GALILEO AND ME: An L.A. Memoir (Part 3 of 3)
David Fine
Back on my fat-wheeled Schwinn, I headed up La Cienega, the last thoroughfare on my route. My apron by this point held only a few newspapers, and I felt I could fly. But La Cienega was a well trafficked boulevard flanked by commercial buildings, not private homes, so I needed to ride on the sidewalk to target accurately the doors of its last few few subscribers. And I had to slow down to avoid late afternoon pedestrians, people just off work or drifting into the bars and restaurants along the way. Dodging them was a challenge, but I’d become expert at it, obnoxiously coming within a foot or two of them before swerving past. I was adept at the maneuver, and it was fun.
One of my customers on La Cienega was the old Coronet Theater, a low stucco building set back and not quite visible from the street. Out front, there was a sign at one point announcing the current production, something called The Skin of Our Teeth, if memory serves me. Then the sign came down, and the board was blank. Ordinarily, I dropped the paper on the brick path out front. One day, though, in early summer, I heard shouts from the back. Curious, I stopped, flipped the kickstand down and, with my nearly empty apron still over my shoulders, walked down the brick path, passing through a patio overplanted with bougainvillea and birds of paradise.
The path ended at the theater door, which was open. I quietly stepped inside. It was dark but for a brightly-lit stage at the far end, and for the moment it was quiet. On stage a large man –fat, really-- with a bushy beard stood in a long white robe, a toga of some sort, while a woman knelt at his feet, pinning the hem. Standing next to him was a boy, also in a robe. They both held scripts in their hands. Then the big man spoke in what sounded like a British accent. “Chaps, why do I have to wear this bloody thing now? It’s not dress rehearsal yet.”
I recognized his face. He was the Hunchback of Notre Dame who’d given me nightmares for weeks! Another man, back-lit by the stage lights and almost in silhouette, paced back and forth between the front row and the stage. His voice, when he spoke, was more guttural, more German. And when he spoke he was shouting again, shouting at the big man on stage to read his lines right, demanding that the man and the boy repeat them. (Here, I admit, memory is helped along by some subsequent reading on my part):
“I recanted,” said the big man in a voice befitting him, “because I was afraid of the pain.”
The boy said, “No!”
“They showed me the instruments”
“It was not a plan?”
“It was not,” the big man said.
Now the shouter paced back forth before the stage, visible at the back only as a moving shadow, an eclipsing moon blotting out a portion of the light each time he crossed it. He was small, with short-cropped hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. He wore jeans (or what passed for them then) and a dark leather jacket. He smoked a cigar.
A determined Bertolt Brecht “Scheisse, Verdammt!” he shouted, moving from one side of the stage to the other, in and out of the light. Then I saw another man, sitting half-way back. I’d seen him a few days earlier outside the theater. The shouter yelled at him too: “How many times, Joseph, do I have to say it? Charles must speak directly to the audience, not to the boy! This is not psychological drama. It is not realism. We are not doing Stanislavski. I want declamation! Galileo must speak to the audience.”
I slipped into a seat near the aisle.
From the partial darkness, Joseph asked: “Who’s directing this, Bert, you or me? It’s a wonderful play, but it’s not your old epic theater, not Mother Courage. You and Charles have changed it. Galileo must be played with ambivalence. He’s a man in conflict. Your old way is static. It’ll distance the audience. The drama’s about his conflict, and his conscience. It’s about the responsibility of a scientist, of science. Two atom bombs on Japan, for God’s sake! Your play is about the ethical implications. It’s about knowledge, and truth, and courage. Sure, Galileo recants, but recants to save himself for his future work. That’s the way you’ve rewritten the damned thing!”
Big Charles nodded.
“No, my dear Joseph,” said the German. “It’s about cowardice. Betrayal. Galileo must be shown as a traitor. I must rewrite some more. This won’t do.”
“How many times are you going to rewrite this scene?” Joseph pleaded. “We’re getting close to dress. I mean, look, they’re fitting Charles already.”
Big Charles, exasperated, stepped down from the stage, minus the robe now (and no sign of a hunchback), and walked up the aisle. He wore an open sport shirt and slacks, and took a seat right behind me. “Bert, he said, intent on settling the matter, “This our translation. Yours, and mine. It’s different from before. Have you forgotten? All our afternoons in the garden? The struggle. The agreement. We gave it passion.”
Bert wasn’t having it. “Charles, there’s still too much sympathy for Galileo. He re-cants! And I want the audience know he is re-canting. He’s a coward. He must be shown as one. He can’t face up to the Inquisition.”
Joseph Losey, Galileo's director Joseph interrupted. “Bert, what you and Charles came up with is a more complex figure. The world has changed. Yes, yes he recants when the Church gets to him, but the audience believes it’s an act, a ploy, a way to go on working. He’ll get to publish the Discoursi, and history will be changed. ”
Charles rose from his seat. “Joseph is right. The play must not make him a cowardly chap. If he recants, it’s an act.”
“Nein, Nein, Nein,” Bert shouted, each ‘nein’ louder than the last.” He’s a coward. He must be seen as a coward who falls at the feet of the Church. I want no ambiguity. If you want psychological realism—“ Charles leaned forward and tousled my hair. “You’re a lovely boy," he whispered. "So handsome.” I drew away.
“—go to Arthur Miller. Go to Ibsen. Characters on a stage are not real. They’re artificial. This is spectacle. Galileo must alienate the audience. I will re-write the scene again, and we’ll rehearse tomorrow.”
Joseph stood up at this point. “I don’t need this,” he shouted. He marched up the aisle to the door, and disappeared out the door.
“Get him!” said Bert. “Bring him back!”
Charles followed Joseph up the aisle and out the door.
I’d been watching two dramas in one—Galileo on stage with Andrea, fearing torture and the “instruments,” and three men off stage struggling over what their play was all about.
Charles and Joseph returned. “And Joseph, another thing,” said Bert, as if nothing had happened. “What Charles was doing on stage? You saw? He had his hands in his pocket and he was playing with himself! Get the costume girl to sew up his pockets. And Joseph,” he added, pointing at me now, “Who is this boy there?”
“Bert, he’s the paperboy. He isn’t hurting anything.”
Bert shrugged, probably not wanting to further aggravate the already aggravated.
Bert Brecht and Charles Laughton discuss their retranslation of Brecht's Galileo
Galileo opened on July 30th in the middle of a heat wave, one of the hottest days ever in LA, according to the News. Blinded by the glare of the sun careening off cars, I had to squint and crane my neck to find the right porches to aim at. When I passed the Coronet Theater, people were lined up for tickets. I kept going. Next day I saw they reviewed the opening performance.
Charles Laughton on stage in Galileo According to the News, it was the biggest theater event in LA history. It mentioned Joseph Losey, who’d written the “Living Newspaper” series for the WPA in the ‘thirties. And it said that Charles Laughton, who played Galileo, was making his first stage appearance in thirteen years. It did not mention that Brecht did the real directing, that he shouted Losey down and rewrote scenes right up to opening night --or that Laughton played with his pockets sewn up. The audience, the paper said, was full of movie people—actors, directors, writers—some, like Brecht, were refugees from Hitler. I recognized only a few of the names, Ingrid Bergman, Charlie Chaplin, John Garfield. That evening, my father talked of some of the others, Charles Boyer, Anthony Quinn, Igor Stravinsky, Billy Wilder. The Coronet Theater, all 260 seats, had been packed. “Good theater, exciting theater, provocative theater.” The critic’s name I saw was Virginia Wright. She obviously liked it.
And I, not surprisingly, was overjoyed. I’d played a part in it, a small, silent part, but a part. I’d been witness to the city’s greatest theatrical event in the making, and even petted by Galileo.
The play ran for seventeen performances during a four-week run, the house packed every evening. After it closed, Brecht, Losey, and Laughton went to New York for its Broadway run. When it opened there, Brecht was absent.
He had, as my father predicted, been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. On October 23rd, ten so-called “unfriendly witnesses” were called to testify. It took days. Refusing to answer the questions thrown at them, they were sentenced to prison for contempt. Brecht, who’d been under surveillance by the FBI since arriving in 1941, was the eleventh to appear before the exhausted Committee . His testimony was evasive and confusing. He pleaded his English was poor, said he’d never been a Communist, and thought of himself as only a guest in America. They dismissed him and the next day, Halloween, he was on a plane for Paris.
Occasionally, I think of those words of Galileo. “They showed me the instruments.” Did Brecht also see the instruments when he testified? Was he evasive to avoid their punishment? Can his words
before HUAC, like Galileo’s, be heard as a fearful recanting? Others who were called to testify --as my
dad said at the time-- openly challenged the Committee’s legitimacy and its power. They stood on their rights. Brecht simply baffled them with confusing answers and apologies for bad English. I was baffled too. The shouting, ranting Bert I’d seen at rehearsal seemed --like the Galileo he insisted on-- a coward in the face of state power.
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DAVID FINE is Emeritus Professor of English at the California State University, Long Beach, and former chairman of American Studies there. His book, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (2000), won the Southern California Historical Society’s Pfleuger Award as the best regional book of the year. This installment concludes his three-part memoir of Los Angeles in the 1940s.
(Kaynak: theficklegreybeast.squarespace.com)
