inspired? Or is the “personal loyalty” owed not to persons but to the noble cause, in service of which any individual is dispensable? Even today, we continue to draw a distinction between Nazism and Communism—between the bad evil and the good evil, the evil that’s philosophically sound, admirably progressive and just ran into one or two problems on the ground, like a great movie idea that went off course in development.
In 1937, Schulberg wrote a short story about an ambitious kid on the make in Hollywood, and then decided to expand it into a novel. Demonstrating the same hands-on approach as Comrade Stalin with Meyerhold, the Communist Party told him to ease up on the Jewishness of the central character, and portray the striking screenwriters more appealingly. Happily, the American Commies lacked the enforcement regime of Uncle Joe. So Schulberg refused, and published What Makes Sammy Run? as written. In essence, he broke with the Reds for artistic reasons.
But he learned a broader lesson in the way they operate. The great speech in On The Waterfront comes in the back of a cab, as Terry Malloy (Brando) lays out the reasons for his failures, as a boxer and as a man.
“That skunk we got you for a manager,” says his mobster brother Charley (Rod Steiger). “He brought you along too fast.”
“It wasn’t him, Charley, it was you,” Terry replies. “You remember that night in the Garden, you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re going for the price on Wilson.’ You remember that? ‘This ain’t your night!’ My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ballpark—and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville . . . I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am . . .”
It’s beautifully muscular prose that achieves a kind of blue-collar poetry. It’s Brando’s signature scene, and Schulberg’s surest claim to a place in the pantheon. It’s too good not to admire, and yet, even in their acknowledgement of its power, the cineastes can’t quite go all the way with Terry Malloy and acknowledge why it’s great—as if somehow the Schulberg who wrote one of the best screenplays of its era and the Schulberg who “rat-finked” on the Hollywood Reds are two hermetically sealed entities rather than entirely consistent, the one being the logical consequence of the other.
A few days after Schulberg died, a man called Kenneth Gladney went to congressman Russ Carnahan’s “town hall meeting” in St. Louis to protest plans for health-care “reform.” He was set upon by Democratic enforcers from the Service Employees International Union and so badly beaten that, at the time of writing, he’s in a wheelchair. He happens to be black, and the SEIU goons taunted him with racial epithets. But it doesn’t matter. He committed the same sin as Terry Malloy or Budd Schulberg. He broke with “his” gang, and must pay the price.
Budd Schulberg was a lifelong liberal, but, unlike most of his comrades, he understood the artist’s obligation to live in truth—and he found a terrific way to tell the story. If it’s any consolation to his detractors, the studio bosses who enforced the blacklist didn’t get it either. Kazan and Schulberg took On The Waterfront to Darryl Zanuck, head honcho at 20th Century Fox. Zanuck turned them down. “Who,” he said, “gives a shit about longshoremen?”
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