Abraham Polonsky: Interviews

On John Garfield

150 On John Garfield Abraham Polonsky / 1975 Introduction from The Films of John Garfield by Howard Gelman (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1975), 7–9. I met John Garfield when I went to see him and his partner, Robert Roberts , to tell them the story of Body and Soul. A new friend, Arnold Manoff, had just come to work at Paramount Pictures, just a few blocks away from Enterprise Studios. Manoff had been trying to make something of the Barney Ross story, but somehow he wasn’t getting anywhere, and since he found me numb with Paramount, he suggested that I go over and see what I could do with some sort of prizefighter story for Garfield. But first, we had lunch at Lucey’s. The match game was going on all around us, but Manoff was telling me about John Garfield and Enterprise. He made it sound like an ironic dream. It was. Arnold Manoff is one of the best short-story writers of the depression years. That world of want, poor New York Jews, the Enlightenment, and Utopian Socialism, the Life of Reason haunting the glorious future, was the heart of Body and Soul. It is Romance with Rebellion. Clifford Odets, of course, was an electric part of this literary movement, and his plays were their enchanting vision, but Garfield was the star for the whole world, the romantic Rebel himself. In a way, I found the ambiguity of the movies much like the souls of Odets and Garfield when I got there after the war. John McNulty was at Paramount when I turned up. What was I doing there, he asked me. I belonged back in New York. The racetrack was the only real thing around. The whole place was a fraud. He himself was just hanging in to get enough money to go back to the city, and he cursed Los Angeles, the sunlight, the palm trees, and the movies. He took me onto a set, the first I saw before the Paulette Goddard one, and he showed me Alan Ladd standing on a box for a tight two-shot in a love scene. “This is it,” he said. “Go home.” abraham polonsky / 1975 151 He never went home, but the Blacklist sent Garfield and me back to New York. The children of rich Jews in those days when they were attracted to the arts had a tendency to become infatuated with the avant garde and the vitality of the irrational, but most poor Jews who didn’t join the money system gravitated to socialism, vague or definite; rebellion, moderate or tough; and self-consciousness, harsh or neurotic. Some became gangsters; most joined the establishment of which crime is, after all, as my friend Ira Wolfert says, “the grease that makes things run” (cf. Force of Evil, based on Ira Wolfert’s novel Tucker’s People). As an actor Garfield was the darling of romantic rebels—beautiful, enthusiastic , rich with the know-how of street intelligence. He had passion and a lyrical sadness that was the essence of the role he created as it was created for him. In the hysterical tragedy in which he found himself he became an exile in his own country. That others before him and others after him in every age would play the same role was no satisfaction to him. He was ambitious. The Group trained him, the movies made him, the Blacklist killed him. The popular story, for instance, is (and he may have said so in public himself, for he was obliging in other things besides politics) that he refused the part of Kowalski in Tennessee Williams ’s play because the woman’s part was better than the man’s. I read the play when it was submitted to his company, and I know the part was turned down by Roberts because Irene Selznick wouldn’t make a proper moving-picture deal on it, so Roberts decided. Garfield was unlikely to turn down anything because a part was smaller or bigger, although he liked to be the star. Everything he did flowed from his magic and frustrating years in the Group. The play was the heart of it. The ensemble was the soul of it. He knew it and acted like that on both occasions when we worked together. Garfield felt himself inadequate as an intellectual. Most serious actors feel like this. They aren’t actually inadequate, any more than intellectuals are, but they feel that way. Being an...