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Upon seeing “Stella!” many people will probably think of
Marlon Brando in “A Streetcar Named Desire” bellowing,
demanding, pleading that his wife, Stella, return to him.
They wouldn’t be far wrong. This time, however, the Stella
is Stella Adler, Brando’s teacher and lover—age disparity
notwithstanding.
Stella Adler was a brilliant actress, director, producer,
power-house teacher, Irgun gun-runner, ardent proponent of
Jewish causes and dazzling blonde glamour girl. The foreword
is written by actor Mark Ruffalo, a former student and
admirer. The book is subtitled “The mother of modern
acting,” although using Stella Adler and “mother” in the
same sentence might bring Medea more to mind than Molly
Goldberg.
Arguably Stella Adler’s greatest performance was before
the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She
didn’t take the Fifth, as did the Hollywood 10 who then were
imprisoned, nor did she name names, as did Elia Kazan. She
played the dumb-blonde innocent to perfection and escaped
unscathed.
This is among the many tidbits in a monumental new bio
written by Sheana Ochoa, who worked on the project, judging
by the dates on the footnotes, for well over a decade. The
research is prodigious. She looks at Stella, and indeed the
entire Adler clan, in the context of history, starting with
Czar Alexander II (“the czar liberator”) who was
assassinated in 1881, through the pogrom at Kishinev to
Stella’s death in 1992. The glitterati pop up all over the
book, not because the author is name-dropping, but because
they are part of Stella’s world: FDR. Eleanor, Ben (“The
Front Page”) Hecht, Quentin Reynolds, Prokofiev, movie and
stage stars, playwrights, including Arthur Miller, who
claimed to have been inspired to write by seeing Stella
perform, and, of course, Stanislavski, as well as the man
who would become Stella’s bête noir, Lee Strasberg.
Ochoa has amassed a mountain of information about the
entire Adler clan, starting with Stella’s father, Jacob
Adler, the lion of Yiddish theater, whom John Barrymore came
to watch to “learn how to act.” Jacob Adler, the handsome,
charismatic patriarch who ruled with an iron fist, doling
out love according to how someone performed onstage, looms
large throughout the book. Stella’s mother, Sara, her
siblings, (legitimate and illegitimate) among them Celia,
Luther, Frances and Julia, were all working in their
father’s theater, Stella from the time she could walk. The
theater was their real home.
This bio is a work of great magnitude, but it’s as if
readers were led into the stacks of a library and left to
fend for themselves: 290 pages in search of an editor. For
example:
The great director Harold Clurman (who became Stella’
second husband) is quoted at the top of Chapter Four as
saying “All of his children were in love with [Jacob],
incestuously in love with him.” A bit later, an explanation
of the behavior of Julia, an older sister of Stella, is
posited as perhaps “having something to do with the sleeping
arrangements.” Jacob Adler slept with his daughters—he slept
in Stella’s bed until she was 18 and while she insisted they
had not been intimate, the same is not true of Julia, who
later fled. The subject is not mentioned again for more than
100 pages, then toward the end, page 289, Stella is quoted
as calling her father “degenerate.” The bunker-buster was
dropped early on, mentioned thrice, but its effects were not
examined.
Stella’s grandson Tom Oppenheimer is quoted as saying he
never attended any of Stella’s classes on the West Coast and
feared they were full because people wanted to watch Stella
cut up her students—acting classes as a blood sport. James
Coburn concedes that Stella was particularly rough on women
and there is a line before the birth of Stella’s daughter
noting that Stella hoped for a boy because she preferred the
male sex.
The reader is told how devastating Stella could be to
students, females in particular, yet never shown examples:
not the how nor the why.
Where
men are concerned, Stella is described as being like a child
in a candy store. Truly her father’s daughter, the concept
of sexual fidelity was foreign to Stella, yet we’re given
few names.
Near the end of her life, it’s conjectured that Stella’s
dark mood might harken back to feelings about an abortion
she’d had sometime during Group Theater days. That was
back-alley coat-hanger abortion time when the procedure was
illegal and dangerous. Who was the man involved? Who, where,
how was the abortion arranged? (Maxwell Perkins where are
you when we need you!)
A copy editor could have corrected the spelling of Rudy
Vallée, called attention to the missing names of the “two
world-famous actors who were in the theater that night,”
and, amid all the material on “Men in White” could have
found a place to insert the name of the playwright, Sidney
Kingsley, and spelled Stanislavski consistently. A copy
editor could have noted that while Brooks Atkinson was
indeed the critic for The New York Times he was not “the
dean of critics” in 1931. The giants at that time included
Burns Mantle, John Gassner, George Jean Nathan. Atkinson did
not ascend to the “deanship” until after WWII.
Stella Adler’s life and career—the two were
inseparable—reflects the tectonic changes in the theater in
the 1930s as well the turbulence in much of the world. “Art
Imitates Life” became the mantra of the theater as socially
significant dramas began to replace mindless fluff. Group
Theater led the way with Clifford Odets front and center.
Stanislavski was the mentor and proper interpretation of his
“method” led to disputes and lifetime feuds. “Stella!”
provides much riveting reading—and unanswered questions.
Why, despite Stella’s written instructions that she be
buried next to her third husband, Mitchell Wilson, in the
East Hampton cemetery where she owned six lots, was she
interred in the Adler family plot in Carmel? Was this her
daughter Ellen’s posthumous slap at her unmotherly mother
and an embrace of Harold Clurman, Stella’s second husband
with whom Ellen had a strong bond? (Harold was buried in
the Adler plot.)
We’re told that among Stella’s myriad affairs was one
with a president. It’s postulated that the president was not
FDR. Could it have been Harding, because the family
supported him because he looked like Jacob? We aren’t told.
While much attention is given to acting techniques, much
more touches on the international situation pre- and
post-WWII including McCarthyism and the Blacklist.
This is a weighty tome which in addition appealing to
theater devotees and news junkies, should be of interest to
historians, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists.
THE BOOK HAS 330 PAGES INCLUDING FOOTNOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND INDEX. 15 PAGES OF PHOTOS. PUBLISHER:
APPLAUSE. US PRICE: $29.99.
The reviewer is a former actress and singer whose mostly
mirthful memoir is “Misadventures of a Would-Be Muse.”
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