In the mid-1960s, there were two kinds of young actors working in New York theater: the type that Hollywood’s East Coast casting directors thought were handsome enough to recruit for movies and the type that weren’t. Those in the first group— square-jawed, symmetrically attractive men like George Peppard, James Farentino, and John Phillip Law—were approached by the studios early in their stage careers and in many cases signed multifilm contracts and were thrown into one movie after another to see if the transplant would take. In rare instances, as was the case with Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, the bet paid off well enough to justify all the times that it didn’t. The second tier of actor was understood to be a victim of genetic bad luck, someone who, whatever his talent, could never be groomed or reshaped or prettified into a movie star and was left behind to ply his trade in New York. The studios assumed that actors who looked or sounded like Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight, and Alan Arkin would be of little interest to the American public; they might be useful in a comic or supporting role now and then, but nothing more.
Dustin Hoffman was in a third category: He was the kind of actor who couldn’t get work at all. Hoffman had grown up on the West Coast; he dropped out of Santa Monica City College to come to New York in the late 1950s.1Despite the fact that his parents had named him, aspiration-ally, after the silent-movie cowboy star Dusty Farnum, he had no illusions about the sorts of roles that he would be able to get. “At that time, there was not necessarily an anti-Semitic, but certainly an antiethnic code,” he says. “If you got Back Stage [a New York theater trade paper], the casting notices said Leading Men, and then Juveniles, and Leading Ladies, and then Ingenues. And then, next to that, it said Character Leading Men, Character Juveniles. And that word— ‘character’—meant that you were not attractive: You were the funny-looking person next to the good-looking person in high school. And everybody knew it.”2
For five years, Hoffman scraped together a bare subsistence living in New York City. He got a handful of tiny parts, mostly one-shot guest appearances on New York–based TV series like The Defenders, The Nurses, and Naked City. “And I only got those because Bob Duvall was a favorite with Marion Dougherty, the casting agent,” he says. “He would read for her, and I’d be waiting outside, and as he’d leave, he’d say, ‘Marion, cast him, he’s good!’ So I got a couple of little parts, but that was it. Bob, at least, got the lead as the villain on a lot of those shows. If I had a scene, I was lucky.”3 Hoffman worked as a waiter, as a toy demonstrator at Macy’s, as an attendant at the New York Psychiatric Institute, and as the only male typist in the steno pool at the Manpower temp agency. When jobs got really scarce, he would sleep on Gene Hackman’s kitchen floor.4 And on the few occasions when he was able to get an audition, he was turned down every time.
“Dusty did something I could never do,” says Susan Anspach, a friend from those years, “which is that he kept hanging in there through rejection after rejection, year after year after year after year.”5 That may have been due less to Hoffman’s faith in himself than to his natural tenacity and unwillingness to back down. “I got kicked out of acting class when I was twenty years old because I screamed at the teacher when she started talking to me in the middle of a scene,” he said later. “I had a big fight with Lee Strasberg in my first class with him ….. I have never felt unbrave.”6
Nonetheless, by the beginning of 1965, Hoffman was twenty-seven, seriously demoralized by his inability to land an acting job, and considering a change in careers. He signed on to work for Ulu Grosbard as an assistant director and assistant stage manager on Grosbard’s production of A View from the Bridge, which featured Duvall, Voight, and Anspach in the principal roles. “I had reached a point, when I was doing View from the Bridge, when I decided, I’m not gonna act anymore—to the extent that you can quit something you’re not doing,” says Hoffman. “I thought, maybe I’m gonna become a director or something.”7 But he couldn’t quite let go of the hopes that had brought him to New York in the first place. Anspach, who met him during that production, recalls a lunch for the cast and crew of the play at which he told her with bravado, “‘You know, if I were older, I’d be playing Bobby’s part.’ And I said, ‘Sure, right, Dusty.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean!? I’m fuckin’ talented! Ask Bobby! He’ll tell you himself!’ I said to Bobby, ‘Is he putting me on? He’s the sweep-up guy!’ And Bobby said, ‘No, it’s true, he’s the most talented guy among all of us.’”8
Hoffman impressed Grosbard, who told Arthur Miller that the actor might make a good Willy Loman one day. (In his memoir, Timebends, Miller wrote, “My estimate of Grosbard almost collapsed as, observing Dustin Hoffman’s awkwardness and his big nose that never seemed to get unstuffed, I wondered how the poor fellow imagined himself a candidate for any kind of acting career.”)9 When A View from the Bridge, a one-act version of which had failed on Broadway ten years earlier, opened, it began a highly successful two-year run that gave many of the people involved a degree of job security for the first time in their lives. “Ulu would let me leave to do other plays, and they’d flop, and then I’d come back,” says Anspach. “Bobby Duvall did the same thing.”10
Grosbard encouraged Hoffman, who was now rooming on and off with Duvall, not to give up on acting and got him an audition for Harry Noon and Night, a play by Ronald Ribman that was to be staged in Hell’s Kitchen at St. Clement’s Church by the American Place Theatre, which was then in its first season. The role for which Hoffman read was Immanuel, a handicapped, cross-dressing German who was living with an American soldier in the ruins of Berlin after World War II. “He just walked in off the street,” says Ribman. “And we knew instantly he was Immanuel.”11
“I think I tended to relax a little after View from the Bridge,” says Hoffman. “So I did a very nutty audition—this hunchbacked gay Nazi guy with a limp. And I was outrageous enough to get the part. Wynn Handman [co-founder of the American Place Theatre] came up to me years later and said, ‘You put a lot of that into Midnight Cowboy,’ and I said, ‘Hmm, maybe, I don’t know.’”12
The production, in which Hoffman costarred with Joel Grey, was small—the American Place could afford to give it a run of just three weeks, and “we did it with the understanding that it was not to be reviewed,” recalls Ribman.13 But Hoffman, thrilled to have won a role at last, threw himself into preparing for the part with years of pent-up desire to prove what he could do if someone gave him a chance. Arthur Miller arranged for him to spend an evening with his daughter’s German baby-sitter so he could find an accent for his character. “She was from Munich, so we got together and I suggested that she say all my lines into a tape recorder. I remember I used to continually make passes at her. Every once in a while as she was recording, I’d kind of get my hand going down her arm and try to sneak it over, and she would say, ‘I don’t need dis ting!’” The baby-sitter was unyielding, but Hoffman did leave with a workable sound for Immanuel and, although he spoke no actual German, decided to try out his accent in the Upper East Side neighborhood then known as Germantown for its stretch of German restaurants, stores, and candy shops. “I’d go there, and I used to sit at a bar, and someone would talk to me in German, and I would say, ‘I’m sorry, but the only way I’m gonna learn English is to keep speaking it.’ And it worked—they believed it.”14
Despite the play’s short run, Hoffman’s performance generated considerable word of mouth among a small group of devoted theatergoers and professionals. Mike Nichols and Buck Henry both made a point of going to see him. “He played a crippled German transvestite, and I believed all three, no question,” says Henry. “It wasn’t enough for either of us to say, ‘Let’s get this guy for The Graduate,’ but it was enough so that I realized, ‘Oh God, this guy can do a lot of stuff.’”15 Ribman was excited by the play’s reception and went ahead with plans that he had made with another producer to move Harry Noon and Night to a theater in the East Village for an open-ended engagement. But Hoffman, to everyone’s surprise, decided not to continue with the show. “He never told me why he left,” says Ribman, “but it’s my impression that maybe he felt he had a better offer.”16 Joel Grey left the cast as well (he was replaced by Robert Blake), and Harry Noon and Night’s commercial run lasted just four days, leaving Ribman angry at what he felt was Hoffman’s ingratitude.
Hoffman’s better offer wasn’t for a new role, but simply for a steadier and more reliable income from working in the theater, a luxury he had sought for years and wasn’t ready to abandon for a part in a play that might not last. He went back to work for Grosbard, who offered him a new job on his production of Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses, which had won the Tony Award for Best Play in the summer of 1965. Grosbard gave Hoffman the chance to stage-manage the production and also to serve as standby for the young male lead (a role originated by Martin Sheen and then being played by Walter McGinn).
In the fall, Wynn Handman began planning the American Place Theatre’s 1965–1966 season with the company’s co-founders Michael Tolan, an actor, and Sidney Lanier, an Episcopal priest who felt his mission was to bring theater to St. Clement’s Church. Ribman was working on a new piece called The Journey of the Fifth Horse that would be ready in the spring, but the first play they planned to produce that season was William Alfred’s Hogan’s Goat, a drama about an Irish family in 1890s Brooklyn. Handman and director Frederick Rolf were struggling to cast the female lead, the angry, maltreated wife of the play’s main character, when a striking actress with high cheekbones and regal bearing walked in to read for them. “We saw a lot of actors,” Handman says. “Among them was this woman, Faye Dunaway. When she auditioned, I thought she was very talented and beautiful. The director said, ‘She’ll do this when it’s a movie, but not onstage.’ I said, ‘No, let’s give her a call back.’”17
Dunaway, an intensely ambitious and volatile young woman, projected a glamour that was almost entirely self-invented; she was the daughter of an army man with little money who had moved his family from Florida to Arkansas to Texas to Germany to Utah when she was growing up. She had arrived in New York in 1962 as a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Boston University and had made herself known quickly. Within two days, she had signed a year-long contract as a replacement in the cast of the Broadway play A Man for All Seasons; soon after, she met Lenny Bruce, who was beginning his skid into legal battles and drug abuse, and began a brief affair with him. In 1963, Dunaway auditioned for Elia Kazan and made such a strong impression on him that the director invited her to join the repertory company he and producer Robert Whitehead were forming at Lincoln Center. When Kazan directed Arthur Miller’s play After the Fall, about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, on Broadway in 1964, he chose Dunaway to understudy his own wife, Barbara Loden, as Maggie, the play’s female lead. Dunaway would study Loden’s performance every night from the catwalk, wondering if she could match it and if she would be given the chance to try. She started to feel anxious and depressed and went into analysis.18 “I thought that I had talent … but I was frightened that I wouldn’t be able to shape it into something that was exceptional,” she wrote in her autobiography. “The very things that drove me to succeed as an actress—my need and wish and desire for perfection—were also the things that worked against me in trying to find my own happiness.”19
During its two years under Kazan’s stewardship, the Lincoln Center rep company, which also included Martin Sheen, Frank Langella, Hal Holbrook, and Jason Robards Jr., 20 was a hothouse of talent, tension, and neurosis, as thirty actors working closely together committed themselves to the idea of ensemble work but also chased the spotlight. “In those days, all the Method actors, the Actors Studio people, would say, you have to experience everything,” says John Phillip Law, a member of the company. “To assign somebody to do a scene with somebody else was almost to say, ‘Jesus, go home and fuck ’em, and then come back and try to make something real happen.’ And of course, Faye shows up for our scene one day and says right off the bat, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you last night!’ So we had our little roll in the hay. But it was no big deal—it was just how things worked then.” Law, who went on to act in The Changeling and Marco Millions with Dunaway while they both worked for Kazan, remembers her work as extraordinary. “Faye was a little jealous of Barbara Loden, who she felt was getting her parts because of Kazan. But even then, it was clear she was a wonderful actress.”21
Dunaway was offered a contract to join the cast of the daytime soap opera The Guiding Light, but she turned it down. (“In New York, if you did a soap or a TV ad, you’d never admit it,” says Dustin Hoffman. “It meant you weren’t serious.”)22 When Handman was casting Hogan’s Goat, Dunaway had just suffered the first setback of her brief career; Kazan and Whitehead, whose ambitious Lincoln Center productions had received mixed reviews and done only modest business, were dismissed, and their replacements fired Dunaway and many of the other actors Kazan had mentored. When Handman saw Dunaway, he knew she was just one good role away from being noticed by the studios. He and Frederick Rolf hired her to play Kathleen, a challenging, emotional role that required the actress to rail drunkenly against her husband and fall down a flight of onstage stairs to her death in every performance. Hogan’s Goat opened to excellent reviews in November 1965, and nobody was shocked when Dunaway was spotted by a scout for producer Sam Spiegel. “Dustin Hoffman was someone I would never have guessed would end up on a poster in girls’ bedrooms,” says Handman. “But Dunaway becoming a movie star? That didn’t surprise me at all.”23 Three months after Hogan’s Goat opened, she left the play to make her first film. By the spring of 1966, Dunaway had signed long-term contracts with both Spiegel and Otto Preminger and had turned down a chance to test with Michael Caine for the sequel to The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin.24 “I longed to do great work,” she said, “and since you must be famous to get those opportunities, I wanted to be famous.”25
In February, Dunaway left for Florida to star in The Happening, an uneasy combination of comedy and crime drama, for Spiegel and Cat Ballou director Elliot Silverstein. She was paid $25,000 for her role as a bored wild child who joins a group of hippies on a housebreaking escapade. Dunaway was able to resist the romantic advances of her notoriously insistent producer, but there was no escaping the intention of her director to transform her physically into “the cookie-cutter blond bombshell” that he wanted for the movie.26 “The role called for a more kittenish kind of girl,” says Silverstein.27 In 1966, “kittenish” didn’t mean brunette, and the director insisted that Dunaway bleach and tease her brown hair into a blond mane and wear a padded bra and costumes that exposed as much skin as possible. Dunaway started starving herself, fearful about what “acres of bare midriff”28 would look like on a movie screen, and did her best to turn herself into what everyone was telling her she had to become. “I understood from her hair and makeup people that she was quite upset,” says Silverstein. “There were a lot of emotions.” Dunaway, after two years with Kazan, wasn’t used to working fast, without any discussion. “I’d say, ‘Faye, the sun is fading, we have to move on,’” says Silverstein. “She was upset, but then she’d be fine. Most of the time she just walked right in and did it.”29
Hogan’s Goat continued without Dunaway, and Handman began to hold auditions for the American Place’s spring production, The Journey of the Fifth Horse, Ribman’s adaptation of Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man. “I’m sitting in the theater next to Wynn,” says Ribman, “and in walks Dustin Hoffman, again, on an open call. He says, ‘I’m terribly sorry for what I did [on Harry Noon and Night], and I hope it won’t interfere with you letting me read for the part.’ One impetus I had was to grab him by the seat of his pants and throw him out. But he was terrific.”30
Hoffman wanted to play Chulkaturin, a young nobleman dying of tuberculosis. But Handman and Ribman steered him toward the play’s other main role, a “character leading man” part, and cast him as Zoditch, a pinched, fussy proofreader who is forced to confront the tininess and circumscription of his own life while reading Chulkaturin’s diary. Rip Torn and Susan Anspach were cast in the other lead roles, and the play went into rehearsals under the direction of Larry Arick. The level of tension in the room was intolerable almost from the first day. “Rip had a lot of problems with the director,” says Ribman. “He would sit there when Larry Arick was giving notes and hold a newspaper in front of his face—that kind of juvenile behavior. And he and Dustin and Susan became a kind of trio.”31
Arick, for his part, was unhappy with Torn’s behavior and was just as frustrated with Hoffman’s tentative performance and uncompromising working methods. “Dusty did a good audition, but then, like any good actor, he let everything go and started from scratch,” says Anspach. “How do you play a character who’s full of rage but too repressed to show it? It took a while for him to figure out how to show that without spelling it out. By the second week, they were sure they hired the wrong guy. By the third, they were ready to fire him. By the fourth, they had offered the part to another actor behind his back.” The actor, Albert Paulson, was a friend of Torn’s, and Torn asked him not to take the job, telling him, “Please, this guy’s gonna be brilliant, he needs a break, string them along, don’t turn it down or accept it until it’s too late and they have to keep him.”32 Torn was able to protect Hoffman, but not himself. Just a week before the play was to open, communication in the rehearsal room broke down entirely. “We had a few choices,” says Michael Tolan. “We could remove the director, Dustin, or Rip. Wynn Handman and I decided that the easiest thing to do was replace Rip.”33
Tolan stepped into Torn’s part himself, and Handman postponed the opening to give the cast a few extra days of rehearsal. “At that time, Dustin was a very difficult actor to work with,” says Tolan, “because he had such an intense sense of capital-T ‘Truth’ that he found it very difficult to give a performance. He was hardly talking above a whisper in his scenes because he wouldn’t commit to anything that he thought would be false.”34 One afternoon, at the peak of his frustration, Hoffman cut short a rehearsal by saying, “Nobody likes me!” and walked out. “He just left for several hours—maybe to talk to his analyst—and when he came back, he was more confident,” says Ribman.35 But his performance still wasn’t making any impression. “Wynn, Larry, and I got together and said, ‘What the fuck are we gonna do here?’” says Tolan. “At the final dress rehearsal, we said, ‘Dustin, we can’t hear you past the second row of the theater. And he said, ‘What do you want me to do, shout?’ And we said, ‘Yes!’ And suddenly, he gave the performance that he’d been working on for weeks. He’d been getting there all along.”36
When The Journey of the Fifth Horse opened on April 21, 1966, Hoffman received his first review as a professional actor, from Stanley Kauffmann in The New York Times, who wrote, “This portrait of a repressed, clerkish tyrant is sharply outlined and vividly colored…. It is an able comedian’s performance.”37 Other critics were even more enthusiastic; although Journey ran for just ten days, Hoffman won the Obie Award as the season’s best off-Broadway actor, the first time the prize had been given since George C. Scott won it three years earlier. An abridged version of the play was filmed for National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS, and Ribman and the producers quickly made plans to transfer the production to a commercial run at Greenwich Village’s Circle in the Square. But shortly after the television taping was completed, Hoffman, just as he had done a year earlier, decided to drop out of the play, and the transfer was canceled. “The play was optioned, and Dustin Hoffman just walked out,” says Ribman. “And I think that was the last time I saw him.”38
“They talk about Oscar-itis,” says Hoffman. “Well, I guess I got Obieitis. I won the award, and I didn’t work for six months.”39
Hoffman had given his first preview performance in Journey the night after the 1966 Academy Awards ceremony. Like most New York theater actors, he professed not to care much about the Oscars. “There really was a red-state blue-state feeling,” he recalls. “New York was Arthur Miller. Hollywood was Bonanza.”40 That year, the ceremony served primarily as an exercise in studio self-affirmation, an announcement from the Hollywood establishment that it was celebrating a year of having succeeded in doing what it had been built to do, which was to put out big, long movies that made lots of money. The Sound of Music won Best Picture and was probably the most critically scorned film in a dozen years to take the top prize. The night’s other big winner, MGM’s Doctor Zhivago, was an expensive, epic road-show presentation that was doing such massive business that voters permitted themselves to ignore the many critics who noted that the movie fell well short of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
The ten Oscars won by Zhivago and The Sound of Music represented a defiant ratification of old-fashioned picture making and a preference for defending familiar turf over breaking new ground. But the threat to old Hollywood was evident right in the nominations, which seemed to emanate from England and New York as much as from Los Angeles. For Best Actor, Hoffman was rooting for Rod Steiger, a New Yorker who had crossed successfully into Hollywood with his Method training intact; he was nominated for his performance as an emotionally deadened Holocaust survivor working in Harlem in Sidney Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, which epitomized the kind of uncompromising East Coast filmmaking the studios wouldn’t touch. It was left to Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson’s exploitation company, American International Pictures, to distribute the movie, an odd fit on a slate of 1965 releases that also included How to Stuff a Wild Bikini and Die, Monster, Die!
One Best Picture nominee came straight out of the New York theater-television nexus—a cheaply made black-and-white adaptation of the play A Thousand Clowns that starred Jason Robards Jr. and Martin Balsam. Another nomination went to John Schlesinger’s tough-minded swinging-London comedy-drama Darling, which turned Julie Christie into an international celebrity and a fashion sensation and gave Embassy’s Joseph E. Levine, whom everyone enjoyed belittling as a noisy New York importer of Italian schlock and European art-house films, his first-ever Best Picture contender. Only eight of the twenty acting nominations went to Americans, and the night’s big old-guard moment—the “surprise” presentation of an honorary Academy Award to the show’s host, Bob Hope, who had already been given four other honorary Oscars—was so anticlimactic that Time magazine said the telecast (the first time the Oscars aired in color) “made The Beverly Hillbillies look good.”41
Warren Beatty, back from shooting Kaleidoscope, was present to hand out an award, as was one of the actresses he was still considering as a possible Bonnie Parker, Natalie Wood. Another presenter, Yvette Mimieux, had drawn the interest of United Artists’ David Picker,42 who was still interested in making Bonnie and Clyde and also wondering who could play the female lead. That evening, Beatty watched yet another potential Bonnie, Julie Christie, take home the Best Actress prize. A few weeks earlier, he had met Christie for the first time in England as they both stood on a receiving line to greet Queen Elizabeth II at the royal premiere of Born Free,43 and he couldn’t get his mind off the woman who was to become his lover and frequent costar in the 1970s. “I had met Julie Christie. Oh boy, had I met her,” he says. “We had lunch at Shepperton [Studios in England]. I thought she would be, physically, very good for the part. Bonnie was petite, and it struck me as more dramatic to have this petite thing be so tough. But she was British, so that just wasn’t going to work.”44 In any case, Beatty knew there was no point in casting Bonnie until he had a deal with a studio, and that meant shopping the project to the same people who had already turned it down.
In Los Angeles to begin rehearsals and song prerecording for Doctor Dolittle, Rex Harrison, the previous year’s Best Actor winner, showed up at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to present Christie with her award. Among the actresses she beat were Julie Andrews, who had been Arthur Jacobs’s first choice for Dolittle’s female lead, and Samantha Eggar, who, carefully counting the number of days she was allowed to spend in the United States, had returned to attend the ceremony and begin preparations for Dolittle. Sidney Poitier was not present that evening; both of his costars in A Patch of Blue, Elizabeth Hartman and Shelley Winters, had been nominated, but he had not. The Best Actor slot he might have gotten went instead to Laurence Olivier’s blackface performance in Othello. Despite Poitier’s own misgivings about playing the part, it was hard not to feel that Olivier’s nomination was undoing whatever symbolic progress had been made in giving Poitier an Oscar two years earlier, especially since Olivier was being honored for an overripe, pop-eyed filmed stage turn that The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther had called an “outrageous impression of a theatrical Negro stereotype. He does not look like a Negro …. He looks like a Rastus or an end man in an American minstrel show. You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out.”45 And what was Poitier (or any other black actor) to make of Pauline Kael’s patronizing assertion in McCall’s that she “saw Paul Robeson and he was not as black as Olivier is …. Possibly Negro actors need to sharpen themselves on white roles before they can play a Negro”?46
The evening’s glummest attendee was probably Stanley Kramer. Ship of Fools had been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but Kramer, whose direction of the movie had come in for stinging criticism in many reviews, was not among the Best Director nominees, and his own gloomy assessment that the film had fallen short of greatness had not been contradicted by its mediocre grosses or by the bad night it was having (it won awards in the black-and-white categories for Cinematography and Art Direction, but nothing else). Kramer also had to contend with the bleak news that his bad run at the box office had just put an end to his next project, Andersonville. An ambitious, large-scale battlefield drama could never be made within the $3 million budget ceiling that Columbia had imposed on Kramer, and longtime ally Mike Frankovich had let him know that his studio had now decided not to bankroll the movie at all, even though he had been working on it for nearly four years. For the first time since he had become a producer, Kramer had nothing on his plate.
In the audience, Rod Steiger sat nervously waiting for the Best Actor category. Two rows in front of him was Lee Marvin, who, as he was taking his seat, turned around and joked that he was planning to wait until Steiger’s name was announced, then trip him on his way to the stage.47 Steiger was an actor’s actor, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, a movie star. Reviewing him in The Pawnbroker, Judith Crist called him “a brilliant and bravura actor whose performances … are unforgettable but who, of course, just doesn’t rank at the box office the way a Rock Hudson or a Heston does.”48 He had been nominated once before, for playing Marlon Brando’s brother in On the Waterfront. But in the decade since, Steiger’s career had drifted; he made a number of unmemorable movies, then showed up in a few television series. In the early 1960s, fed up with his inability to get work in the United States, he and his wife, actress Claire Bloom, moved to Europe,49 where he worked for the Italian directors Francesco Rosi and Ermanno Olmi.
Steiger had a major role in Doctor Zhivago, which was by far the biggest hit of his career, but it was his work in The Pawnbroker, which he had finished more than two years earlier, that marked a triumphant homecoming for the actor—that is, once the film reached the United States. The brutal, small-scale character study had been developed for MGM, but after the studio demanded that the script be softened, independent producer Ely Landau decided to finance the $1.2 million film out of his own pocket. When Sidney Lumet took over as director during preproduction after Landau fired Arthur Hiller, Steiger had already been cast. Lumet’s initial reaction was disappointment. “That was my one hesitation in taking it,” says Lumet. “I knew Rod. We had worked together in live television, and I liked his work. But I felt he was a rather tasteless actor—awfully talented, but completely tasteless in his choices.”50 Steiger’s Achilles’ heel was what even his own wife recognized as his tendency to go over the top; Bloom wrote that he could “be all over the place, out of control, no sense, just the spewing out of a scene” on the first take.51 “The New York Post used to have a columnist named Max Lerner, a really cantankerous fool,” says Lumet. “A friend of mine, the scenic designer Boris Aronson, was once asked why he didn’t like Lerner. And he said, ‘For five cents, he gives you too much.’ I felt that way about Rod.”
Lumet, if he had had his way, would have cast James Mason as the haunted camp survivor, but Steiger ended up surprising the director. “During rehearsals, we talked about how important the repression of the character’s feelings was, and Rod was more than willing to go that route,” says Lumet. “And he worked out just fine.”52 When The Pawnbroker made its debut in June 1964 at the Berlin Film Festival—an especially meaningful venue given its subject matter—it received a sustained ovation, and Steiger won the Best Actor prize for what many hailed as the performance of his career. But the movie was rejected by every studio in Hollywood because of less than five seconds of footage—a scene in which a black prostitute exposes her breasts to Steiger’s character, whose memory flashes, in a split-second shock cut, to his late wife, also bare-breasted, in the concentration camp. Lumet had decided not to film a “protection shot” (an alternate take of the scene without nudity): “I figured, what the hell, it’s private money, we’re all working for next to nothing, and I’ll just dump the problem on Landau.”53 But the Production Code’s ban on nudity was absolute. Without a PCA seal from Geoffrey Shurlock, and its nonsecular equivalent, an approval rating from the Legion of Decency (by then called the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures), no major company would touch the picture. Landau, to his credit, refused to remove the footage, and The Pawnbroker remained unseen in the United States for almost a year after its Berlin premiere.
At the urging of his colleague Joe Mankiewicz, Lumet took the then unusual step of appealing Shurlock’s decision to the Motion Picture Association’s thirteen-member board. Mankiewicz himself was a member of the appeals committee, and thanks to his impassioned lobbying, in March 1965 The Pawnbroker became the first movie with bare breasts to receive Code approval, with the Code announcing that it was “to be viewed as a special and unique case.” Notwithstanding Shurlock’s insistence that the decision was, as The New York Times dryly put it, “an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent,”54 the reversal was the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years. And the National Catholic Office’s decision to stand firm and give the movie a “Condemned” rating was just as damaging to its own authority; for the first time, the Catholics were pointedly belittled by other religious film advocacy groups. The Broadcasting and Film Commission of the National Council of Churches gave The Pawnbroker a best picture award, and the editor of the newsletter the Christian Advocate wrote in defense of the nude scene, “Anyone obtaining salacious pleasure from those terrifying moments is already dead to the rest of life, and hardly a subject for further stimulation.”55
Steiger’s work in the film moved Life magazine to praise his “endless versatility”56 and The New Yorker’s Brendan Gill to write, “By a magic more mysterious … than his always clever makeup, [he] manages to convince me at once that he is whoever he pretends to be.”57 Steiger was considered, along with Ship of Fools’ Oskar Werner, a front-runner for the Oscar, and his visibility in Doctor Zhivago could only help. When Julie Andrews opened the envelope and announced that the winner was Lee Marvin for Cat Ballou, Steiger, according to one account, “momentarily choked.”58 Marvin was a well-liked actor who, after years of playing heavies, had delighted and surprised audiences by giving a deft comic performance in the western spoof. He went home the winner, and Steiger and Claire Bloom went back to their hotel, miserable. “I can’t say I was happy about it,” he said. “I think I wound up telling her not to feel so bad.”59 Soon after, Steiger took a role in The Girl and the General, a minor Italian antiwar comedy, and returned to Europe. His comeback had stopped short of either an Academy Award or a single job offer from Hollywood.
1. Klemesrud, Judy. “Dustin Hoffman: From ‘Graduate’ to Ratzo Rizzo, Super Slob.” New York Times, July 14, 1968.
2. Author interview with Hoffman.
3. Ibid.
4. Klemesrud, July 14, 1968, op. cit.
5. AI with Anspach.
6. Schwartz, Tony. “Dustin Hoffman vs. Nearly Everybody.” New York Times, December 16, 1979.
7. AI with Hoffman.
8. AI with Anspach.
9. Miller, Arthur. Timebends: A Life (New York, Grove Press, 1987), p. 373.
10. AI with Anspach.
11. AIs with Wynn Handman, Ronald Ribman, and Michael Tolan all provided useful background about the early history of the American Place Theatre.
12. AI with Hoffman.
13. AI with Ribman.
14. AI with Hoffman.
15. AI with Henry.
16. AI with Ribman.
17. AI with Handman.
18. “Faye Dunaway: The Farmer’s Granddaughter.” Look, December 13, 1966.
19. Dunaway, Faye, with Betsy Sharkey. Looking for Gatsby: My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 77 and 79.
20. Schickel, Richard. Elia Kazan: A Biography (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), pp. 407–417.
21. AI with Law.
22. AI with Hoffman.
23. AI with Handman.
24. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit.
25. Los Angeles Times, June 18, 1997.
26. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit., p. 96.
27. AI with Silverstein.
28. Dunaway, Looking for Gatsby, op. cit., p. 96.
29. AI with Silverstein.
30. AI with Ribman.
31. Ibid.
32. AI with Anspach.
33. AI with Tolan.
34. Ibid.
35. AI with Ribman.
36. AI with Tolan.
37. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Theater: Turgenev Tale.” New York Times, April 22, 1966.
38. AI with Ribman,
39. AI with Hoffman.
40. Ibid.
41. “Ticky-Tack.” Time, April 29, 1966.
42. AI with Elinor Jones.
43. Finstad, Warren Beatty: A Private Man, op. cit., photo insert.
44. AI with Beatty.
45. Crowther, Bosley. “The Screen: Minstrel Show ‘Othello’; Radical Makeup Marks Olivier’s Interpretation.” New York Times, February 2, 1966.
46. Kael, Pauline. “Laurence Olivier as Othello.” McCall’s, March 1966.
47. Wiley and Bona, Inside Oscar, op. cit., p. 386.
48. Crist, Judith. “Over the Rainbow—Two Big ‘Little’ Films.” New York Herald-Tribune, April 25, 1965.
49. Ward, Robert. “Hollywood’s Last Angry Man: Rod Steiger Bites the Hand That Hasn’t Been Feeding Him.” American Film, (January–February 1982).
50. AI with Lumet.
51. Bloom, Claire. Limelight and After: The Education of an Actress (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 154.
52. AI with Lumet.
53. Ibid.
54. Weiler, A. H. “Board Gives Seal to ‘Pawnbroker.’” New York Times, March 29, 1965.
55. American International Pictures press release, April 29, 1966, The Pawnbroker file, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
56. Oulahan, Richard. Life, April 2, 1965.
57. Gill, Brendan. “The Current Cinema.” The New Yorker, Jan. 24, 1965.
58. Wiley and Bona, Inside Oscar, op. cit., p. 389.
59. “Playboy Interview: Rod Steiger,” Playboy, July 1969.