Bloodline to Star Power (ii)

In 1955, my parents were living in Los Angeles, my mother was working for the ACLU, and she asked my father to ask Joseph Schildkraut to participate in an ACLU-sponsored memorial to Albert Einstein, who had died in April. “After all,” my father wrote in reply to one of my innumerable requests for more information, “Einstein was a German Jew and Pepi [Schildkraut’s nickname] had spent so much of his professional life in Berlin and was a member of a group of prominent people who had fled Germany in the years before Hitler and lived in the Pacific Palisades–Santa Monica area.”

My father got Schildkraut’s phone number and called him, telling him he was a Schildkraut, too, and inviting him to speak at the memorial tribute. “After much backing-and-filling and long, pregnant pauses (his, not mine) on the phone,” my father said, Schildkraut told my father to bring him the script. A few days later my father went to Schildkraut’s house in Beverly Hills to show him the script he would read at the memorial if he decided to appear on the program. Schildkraut came to the door, greeting Shields (né Shildcrout) stiffly. “He was very businesslike—cold, distant.” For a moment or two they talked about their families. My father told him about the backstage visit in 1923. Joseph knew absolutely nothing of the Schildkraut family’s ancestry. “Joseph Schildkraut, I would say,” my father said, “and I think it’s a fair statement, was somebody who didn’t think about his Jewish heritage.”

Schildkraut talked to my father for about thirty minutes in the foyer of the big, rambling house. “Later, in telling the story, I often exaggerated—said he clicked his heels, Prussian-like. He really didn’t.” Schildkraut said that he had to show the script to Dore Schary for approval. (Schary was a writer who had become the head of production at RKO and then MGM. Anti-Communist fears lingered; the blacklist was still in effect.) Schildkraut told Shields to come back in a week.

When my father returned, Schildkraut again talked with him rapidly in the foyer of the house—“On neither visit did he have me come into the living room, nor did he introduce me to his wife, who was moving about in the next room”—and wound up saying that Schary had read the script and said it was all right. The script was taken almost entirely from Einstein’s writings on civil liberties, academic freedom, and freedom of speech. The memorial was held at what was then the Hollywood Athletic Club and later became the University of Judaism. Also on the platform were Linus Pauling; A. L. Wirin, the chief counsel to the ACLU; John Howard Lawson, a screenwriter and the unofficial spokesman for the “Hollywood Ten” Anne Revere, who before being blacklisted won an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in National Velvet; and a novelist who my father insists was once famous and who in any case has a name worthy of the Marx Brothers—Lion Feuchtwanger.

The event was free. Every seat in the immense auditorium was filled. Hundreds of people sat in the aisles. Eason Monroe, the executive director of the ACLU and a man upon whom my mother had an immense, lifelong crush, asked the overflow audience to find seats or standing room in several small rooms upstairs. Monroe assured them that all the speakers would come upstairs to address them after speaking in the main auditorium. The program started a little late, about 8:30 P.M., but Schildkraut still hadn’t shown up. Monroe asked Shields, “Milt, where’s your cousin? It’s getting late.” My father assured Monroe he’d be there. “He was too big a ham to stay away on such an occasion.” His name had appeared prominently in the ads as one of the main speakers.

Finally, Schildkraut showed. Monroe greeted him and asked him if, as the others had consented to do, he would also speak to the groups upstairs. Schildkraut said that first he’d speak to the main auditorium audience; then he’d “see.”

The other speakers—Pauling, Wirin, Lawson, Revere, and Feuchtwanger—spoke to the audience in the main auditorium, were “warmly received” (whatever that means), then went upstairs to speak once again to the overflow audience in a couple of anterooms. “The occasion lifted even the most uninspired speaker and material to emotional heights,” according to my father. “But then came Pepi, the last speaker on the program. When he got to the podium, the audience was noisy and restless. After all, people were feeling the emotion of the memorial to this great man. Schildkraut took one look out there and employed the actor’s stratagem: he whispered the first line or two, and a hush fell over the audience. Then, when he was sure he had their attention, he thundered the next lines. When he finished, he got a standing ovation. And this for a political naïf, or worse: a man who certainly didn’t agree with everything he had just read, or anything else Einstein stood for. But he was the consummate actor, and he read his lines—to perfection.”

When Schildkraut finished, my father asked him about going upstairs. Schildkraut looked right through Shields and walked out the door. “Now he truly was like a Prussian soldier. That’s the last time I saw him. In person, that is. Of course, I saw The Diary of Anne Frank on the screen half a dozen times. And if it’s ever on television, I watch it again.”