Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (25 page)

Mostel had made money on
Forum
and wasn’t desperate for work the way he’d been less than a decade earlier, while the blacklist still suffocated him. He could afford to devote himself to his painting—he called acting the side work that supported the art that mattered more to him—but Tevye tugged at him irresistibly. According to family lore, it was Mostel’s wife, Kate, who insisted he take the role. A retired dancer, she had a good nose for a theatrical hit, and even in the audition draft of the script she could smell a winner (and thus she could see the mink coat she coveted, as one of their sons recalls, adding that the couple fought bitterly for weeks over whether Mostel should accept the part). Friends, though, remember Mostel’s excitement over the opportunity and his sense of entitlement to the role. He considered Tevye not only “the greatest Yiddish character ever created” but by all rights his. No one else possessed the background, the affinity, the chops he could bring. Hal Prince—who had pushed for Mostel in
Forum
as producer of that show—agreed, emphatically enough to offer a then whoppingly generous salary of $4,000 a week against 10 percent of the weekly box office gross (a higher base pay than the $100,000 one-year contract Mickey Mantle was about to sign with the Yankees).

On the twenty-fifth, Robbins wrote Mostel that he so wanted him for the show that he’d postpone it until the fall of 1964 to accommodate Mostel’s schedule were he not “stuck with” a signed commitment “to go this spring.” He fairly begged in signing off: “Please don’t make me do this without you. Please.” Maybe Mostel had been waiting to hear Robbins grovel. In any event, it worked. (And, it turned out later, the schedule was postponed to accommodate Robbins.)

On November 1, Prince started cranking out letters to the likes of Red Buttons and Tom Bosley (who’d starred as Fiorello): “I’m sorry that it hasn’t worked out with Tevye,” Prince wrote, politely reassuring them that it was “a very difficult decision” or that “[I] hope and expect that one of these days we’ll do a show together.”

Mostel and Robbins had worked together briefly before and did not like each other. So Robbins’s eagerness to cast Mostel and Mostel’s zeal for the part spoke to both men’s prevailing sense of artistry—they recognized and respected each other’s talents. Even more, the draw of the Sholem-Aleichem material trumped their mutual distrust and distaste. For both of them, albeit in vastly different ways, this project was personal.

Their first professional encounter (after crossing paths a number of times over the years) had been in 1962. Prince had called Robbins in to help out with
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
when it was in trouble on the road. He reached Robbins in Los Angeles, where he was receiving best picture and codirecting Oscars for the film version of
West Side Story
, and implored him to catch the next possible flight to Washington, where the show was losing half its audience at every intermission. Prince felt that only Robbins could figure out how to rescue it. He also knew that his leading cast members might object to his number one fix-it man. Not only might Zero Mostel resent the “rat fink”; his costar, Jack Gilford, might hold a particular animus: Robbins had named Gilford’s wife, Madeline Lee. Gilford flared at the news and threatened to quit, but when he phoned home Lee counseled him to keep his job: “Don’t blacklist yourself,” she told him. Mostel famously marched up the high road: “We of the left don’t blacklist,” he told Prince. He agreed to work with Robbins. But he added, “You didn’t say I had to have lunch with him.”

Mostel and Robbins agreed on one cultural and political point: “Naming names,” Mostel had proclaimed, “is not Jewish.” And that, at least as Robbins explained the deed to himself, was why he did it.

But it wasn’t just the political bad blood that caused Mostel to call Robbins “that sonofabitch” in place of his given name. Two more opposite temperaments are tough to imagine. Mostel was an unstoppable force, Robbins an immovable object. Mostel was confident and free as an actor could be, Robbins a sack of insecurity as a director. Their very bodies exemplified the contrast between them: an uncontainable, jiggling mass on the one hand, an utterly flab-free, erect carriage on the other. If a time machine could put a story about them on the Yiddish stage of earlier decades, charismatic, outsize Thomashefsky would have to play Mostel and haughty, blazing Jacob Adler would embody Robbins.

Like those brilliant rivals of yore, Mostel and Robbins arrived from opposite directions at a consummate sense of artistic showmanship. Both were alternately considered highfalutin for their pronouncements about capital-A Art and scorned for pandering with base entertainments. In other words, they were masters of Broadway, making popular works with serious ambitions.
Fiddler
counted on both.

Mostel would have seemed the perfect choice to Robbins for a deeper reason, too: he represented an image of Jewishness that Robbins had done all he could do to distance himself from but that exerted a pull on him all the same. He described it in one of his journals as a “crude, vulgar, but healthy and satisfied” way of being, a way of saying, “I don’t care what they think. Fuck them!!! Ha!” And he recounted a scene he witnessed in a Paris restaurant: a Jew and an Englishman were conferring over a business deal at a nearby table, the first man’s boorishness starkly contrasting with the second’s tamped-down scorn. “How I wish the Jew had gone further,” Robbins wrote. “Slammed the table, dribbled down his chin, ate with his hands and spilled the wine, pushed the table over and danced some demoniacal freilach. He should have farted and laughed, spit.” Robbins could well have been describing Mostel at his most deliberately, histrionically coarse. (In one of many displays of outrageousness recounted by a journalist, Mostel once roguishly buttered a roll in a restaurant and, as if carried away by the sheer motion, kept slathering the spread up his arm, then up the sleeve of a stranger at the next table.) Mostel represented all that Robbins had repressed. Perhaps Robbins sensed that
Fiddler
needed the tension between decorum and the threat of vulgarity, between dignity and populism, polite assimilation and that self-assured “Fuck them!” Certainly Robbins knew that alone he could supply only the half of it.

Like Robbins, Mostel fought an inner war over Jewish identity, but the enemy fire came from a different place. Mostel never sought to evade his Jewishness—on the contrary—but he rebelled against, and came deeply to resent, the Orthodox practice his parents maintained and expected their eight children to carry forward. The family lived in the concentrated community of some 230,000 Jews in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1915, when Zero was born (his given name was Samuel), and later (after a failed sojourn on a farm in Connecticut) moved to the Lower East Side. Yiddish was spoken at home and in the neighborhood. Despite the second-commandment prohibition against graven images, Mostel’s mother supported his attraction to art as a youngster, encouraging him to visit museums, where he copied paintings for hours on end. Quick-witted and apparently in possession of a photographic memory, Mostel would have made an excellent rabbi, his father thought.

Mostel understood that choosing to pursue painting and performance meant leaving his family’s world behind. “Could you imagine my father, a Jew in a black hat with a long beard, sitting in a night club?” he once asked a journalist who had wondered whether the performer’s parents had ever seen his routines. As Mostel saw it, the life he chose was fundamentally at odds with the life he abandoned. The problem with religion, the inveterate joker told the audience at a Harvard lecture in 1962, is that it is “devoid of comedy.” Mostel put his faith, instead, in the universal will to laughter. “Comedy,” he continued, “is rebellion against hypocrisy, against pretense, against falsehood and humbug and bunk and fraud, against false promisers and base deceivers—against all evils masquerading as true and good and worthy of respect. It is therefore the role of comedy to put to the test whatever offers itself as piety, to examine all claims.” As a performer—on stage and often off—he devoted his life to that proposition.

Jerome Robbins directs Zero Mostel and Maria Karnilova as Joanna Merlin and Austin Pendleton await instruction.

If Mostel’s calling as a comic conflicted with his upbringing as a strictly observant Jew, he experienced a further shove away from religiosity in 1944 when he married Kate Harkin, who came from an Irish Catholic background. His parents would not accept her, and supposedly they sat shiva for him. The extent of his estrangement from his mother and its impact may have been exaggerated—one Broadway reporter went so far as to invent, and publish, the story that Mostel almost refused to go onstage for the New York opening of
Fiddler
because he couldn’t bear to play the scene in which Tevye disowns Chava for marrying the non-Jew Fyedka—but certainly she kept her distance. Mostel’s two sons didn’t spend time with their grandmother. The older brother, Joshua, remembers his reaction as a boy upon hearing that Zero’s mother had just died: “He has a mother?”

On the other hand, Mostel sustained a lifelong grudge against his mother-in-law because she served him creamed beef the first time Kate brought him home to meet her; he considered the ostentatiously nonkosher dish a deliberate anti-Jewish slur. And though Mostel did not raise his children with any religion, he could not altogether abandon the one in which he was raised. Tobias Mostel remembers that throughout his teenage years he’d see his father praying privately at home late at night, hunched and bobbling over a Hebrew text, yarmulke tilting atop his bald spot—as if the daily practice of Mostel’s upbringing hung on like vestigial cartilage, lacking utility or significance but too familiar and ancient a part of himself to question, too painful to remove.

Then there was Yiddish. Mostel peppered his outbursts with its pungent insults. He coarsened his jokes with its salty phrases. He muttered in
mamaloshn
when he didn’t want others to understand—or, perhaps more to the point, when the content of the utterance was less important than indicating that the emotional size of his response was so great it required his secret language. Yiddish never stopped gurgling within him; often it spilled out. Besides, Mostel was well read and as refined in his aesthetic sensibility as he was obstreperous in his outward behavior. In addition to pre-Columbian objects and fine art books, he collected Judaica—including dozens of dreydls from around the world. He loved to discuss—and show off his knowledge of—Yiddish culture and literature, which, he took as a given, required no special pleading to be considered among the world’s great works. When he listed the supreme masters of the comic form in his Harvard lecture on comedy, he included—alongside the likes of Rabelais, Swift, and Dickens—Sholem-Aleichem. Tobias, born in 1949, was told his name derived from Tevye.

Playing Tevye, then, was not just another job or even just another starring role for Mostel. The part offered a kind of vindication, a reconciling of Mostel’s past with his present, a means of honoring the background he had to reject in a form that, in itself, expressed, even celebrated, that rejection: playing Tevye on Broadway, he could have his kreplach and eat it too. Robbins, in contrast, had run from an image, from a specter of incivility and weakness that rose from his ignorance and fear and from his desire for acceptance. Mostel knew what he had given up and could represent it with affection as a trace of the past; Robbins was joyously discovering a cultural wealth that he’d been denied and that the show could display as a gleaming treasure—but, crucially, one from long ago and far away. In different fashions, both men were internally making the show’s primary contradictory gesture: embracing Jewish practice at arm’s length.
Fiddler
’s own dialectics—Tevye’s constant on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand reasoning—expressed this ambivalence and made space for audience members, whether Jewish or not, at any point along several spectrums of observance, knowledge, or parallel experience, to find a place of emotional entry. Robbins was right that the theme of “tradition” solved everything. It gave the show dramatic conflict that could be reiterated with new variations in every scene, but beyond that all-important technical necessity, the theme performed an alchemical feat that would be the key to the show’s success: by turning
toyre
(Torah)—Jewish law and religious practice—into “tradition,” it handed over a legacy that could be fondly claimed without exacting any demands. Heritage, after all, is not something one does; it is something one has. Through
Fiddler
, Mostel and Robbins—and millions of spectators in the decades to come—could cherish, honor, and admire a legacy in the safely secular, make-believe space of a theater.

*   *   *

By the end of 1963, with a headlining director and star nailed down, designers studiously at work, and the script and score already in passable shape, the
Tevye
project needed only one thing more: cash. Fred Coe had neglected to raise any in the year and a half since he’d become its producer. Nor had he managed to draw up contracts for the designers and the actors Robbins had selected. The enthusiastic southern gentleman was in over his head—including in drink. And he had a new project on his plate, directing the film version of
A Thousand Clowns
(which he had produced on Broadway the previous year). Prince had come into Tevye sharing duties and future earnings equally with Coe, but Coe’s piece of both dwindled. Eventually, he was relieved of all responsibilities, cut back to 12 percent of the producers’ interest, and taken out of the credits entirely.