THE SAGA OF THE BROADWAY PRODUCTION OF THE DIARY of Anne Frank is so rife with betrayal and bad behavior, so mired in misunderstanding and complication that at least four books have attempted to explain what happened and why. Published in 1973, Meyer Levin’s aptly titled The Obsession blames a leftwing cabal masterminded by Lillian Hellman, a secret conspiracy to purge the diary of everything Jewish, including the six million dead. Levin’s version is supported by Ralph Melnick’s The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank, which likewise sees Hellman as the malevolent puppeteer in the wings.
Ten years after Meyer Levin’s death, his wife, Tereska Torres, wrote a book, Les Maisons hantées de Meyer Levin, which appeared in France and mingled fiction and memoir to portray a long and loving marriage to a man whose every hour was haunted by Anne Frank’s ghost. The most dispassionate analysis of the controversy can be found in Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank. But though these Rashomon-like retellings of the drama surrounding the drama disagree on the motives of the principal players and the machinations of the supporting actors, all are more or less in accord about the basics of the scenario, in which high-mindedness and slipperiness coexisted in extremely elevated concentrations, and which spanned decades of accusations and counteraccusations, decades in which money, power, and fame were pursued in the name of idealism and of loyalty to a murdered girl.
Eventually, the unfortunate history of the dramatization of Anne Frank’s diary would become as convoluted as the plot of a Dickens novel. Cynthia Ozick compared the story to Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, the protracted court case at the center of Bleak House, and indeed the wrangling, the maneuvering, the charges and countercharges would recall not only the obsessional lawsuit that Dickens so brilliantly portrayed, but also his awareness of what such a fixation costs, even beyond the legal fees.
WITH eight major characters, a few rooms, one set, a rising arc of family conflict, teenage romance, and terror, Anne Frank’s diary seemed perfect for the stage. Within days of the American publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, Doubleday’s New York office was fielding calls from interested producers. The callers must have assumed that they were getting in at the beginning. But as those who became involved in the production would soon discover, to their chagrin, these early arrivals had actually come to the story late, seven years after it started in the same place where Anne Frank’s story ended, and only a few months after her death.
A prologue of sorts had been enacted over a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, to which an American writer named Meyer Levin traveled as a correspondent for the Overseas News Agency and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. A scrappy Chicago tailor’s son, the child of Eastern European immigrants who had risen, through hard work, to upper-middle-class respectability, Levin had had a gnarled relationship with his Jewish heritage. But those tangles sorted themselves out when Levin witnessed the Allied liberation of the Nazi prison camps.
By then, he had published several well-received novels, none a commercial success, and had been cobbling together a living by writing journalism, criticism, and short fiction. Too old for active service, he was glad to have found a way to use his skills in the war effort.
His instincts in the face of catastrophe were generous and energetic. He was known for asking newly freed prisoners if there was anyone they wanted him to contact. Survivors inscribed their names in the dust on his Jeep. Levin vowed to make sure America knew about the destruction of the European Jews, and though he briefly considered writing about their fate, he became convinced that “from amongst themselves, a teller must arise.”
After the war he helped Jewish refugees trying to reach Palestine, made two documentary films about their plight, and wrote The Search, a three-part memoir about his Jewish-American childhood, what he observed in the camps, and his work to help survivors emigrate to Israel. The book was rejected by every editor to whom Levin showed it, one of whom criticized its excessive whining about anti-Semitism. It was finally printed in Europe at Levin’s expense and by a small publisher in the United States.
In 1950, Levin and his wife and their two children moved to the south of France so he could work on a screenplay adaptation of an early novel about a musician—a project commissioned by the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who wanted to make a movie in Israel. In Antibes, Tereska Torres gave Levin a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which had just appeared in French. It was a gift that Tereska, a writer whose Polish father had converted from Judaism to Catholicism, would regret.
As he read the diary, Levin became convinced that Anne Frank’s was the voice he had prayed to hear as he stood over the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen. He felt the excitement familiar to anyone who has ever discovered an unknown masterpiece and been convinced of the importance—the necessity—of its reaching a wider audience. But in fact the book was hardly unknown, having made the rounds of American and British publishers and been everywhere rejected.
When Levin wrote Otto Frank, praising the diary and offering to help find it a home in the United States, his letter must have seemed to Otto like a reason for fresh hope. Levin reassured Otto that his enthusiasm for the book had nothing to do with money. He himself would translate the diary if Otto thought it might be useful. He mentioned an obvious selling point, the story’s potential as a play or even a film. Otto Frank was less convinced about the diary’s dramatic possibilities, but he gratefully accepted Levin’s offer to broker its sale.
After the first round of letters, Otto Frank and Meyer Levin became friends. Their correspondence suggests an exchange between a fond uncle and his younger, smarter, savvier—but always respectful—nephew. Promising to make the right contacts and to help Otto navigate the treacherous currents of American publishing without sacrificing the integrity of Anne’s work, Levin began, with Otto’s blessing, a letter-writing campaign to American editors.
In November 1950, after the New Yorker ran Janet Flanner’s mention of the diary’s French success, Little, Brown offered to copublish the book with Vallentine-Mitchell in the UK, but the offer fell through when Little, Brown insisted on retaining the dramatic rights. Persuaded, presumably, by Levin, Otto had become so convinced of the necessity of controlling these rights that it was the one provision he insisted on in his negotiations with Doubleday, which acquired the book when Little, Brown dropped out.
Judith Jones’s account of finding the French translation of Anne Frank’s diary in the Doubleday rejection pile and of reading all afternoon and into the evening contains a brief coda describing a conversation that took place after Jones convinced her boss, Frank Price, to publish the diary. When Otto Frank asked to meet with representatives from Doubleday’s European office, Price and Jones invited him to come from Amsterdam to Paris. After a long, leisurely lunch, “he made just one stipulation. He wanted to have a say in the dramatic rights, because he admitted, with tears in his eyes, ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of some actress playing my Annie.’” Time would show that Otto’s misgivings were correct, for more reasons than he could have imagined.
In the early letters between Otto and his editors at Doubleday, Meyer Levin initially appears as a beneficent presence who wanted the best for the diary and who was to be consulted on decisions about the American edition. Levin’s good intentions became even more apparent, and his intercession more welcome, when his Times review propelled the diary onto the best-seller lists.
Levin was not responsible, as he would claim, for the diary’s publication, but he was important in its success, and that success was his undoing.
THE Obsession is a strange memoir, a journal of madness by a madman who has yet to be cured, or for that matter convinced that the pathology that has ruined his life is an illness. It begins with a nod to Dante’s descent into hell: “In the middle of life I fell into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me, these twenty years.” The first scene takes place in the office of the latest of several psychiatrists to whom Levin has gone in search of insight, if not relief. “Amazing, how these writers carry on, running from one analyst to another, the way, after a pessimistic medical diagnosis, one runs to another specialist in search of a different finding!”
Digressive, discoursing on the evils of McCarthyism and the reluctance of the Soviet Union to let its Jewish citizens leave for Israel, shot through with complaints about the literary establishment’s conspiracy to ignore his latest novel, The Obsession keeps looping back to its central theme in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has ever tried to talk to the severely depressed. Comparing himself to Solzhenitsyn, a fellow victim of political persecution, Levin exhibits delusions that he never suspects are delusional, any more than he realizes that the opposition lawyer whom he mocks for saying, “Levin has the hallucination that he actually wrote the diary,” could hardly have been more correct.
“Agreed, it was an obsession. Admitted. There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react, send out protests and petitions. That was all very well for suppressed Russian writers, from prisons, from labor camps…but for a free American writer to complain for twenty years about a so-called act of suppression was obviously obsessional.”
The Obsession is suffused with Levin’s intense and unconscious ambivalence. He describes Holocaust survivors as “ringed by eternal fire in the unapproachable area of those who have endured an experience that puts them beyond our judgement” and on the very next page reports telling Otto Frank, “You have been my Hitler.” His wife appears to have been a paragon of patience and forbearance until Meyer’s fixation drove her to attempt suicide and nearly wrecked their marriage. “Again and again times have come when she agonizedly cried out, “It’s me or Anne Frank! Choose!” as though this were some rival love I could abandon at will (Masochist, clinging to your pain-giver!). But can one by an act of will banish what invades one’s mind?”
Levin’s claim to have arranged the diary’s popularity might seem like a wishful fantasy if not for the front-page rave in the New York Times Book Review. We can assume that his review was motivated by unalloyed admiration for a book that went on to be admired by millions, and that he meant his praise wholeheartedly. Yet the cheapening of Anne Frank’s diary had already begun, set in motion, with the best intentions, by a man who dedicated himself to ensuring that it not be cheapened.
“Anne Frank’s diary,” Levin’s review begins, “is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label ‘classic,’ and yet no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment.
“The diary is a classic on another level, too. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl’s life, Anne Frank was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms…The diary tells us the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis. It is, in reality, the kind of document that John Hersey invented for The Wall.”
Already, the essay has become a kind of pitch, with the pitch’s nod to the latest work on a similar theme that made money. Ironically, Levin had written an article in Congress Weekly arguing that Hersey’s best-seller about the Warsaw ghetto had found an audience that would be denied Anne’s diary and Levin’s In Search because the authors were Jews. In the New York Times Book Review, Levin points out that the diary “probes far deeper into the core of human relations, and succeeds better than The Wall in bringing us an understanding of life under threat.” Which is true. Today The Wall is hardly read. But for Levin, it was the competition.
Yet another striking feature of the Times review is Levin’s use, before the first space break, of the word universalities—a term he came to despise as he argued for the particularity of Anne’s experience. “It has its share of disgust, its moments of hatred, but it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their within-the-family emotions, their tensions and satisfactions are those of human character and growth, anywhere.” Levin’s emphasis on the people-next-doorness of the hidden Jews would later be echoed by all those who wanted the book, the play, and the film to have the largest possible audience. Universal is not just an adjective, but, in the world of commerce, a projected number, which is why universal would be employed, more and more frequently, as the antonym of Jewish.
THE New York Times was understandably upset by Levin’s failure to inform them of his connection to the diary. In the Anne Frank Museum archive is a letter from Meyer Levin to the Book Review, expressing his hope that the paper will ask him to write for them again. He understands that the editors have heard he was agenting Anne Frank’s diary, which might suggest that it would have been unethical of him to request the review assignment. But in fact he wasn’t, strictly speaking, the agent. He had no intention of profiting from the book and had been motivated by pure enthusiasm for the diary as literature. Later, Levin would blame Barbara Zimmerman for suggesting he seek the assignment from the Times.
No sensible person would argue that books should be reviewed by their agents. But The Diary of a Young Girl may be an anomalous case that encourages us to view even this dubious event in light of its result. What if the diary had been assigned to a critic who, like the reader at Knopf, thought it “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions”? Even though Eleanor Roosevelt had praised the book, a lukewarm review might have arranged a slow trip to the remainder table, where, with luck, it might someday be rediscovered for the Holocaust Studies series of a university press. Arguably, Levin’s review represented a breach of ethics that worked out for the best.
Should Doubleday have told the Times not to run the review because Levin wanted to write the play? The publisher believed in the book; it would have been self-defeating. The letters between Otto Frank and Barbara Zimmerman exulted over Levin’s essay, which Zimmerman praised for its beauty and for the space it got in the country’s most influential paper. Buoyed by the book’s success, everyone chose to ignore the fact that Levin was in touch with at least two Hollywood studios and that Variety described him as “agenting the tome for possible filmization or legit treatment.”
Though Levin pitched the diary as being better than The Wall, a successful pitch needs a successful precedent, and in this case there was none. There had been nothing quite like it, and no evidence suggested that adult readers would buy a girl’s diary. Meyer Levin argued that the book should be read: “There is anguish in the thought of how much creative power, how much sheer beauty of living, was cut off through genocide. But through her diary Anne goes on living. From Holland to France, to Italy, Spain. The Germans too have published her book. And now she comes to America. Surely she will be widely loved, for this wise and wonderful young girl brings back a poignant delight in the infinite human spirit.”
Levin’s review ends with a hook designed to drag the reader out of his chair and straight to the bookstore when it opened on Monday morning. Which is exactly what happened. Who can say how many of us would have read Anne Frank if not for Meyer Levin’s review, a brilliant, if suspect, piece of publicity that got the diary into the shops, into the hands of readers, and onto the desks of the Broadway producers who would engineer his downfall?
FROM the start Levin believed, and told Otto, that he was the ideal choice to turn the book into a play. He was Jewish, he felt a powerful sense of Jewish identity and of responsibility to the victims of the Nazis, he had been to the camps, he was among the diary’s earliest and most devoted fans. But as the book’s reputation and popularity grew, names more famous than Levin’s began to be mentioned in connection with its theatrical adaptation.
More than fifty years later, one can hear the tone of the conversation change as the principals—Otto Frank, Meyer Levin, the publishers and producers—realized that a hot property was about to get hotter. Doubleday asked Otto if they could negotiate the theatrical rights for a 10 percent commission. Meyer Levin agreed. If Barbara Zimmerman was Otto’s lost daughter, Levin was still the loyal, supportive nephew, and no one had forgotten the importance of his review. Confidently, Levin agreed to let the publisher make the best deal. Otto wanted everyone to be happy—for Levin to be rewarded and feel included, and for his publisher to maximize the book’s potential without distorting Anne’s work.
It was at this point that Levin wrote Otto Frank a fateful letter reiterating his desire to do the adaptation. He had no interest in an agent’s commission. All he wanted was to remain Otto’s first choice as writer. Betraying a fatal failure of the imagination, Levin volunteered to step aside in the event that his withdrawal was the only way that a famous dramatist would agree to adapt the play.
Otto Frank’s consent to let Doubleday sell the dramatic rights stipulated that the sale be approved by Levin. And even if Levin was beginning to seem like a troublemaker, everyone still imagined that everything would work out. Doubleday offered Levin half of their 10 percent agent’s commission, and again Levin agreed.
Otto was reassured. The book would find the most prestigious and sensitive producer, Levin would either write, or collaborate on, the script. But one by one, the principal parties began to wish that Meyer Levin would just go away. In a letter to Frank Price, Barbara Zimmerman wrote that Levin’s motives didn’t seem mercenary, but that he was “screwing up the whole deal.” In subsequent letters, Zimmerman, clearly at the end of her tether, described Levin as “impossible to deal with on any terms, officially, legally, morally, personally” and claimed “he seems bent on destroying both himself and Anne’s play.” Levin couldn’t help but sense the growing disaffection with his role in the negotiations, and he slowly began to see himself as a desperate character, a failed writer, a poor Eastern European Jew surrounded by rich German-Jewish snobs, personified by Otto Frank.
In fact, Otto had been in a shaky financial position for much of his life, struggling to shore up a failing bank, and, with his cousin’s help, running a modest dealership in jam-making products. Hitler had taken everything and murdered his wife and children. On his return to Amsterdam, he’d once more had to rely on the loyalty and charity of his former employees. And now it seemed that his daughter had not only given the world a literary classic but had provided him with a way to finish out his life in security and comfort. Who could blame him for wanting that after all he’d been through?
As the diary remained on the best-seller lists, the discussions about the selling of the dramatic rights began to include the magic words that sealed Meyer Levin’s doom: Famous writer. Important playwright. Or sometimes, more coarsely, big name. The big names bandied about included Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, Harold Clurman, Elia Kazan, and Joshua Logan. Three weeks after the book’s publication, Variety ran a list of possible producers.
At first Levin’s resistance was gentle. Every time a famous playwright was suggested, Levin helpfully explained why this or that celebrity was wrong for the job. Levin claimed that, as early as 1950, Otto Frank had agreed that Levin would serve as his American agent, negotiate the theatrical rights to the diary, and write the dramatic version. To which Frank replied that their understanding was not as formal and binding as Levin believed.
Otto reassured Levin of his faith in him and in Doubleday. But the first notes of desperation began to sound in Levin’s letters to Otto. His advice grew more unreasonable and manipulative. He warned Otto that a famous playwright might leave too heavy a stamp on the material, and besides, some of the writers mentioned were has-beens with strings of failures. A few of the playwrights and producers Doubleday was considering had been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee; such candidates should be avoided lest the diary be caught in the political crossfire.
When Maxwell Anderson was suggested, and refused to collaborate with Levin, or with anyone else, Levin panicked. Anderson’s “heavy-handed” work, Levin wrote Otto, had fallen out of favor. And his reputation might overshadow the diary: “If he writes the play, it will undoubtedly be known as Maxwell Anderson’s play about the little girl, what was her name? It seems to me that the play should be identifiable as Anne’s work.” Finally, Levin claimed, Anderson was unqualified because he was not a Jew.
Otto Frank, who would spend the rest of his life ensuring that people not be judged and excluded on the basis of their color or race or religion, was offended by Levin’s suggestion that non-Jews need not apply. In June 1952, he wrote back: “I always said that Anne’s book is not a warbook. War is in the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background. I never wanted a Jew writing an introduction for it. It is (at least here) read and understood more by gentiles than in Jewish circles. I do not know, how that will be in the USA, it is the case in Europe. So do not make a Jewish play out of it! In some way of course it must be Jewish, even so that it works against anti-Semitism. I do not know if I can express what I mean and only hope that you won’t misunderstand.”
Otto was right to worry that he might have failed to explain himself clearly. His letter is filled with contradictions—Anne’s story is Jewish, it isn’t Jewish, it shouldn’t be a Jewish play but should combat anti-Semitism.
Another recurring debate surrounding the diary has centered on the Jewish identity of Anne Frank. Did she think of herself as Jewish? Was she aware of what was happening to her fellow Jews? The answer is yes, and yes. Did the Franks keep a kosher house? A diary entry is devoted to Mr. Van Pels’s expertise in making pork sausage. Did she believe in God? One of the things that surprised Otto Frank when he read his daughter’s diary was how often, and how fervently, she wrote about God. Were the Franks “assimilated”? Yes. They celebrated Hanukkah and St. Nicholas Day. When Otto Frank asked Kleiman for a copy of the New Testament so that Anne could learn about it, and a “somewhat perturbed” Margot asked if he meant to give Anne a Bible for Hanukkah, Otto agreed that it might be better as a present for St. Nicholas Day, since—as Anne writes in her revisions and as Otto keeps in the published diary—Jesus didn’t seem to go with Hanukkah. Like many modern parents, the Franks had, as their gods, their children.
Of course Anne’s story was Jewish, and, despite his assimilated German-Jewish background, so was her father. His objection to making it “a Jewish play” was too complex to chalk up to his upbringing, his views on religion, or the postwar desire to return to normalcy and forget the catastrophic singling out of the Jews. It must have begun to occur to Otto that Anne’s story could reach a much wider audience than the drastically reduced Jewish population. Of course the diary was read by more European gentiles than by Jews; there were so few Jews left. And even the forebearing Otto was clearly irritated by Levin’s “nationalistic” objection to Maxwell Anderson. Beneath Otto’s unease is an instinctive shrinking back from Levin’s impulse to control him and the diary. As it rapidly became clear that Levin was not an impartial adviser but had a fierce personal stake in the diary’s future, Doubleday began to leave him out of the loop.
Meanwhile, Levin was busily writing his own dramatization of the diary, which was finished by the time Doubleday engaged a producer, a seasoned Broadway veteran named Cheryl Crawford. Initially, Levin liked Cheryl Crawford, though again there seems to have been a misunderstanding about his role. Crawford initially suggested that Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets adapt the diary, but when she heard about Otto’s loyalty to Levin, she gave Levin two months to come up with a draft.
That summer, Levin worked on the play, taking a break to write a half-hour radio adaptation of the diary for the American Jewish Committee, which was slated to be broadcast in September. During this time, another producer—Kermit Bloomgarden—suggested himself for the project and proposed that Arthur Miller write the adaptation. At least Miller was Jewish, said Levin. But he wasn’t Jewish enough.
In the fall of 1952, Otto arrived from Europe—on Yom Kippur, as it happened. Barbara Zimmerman met his boat at the pier. The next day, Cheryl Crawford told Levin that she liked his first draft. But two days later she informed him that she had reread it in the middle of the night and now had serious reservations. She agreed that he should be given time to revise it. Too little time, he argued. That Levin was given a weekend to rework the entire thing suggests that Crawford had already decided against him. The playwrights who were chosen would eventually write eight drafts.
With Doubleday’s encouragement, Otto Frank engaged a lawyer, Myer Mermin. Though Mermin determined that Levin had no formal rights to the play, he did acknowledge that his casual arrangements with Otto might support a legal challenge. Mermin suggested that Levin be given a month to submit his script to an approved list of producers. If none was interested, Levin would renounce all rights to the drama.
When no willing producer could be found, Levin argued that his play was being discriminated against for being too Jewish, a quality that offended the “doctrinaire” political sensibilities of the anti-Semitic Stalinists, among them Lillian Hellman, who was advising the production team. The period in which this censorship occurred, Levin would later write, coincided with the height of Stalin’s campaign against Jewish writers and cultural figures. Not wanting to give the House Un-American Activities Committee more fuel for its fires, Levin claimed, he kept silent about the reason for his work being suppressed and wound up pinned between Josef Stalin and Joseph McCarthy. Others, including Crawford and the play’s eventual producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, blamed Levin’s play for being insufficiently dramatic to work on the stage. Levin argued his case in letters that the New York Times and Variety refused to print, and in an increasingly testy correspondence with Otto Frank. In one letter to Otto, Levin called Cheryl Crawford a “castrating homosexual.”
By now a larger cast of characters had been assembled to weigh in: Hellman, Bloomgarden, Elia Kazan. Here is where Levin (and Ralph Melnick) see the heavy fist of Lillian Hellman crashing down as she arm-wrestles the production away from Levin, with his narrowly sectarian (that is, Jewish) slant on Anne’s story, and conspires to hand it over to a team who will be more in harmony with her own anti-Semitic, extreme-leftwing program. Melnick finds abundant evidence supporting Levin’s claims that Hellman manipulated the situation to achieve her Stalinist agenda. But that seems unlikely, since, in Lillian Hellman, personal ambition appears to have trumped politics. Lillian Hellman wasn’t Stalin’s agent, but her own. She knew the most important writers, she knew theater people, she could make things happen in a way that Meyer Levin could not.
The other so-called co-conspirators and dupes—producers, writers, directors—intuited, early on, that the play might turn a profit. Even if the principal architect of the “cabal” against Levin was a Communist, rarely has Communism achieved such capitalist cash-cow success, and it seems unlikely that Hellman and her cohorts conspired to funnel the profits from Broadway to the Kremlin. Regardless of the political views of the players, the drama of the diary’s adaptation was not about Communism but about capitalism working exactly the way it’s supposed to, cutting the dark stuff, the Jewish stuff, the depressing stuff, emphasizing the feel good—and making money. This was 1950s America, the war was over, the “healing” well under way, and it was time for the sitcom teen, together with Mom and Dad and Sis, to head off to the secret annex.
In early conversations between Lillian Hellman and Garson Kanin, who would eventually direct the Broadway production, Hellman made a telling remark that would probably have been lost on Levin had he heard it. While acknowledging the diary’s literary importance, Hellman explained that she was the wrong person to adapt it. Such an adaptation, she said, would be so depressing that the producers would be lucky if the play ran for one night. They needed a playwright with a “lighter touch.” Later, the chosen writers—Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett—were instructed to emphasize Anne’s humor. “The only way this play will go will be if it’s funny,” advised Kermit Bloomgarden. “Get (the audience) laughing…That way, it’s possible for them to sit through the show.”
Once again, Levin got it wrong. His approach to Anne’s diary may have been “too Jewish” but it was also, more problematically, too serious. Ironically, the ponderousness and sententiousness of his own adaptation meant it might have had a better chance of being produced in the state Socialist system he despised and feared, a climate in which art, however wedded to propaganda, was divorced from commerce, and less dependent on a theatergoing public who could choose to buy, or not buy, expensive Broadway seats. Only in a capitalist society were ticket sales related to a play’s ability to make its audience feel chastened but uplifted, sad but hopeful. The play’s producer and director understood that a drama confronting the horrors of the Holocaust and the political ramifications of Nazism, Zionism, and Jewish spirituality was unlikely to pack the house night after lucrative night. Whatever the strengths and virtues of the play that Meyer Levin wrote, and that can still be read in a version performed by the Israel Soldiers Theatre, levity and humor were not among them.
AT SEVERAL points in The Obsession, Levin the novelist takes over from Levin the memoirist and Levin the polemicist, and we read scenes, drawn from life, that suggest a different explanation for his disappointments than the one that he is (or believes he is) providing. Several excruciating passages detail his bruising encounters with Joseph Marks, the vice-president of Doubleday, who was deputized to handle dramatic rights to the diary.
In his elegant office, Marks reads a list of famous producers who have made offers and informs Levin that the deciding factors will be the track record of the producer and the fame of the adapter. Obviously, he is saying this to a virtually unknown writer. Levin points out that the diary is his project, and Marks says he understands that, but a “big-name dramatist would virtually assure a Broadway success.” Again, it’s difficult to link this conversation to the Stalinist ideology that, Levin claims, engineered his failure. On the other hand it’s all too easy to imagine the unease of potential backers listening to Levin’s plans for the adaptation: “The very origin of our theater was in religious plays of martyrdom…the play, if done, must be a reincarnation. In the persistence of the living spirit each spectator would feel a catharsis. When the spirit reappeared before him, indestructible, the crematorium was negated…I saw the form almost as a ballet, a young girl’s probing, thwarted at each impulsive moment while she strives for self-realization.”
To read Meyer Levin’s adaptation of the diary is to confront the pitfalls of basing a work of art on Big Ideas: martyrdom, reincarnation, self-realization. As Levin’s drama begins, a group of mourners in black raincoats chant the Hebrew prayer for the dead. A narrator, employed throughout to apprise the audience of historical developments—the implementation of the final solution, the construction of the camps at Auschwitz and Treblinka, the German incursions into Russia and Africa, the Allied invasions, as well as the shifts in time between the acts—outlines Otto Frank’s background and his emigration from Frankfurt to Holland.
The prologue opens on an Amsterdam street, outside the Franks’ home. It’s Anne’s thirteenth birthday, and she and her friends, Joop and Lies, are discussing her gifts. The conversation shifts to Anne’s flirtation with a certain Harry Goldberg, and Joop asks if Harry is taking Anne to the Zionist meeting. The girls discuss the restrictions that the Nazis have imposed on the Jews and the dangers of violating curfew. One says, “Quite a triumph, to get yourself sent to the concentration camp in Westerbork for ten minutes extra in the company of Harry Goldberg.”
Otto Frank appears, carrying a parcel that he claims to be giving to Dutch friends for safekeeping from the Nazis. He and Anne discuss the possibility of going into hiding. There’s a long conversation about the onset of menstruation, and Mrs. Frank laughs at Anne for hoping that her first period might arrive as a birthday present. Then the call-up notice comes, spoiling the amiable mood, and Mrs. Frank says, “We must go into hiding at once.”
Cut to the secret annex, where Margot is telling Miep about the guilt she feels for endangering her family by ignoring the summons; she mentions her dream of someday moving to Palestine. The rest of the family arrives, there are intimations of Anne’s conflict with her mother, followed by a romantic scene between Anne and her father in which Anne speaks of her desire to be alone with him in the world.
The entrance of the Van Daans is more artfully handled than in the Goodrich-Hackett version, in which we are meant to accept the preposterous notion that the two families are meeting for the first time. In Levin’s play, as in life, they have a history. There’s a nice moment when Mr. Koophuis asks Mrs. Van Daan to remove her high heels, so as not to make any noise, and she says, “Never let a man choose a house.”
Likewise, when Dussel appears in the second scene, his characterization is closer to what we know of Fritz Pfeffer than is the buffoon who stands in for him in Goodrich and Hackett’s drama. As the others wait for Dussel to show up, Mrs. Van Daan says that she hears he’s the biggest Don Juan of all the dentists in town; perhaps his delayed arrival means his female patients are reluctant to let him go. There’s an argument in which Anne objects to letting Dussel share her room, and another about which books children should be allowed to read—a disagreement that appears in the diary.
The extended debates about spirituality and Palestine (“It’s part of being something more than yourself…. It’s making a free life for ourselves,” says Margot) point out the strength and weakness of Levin’s play. Anne is given at least some of the intelligence she displays in the diary, and which the Goodrich-Hackett heroine lacks. In one scene with Peter, she quotes Plato about men and women having once been united, then splitting into two halves, each struggling to find completion. One can hardly envision the Anne who pouted and pranced her way across the Broadway stage citing The Symposium. Yet the long passages of dialogue with which Levin delineates Anne’s character contribute to the static, discursive—unstageworthy—quality that troubled the producers. One can imagine potential backers cringing when Anne and Peter talk about how to determine the gender of a cat.
Throughout, Levin’s play makes one realize how little “action” is in the diary, and how much is domestic, interior, and psychological. Having failed to discover the rhythm of crisis, danger, and (relative) relaxation that would engage the audiences who attended the Broadway production—a tension that Goodrich and Hackett labored, in draft after draft, to sustain—Levin relies on frequent mentions of Westerbork to create a sense of threat. The break-in downstairs is more discussed than dramatized, though there is one tense moment when a bomb falls nearby.
In a scene between the Franks, Edith—whose piety becomes so oppressive that you can understand what irritated Anne, though this seems not to have been Levin’s intention—wonders if God is punishing them for not having taught the children more about their religious heritage. When Anne announces her plan to write a book entitled The Hiding Place, her sister replies, “I suppose it could be exciting. All the times we’ve been nearly caught, the robbery in the front office, and that nosey plumber”—events that Levin fails to exploit for their drama, though later, during the Hanukkah party, we see two thieves picking the downstairs lock.
For Levin, a long scene in his play—in which Anne explains her religious feelings to Peter—conveys the soul of Anne’s book. In the diary, Anne’s first doubts about Peter, misgivings that upset her even in the heady phase of their romance, occur when he remarks that life would have been easier had he been born Christian. In later entries, Anne’s reservations about Peter often surface following spiritual discussions; she is troubled by his distaste for religion in general, and for Judaism in particular.
Hans, the object of Cady’s romantic feelings in Anne’s novel-in-progress, Cady’s Life, is more religious than she is, and offers her this guidance (in a scene that goes on even longer than the conversation in Levin’s play) when they meet near the sanitarium where she is recuperating:
“When you were at home, leading your carefree life…you just hadn’t given God a lot of thought. Now that you’re turning to Him because you’re frightened and hurt, now that you’re really trying to be the person you think you ought to be, surely God won’t let you down. Have faith in Him, Cady. He has helped so many others.”
One can imagine Levin being less than thrilled by the pantheistic (or animistic) beliefs that Hans expresses: “If you’re asking what God is, my answer would be: Take a look around you, at the flowers, the trees, the animals, the people, and then you’ll know what God is. Those wondrous things that live and die and reproduce themselves, all that we refer to as nature—that’s God.” In fact, this conflation of nature with God runs close to the core of what Anne appears to have believed during her final months in the annex.
In any case, if Anne and Peter’s extended metaphysical discourse seemed less gripping to others than it did to Levin, that may have had less to do with his play’s “excessive Jewishness” than with the producers’ pragmatic realization that, if an audience is going to watch two teenagers on stage, it’s not because they’re having a conversation about God.
Like the play that ran on Broadway, Levin’s drama ends with the quote about people being good at heart, but, unlike the Goodrich-Hackett version, it puts the line back in context, amid the dialectic between Anne’s hope and her terror that the world will turn into a wilderness. The stage goes dark, the sounds of combat come up.
“End of the diary,” declares the narrator. The stage directions specifiy that the battle noises grow louder, but reading the play, one may be more likely to hear the responses of the producers to whom Levin showed his drama: Dark. Depressing. Jewish. Gloomy. Insufficiently universal. The polar opposite of commercial.
EVEN if Cheryl Crawford had admired Levin’s script, it would have been hard for her to ignore the siren song playing in everyone’s ears. Lillian Hellman believed they could get a playwright who was not only more famous but classier than Meyer Levin.
Among the classiest names being mentioned was that of Carson McCullers, who had adapted her novel, The Member of the Wedding, for the stage, to great success and acclaim. The fact that its heroine was a teenage girl was one of the reasons, Barbara Zimmerman told Otto Frank, why McCullers was the perfect choice. Frank Price, at whose Doubleday Paris office the diary had been rescued from the rejection pile, contacted McCullers, then living in France with her husband, Reeve.
Carson McCullers wrote Otto Frank, “I think I have never felt such love and wonder and grief. There is no consolation to know that a Mozart, a Keats, a Chekov is murdered in their years of childhood. But, dear, dear Mr. Frank, Anne, who has had that…gift of genius and humanity has, through her roots of unspeakable misery, given the world an enduring and incomparable flower. Mr. Frank, I know there is no consolation, but I want you to know that I grieve with you—as millions of others now and in the future grieve. Over and over in these days I have played a gramophone record of the posthumous sonnets of Schubert. To me it has become Anne’s music…I can’t write an eloquent letter but my heart and my husband’s heart is filled with love.” She added that she hadn’t given much thought to the idea of writing a play based on the book. “I have only read the diary and am too overwhelmed to go any further.”
Otto and his second wife, Fritzi, visited Carson and Reeve. Soon after, McCullers wrote Fritzi, “We have no formal religion but there are times when one understands a sense of radiance—and that feeling was with us when Otto was in our home. What is this radiance, this love? I don’t know, I only want to offer our joy that you and Otto are united and this carries all our love to you.”
Two months later, Carson McCullers decided not to proceed with the project. “In spite of our deep feeling about Anne’s diary, it requires more technique in the theater than I can command…You see it is different doing a solitary work—that is all I have done—than adaptation on others’ books. Consequently I feel the result might lead to unhappiness to all concerned.” Later, she would claim she feared that immersing herself in the diary might damage her already fragile health, and that the mere prospect of it had caused her to break out in hives.
In April 1953, Cheryl Crawford, alarmed by Levin’s increasingly litigious threats and demoralized by the financial loss she’d sustained staging Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, withdrew from the negotiations. That fall, Kermit Bloomgarden signed on to produce. Though Bloomgarden showed little interest in Levin’s adaptation, Levin behaved as if Bloomgarden’s involvement signaled a new beginning. When Levin realized that Bloomgarden was not the ally he had hoped, his behavior further deteriorated. In a letter to Otto, Levin claimed that his passion for his play was exactly like Otto’s feelings for his daughter, and expressed his conviction that neither the play nor the child should have been killed “by the Nazis or their equivalent.”
It was around this time that Bloomgarden first contacted the husband-and-wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They’d had glamorous careers in Hollywood, where their hits had included Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Virginian, and Easter Parade. “The Hacketts of Hollywood,” Levin called them. They’d come with the highest credentials, recommended by Lillian Hellman who, as we have seen, felt that the diary needed just the sort of light touch that the Hacketts could provide. As the authors of Father of the Bride, they had demonstrated their ability to write about adolescents, just as the experience they’d had in doctoring the script of It’s a Wonderful Life had proved that they were able to brighten “dark material.” Who could balance charm and suspense? The adapters of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.
Goodrich and Hackett hesitated, but were at last persuaded by the possibility of leavening the tragic story with “moments of lovely comedy which heighten the desperate, tragic situation of the people.” They saw it as a “tremendous responsibility” and were flattered by the invitation to be associated with a book that a major figure like Lillian Hellman considered serious literature. They even agreed to take a pay cut and to accept a fee far below that which they were accustomed to receiving for screenplays. In fact, they were working “on spec,” an almost unheard-of situation for professionals of their stature. They would get a thousand dollars if, and only if, Bloomgarden picked up the script.
They wrote Otto Frank to say that they felt honored to have been chosen to bring his daughter’s spirit and courage to the stage, and Otto wrote back, pleased that they had been so moved by the diary and offering his help. The Hacketts were less successful with their conciliatory note to Meyer Levin, which elicited a four-page, single-spaced disquisition on how badly he had been treated. When the Hacketts began their research, visiting Jewish bookstores and a rabbi in Los Angeles, the frosty receptions they received made them worry that Meyer Levin had managed to turn the community against them.
On January 13, Meyer Levin placed the following paid advertisement in the New York Post:
A Challenge to Kermit Bloomgarden
Is it right for you to kill a play that others find deeply moving, and are eager to produce?
When you secured the stage rights to Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl you knew I had already dramatized the book, but you appointed new adapters…and shoved my play aside. The Diary is dear to many hearts, yours, mine, and the public’s. There is a responsibility to see that what may be the right adaptation is not cast away.
I challenge you to hold a test reading of my play before an audience.
A plea to my readers.
If you ever read anything of mine…if you have faith in me as a writer, I ask your help. Write to Mr. Frank and request this test.
My work has been with the Jewish story. I tried to dramatize the diary as Anne would have, in her own words. The test I ask cannot hurt eventual production from her book. To refuse shows only a fear my play may prove right. To kill it in such a case would be unjust to the Diary itself.
The question is basic: who shall judge? I feel my work has earned the right to be judged by you, the public.
Write or send this ad to Otto Frank…as a vote for a fair hearing before my play is killed.
Levin’s plea had the unintended effect of finally alienating Otto. Bloomgarden wrote the Hacketts, telling them that he would refuse to dignify Levin’s challenge with a reply. As further evidence of Levin’s disreputable character, Bloomgarden cited the fact that Levin had reviewed, in the New York Times, a book that he was representing, as its agent.
The Hacketts began work on the play. Writing eight drafts would involve great strain for both writers, elicit copious tears from Goodrich (weeping she ascribed to guilt over not having known and done more about what happened to Anne and others like her), and spark numerous marital squabbles, some private, some public. In addition, they wondered whether, at a time when the United States was interested in cultivating Germany as an ally in the Cold War and as a market for American investment abroad, anyone would want to stage a drama that accused the Germans.
They scrapped the second draft when they realized that their fear of making the characters unsympathetic had kept them from making them human. Encouraged by having found an apparently workable ending, they sent their fourth draft to Bloomgarden and Hellman, both of whom hated it. Their spirits were further dampened by a letter from Otto Frank, who said that he could not approve a play that ignored Anne’s idealism, her moral vision, and her desire to help mankind. Oddly, what Otto seems to have wanted was something more like Meyer Levin’s rejected version. Otto complained about the “snappish” characterization of Margot, criticized the downplaying of Anne’s friction with her mother, and doubted that their adaptation would appeal to young people.
Meanwhile, royalties from the sales of the book had allowed Otto and Fritzi to move to Switzerland, where some of Otto’s family lived, having taken refuge there before the war. Despite his reservations about the Hacketts’ early efforts, he was relieved that the project was going forward. He reconciled himself to the fact that some of the changes he proposed—during the Hanukkah scene, the men should wear hats—were approved, while others—the actors should sing the solemn, traditional hymn in Hebrew rather than the raucous party song in English—were ignored. Bloomgarden also chose not to follow Otto’s suggestion that the theater program contain a note stating that the play was based on actual events. Later, Otto would hear from a Dutch acquaintance that at one performance she had sat beside an American woman who had seen the play three times without having any idea that the actors were portraying real people.
Otto’s fragile peace was regularly broken by progressively more disturbing communications from Meyer Levin. For a while, Otto continued to defend himself on the subject of the play’s Jewish content, but later, probably on the advice of his lawyer, he circulated a statement expressing his confidence in his own ability to interpret and stand up for his daughter’s ideals and example.
Levin was unconvinced. He wrote to Otto questioning his right to decide how Anne would have wanted to be portrayed, accusing him of foisting his own interpretation on an unsuspecting public, and invoking Anne’s hatred of injustice to suggest that she might have sided with Levin, the victim of injustice, against her father, the perpetrator. Though he admitted that Otto might have known her as a daughter, Levin insisted that Otto could not have known her as Levin did, the way one writer knows another. That deeper intimacy, Levin claimed, should give him the right to decide—in Anne’s name—who should adapt her diary. And he was the person to do it.
Meanwhile, Otto continued to send amiable letters to Levin’s wife, who seems to have hoped, as did Otto, that the two friends could be reconciled. Levin responded with the most direct attack so far, claiming that Otto’s treatment of him was typical of the “cavalier” way in which Otto used and discarded his allies; Levin cited the example of one of the diary’s early translators, whose work Otto had decided against.
Even as we recoil from Levin’s claim to speak for Anne, something keeps compelling us to see things from his side, or at least to understand what made it so hard for him to give up. In his writings, he repeatedly emphasizes that he was present when the camps were liberated, and that the memory of the dead prevents him from standing by and witnessing Anne’s transformation into just another teenage girl. But of course Otto Frank also had direct experience of the camps, not as a liberator, but as a prisoner—a fact that Meyer Levin appeared to forget as his obsession spun further out of control.
IN September 1954, as they struggled with the fifth draft of the play, the Hacketts consulted Lillian Hellman, who made a number of structural suggestions that Frances Goodrich called “brilliant.” Garson Kanin, whose triumphs included the popular Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy films Woman of the Year and Adam’s Rib, and the Broadway hit Born Yesterday, was hired to direct. It was Kanin’s idea to end the play with Anne’s statement about people being good at heart and to ramp up the tension by adding threatening noises—footsteps, sirens—from outside the attic.
Kanin advised Goodrich and Hackett to eliminate a conversation in which Peter expresses his outrage at the fact that they are suffering because they are Jews, to which Anne replies that, throughout history, Jews have always had to suffer. Kanin reminded the playwrights that every minority has experienced its share of persecution, and that for Anne to single out the Jews “reduces her magnificent stature.” Without such “embarrassing…special pleading…the play has an opportunity to spread its wings into the infinite.”
The Hacketts continued to produce drafts that disappointed Bloomgarden, who advised them that the romance with Peter was not intense enough, that the Anne they’d created was not enough like George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc, that the character of Mrs. Van Daan was insufficiently shrewish, that Anne’s relationship with her father needed to be more loving, and that they were turning Anne into a sour and pessimistic young woman. First the Hacketts were told that their play was too dark, and then that it was not dark enough.
In the fall of 1954, they met Garson Kanin in London, and the three of them spent long days collaborating on yet another draft. In December, they visited Otto Frank in Amsterdam for a week that Frances Goodrich described as “very harrowing.”
“I thought I could not cry more than I had,” she wrote. “But I have had a week of tears.” A photo shows the playwrights, Kanin, Otto Frank, Johannes Kleiman, and Elfriede Frank standing in front of 263 Prinsengracht. Kleiman and Fritzi wait patiently in the background, while their American visitors look suitably chastened and ennobled by the chance to walk in the footsteps of the girl who had so inspired them.
Dispatched to do research at the secret annex, a photographer documented every inch of the attic. Recordings were made of ambient street noise and the Westertoren bells. Goodrich described stretching out her arms in the room that Anne had shared with the dentist, while Kanin noticed that one of the pictures Anne had on her wall was a still photo of Ginger Rogers in Tom, Dick and Harry, a film he’d directed. Clearly, the project was meant to be.
Though the pictures on the walls of Anne’s room are occasionally rotated by the museum staff, the postcards, snapshots, and newspaper clips that decorate the room today are more or less the same ones that the American theater people must have seen. Yet the finished play suggests that the Hacketts and Garson Kanin factored only a few of those images into their version of Anne. They captured the starstruck Ginger Rogers fan, the giddy teen with a fondness for the royal princesses and Deanna Durbin, but seem to have missed the ironic humor of the child amused by the chimpanzee tea party, as well as the adolescent eroticism of the girl drawn to the languid Jesus in Michelangelo’s Pietà.
Their understanding of Otto was equally skewed and incomplete. “In all my meetings with him,” Kanin said of Otto Frank, “he was unhurried, casual, old-worldish. He talked about the hide-out and the arrest without an ounce of emotion. ‘This is a cold fish,’ I told the Hacketts.” But Kanin changed his opinion on learning that Otto had collapsed after the American theater people left Amsterdam. “He had been crushed, but he had not shown it. He had been as he had been in the days when the Gestapo was outside the door—a tiny, tiny, modern miniature Moses. If he had shown a moment’s fear then, the whole annex would have crashed down.”
A few weeks after Kanin’s trip to Amsterdam, Meyer Levin, who had found a lawyer willing to take his case, filed suit in New York State Supreme Court against Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank, charging them with breach of contract. He sought a monetary award of $72,500 from Crawford, while from Frank he asked that they forget the damage each had inflicted on the other and return to the point at which it had been understood that Levin would write the adaptation. Otto sent the Hacketts a reassuring letter. How this would have upset Anne, Otto wrote—Anne, who, like him, hated quarrels.
Otto Frank’s lawyer managed to have the suit set aside (but not dismissed) on a technicality: the summons could not be delivered to Otto, who was in Switzerland. Levin suffered an emotional collapse, but nonetheless found the strength to send Otto a letter vowing to fight the production, a struggle he compared to the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
MEANWHILE, in New York, the play was being cast. Joseph Schildkraut was chosen to play Otto, despite some hesitation on the part of Bloomgarden, who—according to Schildkraut—could not dispel his impression of the actor as the “flamboyant and dashing” character he had played in previous roles. In her New York Times piece about the production, Frances Goodrich reports having noted, on first meeting Otto Frank, his “uncanny” resemblance to Schildkraut. Susan Strasberg was picked for Anne, while Mrs. Frank would be played by Gusti Huber, an Austrian actress alleged to have acted in Nazi propaganda films. (Echoes from the Past, a documentary about the making of the 1959 Hollywood version of The Diary of Anne Frank that appears as supplemental material on the DVD, explains that Schildkraut and Huber, who re-created their stage roles on screen, were both Austrian and both “had first-hand experience of Nazi anti-Semitism.”)
Alarmed by the rumors about Huber, the Hacketts wrote Otto Frank, who replied that his Viennese wife had not heard of Huber but was curious about her. Otto seems not to have followed through on his offer to inquire further into Huber’s background.
Dennis Hopper was the Hacketts’ first choice for the role of Peter, but Warner Brothers, with whom Hopper was under contract, insisted that he remain on the set of Giant, where he was being considered as a replacement for the temperamental James Dean. Lou Jacobi was brought in to play Mr. Van Daan, and Jack Gilford was cast as the dentist, Dussel.
Rehearsals began in late August, and at the first run-through, Kanin gave his actors an inspirational talk. “This is not a play in which you are going to make individual hits. You are real people, living a thing that really happened.”
This hortatory speech had only a limited effect on his cast. Strasberg was, it was felt, an ingenue-diva, childish, spoiled, and reluctant to take direction, while Schildkraut had problems tamping his ego down enough to play the gentle, mild-mannered Otto. Initially, the actor resisted the suggestion that he shave his leonine hair so that he would more closely resemble the balding Mr. Frank, but subsequently discovered that this blow to his vanity provided the key that gave him access to Otto’s character. Kanin used his insight into Otto Frank as a “tiny, tiny miniature modern Moses” in the direction he gave Schildkraut. “I told him also, you, too, can collapse the way Mr. Frank did, but only after the curtain comes down. We worked out a Mr. Frank who does not show how he feels. But we hope the audience will sense his strength.”
The playwrights and the director were troubled by problems with the second act and worried by unpromising advance ticket sales. “Both Kermit and Gar talked their heads off,” Goodrich confided in her diary. “No good. Too serious.”
They decided to increase the suspense in the second act by inventing a fictional scene in which Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread. This plot turn aroused Otto Frank’s fervent objections, to which no one paid much attention. What disturbed him was not so much its lack of veracity or plausibility, but rather the fact that his former business associate, friend, and roommate had living relatives whose feelings might be hurt.
A few days before The Diary of Anne Frank opened on Broadway, New York Times reporter Bernard Kalb helped theatergoers understand what they were about to see. The play, he wrote, is “partly” an account of eight Jews in hiding. “Mostly, though, it is the story of one of them—a young girl who refused to be robbed of the adventure of adolescence.” Most of the article draws on an interview with Garson Kanin, in which Kanin describes the trip to see the secret annex and to meet Otto Frank in Amsterdam, and explains why Anne exits smiling. “Well, it seems that Anne’s first reaction on finally leaving the annex was one of joy. At last, she was in the sunshine.” Moreover, he says, when Otto Frank last saw his daughter, on the train on which she was being sent to Bergen-Belsen, she was smiling and waving at the crowd of men, hoping her father might see her.
“ That’s the way I last saw her,’ Kanin claims Otto remembered. “Smiling and waving. She never knew that I saw her.’” Kanin continues, “I told this, the last eye-witness account of Anne, to Susan, and that’s why Anne is smiling when we last see her. I couldn’t have thought that up. It would never have occurred to me. Yet that is the essence of Anne.”
As we know, this was hardly the last sighting of Anne. A production that ended with the reports of the women who saw the emaciated, dying girl at Bergen-Belsen would have been a different play from the one Kanin was directing, which was “not a war play, or even a sad play.” As Kanin told the Times reporter, “This play makes use of elements having mainly to do with human courage, faith, brotherhood, love and self-sacrifice. We discovered as we went deeper and deeper that it was a play about what Shaw called ‘the life force.’ Anne Frank was certainly killed, but she was never defeated.”
The play opened at the Cort Theater on October 5, 1955. Otto Frank declined to attend the premiere because he feared that it would be too painful to see himself, his wife, and his children portrayed on stage. In addition he had been warned by his lawyers to stay out of New York to avoid being served with a legal summons. As a consequence of Meyer Levin’s lawsuit, all of Otto Frank’s royalties had been put into escrow until the case was settled.
The drama was not only a critical, but also a popular, success. It ran for 717 performances over nearly two years, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.
Meyer Levin stood outside the circle cast by the brilliant spotlight that could have shone on him. He continued to write abusive letters to Otto Frank, equating the fate of his play with that of the murdered Jews. In December 1956, he again filed suit in the supreme court of New York, this time seeking $200,000 in damages and adding charges of plagiarism to his previous claims of breach of contract. Once again, the contradictions and confusions surrounding the diary in general—and Levin’s case in particular—surfaced as Levin, who had been arguing that the play was a travesty of the diary, now insisted that it was based too closely on his adaptation.
Even as the judge dismissed the charges of fraud and breach of contract, he allowed a jury to determine the validity of the plagiarism charges. They ruled that Levin should receive $50,000 from Kermit Bloomgarden and Otto Frank. The verdict was set aside by the court, sensibly ruling that plagiarism was difficult to determine when the works in question were based on a common source. Eventually, after Eleanor Roosevelt had offered and then withdrawn her support for Levin, a settlement was reached, and Otto agreed to pay Meyer Levin $15,000. But still Levin kept writing to Otto, charging him with having returned evil for good and having betrayed his daughter. Which is the image that we’re left with at the end of this painful story: a man possessed and maddened enough to write such letters, and a bereaved father receiving them, until at last he reached the point at which he refused to read any more.
LIKE Meyer Levin’s adaptation, the Goodrich-Hackett play begins with a prologue, though here it serves as half of a framing device that book-ends the central action. The war is over. Broken, widowed, and childless, Otto Frank returns to the attic and, as the Dutch helpers look on, he begins to read aloud from the diary that Miep has just given him. In concert with Otto’s, we hear Anne’s voice, and then her voice takes over, describing the prohibitions, the special schools, the yellow stars, the events that occurred when “things got very bad for the Jews.”
Shouldn’t this have reassured Levin that Jewish religious and historical context had not entirely disappeared? In fact, the Hacketts went to such pains to explain the reason for the Franks’ incarceration that what is integrated and organic in the diary seems awkwardly expository in the drama. But how could the Hacketts have told the story without Judaism and the final solution? What else were the Franks, the Van Daans, and Dussel doing in the secret annex? Regardless of what song they sing at the Hanukkah party, regardless of what language they sing it in, regardless of whether Anne laments the persecution of her people or of all people, we are never unaware that the characters onstage are Jews.
When Dussel arrives, we hear (as we do in the diary) that Jews are being rounded up and deported. But a note of unreality creeps into the drama whenever there is a mention of life beyond the attic walls. In the diary, the residents know perfectly well that they are condemned to stay in the attic for the duration of the war. But in the play there’s some talk of the dentist remaining only until he can find somewhere else to go, just as later, after the scene in which Mr. Van Daan is caught stealing bread, Mrs. Frank suggests that the Van Daans find another hiding place. All of which makes it sound as if they are facing an extreme sort of housing crisis rather than trying to save their lives by evading the Gestapo.
If the scene in the Goodrich-Hackett play that most troubled Meyer Levin was the one in which Anne’s observation about the sufferings of the Jews was generalized to include the sufferings of the human race, I’d nominate another episode as the drama’s most distressing moment. It occurs early on, and involves our introduction to Anne. Poor Anne, so conscious of her self-presentation as she rewrote her diary to reflect the way in which she wished to be perceived! How embarrassed she would have been to learn that practically the first thing we see her do is remove her underpants, in full view of her fellow actors and the audience. When her mother objects, she replies that she has several more pairs underneath.
Like so many others, Meyer Levin seems not to have noticed that, if Anne’s spirituality has been omitted, so has nearly everything else about her. Judaism is only one feature that was altered in the makeover that left the character of Anne Frank virtually unrecognizable as the author of the diary. On the page, she is brilliant; on the stage she’s a nitwit. In the book, she is the most gifted and sharp-sighted person in the annex; in the play, she’s the naive baby whom the others indulge and protect. For all her talk about being treated like a child and not knowing who she was, Anne saw herself as an adult and the others as children. In the drama, those relations have been reversed. Anne is always needing the obvious explained; she’s invariably the slowest to grasp the dangers and necessities of their new life. A preteen trickster, she can’t stop playing pranks, hiding Peter’s shoes and saying lines like, “You are the most intolerable, insufferable boy I’ve ever met!” How the real Anne Frank would have cringed at the scene of her spilling milk on Mrs. Van Daan’s precious fur coat, and how that brave girl would have railed against being shown fainting from terror when thieves break in downstairs.
Most critiques of the play, Levin’s included, seem narrowly focused and myopic, oblivious to the ways in which Anne had been turned into a silly and shallow version of herself. Seriousness and humor were equally important to Anne, who by all accounts was a funny girl. But one can’t quite imagine her being arch and kittenish, as she so often is in the drama.
For all the attention given to the question of what hymn would be sung at the Hanukkah party, scant mention has been made of the fact that Anne attends the celebration with a lampshade on her head. People who knew Anne describe her as a chatterbox and a showoff, and in her diary, she portrays herself that way. But no one has ever suggested that she was stupid, which is the impression created by scene after scene. It’s hard to picture the real Anne exclaiming the Dutch or German equivalent of “Whee!”, which, in the drama, is the sound she makes at the end of the workday when the annex residents are released from having to tiptoe around in their socks. In the script, many of Anne’s lines end with an exclamation point.
The process of coming to take one’s self seriously as a writer may be even less dramatic than that of embracing one’s identity as a Jew, and yet one can’t help wishing that the greatness of the diary itself—and the value that Anne placed on her work—had somehow been evoked to counterbalance her youth and innocence. In life, she received the diary several weeks before her family vanished from their old life. But in the play, she’s given the journal when they are already in the annex. It’s not the tweaking of history that grates so much as Anne’s (and her family’s) response. Delighted by the gift, she’s all ready to run downstairs to get a pencil so she can start writing when her mother forbids her to go to the office. Only then, the stage directions tell us, does Anne understand what it means to have gone into hiding, when in fact we can assume that Anne grasped the implications when her father first mentioned the possibility.
Anne’s response to a conversation about burning the diary to protect their helpers (“If my diary goes, I go with it!”) is given, in the play, to Peter to say about his cat. (In the film, the line is restored to Anne to say about her diary, so that both Anne and Peter say, “If it goes, I go with it,” a repetition that equates a literary masterpiece with a noisy pet.) When Anne tells Kitty that she wants to go on living after her death and wonders if she will ever be able to write well enough, the honest answer—were one to judge solely from the evidence offered by the play—would be a dubious maybe.
What could the girl we see in the play manage to write? When she reads aloud from her journal, stalls and ellipses interrupt every cogent reflection or opinion. The prodigiously articulate author can hardly utter a sentence without pausing to collect her scattered thoughts, none of them especially incisive. The pointed accuracy of her observations has been blunted, the delicacy of her perceptions has everywhere been coarsened. The beautiful line about Margot lacking the nonchalance for conducting deep discussions reappears in the play as a banal complaint about her older sister taking everything too seriously.
Anne’s intriguing contradictions have been simplified out of existence. The diary’s final entry, in which she writes about the gap between her inner and outer selves and speculates about what she could become…“if there weren’t any other people living in the world” has been edited to remove the part about other people. Now her existential fantasy trails off. “…Some day, when we’re outside again, I’m going to…” Going to what? Of course, she doesn’t know. This Anne is a people person. Why would she wish to live in a world without all the entertaining characters with whom she is imprisoned?
Not only did the Hacketts de-emphasize Anne’s spiritual and intellectual life, but they also showed scant interest in her moral development, that aspect of the diary that so impressed John Berryman: the conversion of a child into a person. In the play she remains a child, if an erotically awakened one. But what besides time itself, a romance, and some scares about burglaries could have helped her grow? The nightmares to which Berryman attached such importance—the visions of loved ones lost or abandoned to terrible fates, of her friend Lies and her grandmother—must have been considered way too dark. They’ve been replaced by a generic bad dream from which Anne wakes up screaming, “No! No! Don’t take me!”
And finally there is the line that has come in for so much criticism for its role in distorting our view of Anne and of her diary. “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart!” It appears not just once but twice in the play. We hear it when Anne tells Peter that the world is “going through a phase, the way I was with Mother. It’ll pass, maybe not for hundreds of years, but some day…I still believe, in spite of everything…” And it is repeated in the final scene, when Otto has returned to the deserted annex. After paging through the diary for the inspirational sentiment, which Anne intones in a voice-over, Otto adds, “She puts me to shame.” In one especially vituperative letter to Otto, Meyer Levin called that the only accurate line in the drama.
Even as the principals involved in the Broadway production battled over Anne’s Jewishness, even as Meyer Levin claimed to speak for her as a fellow writer, there was no one to fight for an accurate representation of Anne’s brilliance and her gifts as an artist. But why would anyone, really? She was only a girl who kept a diary for the last two years of her life.
NONE of this seemed to bother the critics who helped make the play an instant success. In the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote that “they have made a lovely, tender drama out of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’…they have treated it with admiration and respect…Out of the truth of a human being has come a delicate, rueful, moving drama.”
Ten days later, again in the New York Times, Atkinson rethought—and heightened—the praise he’d already given the play. “There is only one way to account for the soft radiance of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ The play and the performance are inspired. At rare intervals along Broadway, something happens that puts the theater on its mettle and animates everyone into doing a little more than he is capable of doing. A dream of impossible perfection drives everyone into lifting himself up by his bootstraps. Something in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ has had that happy effect.”
Newsweek’s summary lauded “the punch of plain, poignant truth.” A positive but peculiar notice in the New Yorker contained the following passage: “I can think of no criticism of anything the authors have done, except possibly a tendency toward the end to make their adolescent heroine just a shade more consciously literary and firmly inspirational than either her age or her indicated character would appear to warrant. I have not read the book, however, and it may well be that the quotations that bothered me were taken from it verbatim, since, as I am well aware, most young ladies have their flowery moments. The fault, in any case, is slight, and I think the play on the whole is magnificent.”
Only a few critics would remark on what had been lost in the course of Anne’s coronation as a Broadway princess. Writing in Commentary, Algene Ballif noted that, “If the diary of Anne Frank is remarkable for any one thing, it is for the way in which she is able to command our deepest seriousness about everything she is going through—the way she makes us forget she is an adolescent and makes us wish that this way of experiencing life were not so soon lost by some of us, and much sooner found by most of us. Ironically for her, the Anne Frank on Broadway cannot command our seriousness, for all Anne’s true seriousness—her honesty, intelligence, and inner strength—has been left out of the script…. If we in America cannot present her with the respect and integrity and seriousness she deserves, then I think we should not try to present her at all. Not all adolescents, even in America, are the absurd young animals we know from stage and screen…. Anne Frank was not the American adolescent, as Hackett and Goodrich would have us believe. She was an unaffected young girl, uniquely alive, and self-aware—experiencing more, and in a better way perhaps, than most of us do in a lifetime.”
A year after its Broadway debut, the play opened in Germany, where critic Kenneth Tynan observed this response at the end of the performance. “The house lights went up on an audience that sat drained and ashen, some staring straight ahead, others staring at the ground, for a full half-minute. Then as if awakening from a nightmare they rose and filed out in total silence, not looking at each other, avoiding even the customary blinks of recognition with which friend greets friend. There was no applause, and there were no curtain calls.” A rather less wholehearted reaction was recorded by Theodor Adorno, who reported that, after seeing the drama, one German woman said, “Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live.”
Sales of the book spiked in Germany and throughout Europe in the wake of the play’s popularity. Perhaps the Anne of the diary was, despite the cuts and edits that had been made for the German edition, still too complicated, too Jewish—and too angry—for the Germans to embrace. But the conciliatory, hopeful, “universal” and dumbed-down Anne made that embrace possible, and Anne quickly became an object of devotion. A memorial plaque now marks the house in Frankfurt where she lived as a small child, and, in 1957, two thousand young Germans made a quasireligious pilgrimage to leave flowers on the mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, where Anne is believed to be buried.
Performed in schools, community centers, and summer theaters, the play has acquainted countless audiences with Anne Frank and her tragic plight, and has helped steer thousands of readers back to the diary; to a lesser extent, this is also true of the Hollywood film based on the drama. Less happily, the play has, for many people, become the diary. In classrooms throughout this country and the world, it is taught to students for whom the flighty, mindless stage Anne becomes the only Anne Frank.
And yet there is no denying the effect that the play has on its audiences. I remember seeing the original Broadway production, which meant that I had to have been between eight and ten years old. I was already a passionate fan of the diary, which is how I know how young I was when I first read it. I remember watching the play, feeling that Anne’s diary had been brought to life and being so moved that I wept. I remember that the audience was weeping, and that I felt (though I would not have known how to express it then) that a private and personal experience had become a communal one. I could not have been more grateful to have found a theater full of people who shared my admiration and pity for this remarkable girl, and my passion, however childish, for her work.
IN 1997, Anne Frank returned to Broadway, in a new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman. Approached by producers Amy Nederlander and David Stone and by director James Lapine, Kesselman undertook the commission because, she says, “I wanted to restore the truth” to the way that Anne had been portrayed onstage. By then, the publication of the 1995 Definitive Edition had brought the diary new attention, and those involved in the project wanted to provide a more nuanced and complete picture of Anne’s character and achievement.
Kesselman’s initial idea was that her version would closely follow Goodrich and Hackett’s, with only the “frame”—the prologue and epilogue in which Otto revisits the attic—eliminated. But as she reread the diary, she decided that more needed to be done, a decision complicated by the fact that the copyright specified that no more than 10 percent of the original 1955 play could be altered.
In fact, Kesselman’s adaptation is more faithful to the diary than its predecessor. Anne’s voice, her intelligence, and her spirit come through more clearly, and there are longer passages read verbatim from her journal. Anne’s references to her physicality—and to her memory of touching another girl’s breasts—have been restored. This time, we hear the radio speech by Minister Bolkestein that inspired Anne to think that her diary might be published and to hope that she might grow up to become a writer. The historical and religious contexts have been clarified, as has the threat of what being arrested will mean to the annex residents. We listen to the voice of SS leader Rauter ordering that the Netherlands be cleansed of Jews. (The fact that only a small percentage of Dutch Jews survived was, claims Kesselman, a “revelation” that changed, for her, the popularly held notion that the entire Dutch population was either hiding Jews or working for the Resistance.)
The minor characters are more rounded and more persuasive, and Mrs. Van Daan is given a touching speech about how she fell in love with her husband. In an early public reading of Kesselman’s version, Linda Lavin, who played Mrs. Van Daan, was moved to tears the first time she read the passage.
“She doesn’t do that very often,” an agent is said to have dryly commented.
Anne’s belief in the goodness of the human heart has been retained, but returned to what Cynthia Ozick termed its “bed of thorns.” The lines about the world being transformed into a wilderness and the suffering of millions are the last we hear from Anne in the play, which ends with Otto informing the audience of how the others perished and how Hanneli saw Anne, naked, her head shaved, ridden with lice, shortly before she died of typhus. Unlike Goodrich-Hackett’s, Kesselman’s adaptation makes it difficult for the audience to remain in doubt about what happened to Anne.
But finally a play is only a script, a blueprint, and much depends on the quality of the production. In the spring of 2007, a staging of Kesselman’s version, directed by Tina Landau at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, seems to have maximized its potential.
Responses to the 1997 Broadway production were more mixed. New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley was quite taken by the leading actress: “To see Natalie Portman on the stage of the Music Box Theater is to understand what Proust meant when he spoke of girls in flower. Ms. Portman, a film actress making her Broadway debut, is only sixteen, and despite her precocious resume, she gives off a pure rosebud freshness that can’t be faked. There is ineffable grace in her awkwardness, and her very skin seems to glow with the promise of miraculous transformation.”
Others were less convinced. Writing in Commentary, Molly Magid Hoagland noted, “Despite the changes, this is still the sentimental play about a luminous, flirtatious, idealistic Anne Frank that made the critics swoon 40 years ago.” In many cases, the critics’ disappointment focused on Portman, who appears to have taken too literally the stage directions to run and jump, to fling her arms around her father’s neck and prance about. Also in the New York Times, Vincent Canby called Portman’s performance “earnestly artificial, having been directed to behave in a fashion that might have embarrassed even Sandra Dee’s Gidget. Ms. Portman seems never to walk if she could skip; when she lies on the floor, tummy down, heels up, writing in her beloved diary, her little feet are forever kicking back and forth like a 4-year-old girl’s. The girl we see has no relation to the thoughts she speaks, either in person or as prerecorded narration.” And Portman’s own statement, in an interview, that the play “is funny, it’s hopeful, and she’s a happy person” seems to have been at least partly what raised Cynthia Ozick’s psychic temperature to the boiling point at which she wrote “Who Owns Anne Frank?”
For Ozick, Otto Frank is to blame for being “complicit in this shallowly upbeat view,” for emphasizing Anne’s idealism and her spirit and “almost never calling attention to how and why that idealism and spirit were smothered, and unfailingly generalizing the sources of hatred.” To which the reader can only respond by wishing that the sources of hatred were not as generalized as indeed they are. If only the perpetrators and the victims of prejudice were forever limited to Germans and Jews.
Once more, Anne’s diary, and the circumstances surrounding it, have given rise to a paradox. Perhaps Otto Frank was right to doubt the wisdom of dramatizing his daughter’s work. Perhaps he should have listened to his instincts and resisted the lure of money, fame, and—more important from Otto’s point of view—a greatly expanded audience for Anne’s book. And yet that audience was, to some extent, generated by the play and the film. We cannot estimate how many readers the play has created for the diary, how many people would never have sought out the book had they not seen the drama first, how many students would never have heard of the diary had the theatrical versions not brought it wider acclaim. In fact, only after the play and the film appeared did the diary begin to be widely adopted as a classroom text.
Though not everyone would agree, one could argue that, in this case, the end result justified the means. Regardless of how the play and the film distorted Anne Frank into a bubbleheaded messenger of redemption, regardless of how she was stripped of her religion and ethnicity, robbed of her genius, removed from history and recast as a ditsy teen, the play and the film steered millions of readers back to the diary, which would always remain the diary, no matter how it was misrepresented. As Molly Magid Hoagland wisely pointed out, “There is no need to rely on Broadway, or any intermediary, for a true sense of the brilliant bundle of contradictions that was Anne Frank. Anyone who has a mind to can still turn to the work that Miep Gies rescued and that Otto Frank, despite misgivings, and to his everlasting credit, brought into the light of day. In its pages, in whatever edition, his daughter has always spoken for herself.”
Two years after the play’s Broadway run, Natalie Portman wrote, in Time magazine, about the difference those two years had made in her reading of the diary, a change that one can’t help wishing had occurred before she took on the role. “At 16, when I portrayed Anne on Broadway, it was her flaws—vanity, overexcitability, and quickness to fight—that interested me the most. And now, upon my most recent perusal just weeks before my 18th birthday, I am struck most strongly by her introspection, solitude, perfect self-awareness and sense of purpose…The beauty and truth of her words have transcended the limits placed upon her life by the darkness of human nature.”