Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance 1477328505, 9781477328507

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. What We Talk about When We Talk about the Method
Chapter 1. Methodists and Method-ists: Primordial Ideas of Methodness
Chapter 2. Acting a Foil: John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and the Othering of Methodness
Chapter 3. James Dean’s Story: Posthumous Reception and Methodness Memorialized
Chapter 4. History in Hysteria: John Garfield and the Limits of Methodness
Chapter 5. Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats: Methodness to the Present
Conclusion. Facing a Future Methodness
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Imagining the Method

Imagining the Method Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance Justin Owen Rawlins

University of Texas Press 

 Austin

Chapter 3 draws in part from Justin Rawlins, “Over His Dead Body: Hedda Hopper and the Story of James Dean,” Velvet Light Trap 71, no. 1 (2013): 27–41. Copyright © 2024 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2024 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 utpress.utexas.edu The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rawlins, Justin Owen, author. Title: Imagining the Method : reception, identity, and American screen performance / Justin Owen Rawlins. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023010653 (print) | LCCN 2023010654 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-4773-2850-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-4773-2851-4 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-4773-2852-1 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Method acting—History. | Method acting—Press coverage. | Method acting—Influence. | Motion picture acting—History. | Motion picture actors and actresses— United States—History. | Motion picture audiences—United States—History. Classification: LCC PN2062 .R39 2024 (print) | LCC PN2062 (ebook) | DDC 792.02/8—dc23/eng/20230424 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010653 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023010654 doi:10.7560/328507

Contents

INTRODUCTION

What We Talk about When We Talk about the Method 1 CHAPTER 1

Methodists and Method-ists Primordial Ideas of Methodness 25 CHAPTER 2

Acting a Foil John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and the Othering of Methodness 61 CHAPTER 3

James Dean’s Story Posthumous Reception and Methodness Memorialized 89 CHAPTER 4

History in Hysteria John Garfield and the Limits of Methodness 119 CHAPTER 5

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Methodness to the Present 151 CONCLUSION

Facing a Future Methodness 187 Acknowledgments 199 Notes 205 Selected Bibliography 239 Index 249

Imagining the Method

INTRODUCTION

What We Talk about When We Talk about the Method

A Cauldron of Disputation The setting is an institution of some kind, its buildings and grounds plain and unremarkable. Five men in wheelchairs gather around a table in the background, conversing and playing cards. Splashed obliquely across the foreground, a young man reclines slightly against a screen door, left foot planted on the ground as the right rests on a wheelchair. One hand clasps a cigarette and rests atop a script. He stares off-screen as if in thought, smoke wafting from his mouth. This individual would soon be unmistakable to postwar US screen audiences and would come to be widely regarded as one of the greatest American film actors to ever practice the craft: Marlon Brando.1 Brando was the focus of Ed Clark’s October 1949 Life magazine photo shoot for good reason. Hot off his meteoric rise in the Broadway smash A Streetcar Named Desire, the actor’s trajectory suggested screen stardom would soon follow. Brando’s seemingly unorthodox approach to acting heightened the appeal: he was preparing for his first film role as Ken Wilocek, a veteran with paraplegia, in Fred Zinnemann’s forthcoming picture The Men (1950) by spending a month in Van Nuys, California, embedded among disabled veterans at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital. Yes, the actor had appeared in Life before, but then he was little more than a caption in the December 1947 write-up celebrating the author Tennessee Williams on the occasion of A Streetcar Named Desire’s triumphant Broadway debut.2 Brando was now the unquestioned center of attention, and Clark’s lens documented the twenty-five-year-old’s verve as he exercised his craft in 1

Imagining the Method idiosyncratic fashion. Photo after photo captured Brando ensconced in Birmingham life: developing his wheelchair skills under the tutelage of veterans with paraplegia; fraternizing and rehearsing with his VA comrades; training with crutches and leg braces; studiously perusing a script. Clark’s shoot would go on to provide images for the successive Life profiles “Preparing for Paraplegia” in June 1950 and “The Brilliant Brat” one month later.3 With a reach that extended to approximately 22.5 million Americans, Life was the most widely read magazine in the nation at the time and brought the young Brando to a mass audience.4 The magazine’s distinctive image-centric mode of storytelling mimicked filmmakers’ suturing of disparate scenes to suggest a cohesive narrative.5 The result had Brando straddling the two most widely consumed visual platforms of the time and painted an indelible portrait of a purportedly new type of actor and performance style—what would be called Method acting—on the cusp of their explosion into the American popular consciousness. Life’s images, which provided readers with an elliptical narrative structured around Brando’s apparently visceral preparations, appeared to disclose a lot while in fact leaving the bulk of his acting process—not to mention Brando himself—off limits. As would be the case with many behind-thescenes glimpses of well-known Method performers in the midcentury “Method moment,” these images offered a broadly appealing iconography of acting that seemingly merged role and self while often embodying tensions for audiences between internal individual desires and external social responsibilities.6 More than previous stars and performers, the images and discourses surrounding the likes of Brando proffered palpable physical cues—such as the actor’s transformation into a veteran with paraplegia—as indicators of extraordinary acting skill rooted deep within the actor’s subjectivity. The consequent inaccessibility of that performer’s interiority and process would then be held up as evidence of the actor’s, and the performance’s, singularity. Such was the prevailing reception of what would soon come to be known as the Method and its purported practitioners. Contrary to the ballyhoo, Brando was not in fact a Method actor. He had only briefly attended New York’s Actors Studio—the pantheon of Method acting—and he repeatedly disavowed that organization, its guru Lee Strasberg, and the Method. Still, his repeated insistence that it was Stella Adler (not Strasberg) who had taught him to perform (what Cynthia Baron has characterized as “Modern” rather than “Method” acting) gained little comparable traction in the interpretive landscape of US popular culture.7 This erroneous application of the Method label continually frustrated Brando yet outlived him. It also paralleled a far-reaching fixation on so-called Method 2

Introduction acting and actors that was often at odds with actual performance philosophies and practices but nevertheless became increasingly embedded in film and star promotion, reviews, industry accolades, and public discourse. These images and stories about the performers and performances were part of a long twentieth-century arc in which Method acting and actors (actual and ascribed) became loaded signifiers of exceptionality and inscrutability etched into the US popular imagination. In this book I look to reconstitute the terms and conditions of this arc in order to render it more visible and to analyze its features as well as its relation to the prevailing history of Method acting. To do so, I examine the cultural imagining of Method acting and actors and explore how studios, journalists, critics, and audiences have contributed to the significance of the most consequential performance style of the last century. Public understanding of “the Method,” as it has often been called, is riddled with contradictions and inaccuracies. Despite this fact, institutional, popular, and critical discourse around Method acting and Method actors has attracted little sustained scrutiny, even as the performers continue to receive outsized media attention (not to mention industrial and critical plaudits) for their purported commitment, immersion, transformation, and sacrifice. Such features have come to stand in for explicit mentions of Method, enabling it to permeate popular culture yet rarely be named. The Method’s paradoxical obscurity and ubiquity have resulted in a lingua franca for making sense of actors and acting that we regularly traffic in yet rarely question, let alone dissect. By continuing to overlook the way we talk about and thus imagine “the Method,” we perpetuate ingrained assumptions about the conjunctures of identity, performer, and performance. This book seeks to unravel the paradox by situating the construction and connection of those assumptions within a revised historical narrative that illustrates the identity-based stratifications of actors, acting, and subjectivity we uphold in our long-normalized discourse about screen performers and performances. Efforts to decipher this performance style have long hinged on the question “What is Method acting?” Film, theater, and performance studies scholars have rigorously taken up this query, and the resulting work has charted competing histories, philosophies, and techniques—some of which are not Method at all—housed within the term’s monolithic popular usage.8 They have complicated Method acting by gesturing toward audience appropriations of its perceived rebelliousness, both domestically among leftist activists and internationally on the part of anti-colonial proponents.9 So too have scholars pointed to the alternate masculinities and queer possibilities manifest in Method acting, particularly amid the stultifying ideological impositions of early Cold War conformity and the era’s uncontainable instabilities 3

Imagining the Method in gender and sexuality.10 Most recently, scholars have turned attention to long-overlooked women in Method’s master narrative, from stars to teachers to figures such as Stella Adler, who opposed Strasberg and the Actors Studio but was nevertheless conflated with—and summarily sidelined by—them in the American popular imagination.11 Altogether, such interventions have attempted to splinter the hagiographic master narrative that has long cast the Actors Studio and Lee Strasberg as codependent protagonists in Method acting’s revolutionary postwar triumph over stage and screen.12 As James Naremore writes, the achievements of the Actors Studio “are difficult to substantiate” because the studio yielded “no especially significant theater,” supplied “no coherent theory of acting,” and held a reputation for training professional performers that was to some extent exaggerated.13 In spite of scholars’ efforts, popular and critical reception alike have largely continued to cloud the Method’s rich signifying possibilities by eliding the countless strands of acting philosophies and practices subsumed—sometimes inaccurately—under the Method label, as well as the contested terms and excluded figures who make up competing histories of performance. Language, wrote Raymond Williams, depends on a certain confidence in its transparency and applicability. It is stable and mutually understood enough to be taught and attached to objects or people, but its signification potentially becomes more fragile as changes arise and “questions [of meaning] are not faced.”14 Such questions, Williams notes, are ultimately about the plurality of signification even as one may seek to impose fixity on language. This book joins an emergent chorus of scholarship seeking to sidestep long-standing “factional squabbles and terminological disputes” over craft that have long saturated critical work on Method acting and actors, attending instead to the multiplicity of Methods that exist.15 The longtime focus on what Method acting is, I consequently caution, risks its own imposition of fixity that restricts alternative inquiries into what the term “Method” may signify. In other words, the question “What is Method acting?” presumes at its core that Method acting is internally coherent—that it holds an irreducible meaning capable of being discerned. This premise animates analytical frameworks subsequently applied to studying Method acting and actors, yielding rigorous and invaluable scholarship that nevertheless homes in on philosophies, practices, and screen performances in a way that largely skirts considerations of the contextual and contingent production of Method meaning beyond the stage and screen. By reconsidering the formative question itself—“What is Method acting?”—and the consequent approaches to stage- and screen-based mean-

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Introduction ings of performance the question prescribes, one can conceptualize other avenues for making sense of acting and actors. This book offers a revisionist accounting rooted in one such line of inquiry that asks what the Method does rather than what it is. In reframing the principal question, this book intervenes in a wide range of dialogues revolving primarily around the popular valuation and signification of performer and performance. Turning the focus to reception, I examine the discourses emanating out of Hollywood studios, general-interest magazines, newspapers, fan magazines, gossip columns, star interviews, fan letters, and other sources. These paratextual materials move along cultural circuits both formal (film promotion, news syndication, fan magazine subscriptions) and informal (fan communities, word of mouth, secondhand circulation), occupying spaces both private (producers’, consumers’, and intermediaries’ personal engagements with such materials) and public (popular platforms and public engagements with such materials). Together these circuits and spaces connect discourses and representations to motion pictures and fill in the gaps around and between them, comprising what I term an “interpretive landscape” upon which producers, readers, and intermediaries work to make sense of performers and performances.16 The terrain of this landscape also reflects the social formation(s) with which it is inextricably entwined, rendering participation and power in the meaning-making process uneven and unequal. The resulting landscape affects how people make sense of the cultural objects with which they engage, and it further colors the cultural objects they generate in turn. Certain interpretations, reader constituencies, and subject positions are privileged in this arrangement, at the expense of others that are overlooked or purposely relegated to the margins. In this book I argue that within the interpretive landscape of US popular culture, imagining Method acting and actors is just as important in these circuits and spaces as in any motion picture.17 Using a reception-based approach that combines discourse analysis and textual analysis with cultural history, I show that in fact the interpretive landscape has yielded a discursive construction of Method acting and actors—what I call “methodness”—that diverged from historical Method philosophies and practices long ago and has in fact eclipsed them in American popular culture. My approach entails looking to performer and performance style as discursively and representationally constituted, as having an expansive cultural footprint beyond the confines of motion pictures and plays, philosophical tracts, and classroom techniques. It involves locating characteristics aligned with Method acting and actors in the American popular imagination (e.g., transformation, commitment,

5

Imagining the Method rebellion, anti-commercialism, white male authorship, authority)—which in many cases eschewed explicit mentions of Method entirely—and considering the conditions under which such associations emerged and evolved. This means exploring the freighted implications of these links and examining the ideological work they do in spaces where critics, practitioners, producers, journalists, audiences, and others try to make sense of performers and performance generally and Method acting and actors specifically. This book shines a light on the cultural politics of methodness operating through the entrenched, still-dominant expectations and assumptions about race, gender, and screen performers and performance undergirding its language and imagery. Asking what the Method does reveals that its prevailing construction affirms white male superiority through the ascribed exceptionality of Method acting and the Method actor’s interiority, commitment, and transformation, whether the reception entails reverence, revulsion, or something in between. This project elucidates the processes through which these associations came into existence, became diffuse, and implicitly perpetuate regressive racial and gender politics through reputedly rebellious countercultural figures and/or mercurial artists—often without explicit references to race, gender, or even Method at all.

Methodologies of Methodness In his December 1965 review of Robert H. Hethmon’s edited collection Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Howard Taubman observed that the mere mention of the Method would send a person “fall[ing] into a cauldron of disputation.”18 The remark was prescient, and decades later Method acting still provokes intense debates because of its contentious terms and mythology, rendering “Method” a loaded and unwieldy term for critics, teachers, scholars, and others seeking to theorize, historicize, or assess it. To sidestep the cauldron of disputation this word invites, I use a related but distinct term, “methodness,” to represent the popular construction of Method acting and actors under study in this book. “Methodness” signifies two key aspects. The term conveys a distinction between received features of Method acting (i.e., methodness) and the actual historical philosophies and practices that fall within Method acting’s complex, contentious, and often misunderstood genealogies. The term also suggests that the prevailing reception of Method acting overlaps with and shares some DNA with its actual techniques, institutions, and personnel. “Methodness” draws attention to the power undergirding the construction and circulation of Method acting and actors in US popular culture, and as it 6

Introduction coalesces, “methodness” intersects with formative institutions, individuals, and ideas within Method acting’s actual traditions.19 Cultural histories of American theater and film supplement and contextualize the institutional, interpersonal, and ideological dynamics within which methodness came together. The alignment with particular reformist movements (e.g., Chautauqua and the Little Theater Movement), institutions (e.g., Moscow Art Theatre, American Laboratory Theatre, Group Theatre), and individuals (e.g., Konstantin Stanislavsky, Richard Boleslavsky, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg) lent shape to the ways in which practitioners, critics, and lay audiences made sense of methodness.20 These understandings and the expectations they engendered were crucial to the identities of Method acting and actors among Hollywood studio promotional staff and executives, celebrity journalists, critics, fans, and others in their popular emergence during the Method moment of the 1950s. The loosening of onerous Hollywood labor contracts, for example, provided the emergent stars Marlon Brando and James Dean with the added freedom to burnish their associations with the preexisting rebellious and anti-commercial characteristics of methodness. For their predecessor of the 1940s, the Hollywood star John Garfield, the actor’s Jewish and progressive political identities (i.e., anti-exploitation, prounion, anti-commercial) circumscribed methodness in his reception, leaving him out of Method celebrations and histories until his reclamation decades later as the purported prototype of the Method-acting rebel. In the following pages I construct a narrative of Method’s prevailing reception that weaves conventional movements, sites, and individuals into the networks of sometimes unconventional figures and venues where methodness has taken shape. As a project rooted in new cinema history, this book looks to industrial records, studio publicity releases, fan magazines, newspapers, performer diaries, general-interest magazines, film trailers, fan letters, and other sources to reconstruct the terms and conditions—the sociocultural history— under which this preferred mode of methodness coalesces.21 Here the goal of a comprehensive histoire totale runs up against the politics of preservation and the practicalities of historical research. Reconstituting the interpretive landscape of the past involves encountering fragmented or outright missing materials. The relative scarcity of audience-generated content, for example, reflects the lack of interest among many studios, archives, and perhaps audience members themselves in the historical value of viewer insights and experiences. Other omissions may be more deliberate, reflecting what Allyson Nadia Field characterizes as the “longstanding, ongoing, and pervasive misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, and racist environment” that renders problematic both the archive and scholars’ discernment of the 7

Imagining the Method evidence and production of history.22 For this book, much of the challenge lies in the ephemerality of the interpretive landscape’s informal circuits and private spaces. In other words, I strive for comprehensiveness with this project while recognizing the limitations and excisions that define historical practice; the aim, then, is to be representative in both depth and breadth. As a result, I focus on the prevailing form of methodness put forth by those institutions and individuals in positions of power, but I am careful to situate this construct as the preferred mode of methodness rather than the only one available. Historical reception provides an essential framework for conceptualizing the imagination of methodness and accounting for the relations of its construction out of a fragmented historical record that weighs competing meanings within a given moment and over time.23 I utilize reception to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives and multimodal artifacts, to draw out the ways in which race and ethnicity, gender, class, theater, and film have contributed to, and subsequently been influenced by, the imagining of the Method. Reception is well suited to the task because it does not rely on an imputed internal system for a film text’s meaning. As Barbara Klinger suggests, reception directs us instead toward meaning as a function of a text’s multiple synchronic and diachronic histories, encouraging us to consider the “network(s) of relationships” as well as “adjacent intertextual fields” (e.g., exhibition practices) and the range of dominant and alternative ideologies present in a given context.24 Reception encourages the pursuit of total historicity to glean “a panoramic view of the contexts most associated with cinema’s social and historical conditions of existence,” while cautioning us to situate interpretations as contingent and contextual rather than monolithic.25 Janet Staiger adds that reception is not simply a matter of interpreting texts but rather explaining “the event of interpreting a text.”26 Such an “event” directs attention to more than the substance of the reading; it invites scrutiny of what happens in the moment of reading and, by extension, what readers do with their interpretations. Though reception often infers an audience-centric approach, Stuart Hall reminds us that it also attends to the contexts and contingencies of power between producers and readers that contribute to disparities in the reach, visibility, and longevity of competing interpretations. “Encoding,” as Hall puts it, represents the ideological conditions and social relations producers express through the media they make. While this positionality affords them varying degrees of authority and control, it does not dictate the conditions and relations that inform others’ “decoding” of media messages.27 This book stitches together available historical materials to attempt to re-create the conditions and relations underwriting the prevailing reception of methodness. 8

Introduction This does not, as Hall cautions, guarantee readings along the same lines. More to the point, attending to these power dynamics of cultural production and reception calls attention to the terms and conditions under which popular culture renders hegemonic specific identities and ideologies. In the US context, the popular cultural environment within which the prevailing mode of methodness is imagined did and continues to reflect or refract whiteness, heteronormativity, cisgender identities, and able-bodied frameworks—the “existing (il)logics of white media industry executives,” as Alfred L. Martin Jr. puts it—that filter a sense of the world on-screen and off- through “the monolithic industrial imagining[s]” of subaltern identity categories.28 Reception provides a framework for envisioning performance as a decentralized accumulation of meanings occurring primarily through discourse and representations in the interpretive landscape surrounding the motion picture. Within this framework, I also look to the concept of the paratextual to think about the importance of discourses and representations in the circuits and spaces constituting so much of the interpretive landscape. Jonathan Gray describes paratexts as “texts that prepare us for other texts.”29 Paratexts include trailers, interviews, previews, publicity and promotional materials, star and director profiles, newspaper and magazine articles, and other material often considered ancillary to the central film text. Emanating from studios, critics, viewers, and other constituencies, paratexts do not necessarily share the film’s author but do constitute crucial parts of the interpretive landscape by supplementing the motion picture and helping its audiences to make sense of it. It is possible to consume paratexts and not the film to which they are connected, meaning that those materials, rather than the motion picture itself, have provided knowledge of the film. Extending this logic to screen acting and actors, paratexts about the performer and performance exist outside “the work,” in Gray’s words, of the film-specific performance, but they are not separate from it.30 They exist symbiotically, and together they constitute “the text.” Thinking paratextually suggests that the paratexts about the acting and the actor are intertwined with the film-based performance: such thinking decenters the screen performance itself as the primary source of cultural meaning, without jettisoning it. Paratexts express the importance of extrafilmic materials to the reception of film content. They both reflect the characteristics of the interpretive landscape itself and contribute their respective interpretations to the broader currents of reception. By decentering the text, my approach also calls to mind Racquel Gates’s caution against overreliance on representation. Images do not speak for themselves, Gates observes, and the ongoing (and consequential) misunderstanding that they do can limit conceptualizations of their possibilities. Gates notes “an unshakable belief that images do work 9

Imagining the Method outside of the histories and contexts in which they circulate,” and this book proposes that using reception and thinking paratextually does the necessary work of exploring beyond the image and attending to context while remaining cognizant of the limitations of an image’s scope and claims.31 Reception and paratexts also highlight the significance of stardom in the discursive construction of methodness. Philip Drake foregrounds the importance of extrafilmic reception in his interrogation of fame and performance. “The question of stardom problematizes the discussion of performance” generally, he asserts, because it paradoxically pitches the star’s role-eclipsing renown against the need to subordinate the polysemic image to each new characterization.32 “Meaning,” Drake continues, is therefore “created both by the performance and also by an audience’s knowledge of the star’s intertextual references.”33 Method acting in particular exacerbates this paradox by further entangling acting with “the audience’s knowledge of Method conventions”— methodness—freighted with the uneven terrain of an interpretive landscape that exceptionalizes white men through Hollywood’s star system generally and performance discourse specifically.34 Richard DeCordova argued that identity and performance may well exist more in the discursive networks of Hollywood’s star system than in the films produced by the industry.35 Motion picture consumption was the primary financial motive behind the system, DeCordova observed, because stars were believed capable of cultivating relationships with audiences beyond the theater and thereby ensuring ongoing patronage of the movies. Newspaper coverage, fan magazines, and other discursive sites have been essential to these epistemological economies, comprising the bulk of information intended to stoke audiences’ desire to know famous figures through managed publicity. This book draws on such an approach to stardom, as it dovetails with a paratextual approach to acting and actors by prioritizing discourse in the construction of stars and consequently foregrounding their significance, alongside and sometimes entangled with methodness, on the interpretive landscape of American popular culture. Discursive analysis also calls attention to the racialization and gendering of acting labor. The economies of knowledge linking producers, stars, and audiences produce iterations of fame (what Christine Geraghty has labeled “celebrity,” “professional,” and “performer”) that have historically sought to regulate access to famous figures and to maintain film- and labor-centric hierarchies of value along decidedly identity-based boundaries.36 Early to midcentury Hollywood publicity and promotion surrounding female stars routinely eschewed discussions of the philosophies and techniques underwriting their performances, or their “productive labor,” as Virginia Wright Wexman puts it. Instead, such materials suggested that what audiences witnessed on-screen 10

Introduction was simply an extension of the women’s real personalities rather than the work of acting.37 Industry rhetoric differed around female stars’ male peers, and although the discourse still sought to demystify the performance process (as this book’s study of John Wayne illustrates), it took pains to emphasize the work involved on the part of the performer. Methodness exacerbated these gendered disparities, as well as the exclusionary dimensions of an overall star system that emphasized the visibility and desirability of white, straight, cisgender, and able-bodied performers at the expense of those outside of such identity categories. As this book’s study of Marlon Brando particularly illustrates, paratextual discourse and representations surrounding so-called Method actors regularly struck balances of disclosure and concealment that provided glimpses of unorthodox, intensive practices yet demurred on the details of their processes in favor of allusions to an unknowable interiority inferred to exceptionalize them. This pattern was overwhelmingly limited to white men who supposedly practiced the Method and was rarely attributed to nonmale and nonwhite performers of color, regardless of the caliber or lineage of their acting.38 Elucidating stardom’s ideological work in its discursive entanglements with subjectivity, star studies proves particularly useful in stretching performance beyond film- or gesture-specific meanings. Reception delineates the expanded historicization of Method acting and actors both synchronically (i.e., within a specific moment) and diachronically (i.e., over time). Thinking diachronically, for example, reveals ideological undercurrents of protomethodness in groups such as the American Laboratory Theatre (1923–1930) and the Group Theatre (1931–1941). It reveals deeper roots in the anti-commercialism and exceptionality of the Little Theatre Movement (ca. 1912–1925) and extends still further to nineteenthand twentieth-century antecedent strands of anti-modern ambivalence and nature-based transformation. In chapter 1, I examine these contradictory tendencies, which mix anti-commercial rebelliousness with religious tent meetings, Chautauquas, and various progressive venues, by turning to oral histories, journals, and print media coverage. Shared perceptions of modern degradation and conviction in the individually and communally transformative potential of rural enlightenment raise additional questions about the regressive identity politics at work within the reputedly progressive Group Theatre. These influential links also call into question Method acting’s axiomatic status as a twentieth-century phenomenon by demonstrating the construct’s ideological indebtedness to much earlier linkages of space, identity, and self-cultivation. This book also explores the synchronic forces at work in the coalescence of methodness, broadening the landscape of those involved in the imagining 11

Imagining the Method of methodness to include unexpected parties. In chapter 3, for example, I examine James Dean’s reception via Warner Bros. promotional materials and fan letters written to the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper following his death, illustrating Hopper’s prominent role in publicizing Dean’s methodness and marshaling both its features and her like-minded readers toward ideologically reactionary ends. In chapter 2, meanwhile, I show how the self-proclaimed “reactor” John Wayne contributed to popular understandings of methodness from outside its immediate orbit through a star image predicated on contrasting his avowedly transparent, studio-pleasing screen labor with an “actor” foil whose esoteric, anti-commercial values aligned with the characteristics of methodness. Together, diachronic and synchronic explorations illustrate the process by which various parties come to understand “Method” acting and actors and what is at stake in imagining the Method.

Parsing Performance Writing on the cusp of the Method’s midcentury eruption into the postwar American popular imagination, the Guardian critic Philip Hope-Wallace gave voice to the “great state of confusion on the subject of film acting” that had gripped “the public mind” in 1949.39 Around him, popular discourse tended not to regard screen acting as artistic labor, and Hope-Wallace found that stardom routinely blurred evaluations of the performer’s and performance’s merits.40 Citing Mercedes McCambridge’s Academy Award–winning role in All the King’s Men (Robert Rossen, 1949), he contended that stage acting did not permit personality to obscure the thespian’s art. The conditions of motion picture production, however, raised the possibility that skill might be confused with, and even eclipsed by, personality.41 As a result, viewers were left to wonder if they were watching the star or the actor perform. To isolate film acting from both the vagaries of collaborative cinematic production and the cacophony of intertextual noise epitomized by the star system, Hope-Wallace suggested that performance be extracted from these contexts, isolating film as a discrete site of meaning making. The suggestion was prescient, even if the execution has continually vexed critics and scholars. One of the key movements toward reevaluating screen performance generally and Method acting specifically has looked not to isolate performance but to situate it relative to the screen, the stage, the classroom, and the circuits of translation connecting them. This line of inquiry has attended to the genealogies of various acting philosophies and techniques merged under the auspices of Method acting and has observed how that resulting monolith 12

Introduction reflects relatively little of the many performance philosophies and practices passed down by teachers not named Lee Strasberg.42 In chapter 1, I discuss how émigré teachers such as Maria Ouspenskaya, for example, eschewed written lessons for interactive classroom pedagogy, which proved consequential for received popular understandings of performance. The scarcity of written, publicly available knowledge about Ouspenskaya’s work with the System heightened the authoritative status of her fellow émigré instructor Richard Boleslavsky, whose prolific publications and public speeches on the System dominated public discourse and overshadowed the private work of his peer. These were among several circumstances conspiring to fragment and transform Americans’ perception of acting philosophies and practices rooted in the Moscow Art Theatre. These histories—and the potential deconstruction of a monolithic Method they represent—provide points of departure for exploring the contexts that cultivate methodness and secure its features. To a certain extent, this book’s inquiry aligns with Rosemary Malague’s work on the gender dynamics of Method education. Homing in on the politics of private Method classroom spaces, Malague argues that feminists and other scholars have overlooked the experiences of the Method actor in training. “What do we need to know about how actresses are prepared?” she asks, calling attention to the dearth of scrutiny directed toward the Method’s long-institutionalized status.43 My analysis bears out her concern about persistent sexism in the classroom, raising the specter of institutionalized patriarchy and female exploitation in the transmission of Method knowledge. What’s more, these practices may be written into Method acting itself, exercised in the power relations attending its instruction. Malague’s work provides an illustrative model for teasing out ingrained power relations and identity politics at work on methodness, and I similarly seek to scrutinize institutional and interpersonal relations in the ongoing negotiation of acting/actor meanings.44 Writing decades after Hope-Wallace, James Naremore offered a more resilient concept of “performance” capable of being “regarded in at least three different senses: as actors playing theatrical personages, as public figures playing theatrical versions of themselves, and as documentary evidence.”45 One cannot entirely sever acting and stardom, but performance can be localized within a “performance frame” that considers the actor’s position within the screen text relative to roles, star images, mise-en-scène, narrative, sound, inanimate objects, audiences, and other factors that collectively lend value to the act. Such a “frame” is critical to the audience’s reading of film performance, Naremore maintains, for it serves as a subconscious interpretative schema through which viewers process the performer’s aleatory and 13

Imagining the Method theatrical acts in concert with other formal characteristics of the film text.46 Insisting, like Hope-Wallace and Naremore, that performance constitutes an “active” site of meaning in need of analysis, Cynthia Baron forcefully argues that screen acting is not an inert effect of film editing or directing but rather an engaged process of “performative choices” contributing to cinema’s fundamental architecture.47 The performance frame and performative choices acknowledge, to varying extents, the importance of context in determining meaning. The former continually animates my interest as to what paratextual materials contribute to the significance of Method acting and actors. Reframing screen acting’s symbolic possibilities also revises master narratives of film performance that have long characterized its styles as entirely distinct from one another. Contrary to the hagiographic narrative about Strasberg’s midcentury acting revolution, pre–World War II–era Hollywood was in fact rife with Stanislavskian-aligned acting styles. The industry’s investments in Method-related techniques were contradictory, relying on studio drama schools led primarily by women instructors while mitigating recognition of their performative labor and all but ignoring those connections and skills when promoting successful alums—especially if they were women.48 The historical implications erode Method acting’s prevailing fictions of purity and superiority that have long been filtered through Strasberg and the Actors Studio. Scholars have brought greater clarity to film acting’s heterogeneous and overlapping genealogies, helping to demystify the prevailing Method narrative and highlight Strasberg’s teleology of postwar acting revolution. I certainly agree with the sentiment that “there is more to film performance than Method acting”; and it is important to note too that such a powerful sentiment cuts multiple ways.49 As an expression of prevailing interventions in acting studies, this mentality contravenes Method-centrism and points to a vast spectrum of performance styles. It can also serve as a call to double down on Method acting to further complicate it and deconstruct its privileged status. If “film acting is best understood as a form of mediated performance that [lies] at the intersection of art, technology, and culture,” then greater attention is owed to negotiations of meaning in the networks surrounding screen acting and actors.50

White Male Acts Drawing out the linkages between performance and identity calls for more sustained engagement with the question of who is, and who is not, aligned with methodness. It is an irrefutable fact that the Method label and its accom14

Introduction panying industrial, critical, and popular acclaim have been almost entirely reserved for white male performers. It is equally true that the acting traditions routinely combined under the auspices of the “Method” have historically included teachers and students representing a broad spectrum of human difference. Nevertheless, the prevailing reception of Method acting and actors has not adequately reflected this reality, nor have its purveyors—including studios, critics, journalists, performers, and audiences—reassessed the circumstances that have historically rendered methodness suspiciously white and male dominated. Rose McClendon, James Baldwin, and Míriam Colón, for example, are among the many who rarely factor into such discussions despite their respective involvement in these histories of Method and Method-adjacent performance. Instead, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, James Dean, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, and others tend to dominate discussions of the craft even as some, such as Brando, have repeatedly rejected the Method label. Even female Method performers who went on to become film stars, such as Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Geraldine Page, and Ellen Burstyn, have tended to draw significantly less attention than their male counterparts. When a female actor did occasionally receive attention—as in Jon Krampner’s book-length study of Kim Stanley, which revealed Stanley’s “secretive .  .  . complex, shape-shifting personality” and her “layers of self-mythologizing”—the account drew on referential terrain already aligned with men.51 In Krampner’s estimation, these characteristics made Kim Stanley exceptional yet elusive—“the female Brando.” In a move indicative of methodness, even praise for Stanley is grounded in the baseline exceptionality of a male performer. Such supposed synonymy between subject and performance style forecloses alternatives for conceptualizing Method acting and actors outside of a white-centric, masculinist framework, abetting the exclusionary features of methodness beneath the veneer of praising Stanley. In other words, the overrepresentation of white men in methodness occurs at the expense of a vast and diverse community of performers who are often excised from that discourse and the history it underpins. Turning attention toward female Method actors has shed light on historically undervalued labor while leaving whiteness firmly in place. Little has been written about Rose McClendon, for example, despite the fact that she attended the Group Theatre’s formative first summer training, staged an allBlack production of the Group’s play Waiting for Lefty, and was regarded as a seminal theater figure in her day. The relative synonymy of methodness and white male performers has no doubt clouded the many histories and players involved in the development and dissemination of Method-related philosophies and techniques. In retracing the construction of methodness at 15

Imagining the Method institutional and interpersonal levels, this book highlights moments in which the elevation of white male subjectivities coincides with the erasure of other perspectives and identities from the Method master narrative. The power of these hegemonic identity categories has routinely conferred upon them an unquestioned, universal status that can prove difficult to pinpoint. Newspaper and student accounts of Richard Boleslavsky’s public speeches and private lessons, for example, which I explore in chapter 1, did not overtly parse out the extent to which his Polish émigré status diminished his whiteness in the nativist climate of 1920s America. Indeed, methodness has generally evaded overt descriptors of identity altogether. This book therefore looks to situate the often inferred racialized and gendered dimensions of methodness within the overarching historical and theoretical analyses of US representational regimes, particularly as they manifest in Hollywood and the film industry’s chief commodity, film stars. At its inception in the mid-1890s, US cinema was already fused with the stratifying representational regimes emerging out of the nation’s lateindustrial social, economic, demographic, and technological transformations. Racial formations were being reworked under tenuous postbellum reforms, while cinema was attempting to achieve greater legitimacy amid steep competition from other forms of leisure. From the outset, cinema’s self-promotion as a distinct visual mode of entertainment in the United States relied upon the influences of other racialized cultural forms (e.g., vaudeville, blackface minstrelsy, burlesque) to stake its claims to visualizing difference in the starkest forms of contrast.52 Bodies have been central to cinema’s rhetoric regarding its unique representational capabilities, titillating audiences with new technological wonders and privileged access to racialized corporeality.53 Films also relied on audiences to bring understandings of identity to their moviegoing experience. As an extension of Western (i.e., Euro-American) visual culture and the Eurocentric worldview that informed it, US cinema affirmed—rather than invented—racialized epistemologies, “confirm[ing] meanings for which the discourses and structures of our society . . . predisposed us.”54 This prevailing imaginary, Richard Dyer has argued, renders whiteness the universalized subject position, so conflated with humanness as to be epistemologically invisible.55 This book draws on scholarship exploring moving images’ implications within this larger “white dominated symbolic order” drawn from structuring racial logics invested in naturalizing white, middle-class, male subjectivity through the constant marginalization and subordination of people of color and women.56 These contrasts between whiteness and otherness—like the fictions that sustain them—were not and are not monolithic. They remain 16

Introduction unstable and subject to contradiction, fragmentation, and resistance. Still, dominant forces underwriting capital and cultural production have worked to ensure that stratifying regimes of signification maintain hegemonic status. The result has seen a consistent visual language for imaging and imagining race and ethnicity, gender, class, and other vectors of identity that has freely revised history, centered “white family discourse,” and contrasted normative white masculinity with the unassimilable strangeness of the racialized other.57 In its efforts to allay social stigmas, avoid external censorship, draw larger audiences, and generate greater profits, Hollywood further inscribed white male exceptionalism into all aspects of film, rendering whiteness in particular “everywhere a fact” in the “audiences, authors, genres, studios, and styles” of the studio system.58 Such context is indispensable in charting the synergies between media representation and American identity politics, and to understanding that race is one of many vectors of subjectivity that may enhance privilege, mitigate it, or intensify one’s disenfranchisement. It helps to situate turn-of-the-century American cinema, as well as the American stage, within sweeping ideological currents helping WASP and WASP-adjacent men pass into unmarked, all-American identities and suture cultural forms to those subject positions. Entertainment media worked alongside legal discourse, policies, and other socioculturally sanctioned arbiters of difference to shape the assumptions of historical audiences regarding the signifying capacities of different individuals. This guaranteed nothing in the outcome of viewers’ actual readings, but it did saturate the interpretive landscape alongside other modes of cultural production, underwriting how future cultural producers such as the Group Theatre imagined difference in relation to performance and theater. I seek to combine these wide-ranging implications of race, gender, and other social identities with interdisciplinary scholarship on stars that foregrounds fame’s entanglements in the politicization of bodies as well as the body politic. Stars have always been entangled in these processes. They have offered a conceptual bridge between Hollywood’s mobilization of broader identity categories and the specific complexities of selfhood demonstrated by its feature players. Stars are neither entirely producer- nor consumer-based creations, but rather assume their shape in the disputed spaces of the interpretive landscape populated by both. They evince a “structured polysemy” where meaning “emanates from Hollywood, and with some consistency within Hollywood,” that makes for uneven interpretive power while “allow[ing] for variation, inflection, and contradiction.”59 This carries provocative implications for performance and identity within a paratextual, reception-based study, suggesting that each are negotiated features of the star’s polysemic corpus as it 17

Imagining the Method eclipses any one role and accumulates meanings across the interpretive landscape in which they operate.60 Whereas cinema’s representational regimes enable the charting of large-scale connections between cinema and identity, the “structured polysemy” of stardom places the specifics of a famous figure’s signification in sharp relief against the institutional and interpersonal power relations that privilege and delimit potential meanings.61 Inextricably bound up in identity, producers and audiences alike imbue performances with “political value” across uneven terrain that precedes and exceeds the film text.62 In other words, while the particular mode of methodness under this book’s microscope is structurally preferred, it does not foreclose alternative interpretations of performers—as Method actors or non-Method actors—or the many possible alternate modes, characteristics, and histories of methodness that may exist.

Chapter Overview This book’s revisionist history does not map the comprehensive history of methodness, because no such monolithic form exists. Instead, I structure this project around a series of case studies exploring the dominant variant of methodness. Each case study is motivated by a central question concerning some facet of this discursive construction of Method acting and actors. What gave rise to methodness? Chapter 1 traces the Method’s ideological undercurrents to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anti-modern ambivalence, sacred and secular back-to-nature enterprises, and Progressivism’s identity politics through shared white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideologies of reform and transformation. These forces underwrote predominant racialized and gendered expectations around notions of education and self-cultivation, particularly within rural settings, which influenced how space, theater, and identity were approached by theatrical progenitors (e.g., the American Laboratory Theatre and the Little Theatre Movement) of the Group Theatre. Inchoate qualities of exceptionalist acting and actors (emphasizing rebellion, anti-commercialism, inscrutability, exceptionality, whiteness, and male authority) came together in an interpretive landscape shaped by movements (e.g., Chautauqua, Little Theatre Movement), institutions (e.g., American Laboratory Theatre, Group Theatre), and individuals (e.g., Richard Boleslavsky, Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg). Boleslavsky’s ascribed leadership over the American Laboratory Theatre, and his popular image as the singular authority in translating Stanislavskian theories of performance into the US context, routinely effaced the vital American Laboratory Theatre teaching 18

Introduction and leadership of his colleague Maria Ouspenskaya. Their disproportionately different visibility and authorial recognition presaged the received alternative, anti-commercial, and enigmatic performance style associated with the Group Theatre as well as the gendered and racialized authority bestowed upon Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. This chapter draws upon Group Theatre member interviews, diaries, and journals as well as newspaper and magazine discourse about the organization to bring the Group’s uneven social relations into sharp relief amid the ideological forces and racial and gender politics demarcating private and public access, and claims, to acting knowledge. I focus specifically on the Group’s formative first summer retreat and rehearsal in 1931 at Brookfield Center, Connecticut, where Strasberg’s authority over the troupe’s acting knowledge was cemented, and the 1934 summer retreat in Ellenville, New York, where Stella Adler formally challenged Strasberg’s ascribed authority over Stanislavsky. The Group would continue until 1941, yet these two moments highlight the ossification of methodness around constructions of exceptional acting subjects and knowledge. These power dynamics underscored Clurman’s public-facing claims to speak for the Group as well as Strasberg’s power over acting knowledge within the organization. The exclusive distribution of authority and knowledge among select Group members, both publicly and in private training and rehearsal spaces, did more than contradict the organization’s espoused egalitarian politics. It imbued the reception of the acting itself—what Strasberg claimed as his “method” in response to Adler’s challenge—with WASP cultural conventions and sutured a distinctly American idea of performance to hegemonic space, race, gender, class, and taste formations. How do non-Method figures contribute to methodness? Chapter 2 turns its sights on an unexpected figure in this revisionist history: John Wayne. Through formal, textual, and discursive analyses of film reviews, interviews, gossip columns, general-interest and fan magazines, studio promotion, and other material, I argue that this avowedly non-Method actor played a significant role in the popular dissemination of methodness. His intertextual persona relied not only upon the western’s representational regimes but also on a particular form of imagined screen labor, “reacting,” that together informed his popular identity as a hegemonic white male performer. Invoked indirectly since the beginning of his career, and more explicitly mentioned as early as 1941, Wayne’s status as a “reactor” became the nucleus of his star image well before the popular emergence of “Method” acting and actors in Hollywood. This distinctive feature, claimed by Wayne and attributed to him by others, persisted beyond his 1950 christening as America’s top film star. It captured 19

Imagining the Method his purported transparency as a performer whose labor was accessible to the public and a person whose philosophy toward performance evoked a romanticized blue-collar fealty to his audiences and his employers. The term “reactor” was repeatedly used to encapsulate what he represented as a performer and a person, and to define him in opposition to that which he repudiated: acting and actors. This chapter contends that the prominence of labor in the binaries of reacting/acting and reactor/actor suggest their crucial importance not only to Wayne’s reception but also to that of his actor foil. Duke’s opposition to acting painted it as an antithetical performance style that was unknowable and antagonistic, a form of labor driven by elusive interior motives that rendered the actor neither interested in placating audiences nor cooperative with the imperatives of commercial filmmaking. He did not specifically cite Method acting or actors for some time—this would change with their popular emergence in the late 1940s and early 1950s—yet the contrasting figure and performance style that circulated to promote Wayne’s own distinct identity bore a striking resemblance to methodness from the very beginning. The actor foil and Method actors’ inscrutable, anti-commercial style of acting dovetailed with preexisting understandings of the Group Theatre. Wayne’s overtly racialized and gendered star image gave this contrast heightened ideological stakes, I contend, for in situating himself at the normative white male center of American power (a synonymy reenacted repeatedly in his screen roles), Duke also helped to cast his foils as marginal figures. Turning to Marlon Brando’s first film, The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950), and the discourse surrounding it provides a telling example of how such contrasts in performance labor and identity play out, how they serve to disseminate methodness ahead of the debut of prominent Method-aligned performers, and how they obscure the exclusionary gender and racial dimensions of methodness by seemingly situating it in the margins and away from power. How can methodness be mobilized and memorialized? Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapter to explore ways in which methodness’s purported marginality could be appropriated and interpreted by reactionary communities. Using films such as East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) and The James Dean Story (George W. George and Robert Altman, 1957), reviews, studio publicity materials, correspondence, the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper, fan correspondence, fan magazines, and other print discourse, I examine James Dean’s reception in the two years following his September 1955 death. For Hopper and the self-identifying Dean fans who wrote to her, the young actor’s death in a spectacular automobile crash tragically punctuated their interpretation of his anti-Hollywood-establishment outsider status. His unforeseen passing 20

Introduction constituted a shared trauma for this epistolary community, as well as a rallying point for transforming their collective readings into efforts to reclaim the actor from the forces of modern liberal culture that they believed had alienated the outsider to the point of self-destruction. Despite their sharp criticism of mainstream American filmmaking and the gossip industry, these Dean fans regarded Hedda Hopper as a like-minded ally in the battle to preserve their shared conservative reception of the young Hoosier against competing, and purportedly unscrupulous, interpretations. Hopper convened an ad hoc epistolary community by affirming writers’ grievances, recirculating fan proposals for crowdfunded memorialization projects, and promising to wield her influence within Hollywood to get industrysanctioned posthumous recognition for the actor on terms that aligned with the group’s reading. She was more than an intermediary; she took an active role in positioning herself as the foremost expert on Dean’s “real” interior self. Alongside similar prevailing interpretations of Dean as victim, one may see in Hopper and these fans the cultural diffusion of methodness and its reactionary mobilization at work. These shared understandings eschewed explicit invocations of Method while trading on the notion of exceptional-yetmarginalized white male figures as martyrs of society’s liberal values and institutions. In death, Dean afforded these audiences a forum to fantasize about a bucolic past rooted in conservative, white, patriarchal hierarchies, to assign blame for the perceived erosion of such a status quo, and to utilize the very institutions (Hollywood) and circuits (gossip) they otherwise criticized for the purposes of memorializing their imagining of Dean against alternatives within the interpretive landscape of US popular culture. What are the limits of methodness? Chapter 4 homes in on the case of the actor John Garfield, who was a member of the Group Theatre and studied with Maria Ouspenskaya and Stella Adler. Garfield vocally espoused his connection to the Group, his intense preparation and anti-commercialist ethos, and his proletarian preference for the stage. He exuded a rebelliousness attributed to his hardscrabble upbringing that exceeded his screen roles. He was openly critical of studios’ exploitative practices and vocal about his progressive politics. Even though these features would all soon align with methodness (and be celebrated in the reception of figures such as Brando), Garfield’s 1952 death in the midst of the Method moment brought no mention of his Method-aligned credentials. Drawing on studio publicity, profiles and interviews, fan magazines, news articles, and other primary materials, this chapter utilizes Garfield’s unexpected death at the age of thirty-nine as a point of departure to reflect on the notable absence of his reception as a “Method” actor. Garfield’s exclusion was even more remarkable coming 21

Imagining the Method amid the period’s Method moment and given his close ties to most of the movement’s key values, organizations, and figures. Focusing on his toughguy typecasting and its ethnic and political connotations, I reevaluate his star image and the conditions under which his proximity to methodness failed to translate into the popular reception enjoyed by peers such as Brando. While John Wayne’s reception featured frequent talk of performance, John Garfield’s contemporaneous tough-guy typecasting instead touted the purported synonymy of his screen roles and his background as a Lower East Side ruffian. I contend that his prevailing reception also situated his Jewishness and progressive politics as excessive enough to render him ultimately unassimilable. Garfield rarely escaped both the tough-guy screen roles and the discourse that repeatedly connected characteristics of methodness back to his biography. These conditions circumscribed his signifying potential and foreclosed his reception as a Method-aligned actor in the 1950s, even as inheritors to his rebellious anti-commercialism and fellow Group Theatre alums (e.g., Marlon Brando and James Dean) were popularly branded with the Method label. It is only in the shifting terms of whiteness during the white ethnic revival of the 1960s and 1970s, I conclude, that his Jewishness and avowed rebelliousness—once deemed unassimilable—suddenly aligned with broadening ethnic and political boundaries of methodness. As a result, critics not only reclaimed John Garfield as a “Method” actor decades after his death but also reinserted him into a revised history of Method acting where he is received as the axiomatic Method rebel who influenced the likes of Brando, Dean, and others. What becomes of methodness when Method disappears? Chapter 5 begins with the films Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) and Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982) to understand the cultural entrenchment of methodness that has buttressed prevailing conversations about screen acting and actors for decades now. Premised on a shared cultural understanding that Method acting is simultaneously revered and reviled, and starring Dustin Hoffman as the Hoffmanesque Method actor Michael Dorsey, the wildly successful Tootsie epitomized how thoroughly ensconced methodness had become in US popular culture by the early 1980s. Tootsie also epitomized what I argue has become a signature feature of methodness as it has become more and more culturally entrenched: the dual pull of revulsion and reverence. Using syndicated news columns, making-of documentaries, magazine profiles, film reviews, and interviews, I examine Tootsie’s reception for how it traffics in methodness and contrasts with Robert Altman’s revisionist Come Back, released two months prior. Come Back’s meditation on the Method actor James Dean, identity, and cultural 22

Introduction memory—and the possible alternative methodness that their conjuncture signaled—was entirely overshadowed by Tootsie and by Hoffman’s Methodactor character Dorsey, whose destructive dedication to his craft alienates coworkers (revulsion) at the same that his transformation into the character of Dorothy Michaels draws widespread adoration (reverence). The remainder of the chapter follows this dual dimension of methodness to the twenty-first century to examine how revulsion and reverence have become key discursive touchstones in the reception of contemporary performers such as Heath Ledger, Jared Leto, Joaquin Phoenix, Jennifer Aniston, and Charlize Theron. Looking at film trailers as well as press junkets, print coverage, and online reception material, I argue that the revulsion/ reverence dynamic has become a key dialectic through which characteristics of methodness (in particular transformation) are negotiated. I find that it continues to carve out selective praise for bodily transformation that maintains white male exceptionalism, offers illusory inclusion of white women, and outright excludes performers of color through problematic assumptions about subjectivity. Where is methodness going? In the conclusion, I recapitulate this book’s overarching argument and survey prospective new directions for revisionist approaches focused on marginalized historical figures. The conclusion also looks to the implications of this project’s reception-based approach for future iterations of Method acting. Discussing the still-novel technologies of AI-generated actors, deepfakes, and other technological innovations related to screen performance, I offer “speculative acting” as a way of thinking about how historical reception serves as the interpretive code that nonperformers, including scientists, draw on to encode and teach “Method” acting to digital thespians. Describing Strasberg’s Method, Shonni Enelow says that “the script [was] not enough” in an approach to performance that emphasized interpretation. Scriptedness was something to be avoided.63 Perhaps there is an instructive lesson here: that we have become too regimented in continuing to privilege and traffic in the prevailing methodness under study in this book. This book’s intervention in questions about Method acting and actors, and the glimpses into a revisionist history such questions generate, invites reflection on the scriptedness of our interpretations and revision with an eye toward language capable of comprehending and situating our engagements with acting and actors within their broader cosmologies of meaning. This book works to chart this interpretive terrain, to usher in more reflection on what it is we are talking about when we talk about the Method.

23

CHAPTER 1

Methodists and Method-ists Primordial Ideas of Methodness

Secret Maneuvers of Creation Already responsible for the “mundane” tasks of “reading scripts, working on finance and calming tempers,” Cheryl Crawford took on an additional role during the Group Theatre’s first summer rehearsals at Brookfield Center, Connecticut, in 1931. A founder of the organization, Crawford was “elected” by fellow founders Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg to prepare the actors Rose McClendon and Fanny (née Fannie) Belle DeKnight for the first of the organization’s two productions that first year: The House of Connelly, Paul Green’s tale of a deteriorating southern family.1 Crawford was already familiar with McClendon’s and DeKnight’s capabilities, having seen the work of the African American thespians in the Theatre Guild production of Porgy several years earlier. Even though both were, in Crawford’s words, “experienced professionals,” their preparations to portray Connelly’s Black field hands Big Sue and Big Sis unfolded separately from the Group’s own studies under the direction of Strasberg and Clurman. Decades later, Crawford attempted to rationalize the act of racial segregation that occurred during the critical first summer of the Group’s existence. “We had to take two black actresses with us because they played important parts in the show,” she recalled.2 As for why they trained apart from the rest of the company, Crawford reasoned that trying “to work with [McClendon and DeKnight] in the Stanislavsky method which Lee used in his personal interpretation . . . would have turned [them] white.”3 Scholarly and popular commentators have long identified the Group Theatre (1931–1941) as the first homegrown US institution to transform 25

Imagining the Method Konstantin Stanislavsky’s teachings—often called the System—into a recognizably American performance style. Many have consequently characterized the Group as the birthplace of Method acting and the wellspring for its first generation of practitioners and pedagogues. In this chapter, I set out to understand what gave rise to methodness, eschewing the long-entrenched narrative of the Group and instead exploring the organization’s ideological tributaries, its delineations of authority and knowledge, and its emergent reception. Caught up in ideological currents and historical trends that converged in the company rather than originated from it, Group members were, like many other audiences, subject to forces cultivating an emergent idea that anticipated many features of methodness during the Method’s antecedent and early periods.4 In other words, the protean characteristics of methodness begin to coalesce even as explicit mentions of Method acting remained off the lips and pages of popular discourse for years. Tracing the contours of such an idea, pinpointing the forces acting upon it and the characteristics and figures aligned with such an abstraction, presents several challenges. As received bodies of knowledge, ideas are often indirect and symptomatic of “presuppositions and accepted attitudes concealed within them.”5 They are also perceptible, made material in the “writing and making . . . reading, seeing, employing, and even hearing” of everyday practices and social relations among movements, institutions, and individuals.6 Ideas acquire and accrete meaning through the conjunctures of discourse, power, and context and are capable of mutating or remaining fixed. The Stanislavsky scholar Jean Benedetti has painted the Method in such a manner, suggesting that rather than being stable—something “the” Method tends to imply—its constitutive elements have remained in a constant state of flux for a variety of reasons. Stanislavsky’s own theories of performance evolved at a rate that far outpaced his codification of such knowledge through print. Erratic publications were fraught by contentious translations and outright omissions as they migrated from the original Russian to English.7 Together with ongoing disagreements over interpretations and techniques among generations of teachers, students, and scholars, these factors have left the meanings of both “System” and “Method” relatively fluid in practice.8 Though his prescription rested on an irreducible textual meaning, Benedetti’s observation is compelling in its attention to instability and is therefore useful as a point of departure for exploring the fluid contexts of Method acting’s prehistory. Nominally bookended by the 1922 arrival of the Moscow Art Theatre régisseur Richard Boleslavsky and the 1941 dissolution of the Group Theatre, this chapter also looks beyond to glimpse the ideological tributaries that nourished the idea of methodness and sutured it within the 26

Methodists and Method-ists Group’s organizational power dynamics and perspectives on performance and identity. As a received body of knowledge, a loose amalgam of preferred characteristics conjured into material form and informed by larger ideological currents, this idea crucially anticipated and buttressed methodness in the interpretive landscape of American popular culture. This chapter maps the coalescence of methodness via links to broadbased national movements, theatrical organizations, and specific individuals from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Beginning with the Little Theatre Movement, I chart the drive to convene a legitimate American stage and audience that imagined itself in opposition to the commercial mainstream.9 The ubiquity of the Little Theatre Movement, its ties to avant-garde European theater, and its claims to the margins helped prepare prospective audiences to make sense of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), the System, and figureheads such as Richard Boleslavsky along the terms the movement had previously popularized. Reception discourse singled out the MAT’s rigorous dedication—to character interiority, emphasis on fellow actors, and the collective environment of the production—for praise even as such imprecise features continually framed the boundaries of popular knowledge about the System, its practitioners, and their organization. These epistemological limits enhanced its air of exclusiveness and exceptionality, setting System knowledge, institutions (the MAT and the American Laboratory Theatre), and their US-based public authority (Boleslavsky) apart based on traits paradoxically publicized yet often construed as inaccessible and consequently praiseworthy. The American Laboratory Theatre (ALT) constituted a crucial transitional period, inheriting popular understandings of the Little Theatre Movement, the MAT, and others, and offering the promise of an “American” performance style in line with long-term Progressive efforts to reimagine an estimable native theater. The ALT also presaged many of the private and public-facing identity politics of performance glimpsed later in the Group Theatre. A gendered disparity in the reception of the ALT’s leadership saw Richard Boleslavsky extoled as America’s System guru while Maria Ouspenskaya was overlooked despite her formative contributions to the ALT and the System. Alongside Boleslavsky’s well-publicized role as MAT emissary and System translator, his public lectures on acting in New York and other American cities, and his publications on acting for theatrical journals, newspaper accounts routinely ascribed to Boleslavsky singular authority over the ALT and its “secret maneuvers of creation.”10 As the attributed founder-artist of the ALT, he was repeatedly painted throughout the formative 1920s and 1930s as the organization’s sole creative force whose translation of the System manifested 27

Imagining the Method in a “severe regimen of study and exercise” unique to the United States.11 Against the backdrop of nativist sentiment and larger social transformations in paradigms of difference, from racial biologism to cultural pluralism and ethnicity, Boleslavsky’s laudatory reception also mitigated his foreignness. Prized by Progressive theater reformers, the protomethodness attributed to Boleslavsky and the Stanislavskian tradition enlisted the Slavic émigré in the larger white Anglo-Saxon Protestant program of cultivating legitimate American culture via the stage. While print discourse chiefly regarded Boleslavsky as the ALT’s lone organizational and creative leader, Ouspenskaya’s reception during the same period construed her largely as a performer. Scant popular attention to Ouspenskaya’s lectures and instructional work with other organizations (e.g., the Junior League theater school, Neighborhood Playhouse, Negro Repertory, Theatre Arts Institute, and Maria Ouspenskaya’s School of Dramatic Arts) as well as her refusal to publish her acting philosophy fueled Boleslavsky’s indelible link with the ALT and its idea of performance, informing the terms of the Group Theatre’s formation in 1931. The received idea of acting emerging at the conjuncture of the Little Theatre Movement, the MAT, the ALT, the System, and the figure of Richard Boleslavsky brought together notions of extreme commitment, intensive study, and strenuous mind-body preparation with self-styled rebellions against mainstream commercial theater and self-identified marginality relative to mainstream cultural norms. Often praised by commentators yet vague in its details, this loose amalgam of ascribed values comprised what I contend is the primordial form of what would become the prevailing mode of methodness—whose links to the previously mentioned institutions and individuals delimited the range of its possible readings. For ALT students (which included the future Group Theatre members Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and others) and overall audiences, this meant both preferred status for the aforementioned characteristics and provisional white male authority for its pedagogical figurehead, Boleslavsky. This chapter follows these roots as they feed the public exceptionalism with which the Group Theatre was received and the interpersonal dynamics among Group members that saw hierarchies emerge over the control of the organization’s acting form as well as its sociocultural function. Using the experiences of DeKnight and McClendon as points of departure for considering the roots of the Group’s ritualized rural retreats in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century camp cultures such as the Chautauqua, I employ the Group Theatre’s collective journal in tandem with popular reception discourse, oral histories, and other primary materials to examine how the soon-to-be-prevalent form of methodness took shape within the reputed 28

Methodists and Method-ists birthplace of Method acting.12 I consider how particular ideologies of transformation drove Group members from the city toward a romanticized state of nature and the consolidation of power within the Group. This also sutured the organization’s endeavors to the racial and gender hierarchies of rural rejuvenation and enlightenment, a fact played out in Strasberg’s control over performance-related knowledge within the Group and the 1934 conflict with Adler over interpretation that gave rise to the invocation of “Method” acting and further endowed methodness with meaning. This chapter also examines Clurman’s public-facing efforts to represent the Group. This discourse, which helped to embed the organization’s public identity in its socially oriented function, aligned Group philosophy with its almost singular, popular spokesperson. The ideological currents that informed the Group’s public and private identities are essential to parsing the preferred readings the Group offered to audiences at this formative stage in the development of methodness and the ever-expanding profile of the organization. Examining the rarely studied Group retreats and other primary materials, I conclude that prevailing strains of conservative, patriarchal, racially exclusive, and ambivalently anti-modern politics within the Group became fused to the emergent methodness even as forces within the organization sought to counter many of its values. Altogether, this prompts a reevaluation of the Group’s role in emergent understandings of Method acting well before its postwar explosion in film and popular culture.

Churches of the Future Firmly rooted in “the molten core of American Protestantism,” transformation lay at the heart of Progressivism’s preoccupation with the paradoxical promises and perils of modernity.13 Critics cited urbanization and poverty, mass production and commodification, secularization, economic inequality, loss of individuality, and estrangement from everyday life as evidence of modernity’s corrosive impacts on hard-won national cohesion and American exceptionality. Politicians, educators, activists, preachers, journalists, and others prescribed conflicting remedies of renewal for the public both to be “independent of existing norms and hierarchies” and to submit to external control. Popular figures such as Theodore Roosevelt trafficked in the vitality of conflict as a capacious regenerative enterprise promising restoration of white male and US superiority. Broadly, Progressivism sought to address economic inequality through regulation aimed at “[fulfilling] the nation’s civic mission,” even though social Darwinism and other strains of reform-minded 29

Imagining the Method discrimination subsumed universal inclusion to identity-based hierarchies.14 Gender and class status determined social standing as well, yet race assumed a particularly important valence of stratification in efforts to define Americanness. Nineteenth-century gradations in race gave way to the twentieth century’s increasingly strict delineations between newly consolidated white and nonwhite subjectivities, offering marginally white groups access to whiteness and its attendant privilege while relegating Native American, African American, Latino, and Asian American people, as well as additional communities deemed “other,” to unassimilable and thus un-American status. The “rebirth of a nation” offered by Progressive reformers was thus a restorative and transformative project chiefly “designed for whites only.”15 Pastoral spaces were indispensable to the “emotional charge” of this endeavor, suffusing American political and religious life and spawning cultural productions as countermeasures to stem the tide of perceived personal and social degradation.16 Lyceum circuits and Chautauquas were among many of these enterprises that—despite differences in geography, agenda, political orientation, and constituent identities—collectively constituted camp cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that pushed rural-contingent renewal. Lyceums offered lectures, discussions, and debates (theatrical performances were added in later years) given by itinerant scholars, politicians, performers, and other luminaries that were aimed at cultivating wide-ranging enlightenment among the general population. The movement marked a secular continuation of sorts from American Protestantism’s emphasis on restorative transformation, leading Ralph Waldo Emerson to label the lyceum “the church of future times.”17 Despite its egalitarian gestures, the lyceum’s educational outreach restricted access for many; its promises of transformation and patterns of exclusion would underwrite similar behavior coming out of the most enduring camp culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Chautauqua.18 Founded by Methodists in 1873, the Sunday School Teachers’ Assembly on Chautauqua Lake sought from the outset to synthesize preexisting models of sacred (“evangelical faith”) and secular (“Enlightenment rationalism”) regeneration.19 Chautauqua participated in what Andrew Rieser has called a prevailing “self-culture,” or a sense of “adult self-betterment through learning,” arising from “a legacy of the acquisitive individualism of the hardy Yankee and the pioneer spirit of the western settler.”20 It represented from the outset a more multifaceted effort to restore the superiority of “American” culture and “Americans” and to harden the prohibition of outsiders. Chautauqua leaders looked to regulate the process and outcomes of transformation itself, to manage possible breaches of mandated lessons and visitor responses. 30

Methodists and Method-ists Taking leadership over the original assembly in 1874, John Heyl Vincent instilled control over daily life through “a series of restrictive laws,” the installation of a perimeter fence, and the formation of the unilaterally empowered Department of Order, which the New York Legislature gave state-sanctioned authority to enforce Chautauqua’s strict moral codes.21 Unapproved activities and curricula were banned, and undesirable ethnic, racial, gender, and socioeconomic groups were barred from membership. As with the broader Progressive movement, Chautauqua’s efforts to tie personal and communal reform to the wilderness were firmly based on middleclass WASP terms intended to reproduce cultural authority, cultivate likeminded communities, and employ the organization’s “racial status to preserve social privileges [such as education] denied to black Americans.”22 When then president Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed during a 1905 tour of Chautauqua that it was “the most American thing in America,” he captured a movement’s ideological apotheosis and its deep resonance with the broader currents of identity-based nation building.23 Circuit Chautauquas broadened the movement’s cultural footprint well into the 1930s by offering itinerant variations on this formula to millions more rural and middling (and most often white) audiences.24 Using fixed and itinerant sites as well as modern mass media, especially articles and advertisements, Chautauqua effectively inundated the American interpretive landscape with narrowly construed prescriptions for individual and collective salvation wedded to the countryside that would be imitated across the nation for decades.25 Even as they began to fade in the late 1920s, the Chautauquas and Progressivism continued to prove successful in helping to remake the nation as “a racially purified polity where segregation was official public policy and ‘American’ meant ‘Caucasian.’”26 Theater held a tenuous position within the Chautauquas’ and Progressivism’s contradictory impulses. Whether they were outright indecent or immoral by association, theater troupes aroused fears of violating the normative bounds of respectability undergirding the Chautauqua idea and Progressive notions of cultural legitimacy. Theatrical performance also threatened to throw the managerial efforts of Vincent and other Chautauqua acolytes out of balance. As a secular variant on the old Protestant model of regenerative transformation, theatrical acting threatened to unleash uncontrollable self-expression in an environment built on regimented learning and selfrestraint. By the late 1920s, however, theater was the primary draw for Chautauqua audiences.27 The overall expansion of recreation through the late 1920s aroused reformist fears that it had become “too technological, too commercial, and too passive.”28 For critics, these detrimental forms of leisure—including radio, 31

Imagining the Method moviegoing, automobiles, and mass-market literature—were symptomatic of the nation’s deviation from the productive self- and social-cultivating practices believed to underwrite American exceptionalism. Camp cultures and rural retreats carved out their relevance within these debates, offering pastoral spaces to hone countervailing forms of beneficial Depression-era leisure aimed at eliminating men’s inactivity and reinvigorating masculinity. Their prescriptions also sought to circumscribe women’s public activity and reinstate their domestic “idleness.” Proponents of rural leisure believed that recreation could be instrumental in fashioning a “‘stronger’ race of people,” through social welfare eugenics, “who could physically and mentally bring the country out of the Depression.”29 Artists contributed as much as scientists to such discourse and were equally implicated in its identity politics. Rising to prominence as the Chautauqua movement faded, the Little Theatre Movement offered a stage-based case for cultural legitimacy via a homegrown, nationwide bulwark of anti-commercial theaters, alternative and noteworthy content, and exceptional audiences. Like Chautauqua, it engaged in the promotion of middle-class white patriarchal modes of leisure and the consequent marginalization of working-class, nonwhite, female alternative forms. The movement’s loaded notions of legitimacy drew upon and reproduced reverence for the contemporary European stage (including the MAT) that, together with the movement’s Progressivist politics, worked to prime commentators, practitioners, and audiences to make sense of the MAT and its emissary Richard Boleslavsky when they began their first US tour in 1923.

A Poetic and Naturalistic Little Theatre Dorothy Chansky writes that “film killed the theatrical ‘road,’” seizing much of its audience and forging new consumers of dramatic entertainment.30 Those not siphoned off formed the core of the Little Theatre Movement with the aim of legitimating the stage and making it the medium to cultivate white, Protestant, middle-class tastes among modern American audiences. Unlike the MAT and the ALT, whose initial regional reception in the northeastern United States eventually gave way to a national audience, the Little Theatre Movement is “best understood as a national, multipronged phenomenon,” rooted in regionally, socioeconomically, and ethnically diverse audiences it claimed to pursue and hoped to assimilate into professional, middle-class WASP interests, tastes, and anxieties.31 Initiated with the opening of Chicago’s Little Theatre and Boston’s Toy Theatre in 1911, the movement expanded within six years to an estimated sixty-three organizations, including those 32

Methodists and Method-ists such as the Neighborhood Playhouse (1915–) that would eventually become part of the prevailing history of the Method. The Little Theatre Movement consolidated “many of the features .  .  . so entrenched in noncommercial theater today,” and terms such as “modern,” “art,” “avant-garde,” and “experimental” all spoke to the movement’s self-identification as the panacea for the country’s allegedly insipid mainstream stage.32 Though the term “alternative” was not used at the time, it captures the movement’s rhetorical antagonism toward Broadway and commercial productions. Even as they regarded sponsorship, paid admission, and publicity as necessary means to suit their long-term artistic ambitions, Little Theatre leaders cultivated an anti-commercial identity that characterized the movement’s institutions, content, and personnel as socially minded and artistically motivated. Claims to legitimacy leveraged the movement’s anti-Broadway, anti-professional, and anti-commercial positions into an exceptionalist identity that prevailed upon personnel and audiences to understand it as the antidote to the supposedly insipid fare of the Great White Way and its ilk. The movement also sought to distinguish itself from mainstream theater by nurturing more US-based writers and promoting engagement with distinctly American themes. During the formative 1910s, however, the Little Theatres’ enduring fascination with European plays and performance styles—alongside their struggle to cultivate domestic plays and playwrights—led to their reliance on trans-Atlantic modern productions and classical revivals. As the ostensible alternative to commercial theater was itself becoming increasingly mainstream, the Little Theatre Movement populated the interpretive landscape with its preferred models for American drama in the form of acclaimed European theorists and practitioners such as Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and organizations such as the MAT.33 Between the preexisting familiarity with Stanislavsky and the System and the estimable identities cultivated by the movement, American stage audiences were primed ahead of the MAT’s 1923–1924 US tours to understand the troupe and its performance style in part along the lines of the Little Theatres’ own exceptionalist self-promotion.34 The Little Theatre Movement’s self-styled outsider identity effaced its proximity to power in culture making. It helped to shape the discursive terrain upon which performers and audiences made sense of the MAT and the System, and by extension the Group Theatre, the Method, and methodness years later. The movement partook in the broader collusion between business and government interests to utilize cultural productions “to depict the nation’s history, to explain its government, and to promote unproblematic loyalty to its institutions” in service of forging “an official culture that could be shared by 33

Imagining the Method all Americans despite deep ethnic, regional, racial, religious, and class differences.”35 The desire of the movement’s leaders to reinvent the American stage and its audiences assumed white Protestant middle-class subjectivities were the “standard by which all culture could be measured,” even when local distinctions proved otherwise.36 Little Theatres were often more sympathetic to ongoing social inequalities than their more commercial counterparts, yet still they offered “depictions created by and for white audiences” that traded overt racism for the omnipresent, internalized, and unconscious hierarchizing “in which persons of color [were] understood in some way as lesser.”37 Thus, their producers and audiences engaged in self-segregating practices alongside other areas of early twentieth-century life, such as civic politics and industrial labor.38 Progressivism suffused the intersections of theater, performance, and identity, consolidating Americanness and catalyzing ambivalence about modern life into nature- and performance-based antidotes. From religious revivals to Chautauquas, camp cultures writ large popularized the identitybased undercurrents of the rural’s restorative properties, informing consequent expectations within organizations such as the ALT and the Group Theatre that the countryside was the ideal environment for artistic and personal transformation. The Little Theatre Movement, meanwhile, helped to shape expectations for what that artistry would entail in the theater. The MAT, the ALT, and others would refine these anti-commercial ideas with the help of public figures such as Richard Boleslavsky, who was received as both the spokesperson for the MAT’s style and the founder artist—and consequent authority—over the ALT. As the ascribed MAT emissary and System translator, as well as the reported force behind the ALT, Boleslavsky and his reception relied upon prevailing understandings of Little Theatres and the MAT that granted him preeminence over both the ALT and a discursively constituted body of received acting that bore hallmarks of methodness. This intermediate idea of theater and performance also took shape amid broader sociocultural transitions between racial biologism and cultural pluralism, exposing foreign influences to heightened scrutiny, criticism, and violence from flourishing American nativism. The relative absence of race and gender in Boleslavsky’s reception points to both the reverence for this protean idea of acting among Progressive culture makers and the émigré’s popularly construed authority over it. Such proximity to culture making tempered Boleslavsky’s otherness, easing his assimilation into Progressivist goals of cultural legitimation as well as the WASP-centric terms of that process.

34

Methodists and Method-ists

Rich in Experience In the fall of 1922, the renowned MAT actor and director Richard Boleslavsky immigrated to the United States to perform in the short-lived Broadway production of Revue Russe.39 The New York Tribune declared him “rich in experience” and informed readers that he was not only “one of Russia’s famous directors” but was also a prodigious member of the vaunted Moscow Art Theatre.40 Revue Russe was a flop, but Boleslavsky remained stateside at Stanislavsky’s request, awaiting the arrival of the MAT, for which he was to serve as assistant, performer, and ambassador. Meanwhile, positive newspaper coverage of Boleslavsky’s colleagues had been preparing readers for nearly a year with descriptions of the organization’s exceptionality.41 Six months before the MAT’s January 1923 debut, the New York Times characterized it as “the foremost playhouse of the European Continent and widely acknowledged even as the world’s first theater.”42 The company’s performances in major American cities were “well-attended and glowingly reviewed”: terms such as “startl[ing],” “triumphant,” and “flawless” punctuated the troupe’s reception, distinguishing it from the American commercial theater that the Little Theatres’ reformers had disparaged for years.43 The syndicated critic Kenneth MacGowan echoed the contrast between alternative and mainstream theater to his nationwide readership, praising the MAT’s “assault” on Broadway with its collective approach to performance.44 As MacGowan and other commentators suggested, the MAT and its ascribed performance style offered something seemingly revolutionary; this reception quickly underwrote the troupe’s foothold in what was, at the time, the heart of American popular culture.45 This further enhanced the status of the MAT and the System in the interpretive landscape, providing by extension added credibility to Boleslavsky’s forthcoming lectures while evoking the sense that the System was scientific yet secretive. The success of the MAT tour was immediate and enduring, spawning advertisements for books on Russian theater and the troupe; an appetite for clothing bearing the bold, shadowless colors of “yesterday’s Russia”; and commentary on the growing infatuation with the organization across the country.46 In his capacity as Stanislavsky’s sanctioned ambassador to American audiences, Boleslavsky was regarded by commentators as a significant broker of the group’s achievement. He “quite literally established himself as Stanislavsky’s English language spokesperson,” providing “the first voice in the transmission of his ideas” to young American actors and thus pioneering the assimilation of Russian ideals into US culture.47 In other words, Richard

35

Imagining the Method Boleslavsky was the most visible and vocal expert on the System at the precise moment that it became famous in the US interpretive landscape.48 Within two weeks of the MAT’s American debut, Boleslavsky began a series of ten public lectures at New York’s Princess Theatre. While the MAT exposed audiences to representations of the System in action, Boleslavsky offered a discursive distillation of its methods, ideals, and histories.49 The organization of topics, which moved from the general to the specific, helped to familiarize theatergoers with more of an extensive explanation of the System than they would have derived from MAT productions. The oftentechnical nature of Boleslavsky’s lectures likely did more to cement his own standing as MAT ambassador and System authority than to train audiences in the intricacies of performance.50 This marked both the moment the System become famous and the first significant disparity between its characteristics and its emergent reception. It was the ensemble and the plays, which largely predated Stanislavsky’s 1906 breakthroughs resulting in the System, that attracted the most attention. The System in fact proved divisive enough to threaten the cohesiveness of the group. “But in the press, and onstage at the Princess Theatre,” Isaac Butler writes, “it was the ‘system’ [i.e., not the ensemble or plays] that received the credit for the Moscow Art Theatre’s success.”51 Boleslavsky further solidified his status by penning an article in the April 1923 issue of Theatre Arts. Titled “Stanislavsky—The Man and His Methods,” it detailed the MAT First Studio’s experiments with the System, as well as the individualized instruction and dedication of its participants.52 Though perhaps “wildly expansive and misleading,” the portrait Boleslavsky painted extended public exposure for the MAT and the System beyond live productions and speeches.53 Its insights into strict performer commitment—to character interiority, emphasis on fellow actors, and the collective environment of the production—revealed essential requirements for integrating scene, ensemble, and individual at the same time as it outlined the epistemological limits of the System’s popular reception. Boleslavsky and the acting expertise in which he trafficked were publicly accessible to an extent; what knowledge lay beyond the public’s grasp buttressed the purportedly enigmatic and exceptional nature of the performance style and its teacher. Even as Boleslavsky broadened popular understandings of eastern European theatrical ideals and helped to adapt them into a distinctly American form, his proximity to the transitional performance style rendered available for public consumption the primordial characteristics of methodness—namely the extraordinary degree of actor commitment and the elusiveness of its knowledge.54 Intentional or not, the language of exceptionalism buttressing the exceptionality of the MAT and the System drew upon preexisting discourses of distinction aligned with 36

Methodists and Method-ists the Little Theatre Movement, and it provided audiences with legible ways of interpreting performers and performances bearing traces of the familiar even as their elusive details likely seemed new and foreign. The MAT’s tours and Boleslavsky’s performances of authority unfolded amid substantive revisions in imagined taxonomies of identity. Racial biologism was “losing coherence” under the weight of critiques from Black intellectuals and Progressives, with the latter steadily popularizing an ethnic paradigm built on observations of cultural pluralism and the prospect of harmonizing difference through assimilation.55 The latter proposed to alleviate distinction and discord, engendering collective national identity for those deemed proximate to whiteness, while hardening white/nonwhite racial boundaries and exclusions for African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos deemed unfit for the Eurocentric assimilable-immigrant mold. This did not preclude European immigrants from discrimination, for government policies such as the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 not only expanded the exclusion of Asian immigrants but also instituted national quotas to restrict the influx of southern and eastern Europeans. The targeting of groups deemed less assimilable highlighted the ongoing tensions and overlaps between the logics of race and ethnicity. While the period saw expansions in the ranks of whiteness, it also witnessed the Johnson-Reed Act’s mobilization of WASP prejudice to transform “cultural nationalism . . . into a nationalism based on race.”56 The reception of Russian and eastern European performers reflected these tensions. Audiences responded to Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes with narratives of orientalism and eroticism when it toured the United States in 1916 and 1917.57 Nativist reactions to waves of European immigrants combined with anti-Bolshevik fervor to curdle broader cultural attitudes toward foreigners by 1923, and several New York newspapers printed accusations that the critically beloved MAT was in fact touring to fund the Bolshevik state and broadcast its propaganda. Stanislavsky and supporters managed to tamp down such allegations, and the discourse surrounding the MAT, the ALT, Richard Boleslavsky, and Maria Ouspenskaya was largely devoid of negativity regarding their foreignness. The MAT’s 1923 American tour did, however, see Russian acting, Stanislavsky’s System, and its teachers parodied “in Manhattan nightclubs and popular Hollywood comedies” as part of “the nation’s gallery of wacky comic ethnic stereotypes.”58 Boleslavsky’s voice also remained inescapably foreign. His “English was pretty terrible,” recalled a former student, Francis Ferguson, “but he would act out whatever he wanted to say, and that was good.”59 ALT student Gretchen Comegys similarly noted that Boleslavsky’s grasp of English was such that he had to rely on a translator at her first audition.60 37

Imagining the Method Students, critics, and other audiences observed that Boleslavsky’s charismatic persona, performative pedagogy, and apparent command of the System minimized the language barrier and provided a foundation for “Russian ideals” to evolve in America.61 The celebrated statuses of the MAT and the System—and Boleslavsky’s proximity to the former and US dominion over the latter—largely mitigated nativist anxieties over potential otherness. His theatrical affiliations and ascribed authority also aligned him spiritually and rhetorically with WASP reformist imperatives, catapulting him in effect to the vanguard of legitimizing the American stage, even though he was not yet American.62 The notable silence regarding Boleslavsky’s identity suggests that in fact his proximity to WASP goals might well have earned him a racial and gender status normally accorded to the already assimilated. “It seems to our unpracticed eye,” concluded a reporter in the New York Herald Tribune in 1924, “that Richard Boleslavsky looks more like an Englishman than a Russian.”63 Alongside Boleslavsky’s work for the MAT tour, his lectures at the Neighborhood Playhouse (which also began in early 1923), and his essays and the print discourse about him, the Princess Theatre talks circumscribed popular understandings of the System and its translator by inextricably linking the two. Six months after the MAT’s American debut, the momentum of its ideals, the desire for a homegrown variant, and the expertise ascribed to Boleslavsky led to his role in cofounding the American Laboratory Theatre in June 1923.64 Newspaper accounts routinely excluded his ALT cofounders, suggesting to readers that Boleslavsky had singularly established the organization and that it was “his project.”65 Within weeks of the ALT’s establishment, Boleslavsky’s July 1923 Theatre Arts essay titled “The Laboratory Theatre” made all the more explicit the popular conflation of his philosophical approach to performance and the creative direction of the theater group.66 Boleslavsky’s article outlined for readers an emergent school modeled on the MAT First Studio he had once led. At times “densely theoretical,” the essay nonetheless emphasized the necessity of “unbridled dedication, collective will, the ability to discard old forms, patience, the acceptance of a single creative leader, and quiet isolation” to the success of artistic laboratories.67 The article’s sometimes-impenetrable language might have alienated some readers, but it also helped to reinforce the rarefied epistemologies of exceptionalism already swirling around the likes of the Little Theatre Movement and the MAT. It also reaffirmed Boleslavsky’s central role in the possession and dissemination of acting knowledge. As artistic director of the ALT, he represented the organization in public lectures, print, and elsewhere. As the Theatre Magazine writer Richard Savage concluded in 1926, “For perhaps the 38

Methodists and Method-ists first time in American theatrical history a man as well as an institution has been endowed.”68 Boleslavsky’s many subsequent publications and theater-oriented activities strengthened this connection. His October 1923 Theatre Arts essay “The First Lesson in Acting: A Pseudo-Morality” was the first of six “lesson” contributions to the magazine through June 1932. These culminated in his widely disseminated 1933 book, Acting: The First Six Lessons, reaffirming his position as an authority on performance.69 The book predated two of Stanislavsky’s critical 1930s works, An Actor Prepares (1936) and An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary (1938); assumed a formative place among US universities and performers; and would undergo twelve printings over the next two decades. Boleslavsky’s work elsewhere garnered him a “respectable prominence” not strictly connected to the ALT; the reverse was not true.70 Savage’s 1926 account suggested that the ALT was “built largely around a single personality,” while a February 1927 feature in the Drama magazine characterized Boleslavsky’s lectures and practice rehearsals as the foundation of the ALT’s work.71 Abetted by complementary discourses that affirmed Boleslavsky’s mastery, his prolific profile inundated the reception landscape upon which 1920s US audiences made sense of the ALT and its transformation of eastern European ideals into a quintessentially American performance style. His ubiquity in public discourse granted him authority synchronically in the moment and diachronically through the ongoing availability of his materials to those making sense of acting within (and beyond) the transitional period between the System and the Method. His omnipresence narrowed the terms available to audiences to understand the ALT and its performance style, thereby elevating Boleslavsky’s stature and imbuing the protean precursor to methodness with white male authority not unlike other Progressivist venues of culture making. Boleslavsky was one manifestation in a far-larger program of Progressive reform and nation making that touted guru figures as pioneers of homegrown American cultural legitimacy. His reception also showcased the zero-sum stakes of meaning making in the interpretive landscape of Method acting’s prehistory. The repeated emphasis on Boleslavsky’s authority and the fusion of his knowledge and the ALT’s identity correspondingly silenced other significant contributors to the theater group, such as Maria Ouspenskaya.72 As the ALT’s principal acting instructor, Ouspenskaya was by some accounts every bit the organizational and philosophical leader that Boleslavsky was characterized as; her comparative absence from the interpretive landscape during this formative antecedent period of methodness contributed further to the gendered exclusivity of Method’s received enigmatic and exceptional characteristics. 39

Imagining the Method

The Art of the Future A fellow veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre’s First Studio, Madame Maria Ouspenskaya arrived in the United States with her MAT compatriots in January 1923. She joined the American Laboratory Theatre in November 1923 (five months after its opening) and, like Boleslavsky, chose to stay there when the MAT tour concluded. By that time, Boleslavsky had already published essays, given speeches, and been featured in numerous newspaper articles and theatrical reviews. His reputation circulated widely from the outset of the MAT’s arrival and the ALT’s existence, and it would continue to dominate discourse surrounding the ALT and the translation of Stanislavskian ideas long after his 1937 death. Meanwhile, Ouspenskaya’s New York, and later Hollywood, students implored her in vain to publish her work.73 She “ignored their pleas,” believing that only the “live relationship,” and not the printed word, would suffice in conveying acting knowledge.74 The result, Mel Gordon has argued, cleaved the knowledge production within the ALT from the popular perception of its institutional authority. “It was Maria Ouspenskaya,” Gordon writes, “who actually appended Stanislavsky’s practical innovations into America’s performing arts and established the Lab’s long-term presence as a beacon of modern actor training. Boleslavsky lectured and wrote about the art of the future. . . . Madame, in her decades of unparalleled teaching, single-handedly created it.”75 Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg similarly highlighted Ouspenskaya’s agency in directing the ALT’s philosophical approach to acting. Their accounts, like Gordon’s, have over the last century been continually eclipsed by a Boleslavsky-centric reception discourse characterizing Ouspenskaya as an assistant rather than an authority.76 Neither Ouspenskaya nor Boleslavsky were the first MAT alums to become renowned on the American stage or screen. Alla Nazimova had appeared in the 1906 Broadway production Hedda Gabler, and she would go on to enjoy success in Hollywood’s silent era.77 Ouspenskaya might have lacked Nazimova’s star wattage and Boleslavsky’s renown, but she was not unknown to audiences in the 1920s and 1930s. She received brief but positive newspaper reviews for the ease with which she performed her first English-language role in Stark Young’s 1924 play The Saint.78 Madame, as she was sometimes called, would appear in seven more Broadway productions but draw little sustained attention because of the brevity of her supporting roles.79 She achieved greater prominence as a character actor whose twenty-film Hollywood career began in 1936. Academy Award nominations for turns in Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936) and Love Affair (Leo McCarey, 1939) brought additional critical 40

Methodists and Method-ists attention, burnishing her largely positive reception as a performer with an admirable acting pedigree. When asked in 1940 to identify ten screen talents who eclipsed his own prowess, the actor John Barrymore named only one woman, Ouspenskaya. Ouspenskaya’s luminosity paled next to stars like Barrymore, but prospective moviegoers still received consistent exposure to the actor through industry discourse whose reach outstripped that of the stage. Studio system constraints, however, confined her to a very narrow range of character types. Her dissatisfaction with such restrictive representation was publicized as early as 1941, yet it had little impact on her roles. She repeatedly portrayed elderly and stately women whose backgrounds sometimes included the performing arts—a former dancer in Waterloo Bridge (Mervyn LeRoy, 1940) and Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940) and a former musician in Love Affair—and whose brief appearances rebuked or imparted wisdom upon the film’s younger main characters. Typecast as the “doddering dowager,” Madame often portrayed characters whose advanced age and attributed ethnicity circumscribed her signifying possibilities, while at the same time they often self-referentially tapped into popular awareness of her status as a seasoned performer.80 Her exoticized foreignness routinely expressed itself through her shrewd insights, replicating the popular discourse around Ouspenskaya that connected her seriousness to the rigorous training of the vaunted MAT as well as the reportedly hardscrabble existence of her Russian youth. This foreignness also marked Ouspenskaya as an unassimilable figure who, unlike Boleslavsky, lacked the pedagogical and institutional reputation to mitigate her otherness, even as she contributed significantly to the development of a legitimate American theater. Unlike Boleslavsky, Madame’s overall reception rarely identified her as a teacher, let alone the ALT’s head instructor. The extent and content of her authority remained unstated, left to the imagination of readers whose exposure to Madame primarily characterized her as a screen actor, a MAT alum, and an ALT assistant. Exceptions, such as a June 1936 United Press syndicated news item, informed readers across the country that Madame was an indemand “tutor of noted stars.”81 Proving the rule, however, the very same article informed readers that Ouspenskaya, who would make her US screen debut several months later in Dodsworth, was a person “of whom you’ve probably never heard.”82 Though she had “soon replaced [Boleslavsky] as the most energetic agent and communicator of the Stanislavsky System in New York,” and had “brought the ‘Russian manner’ of acting into the New World,” acknowledgements of Madame’s teaching tended not to appear until the mid- to late 1930s, and even those were scarce.83 By then, Boleslavsky’s articles, speeches, 41

Imagining the Method coverage in print media, and widely disseminated Acting book had long entrenched his popular image as the ALT’s founder-artist, the authorial presence behind the vaunted and inscrutable Americanized version of the System. Altogether, Ouspenskaya’s refusal to publish her acting theories, her delayed reception as a teacher, and her increasingly popular screen image as an unassimilable other muddied her public proximity to the primordial idea of methodness that had long been attributed to Boleslavsky. Ouspenskaya’s teachings were finally printed in 1954 and 1955, five years after her death. Titled “Notes on Acting with Maria Ouspenskaya,” this series of four essays offered readers a revisionist history that challenged Boleslavsky’s dominion over the ALT’s production of knowledge.84 By that time, however, the prevailing narrative intertwining the ALT, Boleslavsky, and protomethodness was firmly inscribed in the genealogy of a burgeoning American theatrical revolution manifest in the convergence of the Group Theatre, Harold Clurman, and Lee Strasberg.

Every Leaf on Every Tree The American Laboratory Theatre formed a crucial link between past and present theatrical institutions and acting epistemologies in the US popular imagination. Its associations with the Little Theatre Movement, the Moscow Art Theatre, and Richard Boleslavsky collectively formed a gravitational center around which values of methodness (e.g., white male authority, inscrutably interior process and skills, extraordinary commitment to roles, and anti-commercial sensibilities) continued to coalesce. The ALT was critical in lending shape to these inchoate elements, catalyzing them into a more coherent range of public expectations that anticipated the Group Theatre—many of whose members were once ALT students—and its performance style. Wendy Smith has asserted that the Group’s codirectors self-consciously modeled the organization’s formative 1931 rural rehearsals at Brookfield Center on the ALT’s 1923 experimentations in Pleasantville, New York. The latter occurrence provided future Group members with a model of rural retreat designed around the cultivation of a shared group theatrical philosophy and performance style. Few participant accounts from Pleasantville survive, but “visiting observers that summer were impressed by the sense of commitment and collective ensemble which Boleslavsky achieved.”85 Periodicals described the Pleasantville efforts to readers in similar laudatory tones, enumerating the instructional activities in which Boleslavsky imparted acting knowledge to pupils. 42

Methodists and Method-ists The New York Times writer H.  I. Brock’s October 1923 account of the events at Pleasantville followed closely on the heels of Boleslavsky’s public lectures at the Princess Theatre. Descriptors such as “revolution,” “community,” “feeling,” and “emotional conviction” suggested a vague but appealing approach to the dramatic arts radically at odds with what the Little Theatres and others routinely characterized as uninspired and irrelevant commercial fare.86 Brock’s article also reinforced the conflation of rural retreats and theatrical exceptionalism, drawing on familiar Progressive anti-urban tropes. The use of language such as “natural,” “community,” “discovery,” “knowledge,” “reality,” “evocation,” and “passion” connected Pleasantville’s rural setting to the group’s self- and communal discipline, as well as the exceptional educational and physical metamorphoses that resulted. Commonplace understandings of nature’s restorative potential provided the author with perhaps the most legible framework for making sense of what Boleslavsky appeared to be doing—and for communicating that to readers. Providing such coordinates was especially important given the otherwise elusive specifics of the performance style itself. Brock, like others, ultimately attributed Boleslavsky’s exceptionality to the ineffability of his method. Boleslavsky did not specifically tell the actors what to do, Brock relayed, and there was no explicit rubric for “correct” acting. Instead, Boleslavsky worked with each player to evoke the “spine” of the acting part, parlaying his acting expertise into tutelage unavailable to outsiders. This marked off performers’ bodies as authentic, unknowable sites of meaning and further consolidated Boleslavsky’s authorial status over an idea of acting that was gaining publicity even as its specifics remained tantalizingly off-limits. Seven years after the experiments in Pleasantville, former students from the ALT, the Theatre Guild Studio, and elsewhere gathered at New York’s Steinway Hall. This community, which would soon call itself the Group Theatre, used weekly meetings throughout 1930 and 1931 to discuss their shared “dissatisfaction” with the American stage.87 Former colleagues at the Theatre Guild, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman oversaw the proceedings, with Clurman and Crawford hosting at their respective apartments before relocating to Steinway Hall. The “pragmatic” Crawford channeled the discontent by organizing the Steinway sessions and “occasionally [speaking] on the administrative aspects of theatre.”88 Strasberg addressed the organization’s form, outlining a unifying approach to acting.89 Clurman took on “the main burden of delineating the philosophy behind their endeavor,” thereby articulating the Group’s sociocultural function.90 Clurman’s skill set in particular—including his stature as a speaker, his evangelical fervor for the theater, and his demonstrated skill in rendering mainstream and alternative 43

Imagining the Method theater dialectics legible for communal consumption—made him the organization’s logical public face.91 Like Boleslavsky, Clurman fortified and expanded his popular reputation as the Group’s authority through prolific publication. Writing in the New York Times on December 13, 1931, Clurman expressed concern over the Group’s failure to issue a mission statement before the premiere of its first production, The House of Connelly. The oversight created a fundamental reception problem for the organization, he argued, for without a mission statement audiences would have little sense of the Group’s identity vis-à-vis the theater.92 The omission had failed to prime the reading public ahead of Connelly the way Clurman had done to Steinway audiences ahead of the Group’s formation a year earlier. Clurman’s piece for the Times, titled “The Group Theatre Speaks for Itself,” belatedly attempted to rectify that oversight. Clurman performed the familiar role of founder-artist, representing his own voice as synonymous with that of the organization. An anonymously penned 1931 Times piece, “As to the Group Theatre,” appeared the day before the premiere of Connelly and provided readers with a primer on Group history that located the organization’s origins in Clurman’s and Strasberg’s 1928 “mutual conception” of theater while notably excluding Crawford from that formative period.93 In a review of the Group’s 1933 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Men in White, an unnamed Times writer conveyed the collectiveness of the company and its extraordinary, near-religious commitment to superior acting through terms such as “highly developed,” “ensemble,” “disciplined,” and “devoted.”94 The popular conflation of Clurman and the Group materialized through public speeches at Steinway Hall and Clurman’s own prolific self-promotion as the troupe’s spokesperson across newspapers, magazines, and books (especially his 1945 memoir of the Group, The Fervent Years) during the Group’s existence and for decades thereafter. Persuasive though Clurman was, his was not the only narrative. The theater historian Helen Krich Chinoy’s interviews with former members decades later drew out disparities between the organization’s internal social relations and its external identity that Clurman had a heavy hand in cultivating. Memoirs from Cheryl Crawford (One Naked Individual, 1977) and Bobby Lewis (Slings and Arrows, 1984) joined other accounts in highlighting Clurman’s contradictions and exclusions. Still, those alternative characterizations and possible revisionist histories could not match the depth and breadth of Clurman’s long-established framing of the Group in the interpretive landscape of US popular culture. The result situated Clurman as a homegrown Boleslavsky, a public advocate for exceptional theater whose persona recurrently fused with the institution for which he spoke. 44

Methodists and Method-ists More so than Boleslavsky’s, Clurman’s and Strasberg’s attributed leadership mitigated their white ethnicity by suturing them to the hegemonic white male superiority nurtured through conjunctures of American performance and rural transformation. Their authority, and the discourse communities that buttressed them, narrowed possibilities for what exceptional theater could be and who was qualified to represent it in the US popular imagination. It was therefore unsurprising that despite Crawford’s significant contributions and status as a cofounder, her leadership role in the Group extended little beyond the administrative margins. Crawford was a prominent force, yet any authorial aspirations seemed to wither against the identity-based power relations inherited and perpetuated by her male codirectors’ presumed custody over the company’s form and function.95 These relations were evident in the fledgling troupe’s meetings throughout 1930 and 1931 but were more formally realized when the newly named Group Theatre sought—like the MAT at Pushkino and the ALT at Pleasantville before them—sanctuary in the countryside to learn a shared acting style and forge a collective identity. Informed as well by the ideological undercurrents that drove preceding generations of Americans to the transformational promises of rural retreats, the Group set out for Brookfield Center, Connecticut, in June 1931. The Brookfield Center effort was the first Group undertaking to draw significant press coverage, and it has remained an elemental part of the organization’s reception. Writing nearly six decades later, Foster Hirsch called the image of the Group at Brookfield “the most inspiring in the history of American theatre. . . . I am moved by the idealism and ardor, the discipline, the wonderful, saving joy and innocence.”96 Rehearsal and training were integral to the Group’s rural retreats. In addition, these moments catalyzed outside commentators and Group members—Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg in particular—to situate the Group and its meanings for a broader audience. Conceptualizing these periods as meaningful loci for loaded discourse about acting inside and outside the troupe, and not simply as steps in the preproduction process for Group plays, directs attention to that which infused the education, leisure, and nature-based pursuits of individual and collective transformation at Brookfield. Put another way, the Group’s expressions of “joy, love, and an almost preternatural serenity of their first summer together” were symptomatic of ideological undercurrents animating what Group leadership thought about performance, where they thought this performance style was best conveyed, and who they thought should access that knowledge. These fed the way the organization imagined itself and was received by audiences as rebellious, anti-commercial, extraordinarily committed, and elusive. Such were the conditions under which Method acting was communicated 45

Imagining the Method within the Group and methodness continued to coalesce around the organization and its chief spokesperson, Clurman. The Brookfield effort also sheds light on the white supremacist and patriarchal culture that regarded access to protomethodness as privileged and expertise over it as the distinct province of the few.97 It is not simply that the Group routinely failed to engage with these social problems, as they had with other social issues; the treatment of the actors Rose McClendon and Fanny Belle DeKnight at Brookfield exemplified the organization’s investment in these hierarchical couplings of performance and identity. “The America they wanted to speak to,” observes Butler, “was the America that looked like them and suffered from their problems.”98 Crawford’s earlier comments suggest that The House of Connelly, Paul Green’s nostalgic play that followed the postbellum deterioration of the eponymous Southern plantation family, required little from its African American actors regarding character construction. They were expected to be Black more than to take on the roles of the play’s field hands or learn the acting style the rest of the company would be utilizing. Such a linkage between Blackness and nature has historically hinged on the delimitation of Black performers’ representational capabilities, often reducing the complexities of acting to essentialized tropes about dangerous, desirable, or traumatized bodies.99 McClendon’s and DeKnight’s professional qualifications evaporated under these conditions, leaving them as little more than racialized tokens in a revisionist lost-cause narrative of white southern tragedy. Neither actor was included in the formative 1930–1931 Steinway Hall meetings that populated the Group’s initial roster, and the rationale underwriting their segregation—that Strasberg’s interpretation of Stanislavsky would have turned them white—entangled acting knowledge in broader ideological undercurrents of racial and gender identity that consequently regarded them as unassimilable and thus unteachable. Other Brookfield participants imagined access to acting knowledge along similar identity-based lines, going so far as to talk about it in the Group’s communal summer diary provided by the Theatre Guild’s Helen Deutsch (fig. 1.1). Deutsch, whose Theatre Guild had provided the rights to Connelly and allowed the contract players Morris Carnovsky and Franchot Tone to join the production, asked that the journal be used to register daily life at Brookfield Center.100 Each participant was tasked with writing two entries apiece “to record all facts of interest to the group [and] to create a permanent record of the summer which [has] in it something of the personalities of the people who make up the group.”101 In his August 9, 1931, contribution, the playwright Gerald Sykes addressed the “racial problem” presented by the company’s fusion of “native and foreign elements—roughly 46

Methodists and Method-ists

Figure 1.1. Left, Helen Deutsch’s instructions for the Group Theatre’s 1931 summer at Brookfield Center, intended to document its historically significant developments in theater and performance. Right, the list of Brookfield attendees expected to document the experience. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

of Anglo Saxons and Jews.”102 Sykes’s framing of the Group’s interracial character reflected the foreclosure of otherness akin to that expressed earlier by Crawford to rationalize DeKnight and McClendon’s segregation. The slippage between race and ethnicity subsumed the former to the latter, while the narrow terms of Americanness imagined the only “foreign,” racial, or ethnic subjectivity worth engaging to be that proximate enough to whiteness to be assimilated into it. For Ruth Nelson, the fault lines of difference were also utilized to mark one’s subordinate status in the organizational hierarchy.103 Recalling her brownface performance as “Essie, the mulatto girl,” in Connelly, Nelson talked of “weeping bitterly on opening night, upstairs in my dressing room,” as she prepared for the performance. “Well it just killed me,” she wrote. “It absolutely killed me.”104 Clifford Odets deployed otherness similarly and unambiguously, casually characterizing himself and others as “poor niggers” for being left out of primary rehearsals.105 Everyday life bore out the complexities and contradictions of the ideologies converging at the Group’s first rural retreat. McClendon and DeKnight were prohibited from attending Strasberg’s and Clurman’s acting lessons, yet 47

Imagining the Method both actively participated in social life at Brookfield Center, and they contributed to the Group’s communal diary. DeKnight’s July 8, 1931, entry credited Crawford for having introduced her to the retreat’s utopian atmosphere. DeKnight expressed hope that she would remain part of the theatrical collective, a desire foreclosed by the white supremacist politics surrounding the organization and its acting knowledge.106 McClendon’s July 9, 1931, contribution to the diary used an orchard metaphor to convey similar optimism regarding Brookfield’s Edenic atmosphere.107 The two lived and dined with the collective, establishing friendships and burnishing connections already established in some instances through the Little Theatre Movement. Robert Lewis recalled that McClendon, his friend from the Civic Repertory Theatre, was “the person I felt closest to that first summer.”108 He witnessed his friend’s marginalization in Connelly and exclusion from Group classes. This “was the artist who attended all the rehearsals of her scenes in The House of Connelly but never the lectures given by Clurman and Strasberg since there were no blacks in the Group.”109 Lewis observed McClendon’s subtle acts of circumvention, which included listening to lectures by Clurman and Strasberg from behind her window.110 DeKnight’s references to the directors’ lessons in psychology and behaviorism indicated that she too found indirect ways to access the acting knowledge despite its prohibition.111 Still, McClendon and DeKnight’s formal exclusion remained a tangible and lasting reality. It precluded further participation at Brookfield and beyond the Connelly production. It also previewed a pattern of unequal treatment that impeded nonwhite Group membership throughout the troupe’s existence and circumscribed the authority of female Group members. The former would go mostly unremarked upon in the memoirs of then Group leaders Clurman, Crawford, and Strasberg. The latter would contribute to the seismic 1934 rift over acting that would further divide the organization and make clear the exclusionary terms of race and gender that would underwrite the preeminent reception of the Method. Evaluations of the Group Theatre have overwhelmingly lauded its anti-commercial communalism as evidence of a rebellious, politically progressive identity. Harold Clurman’s The Fervent Years ossified this interpretation, even as he sought to minimize the extent of the Group’s perceived radical politics. Clurman championed the organization’s revolutionary intervention in atomized American life and theater. He asserted that the Group’s collaborative focus on all aspects of socially relevant stage productions coalesced with a communally shared emotional authenticity merging theatrical performance with the real world. This constituted an act of rebellion against the status quo and a rebuke of Broadway’s star-centrism, Clurman contended, yet the Group’s critics had also mistaken the organization’s social orientation 48

Methodists and Method-ists for a left-of-center ideological stance. The distinctions between the two were murkier than Clurman’s prose suggested. The Group’s preeminence among the leftist Popular Front for its working-class-centric productions—for example, Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), and Golden Boy (1937)—combined with the collective, egalitarian ethos and emotionally realistic performance style promoted in the press by Clurman and others, presented readers with a company identity that seemed to intertwine radical art and politics. Critics were not the only ones to interpret the Group in this way. Subsequent government investigations into supposed Communist infiltration of the culture industries subjected former members and associates to sustained scrutiny, affirming the company’s perceived ties with the Left. Given such connections, it is unsurprising that the Group Theatre’s dominant reputation would continue to conflate the troupe’s art and politics. Still, Michael Denning counters, “accounts of Popular Front culture . . . suggest[ing] that Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre were the heart of the radical stage” are inaccurate.112 Powerful as Denning’s intervention is, highlighting the company’s historically overstated radicalism has done relatively little to counter the Group’s prevailing identity as artistically and politically revolutionary. Group members’ reticence toward political labels or intent paled in comparison to the company’s popularly received dedication to radical theatrical reform that epitomized the exceptionalism of the organization and its performance style yet contributed to the organization’s demise.113 Many contributors to the Brookfield diary echoed Odets’s sentiments crediting the convergence of education, labor, leisure, and nature for the unprecedented productivity of the participants amid the redemptive possibilities of immersion in the countryside. Mary Morris’s and Eunice Stoddard’s entries addressed the rustic scenery and revelatory experience, suggesting, like Odets, that “such beautiful country” presented an “unparalleled opportunity” for the Group.114 Rose McClendon’s contribution (fig. 1.2) eschewed explicit references to the camp’s exclusionary practices, opting instead to describe the Brookfield “orchard” as an Edenic space where the pears, apples, and nectarines suggested differences in personality rather than gender, class, ethnicity, or race. Like many other contributors, including DeKnight, McClendon intertwined sacred and secular vocabularies to characterize the experience.115 Recalling this first summer retreat decades later, Phoebe Brand perhaps best captured the pervasive and enduring linkage with nature in the minds of participants. “Every leaf on every tree seemed part of the Group,” Brand remembered. “The place itself, Brookfield Center, was part of our creativity. It all seemed to function together.”116 Clurman regarded himself as less sentimental about the experience but nevertheless reaffirmed the centrality 49

Imagining the Method

Figure 1.2. Rose McClendon’s July 9, 1931, journal entry, wherein she imagines difference within the Group Theatre as fruit variations in an orchard. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

of Brookfield’s setting to the Group’s goals: “Paradise is only real when one knows the imminence of hell!”117 Odets’s June 9 personal diary entry characterized the first night at Brookfield in terms reminiscent of a nineteenth-century assembly (fig. 1.3). “Two of the fellows get up and say that they never realized the importance of this and that, they were not giving themselves wholly to group ideas, etc.,” he recounted. “It reminds me of nothing so much as saved souls giving testimonials at an evangelical meeting.”118 Strasberg’s nervous pacing, Crawford’s uncontrollable tears, and participant confessions evoked a scene that night that was for Odets loaded with the sacred and the secular, self-control and emotionalism unlocked by nature. Religion proved for many an apt metaphor for making sense of the Brookfield experience. Others linked leisure and education to their enlightenment. Art Smith regarded Brookfield’s pastoral setting and educational promise as fundamentally intertwined. “The light broke through today in more ways than one,” he wrote. “That rosy cloud which had seemed to be the answer—the easy answer to everything—had settled down into a dark fog and the simple truth had become an enigma hanging over me.”119 It was Strasberg’s instruction, Smith asserted, that illuminated his clouded psyche and led him to reevaluate his once-certain grasp 50

Methodists and Method-ists

Figure 1.3. Clifford Odets’s personal diary entry from June 9, 1931, detailing the religious experience of the Group Theatre’s night meetings in the barn at Brookfield Center. Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

of acting. Many others in the diary shared Smith’s regard for Strasberg’s pedagogical authority. Though he was among the most defiant members that summer, Franchot Tone reinforced Strasberg’s vital instructional role when he expressed concern that novice participants, while learning quickly, risked exhausting Strasberg.120 The regard shown for Strasberg at Brookfield had clear religious overtones. As the prophet, wrote Clurman, Strasberg possessed knowledge that extended beyond the performance styles Art Smith and others had brought with them to the Group’s summer sanctuary. Much in the spirit of Chautauquas, Clurman’s characterization evoked the sense that education in this bucolic setting promised to transform the student physically, mentally, and spiritually. His conclusion that “we shall be saved” demonstrated again the influence of camp cultures and reliance on religious imagery to process the Group’s Brookfield experience.121 Elsewhere, contributors portrayed the teacher/student dynamic in equally stark terms. Clurman characterized Group students as children, asserting that “they place themselves in Lee’s hands and—that is the end of it!” 122 Eunice Stoddard referred to Strasberg as “General Lee” and confirmed Clurman’s characterization of Group loyalty from the previous day.123 Helen Deutsch drew on a somewhat more nuanced understanding of the child metaphor Strasberg himself used to express the untainted idealism of the artist. Like Strasberg, she regarded the Group’s childlike qualities as positive because they brought “unapologetic enthusiasm and willingness to liberate themselves from the trappings” of modern adulthood.124 Deutsch’s explanation broadened the resonance of Strasberg’s analogy and confirmed his paternal role as teacher while also eliciting familiar rural/urban binaries exalting the virgin land and denouncing overcivilization. Diary entries from Clurman, Deutsch, and others made clear that the dissemination of protomethodness 51

Imagining the Method calcified divisions between leaders and everyone else. Strasberg’s authority over acting knowledge buttressed his overall private jurisdiction with the Group’s form. Clurman’s lectures would solidify his public authority over the Group’s function. Crawford’s account of the segregated Brookfield training was emblematic of how Clurman’s and Strasberg’s respective control over the public function and private form of the Group simultaneously convened communal identity through shared access to, and interpretation of, acting while also policing its availability and reception. Still, her complicity in segregating McClendon and DeKnight did not shield Crawford from being marginalized as well. Strasberg’s and Clurman’s early consolidation of control over performance style and social agenda erected a gendered division of labor that consigned their Group cofounder to mundane roles with comparatively little power. Crawford’s experience echoed the overall gender disparity in organizational leadership that reproduced itself privately in Strasberg-controlled studies of acting and publicly in Clurman-authored essays in popular print publications. Writing in the Brookfield diary, Helen Deutsch criticized contributors’ less-than-forthcoming descriptions of their revelations in acting. Art Smith responded the following day that it was difficult for Group members to comply because the requirements of Group education precluded its explanation to nonmembers. Deutsch’s response connected Smith’s evasiveness to a broader exclusionary culture already taking shape around the fledgling company. As was the case with Boleslavsky and the American Laboratory Theatre, the essential elusiveness of acting knowledge served to validate its purported extraordinariness and to rationalize its ongoing exclusivity. The control necessary to maintain those strict boundaries was the sole province of (or was arrogated by) white and white ethnic practitioners, even as other qualified and underrepresented actors were proximate to, and interested in, accessing that knowledge. Production and dissemination of acting knowledge was the province of men, strengthening their authority over the Group’s internal and external significance. Understanding the Brookfield experience’s place in the lineage of back-tonature reform efforts helps to pinpoint the often-unnamed ideological undercurrents suffusing the Group’s organizational identity and performance style. It recasts the Group’s summer sojourns somewhat as ventures informed by long-entrenched reformist beliefs in the capacity of rural locales like Brookfield; on its grounds, education and leisure could combine to create a theater collective capable of counteracting the vapid qualities of the mainstream commercial stage and transforming the self and society. Further, it reveals how the Group’s explicit acts—and implicit discourses—of exclusion were sutured to 52

Methodists and Method-ists prevailing middle-class WASP aims to define America and Americans even as the company’s personnel and avowed politics did not readily identify with those efforts. These conditions did not foreclose challenges, even at Brookfield. McClendon and DeKnight circumvented their formal exclusion. Crawford periodically demonstrated greater assertiveness with her domineering peers. Stella Adler criticized the selection of male-centric productions and the paucity of roles as well as the overall lack of visibility for women in the troupe. She also took greater ownership over acting knowledge within the organization, providing instruction to colleagues such as John Garfield (who joined the troupe as Jules Garfinkle in 1934), and she openly disputed Strasberg’s interpretation of the System three years after the Brookfield effort, in what represented a decisive moment in the history of methodness.

Form, Function, and “Method” Unlike Clurman’s public authority over the Group’s sociocultural function, Strasberg’s power stemmed from his private control over the acting form within the company during its crucial early period. Steinway Hall meeting attendees encountered Strasberg’s ideas about Group performance and arrived at Brookfield Center with clear expectations of his expertise. Acting-centric accounts of the Group’s first rural retreat bore allusions to rigor and hierarchy similar to H. I. Brock’s characterization of Richard Boleslavsky’s Pleasantville retreat eight years earlier. Sacred and secular languages of frontier enlightenment manifested in the intersection of Strasberg’s specialized knowledge and cultural expectations regarding the transformative capacities of the rural setting. Clurman’s June 19 entry in the Brookfield journal framed Strasberg’s authority in these terms. Though Clurman lectured as well, Strasberg was the paternal figure atop the epistemological hierarchy of protomethodness. So high was the regard for the transcendent potential of Strasberg’s wisdom that Clurman saw the ensuing power relations within the Group as particularly sacrosanct. Phoebe Brand and Robert Lewis took the religious metaphor further. Strasberg was not simply a prophet, as Clurman had suggested. Brand and Lewis voiced what appeared to be the consensus at Brookfield that Strasberg was closer to a god.125 Such registers of reverence were difficult to sustain, and within a year Strasberg’s received omnipotence was eroding. During that foundational first summer, however, Strasberg drew upon accumulated interpretations of the System and other acting knowledge while claiming authorship over the idea of performance he disseminated. For the likes of Group members Morris Carnovsky and Sanford Meisner, the actors’ 53

Imagining the Method preexisting relationships with Strasberg and Clurman made for a relatively smooth integration even as—in the case of Carnovsky—there were periodic clashes with the imperious General Lee. Integration was “not a particularly violent step” for them, though it proved jarring for others, whose unfamiliarity rendered them more reliant on Strasberg’s teaching and more disposed to revelatory experiences documented in the diary.126 As the primary conduit for the troupe’s collective performance style, Strasberg became synonymous in the imaginations of many Group members, and eventually the broader public, with the information he imparted. Few publicly questioned the linkage between the Group, Strasberg, and the troupe’s aligned performance style that first summer. Following The House of Connelly’s positive critical reception and the short-lived runs of 1931– (1931, twelve performances) and Night over Taos (1932, thirteen performances), the Group set out again for rural confines— this time in Dover Furnace, New York—with an uneven season behind them and an emergent desire to learn more about performance than Strasberg had on offer. The Group, writes Isaac Butler, was facing a predicament similar to their forebears in the MAT’s First Studio: their philosophical approach to acting had “made the actors less compliant, less willing to submit to the assumed power of those in charge.”127 Sanford Meisner and Clifford Odets joined Stella Adler and others in questioning elements of Strasberg’s teachings; some, such as Adler and Meisner, were also devising their own approaches to performance. This would lead to a decisive confrontation between Adler and Strasberg two years later during the Group’s 1934 summer retreat in Ellenville, New York. Still, this turmoil did little to unravel the popular conflation of Strasberg and the Group’s received performance style. Even as he characterized Strasberg as “God” that first summer, Robert Lewis observed the near-immediate emergence of troublesome hierarchies within the Group. He recalled, “I was quick to notice that Strasberg . . . made daily individual, private rehearsal calls with the lead actors which the rest of the company didn’t attend.”128 Virginia Farmer disapproved of what she perceived to be the conflation of enthusiasm for Group designs with subordination to Group leaders. “It seems stupid,” she wrote in the Brookfield diary, “that expressions of admiration, wonder, or faith should be a necessary means of proving a deep-seated interest in this group and being of it.”129 Morris Carnovsky would later provide the bluntest evaluation of the relations emerging out of that first summer: “The principle of equality was there but the ass-kissing of Strasberg was also there.”130 Tensions grew within the company over its persistent inequalities. Frances Farmer, Ruth Nelson, and Phoebe Brand registered concerns with the Group’s 54

Methodists and Method-ists continued selection of male-centric productions and the accompanying emphasis on cultivating and promoting male talent. Though they might have fared better than women in other theater organizations, Brand recalled that “all of us felt that we did not get the kind of fair shake the men did. We always felt that.”131 Alongside the unintelligibility of Blackness in the company’s conceptualization of race (which only extended to white ethnicity), the Group’s gender politics betrayed how deeply white male centrism guided its culture and decision-making. Women experienced a greater degree of inclusion so long as they subordinated themselves to male authority and whiteness. The shared “attitude” among male members, recalled Brand, meant that women “were invited to all meetings and . . . had a perfectly free say in everything,” but they had to contend with men’s tendencies to “go off and discuss things of concern.”132 This culture pervaded both the production and the educational aspects of the Group. Some wrote this off as owing to the men’s ignorance. “I don’t think that [the Group men] thought in those terms,” recalled Brand, noting, I am sure that Harold [Clurman] and the others never thought they were discriminating. I remember one evening, Frances Farmer and I had a discussion. . . . She was saying, “Why don’t you ask me what I want to do?” “Why don’t you do this or that?” She was hitting at the women’s role. Later Harold asked me, “Do you have any idea what she was talking about?” I said, “Well, sure.”133 Stella Adler waged the most consequential intervention on this front, overtly challenging Strasberg’s authority over Group form and offering company members an alternative. Trained in the American Laboratory Theatre with Ouspenskaya and Boleslavsky (among others) and thoroughly experienced as a member of the preeminent Adler acting family, Stella was arguably better positioned than many of her Group colleagues both to criticize the paucity of Group roles for women and to dispute Strasberg’s interpretation of the System. Her own dissatisfaction with his teaching—specifically his reliance on emotional memory and his lack of interest in MAT techniques—led Adler to Paris in 1934 for five weeks under Stanislavsky’s direct tutelage.134 Adler quickly realized that her distaste for the System was in fact a reaction to Strasberg’s mutation of it rather than Stanislavsky’s original formulation.135 Her pleasure in performing renewed, Adler returned to the United States and headed to the Group’s Ellenville, New York, summer home armed with evidence to call Strasberg’s expertise into question. Carrying a chart of Stanislavsky’s System, Adler lectured Group members 55

Imagining the Method on August 7, 1934, detailing her methodology and prompting “the big showdown.”136 With the enhanced education under Stanislavsky himself, Adler introduced Group members to “then unfamiliar aspects of the System” and rejected Strasberg’s emphasis on emotional memory. The lecture cleaved the company into competing camps and acting methods, dealing a significant blow to Strasberg’s domain over acting knowledge within the company.137 “It was not done, you know,” Brand recalled. “Lee was really an authority, and we all thought he was God. . . . When she challenged him, we all said, ‘Good, good, go ahead.’”138 Many in the Group, like Brand, appreciated Adler’s intervention, including Meisner and Lewis, whose disenchantment with Strasberg’s interpretation and focus on emotional memory made Adler’s methodology an illuminating and appealing alternative reading of Stanislavsky.139 Strasberg reportedly did not attend Adler’s talk. He was, however, clearly aware of the potential fallout, because he followed with his own lecture the next day. An unambiguous attempt to foil Adler’s rebellion, Strasberg’s response sidestepped the allegation that he had misunderstood or misrepresented the Stanislavskian tradition upon which his authority had been staked. Instead, he claimed that his acting knowledge represented the “Strasberg method” rather than the Stanislavsky System.140 The maneuver might have been an attempt to further sequester the Group’s form, in this case from nonpractitioners and Stanislavskian adherents alike, and to consequently retain his command of the company’s purportedly proprietary performance style. Regardless, it failed to mend the breach within the company, and Strasberg never regained the stature within the Group that he had originally possessed. Along with Cheryl Crawford, Strasberg would resign from the Group Theatre three years later. This pivotal moment fractured the veneer of the Group’s seemingly unified performance style and catalyzed prismatic interpretations of Stanislavsky’s teachings that would come to define many of the twentieth century’s most consequential acting philosophies, gurus, and institutions.141 The dispute signaled clear distinctions between the “Method” acting tradition aligned with Strasberg and the “Modern” tradition of which Adler was a part.142 Crucially, this juncture also represented an emblematic baptism for methodness. Invoking the “Strasberg method” crystalized the moment in which this received performance style was exposed as an alleged misinterpretation whose ideological currents underwrote the identity politics of the troupe as well as the hierarchies and segregationist practices coalescing around its body of acting knowledge. The “Strasberg method” consequently constituted a rebrand of this idea of performance, fusing said knowledge to the singular patriarchal figure without foregoing such meanings, and precluding further challenges 56

Methodists and Method-ists by insinuating a new performance style rather than a misreading of an existing one. It recast interpretation as invention, eschewing Method acting’s received elements even as it capitalized on those connotations. Following the 1934 rift, Adler provided acting instruction to fellow Group members such as John Garfield and Beanie Barker and left for Hollywood in 1937 during the troupe’s major reorganization. Following the Group’s 1941 dissolution, she would teach at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in New York before founding her own organization, the Stella Adler Conservatory, in 1949. Meanwhile, at the invitation of the Actors Studio cofounders and Group alums Cheryl Crawford, Robert Lewis, and Elia Kazan (who joined the Group in 1933), Strasberg joined the Actors Studio as a teacher in 1948 before becoming its first artistic director in 1951, a position he would hold until his death in 1982. That partnership lent the “Strasberg method” and its namesake mutually affirming visibility and prestige in US popular culture. Together, they comprised a gravitational center that in the popular imaginary subsumed many forms of acting into a received “Method” monolith, with Strasberg as the founder-artist and the Actors Studio as the home where the pedagogue and performance style were heavily publicized yet inscrutable. While Strasberg continuously leaned in to the “Strasberg method” to affirm the Method’s purportedly revolutionary, anti-commercial, nonconformist features, Adler repeatedly refrained from claiming techniques as her own. “While she would selectively use the term [‘Method’] in some interviews,” Scott Balcerzak has observed, “Adler knew the connotations of ‘Method’ were problematic and limiting.”143 Labeling her work instead as “Stanislavskian” recalled that weighty intervention in 1934, yet it likely also contributed to her comparable lack of publicity in the decades thereafter as well as in the prevailing reception that often attributed her labor, teachings, and students to Strasberg, the Studio, and the Method.144 Adler’s prominence and outspokenness—even about her unique, personal education from Stanislavsky145—were not enough to stem the inertia of methodness in subsuming the diverse range of modern acting philosophies and techniques to “Method” discourse in popular culture, or to counter the prevailing historical narrative around it underwritten by Clurman, Strasberg, and others.

Legacies of Knowledge The Group Theatre’s most significant contributions to American acting were the many members who went on to impart their knowledge and to shape much of twentieth-century stage and screen performance. In terms of the 57

Imagining the Method Group’s, and the Method’s, prevailing reception, however, the legacy of knowledge represents the power dynamics within the company that spawned the evocation of “Method” as well as the popular reception emphasizing Strasberg’s and Clurman’s knowledge and authority at the expense of varied acting philosophies within the organization. Nearly nine decades after its demise, the Group Theatre’s enduring reception has emphasized its rebelliousness and anti-commercialism while remaining silent on the ideological undercurrents of its mutually affirming performance style as well as its hierarchal and exclusionary culture. The company continues to serve a key role in the master narrative of Method acting, providing a metamorphic environment for actors (and future teachers) to work out alternative approaches to a socially responsive stage and emotionally truthful performance. The Group’s romanticized if doomed efforts to challenge the commercial status quo have only strengthened the allure of its purportedly revolutionary features, calling attention to its communal ethos and its exceptional Americanized version of the System. Analyses of Group productions have confirmed this radical characterization, as has the rise of rebellious, idiosyncratic Method-aligned film actors in the postwar period under the reputed tutelage of former Group members such as Lee Strasberg, through institutions such as the Actors Studio. While there is no denying the Group’s crucial status in the ongoing mutation of Stanislavskian and other imported European acting philosophies, questions surrounding the Group’s aligned performance style and its ideological underpinnings persist. Bookended by nineteenth-century camp cultures and the seismic 1934 rift within the Group Theatre, the events of this chapter marked the prehistory of methodness as a vital interpretive landscape where varying movements, institutions, and ideologies coalesced into an idea of performance wedded to gender and racial hierarchies and epistemological control. Methodness, though not yet fully formed, took root in long-gestating negotiations of cultural legitimacy, nation making, and middle-class WASP priorities well before the founding of the Group Theatre—the historically presumed incubator for Method acting. Prominent Group figures such as Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, Stella Adler, and many others participated in and were subjected to these forces, informing their subsequent negotiations of Method-aligned meaning in the lead-up to and following the Group’s 1931 formation. Contrary to consensus understandings of the Method and its connections to Old World theories of acting, and even as many of these early practitioners existed outside of WASP identity categories, the transition between ideas was underwritten by prevailing white-male-centric notions of legitimacy, transformation, and exceptionality that established an 58

Methodists and Method-ists uneven footing upon which a privileged popular reading of Method acting, or methodness, would be built. Key historical forces informed expectations and assumptions among future Group Theatre members as well as their prospective audiences ahead of the troupe’s first, and most foundational, summer at Brookfield Center. From Protestant tent meetings to Chautauquas, these reform-minded tributaries saw transformation of the self and society—often heightened by rural settings—as crucial in countering modernity’s deterioration of mainstream American culture. The reformist Progressive antecedents of the Group took up this charge. While middle-class critics derided the turn-of-the-century commercial American stage, the Group and its antecedents saw theater as a means to produce legitimate American culture. The terms of this transformation were especially loaded, and tracing the ideological currents underneath the Group’s pursuit of reform and rural rejuvenation highlights its debt to white, male, middle-class culture making. Group hierarchies established early through the company’s 1930–1931 Steinway Hall meetings and its 1931 Brookfield retreat delimited access to the organization for African American performers at the same time it foreclosed female members’ access to decisionmaking about the function and form of the company. Like the American Laboratory Theatre that preceded it, the Group’s consolidation of power around knowledge enabled Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg to police the company’s public-facing function as a socially oriented theater and the private form of its acting style. These linkages have endured in the popular imagination. They continue to serve a vital role in the ongoing development of methodness, though in a way that entrenches Method acting’s alignment with white male authority, epistemological elusiveness, and rebellious—and even radical—politics at odds with its quite conventional conservative restrictions. Mapping the convergent forces at work through the Group Theatre and its summer sojourns raises the stakes of the organization’s contradictions and offers an alternative accounting of Method acting’s foremost early institution. In the next chapter, I turn to Hollywood. While Stanislavskian philosophies had been on display for years and were even taught in the film industry’s drama schools, “Method” film actors were not overtly recognized until the mid–twentieth century. I argue that methodness in fact permeated Hollywood before this moment, albeit through often unexpected means. Using the star image of John Wayne, I explore how the Duke’s distinct “reactor” identity constructed and relied upon an “actor” foil that opposed his own industry friendly, transparent performance style. As the “actor” to Wayne’s “reactor,” methodness in the form of Marlon Brando and others carried over to the screen the rebellious, anti-commercial, and epistemologically elusive 59

Imagining the Method characteristics sharpened within the Group Theatre. Well before the emergence of an overtly labeled Method actor such as Brando, decidedly nonMethod performers such as John Wayne leveraged their popularity on the construction of an abstract “actor” other that flooded the interpretive landscape of the pre–Method moment of the 1940s. This discourse filled out the contours of methodness on- and off-screen, obscuring the ongoing gender and racial exceptionalism of methodness beneath a patina of the outsider, the figure at the margins contrasted with the white patriarchal cultural center epitomized by Wayne.

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CHAPTER 2

Acting a Foil John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and the Othering of Methodness

A Straight-Shooting Homo Americanus The request was a peculiar one, the Modern Screen correspondent Kirtley Baskette recalled in February 1943. During the production of Flying Tigers (1942), the film’s top star, John Wayne, had asked its director, David Miller, if the Republic Pictures production could continue through the weekend. Baskette wondered why the star would forego his prized weekend hunting excursion, but further investigation soon revealed Wayne’s motives. Upon hearing that an extra on the film was due to report for military service in a matter of days, the star reportedly sought to complete the young man’s set obligations ahead of schedule, so that he would have more time with loved ones before departing for the war.1 Wayne’s gesture, Baskette wrote for one of the largest fan magazine readerships in the country, was emblematic of the consummate professional “Gentleman Johnny,” whose transparency and lack of pretension combined with his commanding physique to paper over his “dramatic shortcomings . . . and mak[e] those who see him on the screen subconsciously say to themselves ‘There’s a man!’”2 Wayne’s renown had been on the rise before Baskette’s Modern Screen profile, and it was soon to outgrow Republic Pictures entirely. Within a few years, fan magazines placed Wayne at or near the top of exhibitor and audience polls.3 By that time, his link to the western genre had become iconographic and primordial, making Duke (as he was often called) simultaneously Hollywood’s 61

Imagining the Method unrivaled midcentury box-office champion, the world’s best-known movie performer, and the “quintessential western hero.”4 His generic legibility paralleled that of his off-screen life, coalescing into a star image buttressed by transparent earnestness and hard work. “What Wayne is,” Baskette told Modern Screen readers in that 1943 profile, “is an honest, straight-shooting, and utterly guileless species of Western homo Americanus.”5 A 1946 profile in Screenland put it even more succinctly, labeling Wayne the “anti-phony.”6 This depiction continued unabated among popular and critical discourse communities well past Duke’s midcentury ascendance to Hollywood superstardom. Decades later, Jackson Lears would characterize as “monochromatic” Wayne’s resonant self-assuredness and moral certainty that presented to audiences a bulwark of “authentic selfhood” in a world of “timidity and moral indifference.”7 Scholars and critics have long explored how the fixity of Wayne’s roles and the overall stability of his racial machismo came together to situate him as American masculinity incarnate and a figurehead for the forces of postwar conformity and containment.8 Such reception has consequently overlooked Duke’s midcentury transnational stardom and his prominence in “articulating the boundaries and anxieties of a modern, capitalist transnational masculinity” at the conjuncture of seismic postwar social, economic, and political changes.9 His received performance style, too, has consistently gone underexamined. This is not a matter of ignorance; as one of the most popular film stars to ever grace the screen—even now, nearly five decades after his final motion picture—Wayne does not fly below the radar. Such underexamination reflects, rather, the widespread acceptance of conventional wisdom that Duke’s acting skills and the discourse surrounding them merited little attention. Numerous print accounts about, and attributed to, Wayne claimed early in his career that he could not act, never learned to act, refused to act, or chose to “react.”10 This characterization has largely been taken at face value, yet the features attached to “reacting,” and the binary framing of “reacting” and “acting” upon which such assessments have rested, provoke a reconsideration of Duke’s performance style that focuses on the discourse swirling around it and its extension into broader ways of imagining screen performance and performers. In this chapter, I set out to understand how non-Method figures have contributed to the construction and continuation of methodness. I examine how John Wayne’s much-publicized identification as a “reactor” and his aversion to acting and actors accomplished two crucial and interrelated functions with respect to his surging popularity amid the landscape of 1940s film performance. Reacting was, on the one hand, an integral characteristic born out of his “property man” origin story. The oft-repeated reference to his plebian past 62

Acting a Foil sutured Duke’s “reel” life—that is, his screen persona as the heteronormative white patriarch and guarantor of racial and gender order—and his “real” off-screen status as a normative wage-earning film worker whose blue-collar ethos and middle-class consumer lifestyle hinged upon shared loyalties with audiences and studios. Claiming to react rather than act also painted Wayne’s performances as recursively transparent and predictable, and thus bankable for his employers and audiences. I contend that staking out such terrain also circulated and promoted a coherent actor foil in the discursive landscape of the time whose contrasting inscrutability and antipathy toward the interests of industry and audiences dovetailed with the methodness already lingering in 1940s US popular culture thanks to the likes of the Group Theatre and associated figures such as John Garfield. “Reacting,” in other words, expressed the mixture of characteristics both ascribed to and claimed by John Wayne, mitigating conflicts within his star image by outlining a particular form of performative labor that rooted its desirability for audiences and studios as much in the authenticity and predictability it offered as in the contrasting characteristics of “acting” it opposed. Though “Method” actors would not be explicitly named until Wayne had risen to the top of Hollywood’s ranks, his increasingly popular star image up to that point was predicated in part on situating his identity as a blue-collar worker turned screen performer in opposition to a sketched-out other whose features helped to prime the interpretive landscape to read new film actors such as Marlon Brando through the language of methodness. This chapter looks to fan magazines, newspapers, general-interest magazines, and motion pictures to map the significance of screen performance both to Wayne’s star image and to the reception of methodness leading up to the film debut of one of its most famous avatars, Marlon Brando. I explore the western genre’s formative role in cementing Duke’s subjectivity and relationship with acting. The western was not only the primary vehicle through which Wayne achieved unrivaled popularity by the early 1950s, it also mapped the racialized and gendered coordinates with which he was increasingly associated on camera and off. Wayne’s alignment with the representational regimes of the frontier and the imperatives of what Virginia Wright Wexman calls “dynastic marriage” distanced him from romance while charging him with preserving the dominance of white patriarchy.11 This facet of his significance, I contend, is entangled with industry discourse simultaneously emphasizing Wayne’s “property man” origin story, portraying his real life as one of a laborer equally dedicated to his fans and commercial filmmaking. I conclude the chapter by exploring the “high contrast” that Wayne’s purportedly straightforward and transparent (a.k.a. “monochromatic”) style posed against 63

Imagining the Method the “colorful unconventionality” of the newcomer Marlon Brando, whose ascribed methodness was said to captivate even as it eluded comprehension.12 Though Wayne’s star image was not the point of origin for suspicions about actor practices, motives, or identities, his increasingly popular status throughout the 1940s and his top star status by 1950 brought about an ever-expanding number of paratexts juxtaposing Duke and his actor other. This reactor/actor opposition helped inform the interpretive frameworks that soon surrounded Method actors such as Marlon Brando in the “Method moment” of the late 1940s and early 1950s.13 This chapter ends by exploring the reception of Brando’s 1950 film debut in The Men and considering how his acting was framed by prominent discourse communities within the prevailing interpretive landscape. This is the same context that, as I will explore in chapter 4, continued to erect ethnic and political boundaries around methodness and consequently suppressed John Garfield’s reception as a Method actor. Conversely, Brando’s early reception as an actor arose along starkly different terms. The center/margin relationship that emerged between Wayne, the box-office-champion reactor and the epitome of white masculinist social order, and Brando, Hollywood’s rebellious and enigmatic new actor, prevailed upon midcentury US popular culture to laud the latter’s purported inscrutability, rebelliousness, progressivism, and anti-commercialism as the quintessence of great (if elusive) acting. This in turn promoted and further entrenched methodness’s claims to such values as well as to the sociocultural margins as alternative racial and gender forms at odds with the establishmentaligned subject position personified by Wayne. I argue that this adversarial rhetoric concealed the fact that the purportedly marginalized racial and gender performances of Brando, Montgomery Clift, and others might have been situated as stark contrasts to Duke but in fact offered a more implicit white male exceptionalist alternative that has remained difficult for popular and critical discourse communities to pin down. Though their receptions were neither monolithic nor uniform, the prevailing uses of “actor” and “reactor” as well as the contrast between them were critical to the popularization of methodness and to the concealment of its regressive propagation of white male primacy through the purported marginality of its rebel practitioners.

Just the (White Male) Type As early as September 1930, narratives accompanying Wayne’s first starring role in The Big Trail (Raoul Walsh, 1930) associated his big break with qualities preternaturally suited to the western genre. The film’s director saw 64

Acting a Foil something in the young man that eclipsed his lack of acting experience. Wayne was, according to Raoul Walsh, “just the type.”14 At the same time, the monthly supplement Motion Picture Classic deemed the unproven former prop man a “talkie pioneer” (fig. 2.1).15 As if to leave no ambiguity regarding the metaphor, separate photographs accompanied the feature and displayed the performer in full cowboy regalia above trailblazing settlers in settings typical of the cinematic frontier.16 Exhibitors throughout the 1930s confirmed that viewers shared this view of Duke’s “ease in his role of the western hero,” writing to the trade press of audience demand for more Wayne westerns.17 As early as 1940, Wayne reportedly suffered genre exhaustion and had “had enough of ridin’ the range,” though that did little to stem the number of oaters he filmed.18 The performer’s popularity grew faster in the 1940s, as new Wayne westerns circulated alongside reissued B productions from the prior decade.19 Such saturation lent more credence to Duke’s symbolic affiliation with the celluloid frontier, a relationship further cemented by increased attention in trade and fan publications. So inextricable was this connection that Wayne was either limited to westerns and combat films or was cast in roles referring “explicitly to his soldier/cowboy persona.”20 His work with the director John Ford during this period served the crucial function of image building; his Ford-led pictures stabilized his star signification through fixed and imitable characters, settings, and symbols. Featuring higher production values and more seasoned casts than Duke’s more numerous Poverty Row oaters, the collaborations with Ford offered higher-profile venues in which narrative tropes and semiotic landscapes further enmeshed Wayne in the genre’s representational regimes and ideological imperatives.21 In both their popularity and predictability, these films and their paratexts also sought to manage audience expectations and outlined a predominant reading of the figure of John Wayne. The performer’s collaborations with Ford “created a particularly strong link between Wayne’s screen persona and his off-screen role as celebrity and public figure.”22 This expanded his significance beyond many of his peers, connecting Duke to “a highly specific set of myth-historical referents” that entangled him with settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession, the visual iconography of imagined frontier geographies (e.g., Monument Valley), and the enforcement of a conservative social order (e.g., protecting white women, children, and property).23 Most crucially, these referents forged Wayne’s hegemonic identity within these especially gendered and racialized screen spaces. This imbued him with a knowable and reliable hegemonic white masculinity that bridged his reel and real lives. It also made him a bankable financial and ideological investment for studios as well as audiences. 65

Imagining the Method

Figure 2.1. Motion Picture Classic’s 1930 evocation of John Wayne’s propertyman origin story to promote the performer’s first starring role in The Big Trail. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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Acting a Foil At the center of Euro-American cultural production, “white” subjectivities became synonymous with the “human” point of view and accordingly marginalized and erased nonwhite subjects.24 This dovetailed with late nineteenthcentury sociocultural forces prevailing upon men and women to accept a heteropatriarchal domination of the public sphere. The resulting social order was manifest in a normative shift from manliness to masculinity that rationalized its systemic gender and sexual privilege as a reflection of inherent superiority. 25 In the western genre, such gendered and racialized imperatives often manifested in the presence of “dynastic marriage.” Westerns often sought to ideologically unify patriarchal structures and land ownership, prioritizing economic partnerships over sexual unions while still valuing their importance to the perpetuation of social reproduction and the overall white male supremacist logic underpinning American settler colonialism. Many of Wayne’s stardom-burnishing collaborations with Ford throughout the late 1930s and the 1940s were invested in dynastic marriage as well as its antimiscegenation implications.26 Stagecoach (1939) allowed for the union of Dallas (Claire Trevor) and the Kid (Wayne) only in the film’s waning moments. Fort Apache (1948) distanced Wayne from romance entirely, while 3 Godfathers (1948) made Robert Hightower (Wayne) a father figure without requiring sex or marriage.27 In turn, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) emphasized Duke’s romantic neutrality while charging him with the maintenance of social order essential to the protection of prospective unions.28 If “Ford’s films value men who have the potential to become fathers and husbands,” then Wayne’s position as an aggrieved father or husband and a figure capable of identifying such potential roles in others rendered him invaluable to the frontier narrative.29 Like Wayne’s archetypical role as “the man who knows Indians,” as Richard Slotkin styles him, these image-building roles codified Wayne’s star signification as the man who knew dynastic marriage. A figure uniquely skilled to aid the white male supremacist project of western expansion, Wayne’s characters lost families but still lent their insider knowledge to the preservation of white unions and homesteads.30 These western films consequently underwrote Duke’s hegemonic, “hard” masculinity in two interrelated ways.31 First, his decisiveness in securing the frontier imbued him with the expertise necessary to oversee all homosocial and heterosexual relationships, continuously reaffirming both the hierarchal arrangement of those affiliations and his own stature at the top.32 Second, Wayne’s frequent pairing with young men positioned him as a mentor on their journey toward manhood.33 These traits coalesced into a reliable, axiomatic gender performance that served—via film narratives and paratextual discourse—as a touchstone for both Wayne’s masculinity and the 67

Imagining the Method gender/sexuality binary opposition to Method actors upon which Duke’s star image was predicated.34 His films not only prioritized economic and racial imperatives over romantic love, but his “hard” masculine characters routinely demarcated and patrolled frontier boundaries to ensure gendered spheres.35 Frontier women were relegated to roles as “mothers or potential mothers” and tasked with expanding the homestead from within, making them essential, though subordinate, to the gendered and racialized logic of Wayne’s westerns.36 These maternal figures enabled progression territorially (by expanding the ranks of westward occupiers), temporally (by perpetuating control through inheritance), and racially (by maintaining white bloodlines). Links between the frontier and race were familiar to US readers and audiences by the time John Wayne became a screen fixture. Early motion pictures and proto-Hollywood movies defined themselves through raced subjects and tapped into audience’s intertextual knowledge of difference.37 Drawing on the long literary tradition of the captivity narrative, the western’s dynastic marriage paradigm animated racial conflicts through the interminable mobility of the border and framed difference through the threatening specter of miscegenation. The white woman’s mere presence endangered her literal and metaphorical purity as bearer of white civilization and demanded retaliatory, and even preemptive, violence that in turn validated its white male perpetrator as hero. Westerns managed to “sustain the paradox of egalitarianism and Northern European dominance,” even as the mythologies erected around the southern “good home” and the western homestead were remarkably similar in making the family of “racially beset victim[s]” the focal point in rationalizing the moral power of white male primacy and the necessity of social hierarchies.38 This was symptomatic of “a kind of national obsession” with both the frontier and the fiction of race reliant upon Manichean binaries of white patriarchal progress and nonwhite contamination.39 If, as Nikhil Pal Singh asserts, nationhood must be repeatedly narrativized and represented in order to maintain its grip, then cinema—and the western in particular—was critical in perpetuating the fictions of American national history and identity.40 Whiteness was ubiquitous during the studio system era, inscribed into the industry’s race-based exclusionary culture and informing decisions about representations of race at multiple levels.41 Whiteness shaped prevailing understandings of race but was not without its own contradictions. Interracial exchanges in early to mid-twentieth-century American commercial cinema tended to be inelastic and to mitigate the contradictions of white masculinity through the bifurcation of white and nonwhite characterizations. White men could never fully achieve white status because they possessed a darkness within them that manifested the very sexual drives that whiteness denied 68

Acting a Foil and demeaned. Paradoxically, then, white men, and whiteness generally, disavowed impulses that could not otherwise be erased. Within the language of filmic representation, dark drives were accordingly mapped onto the other. By hinging narratives upon the threat of miscegenation, white masculinity sublimated its inherent contradictions through the disciplining of a nonwhite foil. Protecting white women from threats real and imagined accomplished these imperatives, and thus affirmed white male primacy, by preserving hierarchies and maintaining the strictures of social reproduction. Wayne’s inextricable link to the western made him the apotheosis of the genre’s racial and gender politics. His symbolic work as a screen laborer operated through slightly more veiled screen languages of difference even as his repeated alignment with the western predicated his white male signification on similar reversals, repressions, and reifications.42 This predictable and bankable association between performer and genre anchored the construction of John Wayne’s star image. His significance was not monolithic and did not guarantee uniform interpretations, but the consistency with which paratexts surrounding his films linked him to the western and conferred authority on him for guarding social hierarchies did constitute a dominant framework for making sense of him. This preferred interpretation also situated him firmly at the center of the social order as an agent of establishment forces and an executor of power. The exceptionality of the star-genre association also suffused Wayne’s racial and gender identity in the subtler, but just as significant, representational landscape of his real life. His loaded connection to the western served as a constant reminder of his hegemonic white masculinity, signified by his ascribed sincerity, transparency, and knowability as a performer. Though extreme enough to risk his home and family, Wayne’s much-publicized commitment to the work of being a performer and producer—born out of his commitment to both Hollywood studios and film audiences—also served to mitigate contradictions jeopardizing his authenticity. In this way, Wayne’s on- and off-screen image merged genre, race, and gender on the field of his acting labor.

The Workingest Man in Town Despite the relative stability of Wayne’s film signification during his 1940s and 1950s rise to superstardom, his private life, particularly the turbulent relationships with women, introduced fissures into his star image. By 1952, his marriage troubles had already resulted in one divorce and seemed headed for a second. Such tabloid fodder clashed with his promotion as the breadwinning 69

Imagining the Method suburban husband off-screen and the man who knew marriages on-screen. Trade and fan publications attempted to reconcile these incongruities. Some matter-of-factly conveyed his preference for the company of men—whether on or near the film set or in his scarce leisure time—suggesting a seamless continuation of hard masculinity from the frontier to a postwar culture anxious over a perceived softening of modern males. Readers were assured that Duke’s distance from women expressed more the performer’s conformity with western-genre male traits (i.e., dynastic marriage) than any real sexual inabilities or improprieties on his part. Even when writers conjured the specter of ambiguity around Wayne, their ensuing characterizations appeared to confirm rather than question his dominant framing as unmistakably straight and utterly guileless. It was, ultimately, the persistent discourse of his exceptional blue-collar-worker ethic that mitigated contradictions by situating Wayne as a performer-laborer. Morgan MacNeil’s August 1949 Modern Screen profile, “John Wayne’s Double Life,” exemplified this refrain. The article informed readers that “the real man has remained a silent enigma,” even as his screen persona saturated theaters across the country.43 MacNeil saw in “this appalling lack of dope on Wayne” not a deft evasion of the public’s prying eyes but rather evidence of his modesty and lack of typical Hollywood transgressions. For MacNeil and others, Wayne’s reluctance to self-promote confirmed his oft-ascribed humility and therefore bolstered his exceptional transparency as a motion picture personality. Tantalizing intimations of revelation gave way to matterof-fact characterizations of heteronormative midcentury domestic life. Photographs in media profiles captured Wayne and Esperanza Baur, his second wife, posing on the patio, playing a game of chess, viewing “film he shot in Mexico,” and playing croquet on the lawn.44 The private Wayne exemplified the mature male figure promoted by other midcentury cultural commentators and institutions concerned about the postwar erosion of masculinity. His “acceptance of the responsibilities of work, marriage, and family” positioned him to secure the home against the competing pressures of Cold War culture and disrupted domesticity, while also mirroring for readers his reel work in continuously preserving the quintessential American frontier homestead and family.45 The relative modesty of the Morrison home (the press periodically identified Wayne by his birth name, Marion Morrison) linked Wayne to middle-class suburban ideals rather than a lavish star lifestyle. What ultimately emerged from these profiles was not an exposé of indiscretion or affectation but rather corroboration of Duke’s grounded appeal as a blue-collar filmindustry worker who made good. He was, as he had long been reputed to

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Acting a Foil be, “the kind of guy you’d walk a mile for,” whose lack of pretense made him attractive and relatable.46 Wayne’s actual relationships with women complicated this dominant reading. By the end of 1952, John and Esperanza had separated, and by the end of 1954, they were divorced. This was neither Wayne’s first nor his last failed marriage, and as the decade wore on, his increasingly public infidelities, abuses, and absenteeism would eventually begin to undercut his popular chivalric and paternal image.47 Within the historical moment of the early 1950s, however, the relationship with Esperanza Baur—arguably the most publicized of his romantic splits—did less to negate Wayne’s overall signification than to highlight the importance of his work ethic. While it painted him as devoted to his family, Tom Carlile’s August 1950 Modern Screen profile also observed that the star’s busy schedule precluded time for a favorite hobby, deep-sea fishing.48 The mention of business-related constraints was a persistent theme in the paratexts surrounding the star and his films. In a December 1950 guest column for Screenland, Esperanza Baur, writing as “Mrs. John Wayne,” brought the issue of her husband’s availability to the fore and indicated that the consequences were much graver than lost angling opportunities. The article featured Baur in perhaps her most public performance ahead of the Waynes’ notorious divorce four years later. Its title, “Almost a Movie Widow,” referred not to a life-threatening accident but rather to Baur’s belief that she was close to losing her spouse to the film business. Duke, she wrote, is so really interested in motion pictures that he works and works and works. Much harder now than before he had his big success. It’s not that he is concerned only with acting or the money he can make; he wants to do as many things in movies as possible, and know all about them. . . . Someone said recently that Duke is the “workingest man in town.” That’s just about true.49 Baur performed her concerns within the context of her role as a midcentury American homemaker. Publicizing Wayne’s exceptional dedication to Hollywood was framed as a supportive act, with Baur’s revelation vouching for her husband’s authenticity as a protector of dynastic marriage and a devoted actor turned producer, even as his focus on motion pictures began to erode the stability of the couple’s home.50 Other articles soon followed suit. Screenland’s July 1951 gossip roundup, “What Hollywood Itself Is Talking About,” stated that the Wayne family was finally taking a long-rumored vacation. The magazine reminded its readers

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Imagining the Method that “the hard working Duke” required a break because he made “practically more pictures than anybody.”51 A Modern Screen profile one month later informed its readers that the featured image of the Waynes in an intimate embrace captured yet another goodbye as Duke departed to shoot The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952).52 “The only catch about Duke’s overwhelming success,” one of his former poker-playing associates told the feature’s author, “is that we never see him anymore.”53 Wayne had “worked 341 days” in the past year, the friend noted, adding that the star was likely to work just as many in the next.54 In the eight months following the publication of Baur’s “Almost a Movie Widow,” tensions in the marriage appeared headed toward a publicized breaking point. Press accounts detailed Wayne’s simultaneous desires to salvage his marriage and to maintain his provider status, goals that pulled him in separate directions and put his wife and Hollywood in competition for his attention. If “the most precious commodity” Hollywood’s top star possessed was time, then the increased public attention to his eroding second marriage made clear that his profession took priority over his spouse.55 Time’s 1952 profile “The Wages of Virtue” located an analogous pattern in Duke’s second marriage. Expanding on her earlier “Almost a Movie Widow” observations, Baur provided readers with more specific examples of Duke’s obsession than she had the previous year. “My husband . . . is one of the few persons who is always interested in his business,” she testified.56 “He talks of it constantly,” Baur continued. “When he reads, it’s scripts. Our dinner guests always talk business, and he spends all his time working, discussing working or planning work.”57 Although the profile suggested to readers that Baur and Wayne would eventually reconcile, it also intimated that as long as Duke was in demand, he would likely not be in a healthy relationship. As 1952 progressed, accounts bore out that pattern and led to titular pronouncements such as “I Cannot Go On” and “It Had to Happen,” in Movieland and Modern Screen, respectively.58 If Wayne’s well-compensated breadwinner status and seeming transparency reinforced his off-screen normativity, then the increasingly public deterioration of his marriage to Esperanza Baur revealed substantial discrepancies. It was clear that Duke’s near-constant involvement in film production undermined the necessities for stabilizing the home: work, marriage, and family. The incongruities presented by his real life in the early 1950s failed, however, to radically alter the momentum of two decades of screen representation, even as his western roles could be seen to present Wayne with a charged decision where he must choose between “an emerging construction of masculine behavior and an alternate vision of masculinity tied to mobility and often-violent competition.”59 Duke’s purported lack of artifice in 72

Acting a Foil particular offered a means to purify his “troublesome biography” by grounding his transparency and work-centric lifestyle in a “property man” origin story and blue-collar ethos.60 It is as a “reactor” that the discourse surrounding Wayne both sutured his form of white masculinity with his blue-collar approach to screen performance and erected an “actor” foil whose opposing characteristics (e.g., inscrutability and anti-commercialism) echoed and thus inadvertently publicized the received features of methodness.

“I Don’t Act at All—I Re-act” Labor played a key role in smoothing inconsistencies in Wayne’s star image and cohering his identity as a white male screen performer for popular consumption. The “Wages of Virtue” profile was indicative of the trend among Wayne paratexts, with most defusing the explosive possibility that the heteronormative, dynastic-marriage-protecting star had actively destroyed his relationships through excessive work for the audience. Instead, readers encountered a performer who had a guiding hand in his own success but was made to suffer for “complications” that grew harsher as his star shone brighter.61 Thus, Time’s profile joined many others that for two decades made the work of performance an integral feature in scaffolding Wayne’s image through his interrelated property-man origin story and reactor identification.62 The property-man narrative first appeared in the April 1930 issue of the Hollywood Filmograph, predating Wayne’s feature debut in The Big Trail by approximately seven months.63 Robbin Coons’s nationally syndicated “Hollywood Sights and Sounds” column introduced the former prop worker to readers from Hackensack, New Jersey, to Billings, Montana, throughout that year.64 Other accounts followed, recounting similar tales of the “former property man on the Fox lot” turned film lead.65 The narrative figured prominently in what was likely the first official biography of Wayne, also produced in 1930, which mentioned his prop-man past three times in the one-page document.66 Variety soon chimed in to characterize “Wayne’s story” as “one of those Hollywood things,” a remark aimed not at diminishing his significance but rather at reflecting the industry’s sometimes contradictory appeals to both the possibilities of meteoric social mobility and the long odds of trying to make it in Tinseltown. In a promotional landscape littered with discovery origin stories, Wayne’s beginnings as a property man were noteworthy. Several salient features emerged in these prop-man narratives.67 Wayne’s first role, and thus his incipient screen persona, was immediately linked to the observations of others (the director Raoul Walsh or, in later versions, John 73

Imagining the Method Ford), who conveyed that his break did in fact come as a property man toiling on the lot rather than through a formal acting audition. This distinction aligned Duke’s performativity from the outset with physical labor rather than artistic expression. In Mary Howard’s January 1931 Screenland profile, one of the first on Wayne, the aspiring star amplified and validated this embryonic estrangement from acting. Asked if he had “ever had any picture experience before,” he succinctly responded, “Not a bit. . . . If Mr. Walsh had made me act, I would have been lost.”68 The success of Stagecoach reenergized and increased popular and industrial attention to Wayne in the 1940s, expanding and sharpening the significance of his property-man past, the performance style it implied, and the star image it solidified.69 Elizabeth Wilson modified her 1943 declaration that Duke was “the hottest thing in pictures today!” by reminding her Silver Screen readers that the rising star was “a born prop man” who would “still rather be a prop man than an actor—except for the money.”70 As both Wayne’s distance from The Big Trail and his professional stature grew, the property-man story came to represent more of the star’s reputedly unique characteristics. His continued identification with blue-collar stagehands remained, yet his accomplishments suddenly became opportunities to express gratitude and fealty to those credited with enabling him to keep his job (e.g., John Ford, friends, coworkers, and audiences).71 “I started out in this business as a prop-man; and I’m just another prop-man to all of the guys!” Wayne told Screen Stars in 1945.72 His refusal to empathize with more affluent and famous industry figures, his unwavering loyalties to longtime below-the-line associates, and his vocal critiques of Hollywood’s “phoniness” magnified the overtones of authenticity and self-assured permanence often regarded as elemental to his distinct appeal.73 Wayne’s achievement of top star status thus served as the ultimate endorsement of his distinctive mode of film labor. “I came in [to Hollywood] by the back entrance,” he told Motion Picture magazine in 1951. “It was uphill all the way. I had absolutely no experience as an actor, and very little natural talent. Even today, after 150 pictures, I have to work hard at it.”74 Surrounded by other descriptions of his extreme commitment to moviemaking, Duke’s box-office triumph and testimonials from other industry figures affirmed on the largest stage yet the importance of his origin story to his meaning as a unique Hollywood performer-worker hybrid.75 Despite accounts of his rupturing marriage, his noteworthy relationship with labor continued to anchor his image in a relatable working-class ethos essential to his success. Rather than a liability or a justification for dismissing his work, Duke’s attributed and claimed distance from acting—what he and others would 74

Acting a Foil eventually call “reacting”—was vital to his brand of performance-labor and to the broader interpretive landscape surrounding screen performance. “Reacting” likely was not explicitly invoked until sometime in the late 1940s, yet the gist of the term was commonplace in the countless prop-man narratives dating back to the early 1930s. It was present but unnamed in Mary Howard’s 1931 Screenland profile, where the untrained Wayne had not been “made” to act yet had still performed in The Big Trail.76 Donald Hough’s 1941 Los Angeles Times profile revised the origin story slightly, suggesting that Wayne’s performance style was a matter of choice—not circumstance—that constituted a through line connecting his past and present (fig. 2.2). “Why should he have been good?” Hough rhetorically asked readers, for “never for one moment . . . had he studied, or been interested in, dramatics.”77 That Wayne still could not “act” therefore represented less a deficiency and more a declaration of intent merging his identity and preferred approach to performance. Referring to his “underacting” and “non-acting,” the profile made clear Duke’s plans to stay away from the acting he had “never learned and . . . never will.”78 Contemporaries credited Wayne’s prop-man roots rather than actor training for improvements in his performances. Kirtley Baskette’s 1943 “Gentleman Johnny” profile similarly distanced the star from acting both in the past and in the present, suggesting, like Hough and others, that attempts to read the performer as an actor were misguided. “What John Wayne is—not what he acts—is what registers when the camera bears down,” Baskette told readers.79 “Reacting” was not mentioned, but the profile’s evocative framework outlined a distinctive “something” Duke was doing on-screen. “Acting background or not,” Baskette wrote, “there was something there.”80 By 1952, industry and popular publications were frequently referring to Wayne’s “reacting” and its variants. Wayne not only publicly embraced the characterization but also indicated that it had been a matter of public knowledge for some time. “How often do I gotta tell you,” he rhetorically asked Baskette, the author of “Wages of Virtue,” that “I don’t act at all—I re-act.”81 Baskette affirmed this portrayal, declaring that the forty-four-year-old Wayne was both “a businessman who firmly believes in the profitable product he sells” and “a craftsman who has learned his trade.”82 These were, in effect, restatements of the familiar “property man” and “reactor” tropes describing Wayne’s performative labor in unambiguous terms that would either inform the uninitiated or already be familiar to readers. The star reiterated the refrain a few months later, and others, including his oft-credited mentor John Ford, echoed the characterization.83 Steven Cohan has incisively observed of this discourse targeting Wayne’s fans that “reacting” articulated the star’s denial of performativity and flattened “difference[s] between his performing and his 75

Imagining the Method

Figure 2.2. Donald Hough’s 1941 Los Angeles Times profile of John Wayne emphasizes and interweaves his property-man origins and distance from acting. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.

being.”84 Thus, reacting provided a means of purifying symbolic outliers and contradictions, fortifying Duke’s authenticity by conveying “the lack of artifice in his professionalism.”85 Reacting also provides an especially useful analytical frame for understanding the significance of Duke’s performative labor, because reacting relied on the construction of an antithetical acting other for much of its own meaning making. Building further on Cohan’s observation, reacting crucially 76

Acting a Foil situated Wayne’s symbolic capacity within the context of the labor that preceded and thus underwrote it. It was a denial of performativity that was itself performative. It subtended the star’s lengthy career arc, positioning him within a broader constellation of performed identities and carving out a space there as the prop man with no substantive interest in acting. This crucially informed Duke’s star signification and helped to minimize the incongruities in racialized and gendered relation to the screen and the home. Reacting mollified binaries of “good” and “bad” acting and offered a utilitarian alternative that eschewed formal training in dramatics in favor of a recursive “re”-acting. Wayne’s approach to performance was thus rooted in physical labor and in loyalty to the film industry and audiences, which rendered the practitioner all the more predictable, and thus bankable, to his employers and customers.86 As his professional fortunes improved, Duke retained this blue-collar ethos and leaned further into its signature characteristics. The reflexivity of “protecting the investment,” as Wayne put it in 1952, exemplified the balance that reacting maintained between explicit self-commodification and personal integrity, further integrating his on- and off-screen work through purportedly transparent disclosures.87 Reacting also calls attention to the ascribed features of the acting other, to the terms and conditions of the acting/reacting binary. Though Wayne’s turn alongside Montgomery Clift in Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) has generated the most critical attention for the overt juxtaposition of performance styles, Duke costarred alongside several Method actors during his career, including Geraldine Page, in Hondo (John Farrow, 1953); Patricia Neal, in In Harm’s Way (Otto Preminger, 1965); and Robert Duvall, in True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969). That neither Page (a major costar who was second-billed behind Wayne) nor Neal (a costar third-billed behind Wayne and Kirk Douglas) have drawn the same degree of critical attention—in comparison to Wayne or on their own—is indicative of what Keri Walsh forcefully argues is the distinct yet repeatedly elided tradition of women’s feminist Method acting.88 Ultimately, Duke’s relationship to Method acting has heretofore focused almost entirely on Red River, where the explicit juxtaposition of his and Clift’s masculinities fed into fan magazine discourse about binaries of “man” and “boy.” New screen stars such as Clift—and soon Brando—arrived to a postwar popular culture struggling with the fact that masculinity was a contentious and unwieldy subject formation rather than a universal condition.89 Juxtaposed against Wayne’s hegemonic masculinity, Clift’s “boy” conversely offered audiences an alternative gender performance that eschewed the prevailing masculine/feminine binary and lent itself to queer subtexts for fans and the press to unpack.90 In fan magazines, Cohan observes, Clift’s authenticity 77

Imagining the Method hinged on the intensity and dedication of his acting rather than his private life, eschewing the latter while turning “his indecipherability [into] his most authenticating feature.”91 Conflating Clift’s inaccessibility and authenticity as both a performer and a person reflected his disruption of gender binaries and representation that consequently invited queer readings, celebrated their sexuality in transgressive fashion, and prompted reactions seeking to reinstate rigid masculine/feminine categories by way of feminizing Clift.92 Thinking paratextually about performance reminds us that such contrasts emanated not exclusively from Clift himself but rather through many of the discursive networks that orbited the performer and his films. Stitched together as it was in the interpretive landscape of late 1940s US popular culture, the construction of Clift’s acting—and its accompanying ideological significance—was also connected to and informed by paratexts and discourses regarding other prominent performers at the time, including Wayne. Clift and Wayne’s literal on-screen juxtaposition as family members turned rivals in Red River served to heighten the contrast further, making the film a clear touchstone for glimpsing competing performance styles as well as performed subject positions. At the same time, approaching this with the history of methodness in mind serves to decenter Red River and reorient its two leads, opening the field upon which potentially equally impactful contrasts can occur. Such an approach suggests that Clift’s and Wayne’s significations are bound up in long-accreting ideas of screen performance that give notions of transparency radically different valences for each person while still mutually affirming each other via the contrasts of their respective popular reception. In other words, the preexisting constructions of methodness and of reacting were mutually constitutive and had been long imbued with gender and racial connotations well before Wayne and Clift shared the screen. Their accrued significance was brought to bear on the two stars, with these ideas of performance underwriting the racial, gender, and sexual parameters and features of these performers rather than the other way around. The next section explores this dynamic in greater detail by focusing on two performers, John Wayne and Marlon Brando, who never shared the screen. Posited in opposition to Wayne’s nonacting performance on the broader interpretive landscape of US popular culture, the othering of actors during this period rendered Wayne an unlikely but important figure in demarcating the features of methodness within the discursive surround of 1940s and 1950s American popular culture. Wayne’s emphasis on being a reactor did not occur in a vacuum but rather participated in a larger interpretive landscape that entangled understandings of performance and identity. Duke’s disavowal of acting provided a very public, recurring, and thus 78

Acting a Foil vital contrast with actors, which made him an enduring lightning rod for discourses about performance when its characteristics often proved elusive. It was into this landscape that Marlon Brando arrived as a film actor and was received through the oppositional lens that—though he was not in fact a Method actor—wedded him to methodness in the paratexts surrounding his first motion picture role.

The (Method) Men Life’s June 1950 profile of Marlon Brando, the second by the general-interest publication in a two-month span and the first since the Broadway transplant had arrived in Hollywood, claimed to document Brando’s four-week immersion at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital in Southern California ahead of his film debut in The Men (Fred Zinnemann, 1950). The profile’s title, “Preparing for Paraplegia,” and the large photograph above it featuring Brando in a wheelchair, previewed for Life’s millions of readers a distinct mode of film work that began long before the start of principal photography.93 The feature epitomized Life’s signature appeals to visual culture as well as its Hollywood-like narrative structuring of images.94 The magazine, whose reach at the time extended to roughly one-fifth of all Americans over the age of ten, provided its audience with a primer on the young performer’s efforts to “learn the mechanics of living with useless legs.”95 Sparse text contextualized the imagery, explaining Brando’s efforts to learn the techniques for performing a disabled body and to earn the respect—and thus gain access to the experiences—of actual veterans with paraplegia, who comprised his temporary community at Birmingham Hospital (figs. 2.3 and 2.4).96 Integrating anecdotes and images of Brando’s preparations and seemingly successful passing as a disabled veteran among the able-bodied, the Life profile underscored the extraordinary and authentic external outcomes of the actor’s transformation while keeping the interior dimensions of his process off limits. Noting his disabled companions’ approval of his convincing performance, the magazine assured its audience they should expect “Brando [to give] an even better one” in the film.97 Alongside the photographs, the testimonials suggested to readers and prospective movie audiences that the actor had pulled off a persuasive “fakery in allegiance to the truth” before cameras ever started rolling on the film.98 The Men followed its paratexts in privileging Brando’s absorption into his own laboring body. The film, which sees Ken Wilocek (Brando) paralyzed in the film’s opening minutes by a sniper’s bullet, structures its plot around his struggles to, in the frame of the narrative, 79

Figure 2.3. Above left, Brando demonstrates “how to get up.” “Preparing for Paraplegia,” Life, June 12, 1950, 130. Courtesy of Shutterstock, used with permission. Figure 2.4. Above right, Brando ingratiates himself with the veterans. “Preparing for Paraplegia,” Life, June 12, 1950, 132. Courtesy of Shutterstock, used with permission.

“overcome” paralysis, reintegrate into the able-bodied population, and resume his natural place as the breadwinner for his betrothed, Ellen (Teresa Wright). The underlying tension as to whether Ken and Ellen can reconcile their normative domestic fantasies with the character’s catastrophic injury spurs Ken to action, which involves pulling himself up literally from the hospital bed and conveying his despondence. Through tense music and numerous closeups, The Men heightens Ken’s struggle as he strains to “build up,” to conquer disability through rehabilitation in order to stand at his wedding (fig. 2.5). The threat of the alternative—Ken’s emasculating dependency on Ellen— hangs over the character’s Sisyphean effort and finally materializes when Ellen realizes the potential burden of becoming a long-term caretaker of her husband. The conflict, resolved only after Ken’s reinstitutionalization and subsequent discharge to the care of his wife, continually revolves around the volatile forces that suppress and animate Ken’s (Brando’s) body. Surrounded by veterans with disabilities who were nonactors, Ken’s initial trauma and prolonged efforts to mend his body were emphasized for audiences via

Acting a Foil

Figure 2.5. The seeming culmination of The Men’s training montage harkens back to Life magazine’s “Preparing for Paraplegia” paratext. Screen capture by the author.

repeated close-ups of Brando’s body and performance. Ken’s visceral efforts to stand, and the strain his internalized expectations of masculinity put on his relationship with Ellen, render his ultimate ability to stand a Pyrrhic victory that fails to repair him or their union. This dovetailed with midcentury investments in the therapeutic power of performance and further legitimized Method acting’s purported exceptionality in plumbing the depths of the human psyche thanks to its perceived entanglement with Freudian psychology. Brando’s ascribed capacity for authentic portrayal not only aligned him with this performance style but also marked his acting as simultaneously present in his physical dedication and elusive in his mental approach to and absorption in the role. Images of Brando’s body at work in paratexts surrounding the film presented readers with visual evidence of labor specific to The Men. The imagery fell within what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has called the “wondrous” in photography’s long history of representing disability. Wondrous representation essentialized disability by purporting to exalt the subject for accomplishing feats both spectacular and mundane.99 Life’s photographs documented Brando’s extreme measures of willful (if temporary) self-debilitation along 81

Imagining the Method such lines, focusing on his bound legs and exposed upper body in such a way as to accentuate the visceral straining of muscles as he attempted to lift himself to stand. Captions assisted in framing the narrative of the actor’s two main goals, from Brando’s demonstration of “how to get up after a fall without using any muscles below the waist” to his successful integration with actual veterans with paraplegia.100 Together, the words and images presented a performance style that contrasted sharply with John Wayne’s predictable reacting. In an echo of the methodness surrounding Montgomery Clift, Brando’s Life profile epitomized postwar Hollywood photography’s offer of “a more intimate rendering of stardom” that rooted actors’ authenticity in the intensity of their commitment to craft rather than their personal life.101 Whereas discourse leaned on, and thus reproduced, Wayne’s prop-man past and reactor style to situate his reliable professional consistency from one production to the next, the newcomer Brando’s process for inhabiting the disabled body proved illusory. The paratexts offered enough to clearly distinguish the performance as taxing and unique—and not, like Wayne, recursive—yet the images and their accompanying texts also marked Brando’s preparatory labor as emblematic of a more elusive and exclusive skill set, inaccessible to all but a few. The references to acting were both a routine feature of the star discourse quickly coalescing around Brando and an explicit marker of his distinction via the terms of methodness.102 The paratextual framing of Wayne’s and Brando’s opposing performance styles extended to their private lives as well. Stills from Wayne’s movies intermingled with portraits of his heteronormative domesticity, visually connecting anecdotes about his hectic professional life to the benefits (and costs) of his extraordinary breadwinning for the home. In contrast, images and narratives surrounding Brando and The Men in the Life photo essay characterized the actor and his acting as unpredictable and eccentric. He was, Theodore Strauss would write in a lengthy profile for the same magazine just one month later, a “harlequin who had not been house broken.”103 Such portrayals aligned the film with Brando-oriented paratexts dating back to his recent Broadway success and continuing well into the period in which Wayne was explicitly labeled a reactor. Louise Levitas’s May 1948 profile of Brando for P.M. magazine, one of the first in-depth press accounts of the midwestern transplant, illustrates how this prevailing reception more or less existed from the start. Incorporating numerous testimonials to his exceptional acting talent— exemplified in his turn as Stanley Kowalski in the original Broadway run of A Streetcar Named Desire—Levitas intertwined statements about Brando’s ascribed ability to perform (e.g., “His is the acting of the few great ones”) with descriptions of a personality averse to attention, public scrutiny, and 82

Acting a Foil social mores.104 Though Brando had long drawn people in, a confidant told the author, “He doesn’t like to be singled out.”105 Readers would have encountered in this early introduction to Brando an account of an artist uncomfortable with publicity and, as Streetcar’s press agent confirmed, “indifferent to glory, money, and all those things.”106 As if to underscore the veracity of such a characterization, the same agent, Ben Kornzweig, coauthored “My Press Agent’s Scars” with the shy star a year later for Promenade. Putting a finer point on the actorly features that would quickly dominate the interpretive landscape around him, Brando did not mince words in expressing his abhorrence for what he deemed the public’s desire to conflate his acting with the supposed strangeness of his personality.107 Many of the same fan magazines, studio publicists, trade press outlets, general-interest magazines, and periodicals that continually reaffirmed Wayne’s performer-laborer identity cast the newcomer Brando as a performerartist whose identity materialized quickly out of his attributed quirkiness, nonconformity, unpredictability, and anti-commercialism, as exemplified in his anti-Hollywood and anti-celebrity sentiments. Such characteristics were core to methodness and stood in opposition to the transparent, predictable, and industry-friendly reactor John Wayne. One such story, whose variations inundated newspapers and fan and industry magazine coverage leading up to The Men’s 1950 release, painted Brando’s initial arrival in Tinseltown as unconventional to the point of mystifying. He possessed no car and owned few clothes, the articles relayed to readers with astonishment. He resided with family members in modest accommodations. He was disinterested in dating starlets, in signing lengthy studio contracts, and in participating in the rat race toward renown. Such nonconformity left Hollywood gasping, declared the celebrity gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, in perhaps her first write-up on Brando, several months before The Men’s release.108 While Wayne touted the importance of professionalism, critics and commentators enlisted Brando’s colleagues to paint the rising star as a source of potential instability in his productions. As his Broadway costar Jessica Tandy relayed to Hopper, Brando’s late arrivals to the theater left everyone in a state of confusion and panic. In this column—circulated by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate to tens of millions of readers across the country— and others like it, such concerns were often paired with praise, indicating that the uncertainty surrounding the actor expressed itself in both extraordinary risks and exceptional rewards, effectively presaging the simultaneous revulsion and reverence that would later lie at the core of methodness. That Brando was—in Hopper’s fellow Hollywood gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky’s comparable account of the actor’s arrival—“a character even in a town loaded with 83

Imagining the Method characters” expressed the duality of the actor label attributed to him early, explicitly, and repeatedly.109 As early as 1949, discourse surrounding Brando indicated that actorly stories were already preceding him wherever he traveled. By 1952, as John Wayne was reveling in his reactor identity, Brando was openly lamenting in Collier’s magazine that he had tired of his own legend.110 These distinctions were also symptomatic of significant midcentury changes in cultural production, including Hollywood’s diminished oversight of performer labor as well as new approaches to photography. The deterioration of studios’ vertically integrated power saw their once-domineering control over screen talent decentralized, resulting in greater performer agency over film choices and publicity. Many stars responded by forming their own independent production companies; John Garfield, for example, established Enterprise Productions in 1946, while Wayne founded Batjack Productions in 1952, and Brando formed Pennebaker Productions in 1955. Meanwhile, new hybrid approaches to photography emerged that were influenced by preexisting European modern and American vernacular styles.111 In the pages of general-interest magazines such as Life and Look, these intersecting forces of performer empowerment and photographic visuality forged new opportunities for stars to publicize themselves as well as new ways of seeing acting amid the paradoxical postwar imperatives touting both American freedom and American conformity.112 These new perspectives on performance seemed “appropriate to a world defined by flux and instability, a world in which acting is not simply an extension of who we are but an outcome of labor.”113 The prevailing interpretive framework that underwrote methodness thrived in this landscape, providing perceived moments of actor absorption on- and offscreen and being prized by candid postwar photography because it promised new forms of audience-performer intimacy while still retaining the mystique of the acting process.114 This further imbued methodness with individualism in performers’ pursuit of their own artistic goals (rather than industrial imperatives, as valued by Wayne) and in their rebellion against consensus and conformity at the heart of sociopolitical power in the United States. As the personification of that culture of power, Wayne stood in opposition to everything that alleged Method actors and acting stood for. These paratextual contrasts extended to the subjectivities bound up in the performance styles as well. While the reactor Wayne stood in as an avatar for hegemonic white masculinity aligned with the ideological and institutional centers of American social and cultural power, actors such as Brando were quickly characterized as rebels and outsiders in a way that affiliated them to varying degrees with alternative forms of white masculinity. Brando was, according to the actor, author, and Actors Studio alum David Garfield, the 84

Acting a Foil prototype of the torn T-shirt crowd, the epitome of the Actors Studio maverick, even as Brando disavowed the association with the Studio and the Method.115 Moreover, Brando’s nebulous relationship with fellow self-styled outsiders of the time, such as the Beats, and what Krin Gabbard calls his “jazz acting” lent credence to a seemingly marginalized white masculinity that blurred gender and racial distinctions. “White men’s appropriation of black masculine signifiers accelerated dramatically after the Second World War,” writes Katharine Bausch, “as the perceived crisis of middle-class white manhood perpetuated desires among some white men to incorporate attributes associated with these groups into their own performances of masculinity.”116 Brando was a pioneer in the whiteface performance of Blackness, according to Gabbard, because he “paved the way for what has become essential to Hollywood films, the wide-ranging appropriation of black culture without the actual representation of black people.”117 Under the conditions of loss (perceived and real) attributed to postwar consensus culture, the new class of star performers like Brando with ostensibly different approaches to performance and to life further ossified the air of oppositionality reaffirming both Duke’s position at the heart of power and the place of these rebellious actors as outsiders.118 This adversarial dynamic lent further legitimacy to the outsider significance of methodness through its ascribed features as well as the performed white masculinity that lent itself potentially to Black and queer signification. David Savran cautions against oversimplifying midcentury contrasts in identity, arguing that the Beats’ “self-fashioning as an opposition force in U.S. culture” comprised “an oppositional hegemony . . . that remains mortgaged to the very structures it would dismantle.” Put simply, Savran continues, oppositional white male groups such as the Beats “were radical in a representative way that reaffirmed the culture, rather than undermining it.”119 In other words, the contrast between reactor and actor overshadows the almost-exclusive alignment of methodness with white men, which surreptitiously bolstered white masculinity left unchallenged beneath the veneer of the outsider. Overt discourses of methodness were still largely emergent in this period, and The Men and Brando himself resided in an interpretive landscape of film labor dominated by the likes of bigger stars such as Wayne. Duke finally achieved top box-office status in 1950, the year of The Men’s release, ushering in a period of unprecedented popularity for the reactor. Just as Method acting— or, rather, methodness—appealed to an unstable postwar world, Duke’s popularity was by contrast rooted in his image as an establishment man, representing a bulwark against the volatility reshaping social categories such as gender and race.120 Neither the box-office king nor the upstart was universally 85

Imagining the Method received along these lines, yet the prevailing interpretive frameworks coalescing around the two performers during this period engendered dominant receptions that aligned remarkably well with the consensus understanding that still regards them in oppositional terms even decades later. This chapter has contended that popular understandings of Brando and Wayne were to a great extent mutually constitutive. Characterizations of Brando’s acting—and the continued proliferation of methodness generally— unfolded on terms shaped in part by prominent industrial and cultural figures such as Duke, whose prevailing star image relied upon a dissociation from acting that both solidified his reactor image and lent coherence to his actor foil. Wayne’s utilitarian performative labor, shaped by a lack of dramatic training and a blue-collar, businesslike approach to managing his star brand bound together his reel and real lives. These “reacting” features also placed him at odds with an “acting” performer who was conversely uninterested in the imperatives of Hollywood studios, the star system, and audiences. Where Duke was knowable and bankable, Brando was inscrutable and unpredictable. Many such acting features appeared repeatedly in Brando’s early and foundational reception, imbuing his star image from the outset with familiar markers of that which Wayne had long publicly disavowed.

Well-Tended Binaries and Gardens The reactor John Wayne’s contrast to the actor—first implicit via Marlon Brando’s association with methodness before becoming more explicit as the 1950s wore on—was by no means the first instance of discourse communities relying on contrasts to make sense of performance. This instance distinguishes itself by providing an important moment and a different framework for thinking about how performers and performance take on crucial meaning via paratexts. The actor/reactor dynamic unfolded within a broader midcentury interpretive landscape rife with dualisms. The Group Theatre alum and soonto-be Actors Studio director (a post he would assume in 1951) Lee Strasberg traded in oppositions to bolster the putative authenticity of Method acting, “maliciously characteriz[ing] Modern acting as an approach that emphasized ‘the rhetorical and external nature of acting,’ whereas his Method demanded ‘truthfulness of experience and of expression.’”121 This rhetorical tactic, Cynthia Baron has adroitly observed, erected a powerful alternative framework for differentiating Modern and Method acting that, among general audiences and discourse communities, elevated the latter at the expense of the former.122 This diminished and gendered the labor of non-Method “Modern” teachers 86

Acting a Foil and practitioners such as Stella Adler, Josephine Dillon, Sophie Rosenstein, and the Actors’ Lab, and it contributed to the overall subsuming of Modern into Method within the interpretive landscape of American popular culture. In tandem with the heightened visibility of Strasberg and the Actors Studio as the 1950s wore on, the philosophies and practices of Modern and Method performance became increasingly blurred in reception, reflecting methodness far more than the distinct characteristics of either style. Despite their stateside entanglement in WASP culture making, Strasberg and other purveyors of Method acting also sought to distinguish and elevate it through opposition to the British style, whose “poised, formal, and overly articulate” features were held to be outdated—akin to “a well-tended English garden”— and thus inferior to the more authentic and interior American style.123 Performance styles were more nuanced than these binaries suggested, reflecting the synchronic and diachronic cross-pollination of philosophies and techniques. The varied sociocultural forces working on the interpretive landscape, including the paratexts populating them, tended to flatten out subtleties, harden distinctions, and heighten the stakes of amplification and omission. The meteoric rise of Method-aligned film stars such as Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando in the so-called Method moment of the late 1940s and early 1950s did not alter the fact that John Wayne continued to reign supreme at the box office; indeed, these stars entered the regime of representation (of labor and of identity) largely on the hegemonic terms aligned with Duke. Wayne achieved his status through a star image premised on permanence, predictability, and a lack of pretension manifest in a performance style said to channel self-conscious efforts to protect studio and audience investments in him. His popular appeal likely owed to multiple overlapping factors, including deep ties to nostalgic national fantasies and projections of certainty. Meanwhile, the inscrutability and anti-commercialism attributed to acting and actors dovetailed with the ongoing sedimentation of methodness glimpsed in earlier periods surrounding the Group Theatre. Methodness buttressed the loaded characterizations of intensity and transformation swirling around such actors’ emergence in Hollywood and helped to frame transparency less as an act of personal disclosure (as it was with Wayne) and more as an affirmation that their inaccessible performance represented their passion. This contrast heightened their seeming independence and willingness to buck Hollywood film production norms, offering further confirmation of their opposition to Wayne’s avowed (and ascribed) industry-friendly reactor identity. The contrast would only grow starker, as Clift’s and Brando’s reputations for on-set difficulty increasingly outshone plaudits for their performances 87

Imagining the Method as the 1950s wore on.124 This exaggerated feature of the Method actor’s purported dedication to craft and distaste for commercial filmmaking imperatives would come to occupy a key place in methodness, forming a significant plot point in the decidedly meta-methodness film Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), for example, and remaining integral to current uses of methodness to criticize unprofessional, dangerous, and pretentious actor behavior on set. For midcentury actors such as Brando and Clift, this reception would color their lives and careers even in death as subjects whose demonstrated greatness early in their respective careers was never sustainably maintained or never achieved again. These received relations to performance were also entangled with very different subject positions. As Hollywood’s top film star, Wayne resided at the heart of establishment formulations of gender, sexuality, and race mythologies. Conversely, the unpredictability, inscrutability, and disdain for Hollywood’s commercialism attributed to so-called Method actors located them firmly in the cultural margins. Lost in this ostensibly adversarial dynamic was the political work such contrasts both enabled and camouflaged. In the case of methodness, this prevailing center/margin relationship between reactor and actor buttressed the latter’s purported rebelliousness, progressivism, and anti-commercialism already aligned with methodness while clouding the actor’s ongoing proximity to a supposed adversary (the reactor), as well as the actor’s potential for regressive racial and gender significance. The next chapter considers the intensification of this dynamic around posthumous efforts to mobilize reactionary readings of James Dean toward a memorial of white male victimhood.

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CHAPTER 3

James Dean’s Story Posthumous Reception and Methodness Memorialized

A Million Angles As the Hollywood Reporter columnist Mike Connolly prepared to wrap up his August 1955 interview with his friend James Dean, he found himself in a bind. Their wide-ranging conversation had left him without a definitive perspective for his story on Hollywood’s rising star. Connolly turned to his subject for input, suggesting facetiously that perhaps he should write the article from a million angles. “That’s me,” Dean responded in kind, “a million angles!”1 Dean would be dead less than two months later, and his quote would resonate differently when it was published as the coda to Connolly’s December 1955 remembrance of his friend. It presaged how Dean would be refracted through an astonishing variety of readings in the immediate aftermath of his unforeseen death. One of the most prominent readings would be supplied by someone seemingly far removed from the moody, torn T-shirt crowd of Method and Method-adjacent actors, someone who had in fact been vocal in her distaste for many of Method acting’s practitioners: the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Hopper received letters “by the thousands week after week” for three years after Dean’s death.2 She was not alone in this regard. Rival celebrity journalist Louella Parsons talked of the “deluge” of fan mail she received for roughly eight months after Dean’s fatal car crash, surpassing letters regarding all other stars.3 Clair Rochelle’s United Fan Club and Fan Mail

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Figure 3.1. Effigyfashioning artists featured as part of Ezra Goodman’s sensationalist September 1956 Life magazine profile of responses to James Dean’s death. Courtesy of Shutterstock, used with permission.

Service claimed to have received an average of approximately five thousand to six thousand monthly letters by August 1956, eleven months after Dean’s death, outpacing those addressed to the former “top-rater” Marlon Brando during the three months prior.4 Meanwhile, the James Dean Memorial Foundation took in approximately four hundred thousand letters within the first year and, for a time, the deceased drew more mail at Warner Bros. than any other player on its roster—alive or dead.5 A year after the actor’s untimely demise, a September 1956 Life profile sensationalized the range of these reactions in the magazine’s characteristically visual style. A large image of effigy-fashioning artists greeted readers (fig. 3.1), accompanying references to the production of “three-inch-high cast stone heads” and life-size versions “finished in a plastic that looks and feels like human flesh.”6 The journalist Ezra Goodman provided corroborating descriptions of the “delirium” and the “bizarre” craze that he noted had surpassed “in fervor and morbidity even the hysterical mass mourning that attended the death of Rudolph Valentino.”7 For Goodman, Hopper, Parsons, and others, including Giant author Edna Ferber, stories of auctions for Dean-related automobile wreckage and séances to commune with the dead

James Dean’s Story actor provoked moralizing concerns that Dean’s demise had spurred transgressive behavior bordering on the occult.8 Within this context, the posthumous documentary The James Dean Story (George W. George and Robert Altman, 1957) sought to promote itself as the definitive portrait of Dean.9 The actor’s proximity to Warner Bros., which had produced, distributed, and marketed all his films, afforded the studio an authoritative position to insist on its own expertise. The James Dean Story’s promotional discourse attempted to capitalize on such authority to enhance its filmmakers’ claims to comprehensiveness. Warner Bros. touted its producers’ utilization of three detective agencies and thirteen researchers, the allocation of 2,426 man-hours, the accumulation of 4,500 pages of documentation, the inspection of eight thousand photographs of Dean, the expenditure of seventy thousand feet of film on interviews with 1,500 of the actor’s associates, and the outreach to 360 James Dean fan clubs, representing 207,000 members. In obtaining, collating, and distilling so much information, the studio reasoned it was uniquely qualified to make “a different kind of motion picture” that amounted to a comprehensive interpretation of the star.10 A memo written by the Warner Bros. publicity agent Carl Combs invited exhibitors to follow the studio’s lead in emphasizing The James Dean Story’s singular verisimilitude via actor self-portrayals—including posthumous appearances from Dean—as well as the film’s presentation of previously unknown material about its eponymous subject. As it had in its own promotional materials, Warner Bros. suggested that theater owners’ publicity efforts situate The James Dean Story as the last of the actor’s four films for the studio and thus the final authoritative word on the performer from the only studio to produce his movies. Impressive as they were, Warner Bros.’ efforts to prescribe a definitive take on Dean ran up against the ideological tensions, contradictions, and unintended meanings coalescing around him. The ongoing popular entrenchment of methodness in the early 1950s also complicated the studio’s endeavor, solidifying the prevailing reception of Dean and his acting through connections to already-established gravitational centers of methodness within the interpretive landscape of the moment. He was attached to institutions such as the Method-aligned Actors Studio and pedagogues such as Lee Strasberg. He was explicitly linked to actors such as Marlon Brando and implicitly connected to non-Method reactors such as John Wayne. Dean’s reception in the mid-1950s was colored significantly by the features of methodness: performers’ extraordinary commitment to their roles, their anti-commercial impulses, and the inaccessibility of their processes. Proceeding within the long history of Dean’s posthumous reception 91

Imagining the Method following an abbreviated career tragically cut short by a fatal car crash in September 1955, this chapter seeks to understand how the methodness that anticipated and buttressed Dean’s reception as a screen performer in the Brando mold was then mobilized and memorialized in the immediate period after the actor’s passing. As methodness became more mainstream over the course of the 1950s, its attributed rebelliousness, elusiveness, and exclusivity continued to obscure its proximity to power, its exclusionary dimensions, and its capacity for appropriation by various parties to differing ends. Dean’s unexpected death and still-nascent star image (his first film had premiered roughly five months before the fatal accident) threw these facets into sharp relief, inviting diverse readings and political strategies to make sense—and use—of him. While scholars have shown how subaltern co-optations of Dean’s rebellious signification illustrated crucial strategic acts of resistance and therefore dispelled any notion of monolithic meaning, the tendency to focus on progressive counterhegemonic readings has contributed to a critical neglect of the potential for regressive reception.11 In this chapter, I explore one such example of reactionary interpretation in the work of Hedda Hopper, one of the most widely read gossip columnists, and arguably most visible conservatives, of the era. A frequently outspoken supporter, like John Wayne, of the hegemonic identity politics at the center of midcentury US culture, Hopper was unaligned with methodness and critical of the alleged slovenly, mumbling, neurotic, torn T-shirt type. At the same time, however, she repeatedly claimed before and after Dean’s death to be one of his closest confidantes. Like The James Dean Story (and by extension Warner Bros.), Hopper used her prominent status and weekly audience of tens of millions to carve out a privileged proximity to the deceased and consequent authority over his significance. Hopper and Warner Bros. competed with the purveyors of countless other possible readings, yet their respective power via the far-reaching distribution of their readings and the register of the Dean discourse granted their interpretations preferred status in the broader interpretive landscape of the 1950s. Each sought to carve out a particularly decisive reading. The James Dean Story’s purported aim for comprehensiveness was sold to audiences as a top-down expenditure of vast industry resources and expertise, all to distill fact from speculation. Hopper, on the other hand, operated in the affective and speculative world of gossip, playing a seminal (and critically undervalued) role in collecting, mobilizing, and seeking to preserve particular interpretations of Dean rooted in methodness. Straddling public and private spheres of published scuttlebutt, Hopper positioned herself as having unique access to and intimate knowledge of Dean, his fans, and the industry that brought them all together. As the key 92

James Dean’s Story intermediary between audiences and Hollywood, she maintained a space for cultivating Dean-related discursive exchanges. In the process, Hopper worked to delineate the terms of the ostensibly “real” Dean for fans and offered to bring their shared readings to cultural producers as well as the public. Hopper took up methodness to suit her and her community’s efforts to appropriate Dean’s rebellious, anti-commercial, and inscrutable signification and remold it into a more conservative, reactionary framework. Together, Hopper and her epistolary group of fans situated Dean as a victim of Hollywood’s purported inauthenticity, a young person striving for the comfort and security of the midcentury nuclear family, and a sensitive white man driven to devastating consequences by his alienation from the liberal film industry. Within the broader interpretive landscape of mid-1950s US popular culture, the non-Method-aligned Hopper played a prominent role in jostling over the meaning of methodness. She convened a community of like-minded Dean fans around the amplification of marginality—glimpsed earlier in Brando’s “actor” reception—into white male victimhood that she and her readers sought to memorialize and thus ossify at the core of Dean’s significance as a person and an actor against alternative interpretations. Drawing on Warner Bros. publicity materials for James Dean’s first film, East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), as well as newspapers, fan and generalinterest magazine content, print gossip, and commentary, this chapter looks first to the constitution of Dean’s prevailing star image between the initiation of East of Eden promotion circa July 1954 and Dean’s death in September 1955. A closer examination of these paratexts reveals that the rising star’s reception developed within popular orientation points for methodness at the time, from Method-aligned figures (Brando, Strasberg, Kazan) to institutions (the Actors Studio) and motion pictures (East of Eden). This chapter then follows Dean’s reception for two years until the 1957 release of The James Dean Story. I map the contours of the interactions within that period of time between Hopper and an epistolary community of geographically dispersed female readers and self-described Dean fans through their letters and Hedda’s published writings.12 I call these interactions “exchanges” not only because Hopper replied to audience dispatches but also because correspondents’ letters to the gossip columnist often conveyed a sense of communal identity and purpose. Through shared confessions of grief, navigations of legitimate fandom, identifications with Hopper, calls for memorialization, and criticisms of Dean’s fatal alienation at the hands of spectral sociocultural forces, these exchanges drew upon the actor’s received methodness to convene a community and to plot a course of action. Hopper’s epistolary community claimed that in death, Dean (or “Jimmy,” as correspondents and Hopper sometimes 93

Imagining the Method called him) symbolized the tragedy of the midcentury white male subject fatally punished for his inscrutability. Consequent efforts to memorialize the actor and secure this interpretation against competing narratives suggest that the story of James Dean served as an outlet for mobilizing discourses of rebellion and a politics of grievance against larger fluctuations in the gender and racial status quo that reactionary figures such as Hopper routinely resisted and sought to counter.

A Marlon Brando T-Shirt Type Well before the debut of East of Eden, his first major motion picture, James Dean was already firmly ensconced in the institutional apparatus of Warner Bros. That the studio sought to actively cultivate audience familiarity with and desire for him ahead of his debut was not abnormal within the logic of the Hollywood star system, even amid the industry turmoil of the post– Paramount Decree period. The characteristics ascribed to Dean, however, were noteworthy for the tenor and speed with which they cohered his star image. Writing to Eden’s director (and Group Theatre alum and Actors Studio cofounder), Elia Kazan, approximately one month before the film’s March 1955 US debut, the stage and screen producer Mike Todd paired his praise of the motion picture with concern regarding the studio’s narrowly focused and insistent promotion of the young actor.13 While he did not “feel that anything could stop this guy Dean from being a star,” Todd worried that such studio “pre-labels,” which he claimed had stunted the ascent of other up-andcoming performers, risked doing the same to Kazan’s promising protégé.14 One month later, the gossip columnist Dorothy Manners informed readers that Dean was the subject of “the greatest advance publicity ever accorded a new player.”15 Warner Bros. attempted to mask its publicity campaign even as observers occasionally noted the studio’s, and the overall industry’s, efforts to cultivate profitable new personalities amid the turnover of aging and expensive stars and evolving labor relations.16 Carl Combs of Warners’ publicity department recommended to others in the promotional network, namely periodicals and exhibitors, that Dean’s sudden ubiquity be labeled one of the “stranger” things to have happened in Hollywood.17 The department took this further, attributing to the newcomer the singular agency to bring about such widespread interest even as he “remained so completely unseen by the world’s moviegoers.”18 The features that made the young man simultaneously magnetic and mysterious linked him to figures and institutions already brimming with 94

James Dean’s Story methodness in the popular imagination: Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, and the Actors Studio, among others. Those connections figured prominently in the studio’s efforts to understand and exploit its potential star. In March 1954, Kazan and Jack Warner discussed how to manage the “odd” Dean.19 The publicity department eventually provided a solution: claiming that the young actor had “been compared to Marlon Brando,” publicists sought to reconcile the newcomer’s seemingly unconventional dimensions by rendering them in the already legible terms of another Method-related star. It is unclear where the comparison originated, yet the studio’s passive tone thinly obscured its own repeated efforts to collapse the two actors within a similar symbolic register, joined by their shared connection to Kazan and, by extension, the Actors Studio. They were “sample[s] of the Kazan catalyst that [fused] talent and temperament,” wrote one Warner Bros. publicist, while another linked being “a Marlon-Brando t-shirt type” with being a “Kazan-advocate.”20 Eden’s production notes credited the connection to Kazan himself, whose attributed declaration that Dean was “the finest young actor to come along since the advent of Marlon Brando” circulated in large newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times as early as July 1954.21 Lingering concerns about how to manage the peculiar newcomer seemed to dissolve into the conventional exploitation of methodness—readily available to audiences through a preexisting star and performance style, film and theater director, and acting organization. Between Brando’s prolific collaborations with Kazan (A Streetcar Named Desire [1951], Viva Zapata! [1952], and On the Waterfront [1954]), Kazan’s ties to the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, and Brando’s widely available star image that presented him as a certain type of actor, the repeated comparisons between the two performers quickly cohered a preferred framework for making sense of Dean as both a film star and a Method actor.22 Even as he rejected his own ties to the Actors Studio and to Method acting, Brando lent credence to the comparison as well as his own connection with the Studio, telling Modern Screen that he and Dean had worked together there and that while he respected the younger performer’s talent, he found Dean’s work in Eden derivative of his own style.23 Contemporaneous concerns about “miniature Brandos and Deans” upsetting conventions of screen masculinity were symptomatic of a sense that both shared a performance style and cultural footprint.24 The newcomer Dean qualified or outright denied the Brando link in various ways as early as November 1954. He tacitly acknowledged, however, the limitations that such incessant comparisons placed on his reception:

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Imagining the Method It’s true I am constantly reminding people of him. People see only the end result and compare it with the last commercial success that comes to mind. They discover resemblances—we are both from farms, dress as we please, ride [motorcycles] and work for Elia Kazan. As an actor I have no desire to behave like Brando—and I don’t attempt to. Nevertheless, it is very difficult not to be impressed, not to carry the image of a highly successful actor who is, so to speak, from the same school.25 Newspapers and magazines repeated stronger claims that Dean was neither “disturbed by the comparison, nor . . . flattered,” and that he had his “own personal rebellions” for months ahead of Eden’s release.26 Still, Warner Bros. papered over these distinctions, emphasizing the performers’ same school of training as well as a shared repertoire of symbolic gestures and a common set of personality traits (e.g., mysteriousness, authenticity, focus, and aloofness) that rendered Dean’s dramatic-realist collaboration with Kazan— and thus his star-making turn—legible to audiences through the director’s previous “Method” collaborator. The studio cemented the link further in its litany of descriptors for the newcomer, which characterized him as rude, shy, nattily dressed, lonely, depressed, insightful, eccentric, unkempt, tortured, frustrated, neurotic, mysterious, independent, moody, defiant, aloof, misunderstood, and disorderly. Such depictions firmly situated Dean within the lexicon and legacy of methodness, linking his prevailing reception to that of Brando, Kazan, the Actors Studio, and the Group Theatre.27 No matter how thorough or insistent these links were, Warner Bros. could not guarantee that audiences would decode them as desired. Still, studio efforts did find ample corroboration among film exhibitors and commentators. Showmen’s Trade Review echoed Warners’ publicity in advising theater owners and motion picture distributors to sell moviegoers on Dean’s “resemblance and mannerisms” that “make him appear [to be] another Marlon Brando.”28 The New York Times likewise summed up reviewer discourse about Dean, averring that Eden’s “opening has started a lively controversy over his histrionic kinship with Marlon Brando.”29 Some, such as Richard Coe of the Washington Post and Times Herald and W. Ward Marsh of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, staked out a middle ground, suggesting that the similarities between the peers reflected the influence of their shared director.30 Amid otherwise divisive judgments of Eden, observers repeatedly connected the two performers as evidence to praise Dean’s compelling turn as the forlorn protagonist Cal Trask or to dismiss it as an outgrowth of Brando’s style. William Zinsser of the New York Herald Tribune suggested that Dean’s “subtle” and 96

James Dean’s Story “remarkable performance” invited inevitable comparisons to Brando because of the parallels of their roles.31 Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Philip K. Scheuer likewise saw the analogy as inescapable and maintained that Dean’s extraordinary attention belied his appropriation of “the worst features of the Marlon Brando prototype.”32 Supporters and detractors agreed that Dean’s rapidly ascending and coalescing star image was inextricably tied to the symbolism of Brando, Kazan, and the methodness signifiers of the time, grasping to some extent the studio’s role but not their own in propagating such interpretive coordinates of “Method” for audiences. Gossip columns and fan magazine profiles took this further, suturing these features of methodness to Dean’s off-screen life. Hedda Hopper, one of the preeminent celebrity journalists of the postwar period, first relayed her impressions of the young man to audiences on July 7, 1954, eight months before the release of Eden. Making little effort to mask her distaste for Method acting and actors, Hopper described the “dirty shirt school” of acting’s takeover of the Warner Bros. cafeteria as a metaphor for the larger conquest of a “couldn’t care less kind” of show business with which she and ensconced workers such as John Wayne took umbrage.33 The personifications of this new class sat before her, “slouched” and “brooding,” outing themselves as members of “Elia Kazan’s New York School” without uttering a word.34 Hopper’s anecdote, and her pride at identifying the two—James Dean and his Eden costar Richard Davalos—as “school” members from afar, indicated again the entrenchment of methodness and suggests that for prominent commentators such as Hopper, and tens of millions of their regular readers, Dean was already inextricably entwined with “Method” well before his first film. Other commentators followed suit and continued to use such familiar language long after Eden’s premiere to praise and pan the actor. The DeanBrando debate wore on, while the methodness used to describe them went largely unquestioned. Louella Parsons drew on a familiar juxtaposition of “glamorous” matinee idols (e.g., Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable) and the “unwashed, unmannered, unconventional” Dean and his Method cohort.35 “Does he have to continue to act like Marlon Brando (only worse) off screen?” Parsons asked rhetorically, even as she acknowledged Dean’s dynamism.36 Screenland’s complimentary profile most aptly captured the star image that quickly solidified around the performer, trafficking in descriptors aligned with methodness to reflect on his assumed connections to Brando, his exceptionality as a performer, and the “unusual” extent of his ambiguity, which left the magazine wondering if he was as destined for happiness as he was for greatness.37 Dean metonymized predominant midcentury understandings of methodness: the mystery he purportedly embodied was simultaneously the 97

Imagining the Method source of his genius and appeal as well as the root cause of others’ frustration, drawing praise and scrutiny that hinged upon his ultimate inaccessibility to outsiders. Screenland’s attention-grabbing declaration from Debbie Reynolds that the “unconventional” Dean did not “have enough brains to act!” and her subsequent about-face upon watching Eden also rehashed an earlier narrative of misunderstanding and revelation promoted by Hopper that figured prominently in the latter’s authoritative place vis-à-vis Dean’s reception.38 Writing of a very similar epiphanic experience months before the Screenland profile, Hopper recalled how the eventual preview of Eden upended her initial dismissal of the dirty-shirted young actor. “I had seen Dean only once—in the studio commissary,” she recounted to readers, “slumped, surly-looking, carelessly dressed, and I was not impressed.” But “after watching his performance,” she confessed, “I granted that he was worth all the praise that had been given him.”39 The epiphany not only provided Hopper’s sizeable readership with testimony to the exceptionality of Dean’s methodness but also positioned the gossip columnist as one of the few intimates in Dean’s orbit during his brief career. It also coalesced and corroborated before a larger readership the theme of the misunderstood figure that populated Warner Bros.’ publicity efforts and the characters of Cal Trask in Eden, Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), and Jett Rink in Giant (George Stevens, 1956), as well as countless posthumous profiles. It provided a resonant narrative of Hopper’s own initial participation in the larger cultural misunderstanding of Dean. This paradox of the inscrutable yet misunderstood actor would take center stage in his posthumous reception. As the self-styled intermediary between Dean, audiences, and Hollywood, Hopper assumed a powerful position in efforts to interpret the actor and preserve his symbolic legacy along lines resonant with her and her readers’ politics. To understand Hopper’s effectiveness in this role, it is important to first outline the velocity of the columnist’s rapid ascension, the breadth of her multimedia reach, and the resonant features of her communicative style.

The Gossipist Hedda Hopper was late to join the professional ranks of gossip mongering. By her 1937 debut, the arenas of celebrity journalism, entertainment news, and fan-directed magazine literature were firmly in place, significantly populated by women, and able to address large populations of consumers across multiple media platforms.40 Walter Winchell already commanded an estimated 98

James Dean’s Story audience of fifty million through newspaper syndication and weekly radio broadcasts. Louella Parsons’s alignment with William Randolph Hearst’s far-reaching newspaper empire resulted in syndication in more than one thousand newspapers.41 Jimmie Fidler, Sidney Skolsky, and Ed Sullivan also appealed to considerable numbers of people through print and radio (and later television), supplementing syndicated newspaper columns with articles for fan magazines. Other luminaries similarly situated themselves between the culture industries and consumers, distilling the complex transactions of mass media into personality-driven narratives for reading, listening, and watching.42 The writers who penned these stories maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with Hollywood studios and the star system. In theory, gossip perpetuated consumption of motion pictures by offering audiences opportunities to bridge epistemological gaps between themselves and producers, thereby gaining new insights into the lives of above-the-line laborers— primarily performers. By fueling desires to further excavate the real dimensions of screen talent through industrially sanctioned activities (e.g., moviegoing, writing for fan magazines, and endorsing consumer products), those trading professionally in hearsay acted as gatekeepers, distributors, and brokers in the discursive networks of film culture linking producers, texts, and readers. These relations promised to extend pursuits of the star as commodity into public and private spaces and to validate the columnists’ authoritative knowledge over the industry. Gossip opened fissures in studio-sculpted personalities, shined light on their contradictions, and contributed to unsettling stars’ meanings beyond anything a system or singular institution could manage. Still, the relationship between gossip and Hollywood collapsed accuracy, authenticity, and proximity into a circular logic that rewarded the celebrity journalist’s claims to studio access with more power to access the private information of industrial figures. Hedda Hopper’s status as a former silent screen performer enhanced her reputation among syndicates and audiences, placing her in a more advantageous position from which to survey the comings and goings of the famous. Her professional past linked her to industry knowledge but, perhaps more importantly, enabled her to lay claim to a grasp of the inner workings of Hollywood that more than likely exceeded the bounds of her access as a former screen player. By 1942, Variety declared that Hopper had usurped “Queen” Louella Parsons.43 By 1947, Hopper drew an estimated audience of nearly twenty-three million through newspaper columns alone. Industrial assumptions that 70 to 80 percent of motion picture audiences were female further bolstered the 99

Imagining the Method sense of her relevance.44 The Tribune-News Syndicate, then one of the largest news distributors in the country, promoted the celebrity journalist to subscribing newspapers as a generally popular, female-oriented writer who could help papers “build circulation and readership, particularly among women, and increase advertising revenue.”45 Hopper’s appearance on the July 28, 1947, cover of Time bookended Variety’s pronouncement and crowned her the most notable and arguably most powerful gossip columnist of the age. It also promised to extend her cultural impact beyond the boundaries of her preexisting circulation networks (in newspapers, radio, and fan magazines) and into arguably more legitimate journalistic endeavors. She was the only celebrity journalist to grace the magazine’s iconic cover, and her profile image both played on her well-known hat fetish and validated her proximity to and authority over knowledge of America’s commercial film industry. The artist Boris Chaliapin’s cover portrait, captioned “Hollywood’s Hopper,” suggested an inextricable link between the industry and the individual that the accompanying article subsequently inverted. Integrating typewriter, telephone, and microphone with her trademark plumed hat, Chaliapin literalized the instruments of data accumulation, documentation, and distribution as extensions of Hopper’s body and identity. The image and the article that followed concluded that Hopper, though not cybernetic, possessed a relentless work ethic and uncanny ability to locate and exploit private talk, which emerged out of the synthesis of natural abilities and journalistic technologies. This information that Hopper uncovered was clearly marked as gossip, and while both Hopper and Parsons were among its primary practitioners, the former was said to possess a unique gift for making discoveries that eluded her colleagues and the public.46 Hopper, the profile claimed, had actually fed Parsons’s rumor mill while Hedda was still a silent screen performer, increasingly supplementing an acting career in decline with another industryrelated job that would eventually prove more lucrative. “Without even trying,” Time quipped, Hopper “salted down an incredible knowledge of Hollywood’s strange ways [and] means.”47 Other gossip columnists also began their careers in the employ of the studios, yet Hopper alone was portrayed as a superior source for industry chatter well before it was her profession. “Studio publicity men,” added the magazine, “always knew where to get [a story]: go out and latch a siphon on to Hopper.”48 By the mid- to late 1950s, she had surpassed “Queen” Louella in total audience and undermined her rival’s once-privileged dominion over Warner Bros. Nowhere was this more evident than in the junior columnist’s claimed access to, and subsequent authority over, the methodness of James Dean.

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James Dean’s Story Hopper’s popularity hinged upon a second, interrelated characteristic that bridged her publicized proximity to Hollywood through her cultivation of intimacy with audiences. On the one hand, this was a common trait among gossip columnists, who, as Jennifer Frost points out, were “never simply [extensions] of the studios.”49 Like her peers, Hopper possessed a credibility with her audience that “required her to demonstrate a critical independence from the industry” and to maintain a “constant negotiation and give-andtake” defined by “access and publicity.”50 The Time profile’s assertion that Parsons lacked Hopper’s relationship with readers suggested, however, that despite the commonalities among such purveyors of “idol” chatter, Hedda’s dynamic with her audience was somehow special. This was largely attributable to her conversational style, a byproduct of her affinity for dictating columns rather than writing them. Subject to critical backlash for their grammatical errors and colloquial register, her published accounts nevertheless crucially presented readers with a conversational structure that jumped abruptly from one item to the next in a manner that fostered an illusion of intimate chatter between author and reader.51 Hopper’s first-person narration, autobiographical asides, and routine use of her own image (particularly in the widely syndicated “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood” column) alongside those of performers amplified the sense of immediacy she shared with audiences and mirrored her engagement with stars. By speaking to a larger readership in a conversational style, soliciting feedback, and sometimes responding to commentators by name, she combined the intimacy and spontaneous delivery of radio (a medium she also used to connect with audiences) with the real-time reciprocity of the telephone, fostering a sense of friendship with those who consumed her content.52 Though disparaged by some, her inclusive mode of address cultivated an aura of community around shared pleasures, grievances, and politics. By publicizing letter writers and provoking active engagement among herself and audiences broad and specific, Hopper reinforced her own popularity, visibility, and significance while drawing consumers into interactive communities that sought to exercise power through reception. The air of equality in this process remained illusory of course, for the conditions of exchange and interaction were profoundly uneven and weighted in Hopper’s favor. Still, she operated at the center of a nationwide epistolary community that cohered through shared investments in particular readings of James Dean and attempted to mobilize those interpretations, and consequently methodness itself, in meaningful ways.

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Letters to Hedda Nearly seven decades after James Dean’s death, it is difficult to quantify how many Dean-related letters circulated among Hopper, Warner Bros. representatives, Modern Screen editors and writers, and other parties. Like other ephemera, much of the evidence has disappeared due to neglect and destruction. Hedda’s claims to have received thousands of Dean-related dispatches are tempered by the sobering reality that few of these items have survived. Less than eighty of these artifacts remain in Hopper’s collection, representing a small fraction of a much larger “lost audience” whose absence limits the conclusions one can draw from these remnants.53 These documents cannot speak for the totality of Hopper’s audience, nor are they presumed to represent the spectrum of Dean’s potential interpretations.54 The dispatches that remain can speak for themselves, however, and do provide invaluable insights into historically overlooked audience efforts to reconcile contradictions in their affective impressions of “Jimmy,” to express their affinity with Hopper, and to recognize her proximity to and subsequent authoritative reading of Dean. Writers of the surviving letters ranged in age from teenager to retiree. Most identified as female, placing them within 80 percent of Hopper’s audience who were “largely married homemakers, with children, and apparently middle-class.”55 These dispatches revealed complex negotiations of gossip and fandom, which involved interrogating competing interpretations of Dean and criticizing aberrant forms of consumption. It would be a mistake to seek to fix “fandom” too rigidly, to hold it up as a static relation capable of being isolated from the “cultural struggle over meaning and affect” it involves.56 Though few of these individuals claimed the term “fan” in their letters, the label is nevertheless appropriate for conveying the multifaceted sense in which the dynamics between letter writers, Hopper, and Dean were affective and performative.57 Even in the most strident of letters, the cultural work of identifying with Dean involved the delicate balance of purportedly “good” and “bad” modes of consumption and/or consumer identities. Babs Smith typified this careful act of self-situation in a February 1956 letter, couching her confessed anguish and interpretation of the deceased in assurances that she was not excessively emotional. “I guess you think I am a love sick kid that I want to know about him,” she wrote to Hopper, adding, “I am no kid. . . . I am also married.”58 Drawing on the very same linkage, Beverly Laskey was far less certain about the legitimacy of her own response to the actor’s death. She wondered aloud if perhaps she was “being foolish or acting like a giddy teen-ager.”59 Others

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James Dean’s Story echoed the same gender- and age-specific markers of unruly fandom noted by Smith and Laskey. Before articulating their connections to Dean, to Hopper, and, more indirectly, to other fans, they preemptively disavowed the avatar of deviant consumption: the female teenager. The “bobby-soxer,” as writers frequently called her, epitomized the undesirable extremes of attachment that most correspondents deemed irrational and distinctly different from their own affective responses. After acknowledging her profound grief, Marguerite McGuire utilized a common technique of deploying patriarchal, heteronormative markers to situate herself within the prevailing postwar frameworks of responsibility. “I am not a bobby soxer,” McGuire asserted. “I am a happily married woman, the mother of two little girls, and I am of the generation who swooned over Frank Sinatra during World War II. I do not swoon any more!”60 Others similarly validated their interpretations of Dean against an imagined “bad” fan, whose allegedly excessive behavior, particularly an unchecked emotional response to the actor’s death, violated loosely conceived boundaries of rational consumption. This discourse seemed familiar to Hopper’s correspondents, and such language was likely nothing new in postwar US culture. There were many likely reasons for this, including the midcentury popularization of psychology. Perhaps most importantly, characterizations of such aberrant young female behavior brought together lingering anxieties surrounding women’s spectatorship and recent concerns about juvenile delinquency with the pathologizing of fandom itself. The invocation of Rudolph Valentino among letter writers, Hopper, and other commentators aptly expressed this link. The moral panics surrounding the star Rudolph Valentino’s 1926 funeral reflected intersecting male anxieties about the publicness and consumerism of the New Woman and the sexual ambiguity of Valentino as the object of women’s desire.61 The pathologizing of fandom that emerged around this event expressed what Joli Jensen has argued is fundamentally a critique of modernity expressed through attributions of social deviance and dysfunction applied to an imagined-other consumer.62 This linkage retained considerable purchase nearly three decades later, transforming the idol Dean and his funeral into a metric for gauging public—and particularly female—delirium for the figure whose fame lingered long after death. As I discuss in chapter 4, reports of ten thousand public mourners at John Garfield’s 1952 funeral spurred similar pathologizing invocations of Valentino. Garfield would quickly be excised from the “constellation of the remembered Hollywood dead,” yet Dean’s legacy unfolded quite differently.63 For Ezra Goodman of Life, Louella Parsons, and others, invoking the legacy of the silent film star’s

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Imagining the Method unruly fans meant dismissals of current “hysterical” and “morbid” investments in the dead Dean. Whether in purchasing replicas of Dean’s face with lifelike skin or gossiping about him being alive but mutilated following his crash, such forms of attachment violated boundaries of propriety, were too intense, or lingered too long.64 Goodman’s characterization of this cultlike behavior stoked moral panic over not only perceived audience deviance but also the cottage industry that nurtured and capitalized on it. Distinctions between acceptable and scandalous forms of exploitation were opaque, reflecting in part deep-seated cultural tensions over what constitutes “complete” and “correct” reading of texts.65 Warner Bros.’ The James Dean Story actively downplayed the studio’s commercial motives by emphasizing its exhaustive research into the subject. Modern Screen dedicated several pages to fan letters and reproduced the front page of Dean’s hometown newspaper (the Fairmount News) immediately after his death, conceivably in an effort to replicate the physical and communal proximity of Fairmount, Indiana, for fans afield (fig. 3.2). The magazine also pitched the “James Dean Memorial Medallion” to readers as a response to—and not, according to the magazine, an attempt to capitalize on—their expressed desires for photographs and other means of remembrance.66 The telecommunications industry trade journal Sponsor, on the other hand, noted matter-of-factly that the Playhouse of the Stars sponsor Schlitz was bucking its first-run-only policy to replay “The Unlighted Road” with Dean because his “growing posthumous popularity warrants exception.”67 Dean appeared in three reruns in the span of one week, leading one NBC executive to declare him “hotter than anybody alive.”68 Some audience members pushed back against “teen” and “cult” characterizations. In a letter to Life magazine one month after Ezra Goodman’s sensational profile, Margaret Moran identified herself as a teenager interested in the magazine’s coverage of Dean fandom but deeply skeptical about the author’s representation of its morbidness.69 Harold Thompson paired his praise of the article with a correction in his letter: “Not all those whom you term of the ‘Dean cult’ are teenagers but are adults like myself.”70 Moran and Thompson not only disputed uniform understandings of Jimmy but also demonstrated the tensions between “personalized, individual, and subjective moments of fan attachments” and “communal constructions and justifications” that neither overwrote nor surmounted one another.71 Thus, while many of Hopper’s letter writers recirculated tropes about teens and cults, their dispatches evidenced ongoing and potentially contradictory negotiations of their own identities, group affiliations, and attachments to both Dean and Hopper. Writers confessed their affective responses to Jimmy’s death alongside their disavowals of well-known markers of aberrant 104

James Dean’s Story

Figure 3.2. In March 1956, Modern Screen featured a reprint of the Fairmount News, the newspaper of James Dean’s birthplace in Indiana, originally published to commemorate Dean’s life in the immediate aftermath of his death. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

reception. The writers’ effort to sidestep the ignominious bobby-soxer label meant trafficking in the very same gendered and ageist language potentially used against them as letter-writing women, fans of Dean, and correspondents with America’s foremost celebrity journalist. Hopper’s power among these 105

Imagining the Method letter writers derived in part from her seeming ability to help smooth out these possible contradictions through her proximity to Dean, her synthesis of public and private talk, and her expertise over Hollywood’s informational ecosystem. To this end, Barbara Ocilak’s recollection of having “broke[n] down and wept [on] the day” she read Hedda’s tribute to Jimmy demonstrated more than just the familiar performance of confession.72 Ocilak’s gratitude for “a beautiful tribute written as only it could have been by one who knew and loved that poor misunderstood boy” also highlighted Hopper’s crucial role as a prompter, a sounding board, and an intermediary between letter writers and the deceased.73 The knowledge to which Ocilak referred was an essential part of Hopper’s claimed proximity to the “real” Dean and her consequent authority within the group over the reading and usage of the actor’s methodness. In truth, Hopper’s descriptions of Dean as “one of the greatest acting talents I’ve ever known” largely echoed the methodness invoked in studio publicity and commentator discourse. As the epitome of the slouching, “dirty shirt school of acting” and the “rebellious genius” alike, the figure of Dean, and her criticisms and praise of him, drew from the same preexisting lexicon of anti-commercialism, elusiveness, and exceptionality. Hopper reaffirmed the connection again in her posthumous emphases on Jimmy’s “instinct for drama,” unsuccessful search for “love and understanding,” and unlimited potential. Her framing emphasized the external results of Dean’s purported talents, inferred the unknowability of his process, and left his motives vague enough to be curated for her audiences.74 While Hopper originated neither this characterization of Dean nor the methodness employed to describe “Method” actors writ large, her popular image grounded her observations in an exclusive role as the young man’s confidante.75 Expressed in her characteristically conversational style, Hopper’s own confessions of loss and anguish in the wake of Dean’s death reaffirmed her access to a young man whose reception was largely predicated on his unknowability. With no Jimmy to confirm or deny her claims, Hedda could command greater authority over the already-scarce discourse on the newly minted star that provided readers such as Ocilak and others with a framework through which to process their reactions to the actor’s death. Hopper’s claimed—and attributed—authority over Dean rested in part on shared beliefs in the irreducible truth available within the private sphere, an assumption that bolstered the bona fides of the gossip columnist who publicized her intimate conversations with the otherwise enigmatic actor. It was also symptomatic of the dissemination and normalization of methodness that praised, criticized, and pursued the inaccessible interiorities of its 106

James Dean’s Story practitioners. Jimmy’s abrupt death embellished his purported mysteriousness, leaving Warner Bros. with little private information to offer audiences during future promotions for productions such as Rebel Without a Cause, Giant, and The James Dean Story. With the studio’s relatively limited material and the paucity of other Dean interviews—a fact that The James Dean Story’s suggested promotion aimed to reverse—Hopper’s promoted encounters with Dean offered one of the few opportunities for audiences to access his allegedly personal world. On its face, her narrative demonstrated her role as a purveyor of gossip. She invoked features of his malleable star persona and linked those mass-mediated public dimensions—his film roles as tortured, misunderstood, alienated young men—with intimate details of his purportedly authentic self. Her contention that he “will never become part of the hard core of Hollywood” testified to the anti-commercial and anti-authority authenticity of his methodness, features that Hopper sought to conform to her own reactionary political outlook.76 Endorsements from other recognized Dean authorities corroborated Hopper’s status. Deemed an expert on the young star by Time magazine’s Hollywood correspondent Ezra Goodman, the noted Dean photographer Sanford Roth placed Hedda close to the star and confirmed that she “really loved Jimmy.”77 Several letter writers indicated that Roth’s affirmation guided them to Hopper for her unique perspective. “[Roth] said you were the only reporter that ever got very close to him,” Roberta Stubbs wrote to Hopper, adding that the endorsement had brought in Dean fans who had been previously unfamiliar with the work of the celebrity gossip journalist.78 Fred Mann’s search for credible sources in Roth’s article similarly led him to Hopper for additional information on the star she had known so well.79 “I think you help me,” wrote Jeanne Pitruzzello, concisely capturing how correspondents turned to Hopper for definitive knowledge of the “real” James Dean.80 “I seem to remember reading in your column once that ‘nobody really understood Jimmy,’” Pitruzzello continued, and “this statement, plus your interests and personal relationship with Dean, made me feel that perhaps here was a person who really did know him.”81 This ascribed proximity and expertise also made Hopper a rallying point as fans’ sadness morphed into anger toward the sociocultural forces allegedly responsible for misunderstanding—and consequently victimizing—Dean for the very characteristics that made him exceptional. These relations also unfolded against the backdrop of precarious postwar suburbia and contradictory ideas of white masculinity. These factors combined with Hopper’s regressive racial and gender politics, transforming Dean’s victimized anti-authoritarian rebel into a rallying point for those looking to uphold, rather than defy, sociocultural hierarchies. 107

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“I Feel as You Do about Jimmy” Hedda Hopper’s syndicated columns were a crucially important forum for community organizing, a space where she burnished her conversational style and power by naming specific audience members and sharing their thoughts with millions of daily readers. Following James Dean’s death, Hopper helped to facilitate several campaigns through her newspaper columns. She highlighted letters from readers who largely confirmed her interpretation of the actor and who, in some cases, proposed to concretize these shared understandings through legacy projects such as memorials, scholarships, and educational programs. The most cited among these efforts involved six young women from Buffalo, New York, whose November 1955 letter responded to one of Hopper’s previous articles on the question of preserving Dean’s legacy. Vicki Golonka, writing on behalf of herself and her peers (fig. 3.3), stated that a few weeks earlier, Hopper “had mentioned something about trying to talk” Warner Bros. into “build[ing] a memorial in memory [of] the late” James Dean.82 Acknowledging the columnist’s expertise, Golonka implored Hopper to do what she had done elsewhere and use her public platform to marshal readers—this time toward the preservation of Dean and his ascribed values. Hopper publicized the missive, and no less than thirteen of the surviving dispatches mentioned the campaign. Nearly all the messages in question arrived within a few days of the original letter’s publication. The writers enclosed contributions, offered additional financial support and manual labor, asked for help in delivering donations to the six original fans, and expressed eagerness to see the memorial erected.83 This effort seeped into other venues as well. In a featured letter to Modern Screen, a group identifying themselves as “Jimmy’s fans” referred to the memorial campaign publicized in Hopper’s column and vowed to “get our groups together—to have dances, and record hops to help raise money for it.”84 For reasons unknown, the drive ultimately failed to produce a monument. Hedda wrote back to several donors with the unfortunate news, returning their donations and sympathizing with their purpose (fig. 3.4). The letter cast Hopper as a like-minded fan whose intimacy with Hollywood granted her an advantageous perspective and significantly more instrumentality than her correspondents enjoyed. She deflected her failure by validating the popularity of the idea among other fans and friends. The response also offered a related campaign—with Hopper at the vanguard—to obtain another institutionally sanctioned honor: a special Academy Award for James Dean’s grave. Again, Hopper carefully performed the role of intermediary, balancing expertise over Jimmy’s wishes, identification with fan interpretations, and special 108

James Dean’s Story access to the studios that rendered her a specialist—and thus uniquely capable of championing causes before the industry. Like the memorial, Hopper’s attempts to procure an honorary Oscar also failed to materialize. Such interactions contrasted sharply with those of Louella Parsons, who noted the tremendous outpouring of letters from Jimmy’s grieving fans but could neither claim the intimate knowledge of the star enjoyed by her rival nor cultivate the same level of interactivity and cooperation among Dean’s fans. In her wrap-up of the 1956 Academy Awards ceremony, for example, Louella took the opportunity to remind Modern Screen readers of their lack of agency and her ultimate loyalties. “You must remember that the Academy is not a public vote,” she wrote.85 She continued, “You the public registered your choice in voting Jimmy the Best Actor Award in the [Modern Screen] Audience Awards vote. This [the Academy Awards] is a vote from actors to actors—and the choice is not always in agreement with the public on personalities or pictures.”86 It is unclear whether Parsons upheld these rigid boundaries privately, but her unambiguous public position sided more stridently with the Hollywood establishment and seemed little interested in bridging the gap between producers and audiences or lobbying on behalf of Dean’s fans. While Parsons reasoned that the Academy was correct not to issue a special award, Hopper faulted the industry for breakdowns in both memorial campaigns. This might have been an effort to save face when presented with the limits of her agency. Citing Hollywood’s neglect of James Dean as the problem also dovetailed with this epistolary community’s repeated suggestions that the industry and the larger sociocultural forces it represented were the parties responsible for his demise. Negotiating Dean’s passing and signification thus entailed relying on methodness to laud his exceptionality and condemn the forces that made him. Plaudits and critiques of the young performer both tended to make sense of him through Method-aligned figures and institutions, thus drawing on—and reinforcing—the methodness discourse circulated by Warner Bros. publicists, film reviewers, and industry commentators such as Hopper. The uncompromising, inscrutable, commercially averse, and isolated figure discussed among Hopper and her letter writers marked an overall continuation of the prevailing interpretive framework in Dean’s paratexts. While in fact Hopper drew from his studio-preferred reading, her interpretation’s distinctiveness sprang primarily from her widely—and repeatedly—publicized claims to have singularly pierced this inscrutable exterior and gained unparalleled access to his real self. Seemingly corroborated by her conversational tone, industrial acumen, and engagement with audiences, Hopper’s assertions likely registered as genuine and accurate. With a shared sense of proximity to 109

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Figure 3.3. Letter to Hedda Hopper from a James Dean fan on behalf of her peers, positing a memorial fund to honor the late Jimmy. Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.

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James Dean’s Story

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Figure 3.4. Letter from Hedda Hopper to members of her James Dean–oriented epistolary community thanking them for support and noting challenges in their memo­ rialization efforts. Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.

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James Dean’s Story the deceased Dean in place, the gossip columnist and her letter-writing community drew on the language of methodness, adjusted to reflect their corrective interpretation that Dean had been misunderstood and consequently persecuted by the proliferation of liberal forces in his life. In contrast to Hopper’s benign, initial dismissal of the then-unknown actor, correspondents recalled “antagonistic” press coverage of the star that was cruel and unwarranted.87 Narrow-minded and personal attacks, they charged, had misrepresented the young man as “rude,” “neurotic,” and “eccentric.”88 The perpetrators of such allegedly incessant and harmful criticism remained anonymous, yet writers characterized them as indicative of Hollywood’s far-reaching publicity network and its insatiable, immoral appetite for private information. Hopper’s intimacy with Dean placed her above the fray, yet letters frequently indicted gossipmongers and scandal magazines as some of the worst offenders. Colleagues and strangers alike were also to blame, for they had failed to follow Hedda’s lead and try to understand the real Jimmy. The unsettling extent of his victimization, which culminated in his gruesome and premature death, resonated with many correspondents on a larger symbolic level. That a virtuous and unique young man like him could be destroyed by a world where “toothy, insincere smiles and glad hands are a dime a dozen” sent fans struggling not only to glean the real Dean from Hopper but also to share concerns about the larger implications of his fate.89 Though the Hollywood film industry and its publicity apparatus stood as symbolic perpetrators of Jimmy’s destruction, the label never entirely fit the range of culprits implicated. “Hollywood” was both too broad a term to capture the specific figures responsible and too small to encompass the contributing sociocultural factors that writers would not—or could not—pinpoint. Their language, too, was often imprecise, inferring much about the politics of racial and gender grievance that would be more legible against the sociocultural backdrop of the period. Dean’s meteoric ascent to stardom had occurred amid a transitional moment in Cold War America where substantial demographic transformations radically altered the makeup of established urban and developing suburban spaces. Intertwined with the Fordist economic system, as well as legislation such as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (GI Bill) of 1944 and the Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1952, these shifts swelled the ranks of the white middle class. At the same time, they stratified and deradicalized the labor movement, further alienating newly suburbanized white ethnic communities from urbanized and overwhelmingly suburb-excluded nonwhite communities.90 Estrangement extended to the newly minted “nuclear family” and its suburban home, whose omnipresent promise of 113

Imagining the Method fulfillment through consumption tenuously mitigated the dissolution of cities’ extended kinship networks. In other words, suburban homes and the breadwinner ethic that buttressed them offered precarious prosperity in uncertain times, doing relatively little to assuage concerns about the insecurities of the individual, the family, and the country.91 At the same time, postwar culture made acute long-simmering tensions between competing models of white masculinity, placing contradictory demands on the idealized breadwinner to pursue both the affluence of modern corporate regimentation and the instrumentality of nostalgic rugged individualism.92 Even John Wayne’s largely secure star image frayed under this strain, as his corporate-allied, blue-collar turned screen-star labor appeared to erode the very family unit it was supposed to cohere. Within this vortex of deteriorating autonomy, disrupted gender roles, and questionable costs of the touted American dream, the teenager emerged as a newly coined sociological entity and demographic who intensified the register of postwar tensions and fears.93 As the quintessential juvenile delinquent, James Dean’s star image channeled his methodness—elusive interiority, commitment, aloofness, and anti-commercialism—into an intense crystallization of the crises of white masculinity. These historical forces underwriting Dean in the interpretive landscape situated him as the outsider “misjudged and wrongly disparaged by the ruling powers.”94 Exactly who those ruling powers were, how they affected Dean, and what broader resonance was suggested by Dean’s story varied; for Hopper and these letter writers, the answers pointed to the clear victimization of white men in postwar American society. Against such a backdrop of instability (perceived and real), the epistolary community’s efforts to retain Dean’s methodness while criticizing the conditions of his destruction drew upon largely inferential discourses of white masculinity to rationalize his victim status. Whereas the “boy” represented by the likes of Montgomery Clift could trouble the gender binaries that the “man” in John Wayne sought to uphold, Hopper and many of the letter writers employed the “boy” characterization to reinstate those regressive categories. Evocations of Dean’s purported naivete as a Hollywood newcomer, subsequent manipulation, and consequent alienation appeared regularly in correspondence with Hopper. Accounts reconfigured his rebellion and anti-commercialism as ideologically conservative countermeasures in response to an industry accused of driving the decay of identity-based hierarchies and social structures—accusations that paralleled Hopper’s own explicitly conservative public campaigns against industry progressives and her advocacy on behalf of racist film representations. Maternal narratives, even from letter writers who professed to be younger than Dean, personalized such ideological stances by 114

James Dean’s Story retrospectively opining that they could have headed off his tragic demise by taking him into their own family and providing him the stability lacking in the liberal environs of Hollywood. The repeated emphasis on conventional nuclear family values and structures was repeatedly juxtaposed against the absence of such things within the film industry, thereby adding to its alleged responsibility for Dean’s demise. The specifics of Hollywood’s transgressions were rare and largely beside the point in a mobilization effort built on feelings about Jimmy rather than the facts of his brief tenure in the limelight. These affectively rich fan narratives elicited familiar decades-long reactionary cant about the moral corruption awaiting would-be starlets in Southern California, suggesting perhaps that Dean’s “boy” symbolism spoke to a sense of both feminization and vulnerability that letter writers felt was fatal without the intervention and restoration of conventional familial and social roles. The steady entrenchment of methodness throughout the mid-1950s did not preclude reactionary appropriations of its symbolism that intensified the stakes of being an outsider and more directly claimed whiteness and maleness as marginalized—even oppressed—identities.95 This co-optation of injury further eclipsed the historically exclusionary dimensions of methodness and eschewed its subject’s real proximity to the culture industries as well as identity-based sociocultural hierarchies in favor of embracing the veneer of rebellion and tragedy.96 That efforts by Hopper and her epistolary community to memorialize this reading fizzled did not foreclose its impact on either the short- or the long-term reception of Dean. Hopper’s interactions with correspondents carried little of the overtly conservative politics common elsewhere in her work. In fact, her well-known ideological stances might have seemed like an odd match for the anti-authoritarian rebel Dean. Considering his reception here, however, the connection makes more sense. Hopper’s unambiguous support for racist stereotypes, her staunch resistance to midcentury civil rights efforts, and her socially regressive approach to the very industries that buttressed her power make it highly unlikely that her efforts to preserve Dean were apolitical undertakings.97

James Dean’s Story As one of the foremost midcentury intermediaries between the Hollywood film industry and American audiences, Hedda Hopper publicized the private and rendered it personal, drawing readers into participatory cultures with political and sociocultural implications. Nowhere was this clearer than in the reception of James Dean. Combining her long-standing reputation 115

Imagining the Method for industrial access and conversational modes of communication, Hopper assumed a key early role in the construction of Dean’s star image and the place of methodness within its nucleus. Her repeated narration of their relationship before an audience of millions traced an emblematic arc from her initial misunderstanding of the “dirty shirt school” alum to their intimate friendship, vesting Hopper with extraordinary access to and subsequent authority over the significance of the “real” Dean. Her characterizations mostly confirmed the readily legible discourse of methodness already emanating out of Warner Bros. and tying the actor’s imputed elusiveness, antipathy toward commercial interests, and cultural outsider status to familiar Method-aligned figures and institutions, including the actor Marlon Brando, the director Elia Kazan, the Actors Studio, and the guru Lee Strasberg. Dean’s premature death less than two years after his first meeting with Hopper left the celebrity journalist in the advantageous position of possessing a rare knowledge of the performer— and having the forum to write herself into the actor’s story daily before vast swaths of the American public. Her interactions with readers yielded complex and contradictory processes of negotiating the star’s posthumous reception. Within a community of letter writers loosely formed around Hopper and Dean, correspondents aligned their impressions of the deceased performer with Hedda’s reading. These interpretations largely reproduced preferred studio constructions but also corroborated writers’ own delicate self-situation as appropriate Jimmy enthusiasts. The readers acknowledged their reliance on Hopper’s access to the actor and the film industry. Dispatches asked for clarification on Dean-related rumors and inquired about photographs, articles, and other artifacts that might help writers remember him. Correspondents referred to other writers mentioned in Hopper’s columns, asked to be connected to like-minded Jimmy fans, and contributed money and ideas for memorial projects. Their shared readings relied on Hopper to provide access to the “real” Dean and to help preserve his meaning against spectral forces threatening to destroy him in death as they had in life. It was around these vague forces that this community also shared criticisms that relied on methodness to suit their regressive politics. The letter writers and Hopper suggested that no longer simply marginalized for his exceptional characteristics, Dean was instead victimized and driven to self-destruction by the very industry that had brought him to their attention in the first place. Correspondents’ affective attachments to Dean and their identifications with Hopper sought to secure the performer’s significance against alternatives and to utilize methodness in pursuit of that goal. Though they failed to memorialize Dean with a monument or an honorary Academy 116

James Dean’s Story Award, this community’s intensification of his outsider status and criticism of alleged sociocultural oppression took on a decidedly regressive dimension against the backdrop of postwar anxieties about white male vulnerability. Despite the innumerable angles and stories of James Dean, the privileged proximity of an unambiguously conservative figure like Hedda Hopper raises crucial questions about prevailing assumptions regarding Dean’s posthumous reception and the ongoing construction of Method acting and actors. The co-optation of moral wounds and the mobilization of injury discourse by Hopper and her readers through Dean invites additional scrutiny of the actor’s—and by extension methodness’s—ongoing relation to postwar civil rights and social justice movements. John Garfield’s erasure, and eventual reclamation, as a Method actor, discussed in the next chapter, would push those dynamics even more to the fore, deepening the entanglements of methodness and white male exceptionality.

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CHAPTER 4

History in Hysteria John Garfield and the Limits of Methodness

John Garfield’s Loss Is Marlon Brando’s Gain John Garfield figured prominently in press stories during the spring of 1952. The star’s unexpected passing on May 21 at the age of thirty-nine, in the home of a female associate, added popular intrigue to the preexisting scrutiny he faced from anti-communist crusaders within and without the House Un-American Activities Committee. Newspapers drew parallels between the former Lower East Side denizen and the tough-yet-doomed characters he portrayed on-screen. For those who believed Garfield was indeed the same rough-hewn romantic rebel he so often portrayed on-screen, his demise constituted what Body and Soul and Force of Evil collaborator Abraham Polonsky called a “hysterical tragedy” for a man who had become “an exile in his own country.”1 The memorial service was widely covered and well attended, with accounts estimating as many as ten thousand mourners paying respects at Manhattan’s Riverside Memorial Chapel.2 “Tough guy” tributes competed for column space with dystopian portraits of the allegedly riotous crowd. The Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service syndicates confronted urban and rural audiences across the country with loaded descriptors of the scene.3 Police barricades strained under the crushing surge of “weeping women” and “bobby-soxers” whose “shouting,” “heckling,” “shoving” and overall “unruly” behavior elicited comparisons to Rudolph Valentino’s infamous funeral— and the similarly gendered moral panic—nearly three decades earlier.4 Such items complemented columns about Garfield’s meteoric rise and fall, offering 119

Imagining the Method readers across the country images and narratives of purported mass hysteria spurred by the star’s extraordinary proletarian charisma and misfortune. He was “almost an American legend,” Rabbi Louis Newman recalled in the memorial service eulogy.5 Newman’s characterization rang true in ways beyond what he likely intended at the time. The remarkable output of Garfield-related discourse occasioned by the actor’s death dissipated within a matter of days in a precipitous “posthumous fade out” that effectively exiled him to the historical margins of US popular culture for decades.6 Garfield’s renown, which had once rivaled that of Humphrey Bogart, proved evanescent. Rather than become the object of “dark tourism” that preserved the likes of Rudolph Valentino, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, Garfield was subject to the contractions of the “remembered Hollywood dead,” with his name falling out of circulation among the writers, readers, and artifacts that had formerly buttressed his fame.7 Robert Wahls’s New York Daily News headline from five years earlier had unwittingly summed up the situation best: “John Garfield’s Loss Is Marlon Brando’s Gain.” With cruelly precise prescience, the phrase encapsulated the paths entwined by the first stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire, as well as the decidedly divergent fortunes—and receptions—awaiting the man who turned down the role of Stanley Kowalski (Garfield) and the one who accepted it (Brando).8 The “hysterical tragedy” epitomizing both the gendered accounts of women mourners at his memorial and the anticommunist fervor that ended his career comprised a jarring contrast of profuse voices vying to make sense of Garfield, followed immediately by prolonged, near-total silence. Just as his life and career seemed to suddenly disappear, so too did his presence in popular discourse suddenly evaporate. In this chapter, I contend that such alleged hysteria is instructive in elucidating the discursive, paratextual construction—and later revision—of screen performance, as John Garfield’s loss inaugurated an extraordinary, compressed cycle of cultural production from studios, columnists, critics, audiences, and others that wrestled with his significance decades apart. Drawing on syndicated news items, film reviews, profiles, interviews, studio publicity, fan magazines, and other primary artifacts, I probe the interpretive landscape from the outset of Garfield’s film career in 1938 to his 1952 death to map the contours of methodness and outline its limits. Throughout his career, Garfield exhibited numerous features of methodness, including his avowed connection to Group Theatre training, his commitment to deep preparation and suffering, his anti-commercialism, and his professional and personal rebelliousness. While these traits would underpin the methodness of late contemporaries such as Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and others, 120

History in Hysteria John Garfield was not publicly regarded as a Method actor during his career or in the many retrospectives that briefly followed his death. Decades later, however, discourse communities would reconsider Garfield not only as a Method actor but as the axiomatic Method actor who had crucially informed the likes of Brando and Dean.9 Whereas the reception of midcentury contemporaries Marlon Brando and John Wayne hinged on explicit alignments with performance (acting and reacting, respectively), the prevailing interpretive framework coalescing around John Garfield often elided such overt performance language to focus instead on the supposed symbiosis of his typecast screen roles and workingclass biography. Though he was not named a Method actor until long after he died, the paratexts surrounding Garfield in life, and initially in death, charted a volatile proximity to methodness through characteristics that would soon become popularly embraced as “Method” qualifiers. Garfield’s tough-yetsensitive working-class screen portrayals, his rebellion against Hollywood commercialism and studio exploitation, his stated idealism for the Group Theatre and its proletarian spirit, his avowed connection to and tutelage in the Group’s ascribed performance style, and the unknown (and unknowable) extent of his acting process and potential all reverberated with methodness, even as the Method label proved elusive for decades. An exploration of the interpretive landscape over the course of his career and life brings into focus those features emerging as discourse communities negotiated his significance and drew boundaries around it. These include the gender, sexual, socioeconomic, and ethno-racial logics of his restrictive tough-guy designation within the studio system, where Garfield’s workingclass Jewishness was frequently coded through references to his inextricable and unassimilable Lower East Side past, as well as his anti–Warner Bros. disobedience and conflicts over screen roles, which together foreclosed the attributed and vaunted mutability soon bestowed upon WASP-y “Method” performers such as Clift, Brando, and Dean. These paratextual threads highlight both the fluidity of methodness and its limits; in John Garfield’s case, the excessiveness of these characteristics precluded his publicly acknowledged methodness leading up to, and throughout, the midcentury Method moment.

Tough Guy The actor eventually known as John Garfield was born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in the working-class immigrant enclave of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Closer to a mother he would lose at the age of seven than an estranged father 121

Imagining the Method who would subsequently leave him to the care of relatives, “Julie” (as his friends later called him) Garfinkle experienced a hardscrabble youth that blended play and petty crime. A chance encounter with the educator and reformer Angelo Patri channeled this energy into more explicitly performative venues. From public-speaking competitions to the American Laboratory Theatre and the Civic Repertory Theatre (1926–1936), Garfield’s pathway to the American dream was said to be enabled by, and channeled through, acting. Membership with the esteemed Group Theatre and successful turns in other stage productions followed, leading to a contract with Warner Bros. and a supporting role in Four Daughters (Michael Curtiz, 1938). Less than fifteen years later, press accounts grasped for characterizations of the suddenly deceased Garfield that had shadowed him in life. “Tough Guy with a Soft Heart” and “He Was Troubled . . . He Needed Help” led the earliest postmortem accounts.10 Wire services offered similar, if more austere, headlines to newspaper readers from Pocatello, Idaho, to Fort Pierce, Florida, and points in between.11 Articles repeatedly cited Garfield’s background as an alleged juvenile delinquent to rationalize that his “pugnacious” presence on-screen had “made him a natural for hard-boiled roles.”12 Devoting an entire section of their New York Daily News article to Garfield’s perceived history as “a problem child,” Edward O’Neill and Henry Lee apprised their audience that the actor’s “succession of tough guy roles typified the man he might have been if a famous educator had not reformed him early in life,” even as they inferred that the performer’s on- and off-screen lives retained many parallels.13 “Tough child,” “hobo,” “tough mug,” and “juvenile delinquent” epitomized the tough-guy descriptors populating newspaper coverage from Eureka, California, to Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and El Paso, Texas.14 More frequent in their production and arguably more expansive in circulation than fan magazines, syndicated print news and gossip had firmly ingrained themselves in the nation’s informational ecosystem well before Garfield’s 1938 screen debut. As a practice of cooperation and control among publishers, syndication subsidized news gathering and dissemination by sharing costs and excluding nonstakeholders from accessing the group’s network.15 This arrangement engendered an unprecedented geographic reach for syndicated content to newspapers of all sizes in urban and rural areas. It also precipitated repetitious coverage and reiterative language, contributing to preferred interpretive frameworks that confronted readers with an enduring lexicon for making sense of matters beyond the confines of their own communities. Syndicated news and gossip columns joined studio publicity, magazine articles, interviews, and other paratexts in praising the actor known as John 122

History in Hysteria Garfield for his breakout portrayal of the charismatic and doomed outsider Mickey Borden in Four Daughters.16 John Alden of the Minneapolis Tribune wrote that Garfield, who garnered an Academy Award nomination for the role, was “a more accomplished actor than men and women twice his age. .  .  . It’s John Garfield,” Alden concluded, “you’ll remember after seeing the picture.”17 Few observers suggested outright that the Borden part portended future representational constraints for the Hollywood newcomer, a reflection perhaps of the studio’s conscientious promotional efforts to market Four Daughters as a family film.18 Writing for the San Francisco Examiner, Ada Hanifin was an exception. “One would like to see him in an entirely different role before measuring his work as an artist,” Hanifin wrote, noting that “he may be a ‘type.’”19 Hanifin was correct. The prose emanating from studios, critics, gossipmongers, and others immediately and repeatedly suggested that the Hollywood newcomer’s “reel” life as a recurrent screen tough guy and his “real” roughhewn biography were virtually synonymous. Garfield’s meteoric ascension was predicated in large part on this linkage, reflecting branding’s and stardom’s similar aims in “combining signification with commerce” to commodify something both familiar and distinct.20 Biographies were vital to such efforts, providing an architecture of identifiable attributes at once ordinary and extraordinary aimed at cultivating consumption-based relationships with audiences. The narrative rationalizing Garfield’s tough-guy typage calcified quickly around him. Warner Bros.’ 1938 press release announcing his film debut couched its praise for his theatrical craft and passion in the suggestion that such exceptional promise had been an organic outgrowth of the young man’s miraculous delivery from childhood delinquency.21 “Garfield looks like what he is,” the studio informed audiences: “a product of New York’s slums.”22 As would swiftly become de rigueur in coverage of Garfield throughout the remainder of his career and life, Warner Bros. insisted that his “slum” past was practically interchangeable with his present identity on-screen and off-. It was performance, this and future accounts insisted, that had honed the irrepressible features defining his unlawful past into a legal, artistic, and (with his star turn in Four Daughters) lucrative mode of self-expression. Regardless of the change in fortune, the logic went, the tough guy remained the irrepressible essence of who Garfield was. Fan magazines promptly followed suit. Screen Book used Garfield—“A Star from the Slums!”—to promote itself in the pages of Hollywood.23 S. R. Mook’s Silver Screen portrait (fig. 4.1), published several months after the release of Four Daughters, echoed the same features of Garfield’s studio-generated 123

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Figure 4.1. Among the earliest profiles of John Garfield, S. R. Mook’s December 1938 portrait in Silver Screen echoed studio publicity and placed heavy emphasis on Garfield’s tough-guy background, thus quickly circumscribing his symbolism via a constellation of preexisting Lower East Side signifiers. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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History in Hysteria profile, from his birth on the Lower East Side to his juvenile misbehavior. Warner Bros. described Garfield as the personification of New York ghettos, and Silver Screen offered a comparable characterization. The star’s working-class background was “the handicap of his early environment,” Mook disclosed to readers, which “he has overcome . . . everlastingly to his credit [by] working his way from the gutter to the heights.”24 Garfield himself lent credence to the author’s portrait. Even when presented with Mook’s tacit invitation to correct the industry’s customary biographical hyperbole, Garfield’s refusal presented an unambiguous affirmation of the studio’s narrative. It also further legitimized the suturing of that life story to a received performance style light on technical specifics but heavy on symbolic connections to his own past as well as the reception of the still-active Group Theatre, from which he had recently departed. Though Garfield proclaimed that “my past is dead” and “it doesn’t matter,” the same interview and the swell of publicity surrounding his 1938 star-making turn promptly crystallized into a recurring shared language that soon dominated the discourse around him. The seemingly organic emergence of meaning out of an authentic personal history consequently lent credence to the entwined logic of Garfield’s tough-guy label and his successive screen roles. Writing nearly a year after Mook, Mary Parkes stated in her November 1939 profile of Garfield for Modern Screen her desire to sidestep tough-guy talk, acknowledging its predominance even as she subsequently lapsed into the very practice she hoped to avoid. Parkes twice used Garfield’s past to explain his distinctive stardom and performativity, homing in specifically on the “orphan look” he was said to carry in his smile.25 This expression encapsulated a distinctive countenance that made up in likability what it lacked in grace.26 Such self-presentation, Parkes informed readers, had been confirmed both in fan letters and by Garfield’s wife, Roberta.27 This linkage was so prevalent that news items such as Alexander Kahn’s August 1938 syndicated “Hollywood Film Shop” column—published the same month as Garfield’s screen debut—suggested that the actor himself would provide screenwriters with “authentic” source material for the dialogue of a “tough guy” he would then portray. “If the plan” for the actor’s sixth film in less than a year, Dust Be My Destiny (Lewis Seiler, 1939) were to succeed, Kahn explained, “the character that appears on the screen will be Garfield rather than some creature of a writer’s imagination. . . . Garfield will say things he would find himself saying under certain circumstances, do things he feels he would do and react to situations as he believes he actually would react to them.”28 One month after Kahn’s statements, Boyd Martin of the Louisville Courier Journal drew on the

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Imagining the Method same linkage to argue that Garfield’s harsh past had made him “wise in the worst sense.”29 Warner Bros.’ press release, Mook’s and Parkes’s profiles, and Kahn’s column were just a few paratexts in an expansive informational ecosystem that repeatedly situated Garfield’s Lower East Side past as foundational to his on-screen work playing doomed, cynical characters such as Four Daughters’s Mickey Borden. Situating Garfield’s biography at the center of his introduction to broader audiences beyond New York’s theater scene, such paratexts time and again centered the tough-guy narrative in his emergent star image and swiftly solidified it as the bedrock of his reception as an actor. The toughguy label was not explicitly attached to Garfield in these earliest documents, but it took shape soon after and ossified around him before he seemed to realize its impacts on both his professional prospects and perceptions of him as a performer. By at least 1940, prominent outlets such as Modern Screen were overtly trafficking in the term, even as a point of reference in headlines about his wife Roberta’s “taming of a tough guy.”30 As the next section illustrates, the term “tough guy” functioned as a discursive shorthand and a resonant epithet for Garfield’s star image that constrained his perception as a performer. The term encompassed key institutions such as the Group Theatre, with which Garfield was affiliated and whose approach to acting he continued to openly extol. It expressed the received historical and cultural landscape of his upbringing that linked him to other white ethnic figures such as Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson, and James Cagney and marked him as Jewish. It spoke to the ideological position and identity politics that flowed through those institutional, interpersonal, and geographic bonds. Together, the elements that comprised Garfield’s perceived tough-guy features—affiliation with the Group Theatre, rebellious anti-commercialism, idealism, progressive proletarian politics, resistance to Hollywood, and ethnicity—would nearly all be cited and celebrated as part of Marlon Brando’s popular reception just a few years later. These characteristics within this specific interpretive context, however, circumscribed Garfield’s symbolic potential and precluded his popular reception as a Method actor. Colored especially by his ascribed ethnic-ness as well as his demonstrative working-class resistance to Hollywood, Garfield appeared to lack the institutional and identity-based freedom—even as he checked off so many of the characteristics that defined Method actors—that would, roughly a decade after his own screen debut, underwrite the meteoric rise of Brando, his stage replacement as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Coverage at the time hailed this fateful casting as a zero-sum development: Garfield’s loss was Brando’s gain. While accurate, given their subsequent and diametrically 126

History in Hysteria opposed career trajectories (Brando would soon be a full-fledged film star, while Garfield would be dead), this inflection point held a deeper symbolic resonance concerning the shifting terms and conditions under which methodness was and was not aligned with prevailing identity politics and industrial labor relations.

Wise in the Worst Sense Conjuring Garfield’s purported past to lend authenticity to his screen persona was standard practice for stars in the Hollywood studio system. It was indicative of the industry’s lopsided labor relations, which manifested partially through onerous performer contracts and unilateral studio authority to craft paratextual narratives constructing, and often conflating, stars’ reel on-screen and real off-screen lives. Warner Bros.’ 1938 press release announcing Garfield’s screen debut predicated the introduction of its new talent on his ethnicity, drawing repeated comparisons with other ethnic stars under contract while also evoking his biographical link to the symbolically loaded Lower East Side. “Garfield is being hailed as a cross between a James Cagney, a Paul Muni and an Edward G. Robinson,” the release stated, later reiterating the Cagney comparison for emphasis (“he’s about the same size . . . only slimmer, more boyish”).31 At the same time, Warner Bros. was unequivocal that their “product of New York’s slums,” who “looks like what he is,” lacked the “magnificent physique” of WASP contemporaries such as Errol Flynn or Robert Taylor. “If he was walking down a street, you wouldn’t give him a second glance,” Garfield’s own studio said of its potential star.32 Reviews of Four Daughters echoed such sentiment, regularly characterizing Garfield as less attractive than costar Jeffrey Lynn and comparing him to the likes of Robinson, Cagney, and Muni.33 Robert Sklar has argued that such comparisons are indicative of the “city boy” figure, a cultural type that not so much supplanted the cowboy as the avatar for tensions in the American masculine mythos—including “independence and isolation, attachment and responsibility”—as encapsulated “ideologies of contention” that arose organically and were manufactured by the culture industries.34 Hollywood was not immune to such conflicts, even as it sought to commodify the city boy through genres such as the gangster film and stars such as Cagney, Bogart, and Garfield. These figures performed the type because the distinctive street vernacular and mannerisms of their acting was forged in the milieu of an early twentieth-century sociocultural metamorphosis that moved away from conformity and embraced instead a 127

Imagining the Method colloquial defiance of WASP-codified social order.35 In speaking, the city boys signified their place outside the bounds of normative self-presentation, effectively occupying a position of the rebel and (in some cases) the other.36 The city-boy type rose to prominence within a contradictory American mass culture that boosted these performers’ ethnic distinctions at the same time that they were entangled with reinvigorated assaults on difference enshrined in racist, anti-ethnic policies and practices epitomized by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan and the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act.37 Against this backdrop, Garfield’s Jewishness situated him in a more liminal space than the Irish American Cagney and the WASP Bogart.38 Tectonic US sociocultural shifts at the time blurred racial divisions within whiteness—giving rise to emphasis on “ethnic” distinctions—and hardened racial boundaries around whiteness. “By the 1930s and 1940s,” Matthew Frye Jacobson observes, “the logic and terminology of these ‘major [racial] divisions’ had become part of the lexicon of both popular and high culture.”39 The result mitigated the extent of Cagney’s and Bogart’s difference despite working-class-based alignments with ethnic-ness via their gangster roles. The same was not true for Garfield, whose signification was entwined with both proletarian sensibilities of the tough guy and the longer troubled history of Jewish screen representation, elision, and ascribed otherness. While ethnic characters and stories had figured into Hollywood’s silent era, the transition to sound and the continued thrust of anti-Semitism into US popular culture contributed to the virtual disappearance of explicitly identified Jewish characters in film during the 1920s and 1930s.40 The founding of the film industry’s self-censoring body, the Production Code Administration, in 1934 added to the restrictions. As a “film industry watchdog body that scrutinized films [by] looking for, among other things, offensive references to a character’s national origin,” the administration facilitated producers’ justifications for excluding Jewish ethnicity from the screen.41 This in effect aligned the country’s preeminent film industry with US nationalist efforts to portray Jews as racial others—subversive dangers to white purity and consequently to American society.42 The global scale of anti-Semitism (epitomized by Adolf Hitler’s 1933 assumption of power in Germany) spurred further reluctance among Hollywood’s Jewish producers to call attention to themselves, a decision “echoed by prominent Jewish leaders in the Los Angeles community.”43 Even as the industry drew on the talent of Jewish writers, directors, and performers, “Jewish character actors found little if any work during this period, and Jewish leads changed their names to de-emphasize their heritage.”44 Garfield was no exception and was treated in much the same way as fellow studio 128

History in Hysteria talent Edward G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg) and Paul Muni (Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund), whose Jewish identities the studio had proven reluctant to advertise.45 Jack Warner—himself a child of eastern European Jewish immigrants—purportedly reasoned with the newly arrived Jules Garfinkle to anglicize his name: “People are gonna find out you’re a Jew sooner or later . . . but better later.”46 The “tough guy” label may provide a more precise accounting than “city boy” in the case of Garfield, both for its centrality in the discourse surrounding the actor from the outset of his career and for the way it contextualizes tensions in Garfield’s ascribed masculinity and class, coding his attributed ethnicity as excessive enough to inhibit his perceived performative capabilities. The shifting sociocultural terrain of midcentury hegemonic masculinity thus set the tough guy Garfield apart from city boy peers such as Bogart. For Bogart, his pre–World War II screen masculinity emphasizing violence remained even as the features of hegemonic masculinity shifted around him. As the homosocial bonds of wartime disintegrated and the expression of anger was supplanted by its repression, Bogart’s continued reliance on violence constituted a counter-hegemonic performance of screen masculinity that highlighted gender’s mutability and morphed his tough-guy type into a psychopath.47 The tough-guy type often worked in such palpable contradictions, which differentiated it from other avatars of masculinity—for example, “cowboys, swashbucklers, war heroes”—who wrestled more covertly with inconsistencies.48 Garfield’s screen masculinity had long featured tension between anger and resignation. Paratexts linked this to Garfield’s and his characters’ hardscrabble pasts, which represented the origin of his proletarian anger and resentment toward bourgeois pieties, the source of his vulnerability as an outsider beyond the culture of the streets, and the resignation that he was likely fated to return to the gutter. More than the other city boys, John Garfield’s inability to escape the streets animated his typecasting while also consistently balancing edginess and vulnerability amid broader gender instabilities. “Tough guy” also reflects tensions catalyzed by the particularly American formulation of whiteness, the tenuous place of Jews within that paradigm, and the power dynamics of Garfield’s subject position within the strictures of Hollywood’s studio system. As the abject antithesis of WASP normality, the Jewish other was subject to the projection of whiteness’s “insecurities concerning its potential loss of power onto the world,” effectively entangling the ethnic figure in what Sander Gilman calls a “double bind”—pressed for conformity yet diminished in one’s efforts as unconvincing.49 “Tough guy,” I contend, more accurately encapsulated Garfield’s predicament as a too-ethnic 129

Imagining the Method working-class male performer at the conjunction of studio-system-era identity- and industry-based constraints. The lack of overtly Jewish characters or story lines in Hollywood belied inferences of Jewish ethnicity in the constellation of visual, geographic, and discursive signifiers circulating around figures such as Garfield. “The people’s star,” as he was called for his deeply embedded biographical links to the urban and working class, was frequently characterized by industry and adjacent discourse communities in such a way as to convey his Jewishness to knowing parties and eventually to a broader public.50 As early as 1939, within approximately one year of Garfield’s screen debut, his ethnic surname (Garfinkle) appeared in Modern Screen and Variety as well as syndicated newspaper columns.51 His type-setting naturalistic performance of the tough guy with explosive expressivity in Four Daughters further suggested his ethnicity both as a point of contrast with repressed performances of WASP costars such as Jeffrey Lynn (Garfield’s rival for Priscilla Lane’s affection in the film) and as a tacit industry requirement that supporting, ethnic, and female screen players be more animated to distinguish white male leads.52 From the outset of Garfield’s film career, the Lower East Side was crucial in burnishing his urban/noir associations and the connotations of his Jewish and proletarian significance.53 Garfield’s family were among the third generation of Jewish immigrants whose immigration had established Jews as a significant minority group in the United States and who were met with nativism and anti-Semitism that disproportionately channeled them into New York’s Lower East Side. Cinema latched on to this in the two decades leading up to Garfield’s screen debut, characterizing Jews in their limited screen appearances as “ghetto dwellers.”54 The Lower East Side figured prominently in Garfield discourse as well, often accompanying tough-guy characterizations to bolster the credibility of the actor’s purportedly rough-hewn past by appealing to a preexisting popular understanding of the neighborhood and its denizens. Though the Lower East Side was not an exclusively Jewish enclave, it was decidedly ethnic, suggesting that at the very least, Garfield’s frequent associations with it coded him as ethnic, if not Jewish.55 Hasia Diner argues that by the mid-twentieth century, Jewishness had become inextricably linked to the neighborhood in the popular imaginary. She writes that the idea of the “‘Lower East Side’ had become so securely tied to the American concept of ‘Jewish’ that creators of texts and artifacts . . . and the audiences who engaged with them, understood that they functioned as synonyms for each other. ‘Lower East Side’ meant Jewish, and Jewish could be best represented and assimilated through the words and pictures associated with the Lower East Side.”56 130

History in Hysteria Industry press also linked Garfield with several prospective film projects featuring explicitly Jewish figures. A 1938 George Gershwin biopic, which he was openly interested in and was rumored to be cast as the eponymous composer, was the most widely disseminated among these connections.57 Louella Parsons informed readers of her syndicated column that the proposed casting made sense, given that the emergent star “resembles Gershwin in stature if not actual appearance.”58 Garfield was also initially attached to star in the Warner Bros. short Sons of Liberty (Michael Curtiz, 1939), whose narrative revolved around the fact that its protagonist, Haym Salomon, was both Jewish and a patriotic backer of the Revolutionary War.59 So too was Garfield reportedly connected to the unrealized 1938 project “Concentration Camp.”60 The reception that greeted Garfield’s momentary deviation from toughguy performances as Porfirio Díaz in Juarez (William Dieterle, 1939) also illustrated the boundaries of his prevailing signification during the formative early period of his career.61 As a supporting player in his first prestige picture— his fourth film to open less than a year after his screen debut—Garfield and his performance were frequently overshadowed in industry publications by leads Paul Muni and Bette Davis as well as costar Brian Aherne.62 Photoplay’s July 1939 review characterized Garfield’s performance as “uninspired.”63 James Shelley Hamilton, editor of the National Board of Review, offered a backhanded compliment, submitting that Garfield possessed “curious vitality” as Díaz that “makes you forget that his speech is pure Bronx.”64 The Brooklyn Eagle drama critic Arthur Pollock told readers that though Garfield’s turn as Díaz was only an “earnest young man making believe,” his particular ethnicity (signified by Pollock’s use of Garfield’s nickname) meant that “his tongue is the tongue of Jules.”65 Letters to the editor decried Garfield’s turn, arguing that his popularity had gotten him the role and he “didn’t do much with it.”66 So out of the ordinary was this prestige picture for the man from the Lower East Side that the syndicated columnist Sheilah Graham told readers across the country that the Juarez premiere marked the first time Garfield had worn a dress suit.67 Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), directed by Garfield’s fellow Group Theatre alum Elia Kazan, would have assured that Garfield’s Jewish identity was crystal clear, should any ambiguity have remained by the end of 1947. One of Hollywood’s “social message” films in the industry’s short-lived effort to tackle anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement spotlighted discrimination’s material consequences while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes in its representations of Garfield’s Jewish character, Dave Golden.68 Golden reflected the film industry’s finite language for imagining diverse characterizations of non-WASP characters, as well as the fact that such representations 131

Imagining the Method conveyed mutually understood markers of otherness. Garfield’s Lower East Side, lower-caste, and immigrant origins were already familiar to audiences from the earliest press coverage surrounding Four Daughters in 1938. The character of Golden “exhibit[ed] the traits of a bitter outsider that moviegoers would have associated with [Garfield’s] origins,” rendering explicit the actor’s implicit Jewishness and utilizing such dynamics of visible otherness as a significant plot point for the film.69 This might have informed the star’s decision to take the role at a time when the de-Semitizing of Hollywood continued to loom over the prospect of portraying a Jewish character. “No one wanted to play [that] part,” John Garfield’s son David later recalled, because “nobody wanted anyone to know that they were Jewish in Hollywood.”70 In a telling reversal of A Streetcar Named Desire and the distinctions in Garfield’s and Brando’s reception at the time, the role of Dave Golden—“the clearest statement of Garfield’s Jewishness”—had initially been offered to the then-stage actor Brando.71 It is possible that Garfield’s inferred and explicitly coded Jewishness had already woven itself into his prevailing reception before the release of Gentleman’s Agreement. Set against a backdrop of scant Jewish representation during the 1940s, Garfield’s particularized ethnicity might well have stood out even more by comparison.72 His associations with boxing as early as the Group Theatre’s 1937 play Golden Boy, his widely rumored casting as the lead in a remake of The Patent Leather Kid, and his lead performance in They Made Me a Criminal (Busby Berkeley, 1939), his second motion picture, not only literalized his rapidly ossifying star image as a figurative working-class pugilist (Box Office characterized him as a “hard-boiled fighter”) but also carried the sport’s particular ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic associations via his “earthy realism.”73 His oft-cited involvement in the Group Theatre’s Golden Boy—in which the title character was reputedly written for him by Clifford Odets but ultimately assigned by the director Harold Clurman to Group colleague Luther Adler—as well as the publicity surrounding They Made Me a Criminal offered audiences tangible manifestations of Garfield’s rebelliousness and outsider status wedded to kinetic pugilistic performance, whether realized (Criminal) or not (Golden Boy). Such associations likely grew over the course of the ensuing decade. Though a talented violinist, Garfield’s Paul Boray in Humoresque (Jean Negulesco, 1946) is inextricably bound to his Lower East Side roots and draws comparisons to a prizefighter.74 Garfield’s turn in Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947) several months prior to Gentleman’s Agreement entwined the actor’s tough-guy connotations and progressive politics in the character of the working-class Jewish boxer Charley

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History in Hysteria Davis. Body and Soul represented American Jews’ intimate relationship with boxing and wrestled with assimilationist tensions familiar to many ethnic communities. Whether he was “the ultimate Jew of 1940s Hollywood,” the archetype of the Jewish working class, or perhaps simply the industry’s biggest Jewish star, long-solidified discourse around John Garfield imagined his performance style as inextricably entwined with his tough-guy background and an ethnic identity distinctive enough to render him a perpetual outsider.75 He came to embody “the classic Jewish position,” Patricia Erens notes, in his toughness and restlessness, and in his desire to achieve an American dream that always eluded him.76 Garfield’s acting was repeatedly tied via the tough-guy figure to an inability and/or unwillingness to fully assimilate or transform, and an anger toward the world tempered by the resigned realization that he was likely to end up back at his origin point. This informed the tragedies that often befell his characters as well as the heteronormative and homosocial appeal tied to his screen roles. His discursive relationship to performance operated like an assemblage of variegated otherness tied together by an excessive ethnic-ness. Together with his resistance to industry typage and his avowed anti-commercial romanticism for the Group Theatre, these elements were, by the time of Garfield’s 1952 death, signature characteristics of methodness swirling around the likes of his Gentleman’s Agreement and Streetcar competitor Brando. Under the studio system, however, most of these features functioned like strictures circumscribing the availability of—and Garfield’s perceived capacity to execute—diverse roles beyond that of the tough guy.

Satisfaction . . . That’s on the Stage Set against Hollywood’s tony neighborhoods and lucrative lifestyles, the prevailing tough-guy narrative swirling in the press around John Garfield coexisted alongside additional ways of imagining his otherness. Many of the same industry-adjacent magazines, newspapers, and syndicated information streams featured Garfield’s explicit reverence for the stage—specifically the Group Theatre—and provided forums for his vocal skepticism about Hollywood’s commercial motives. Such resistance to the industry’s labor conditions bolstered Garfield’s outsider signification while also reigning in the extent to which such characteristics would be celebrated as part of an ascribed performance style during his career and lifetime. This vein of his reception figured prominently from the outset: Warner Bros.’ 1938 press release not only

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Imagining the Method laid the foundation for their new talent’s tough-guy typage but also noted a stage-oriented contractual clause that would quickly draw attention from other media outlets. The actor’s 1938 studio contract provided Garfield with dispensation to appear “in one legitimate stage production produced by the ‘Group Theatre’ in New York City, or in one legitimate stage production produced by any producing company designated by the said Group Theatre.”77 This detail appeared repeatedly in subsequent press coverage announcing the studio’s new talent. Kate Cameron made a point of mentioning it in her August 1938 review of Four Daughters, characterizing the proviso as the new screen actor’s demand and the deciding factor in Hollywood finally securing Garfield’s services.78 Relaying the clause to readers of the Los Angeles Times in September 1938 (one month after Garfield’s screen debut), Hollywood correspondent Read Kendall characterized it as “unusual, to say the least, for a player who has just achieved stardom to be willing to risk staying away from the screen as long as Garfield elects.”79 Days earlier, Clarke Wales of the syndicated newspaper insert Screen and Radio Weekly attributed the clause to the actor’s insistence on having “an avenue of escape open.” “By shaking the Hollywood dust from his shoes once a year, and going back to his old haunts where he went hungry for the sake of an ideal,” Wales informed readers, “he will retain the perspective he thinks all actors should have.”80 Several months later, the Boston Globe’s Mayme Ober Peak credited the actor’s insistence on the proviso to his sincerity, “peculiar personality,” and “don’t-give-a-damn attitude.”81 Writing in the pages of the San Francisco Examiner, the former MGM publicist Jerry Asher averred that “this surprising realist shrugs his shoulders and blasphemes all the hullabaloo that symbolizes success in Hollywood.”82 Within months, magazines such as Hollywood and Modern Screen joined other outlets in recounting the tale. They informed millions of readers nationwide that Warner Bros. had conceded to its new talent’s theater demand, and that Garfield had declined a more lucrative studio contract elsewhere in pursuit of the stage clause.83 As Garfield would tell the columnist Louis Sobol in October 1940, “the money’s in the movies . . . but the satisfaction . . . that’s on the stage.”84 The provision in question exemplified the strands of Garfield’s repeatedly stated preference for the stage and his skepticism about Hollywood that were present from the outset of his screen career. In the tone-setting early profiles by S. R. Mook and Mary Parkes, Garfield’s relationship to acting was linked to more than his lone film role at the time. The Hollywood neophyte’s claim to Mook that his past was dead could be read as a declaration—at the outset of his film career, no less—of intent, of disinterest in the attention afforded 134

History in Hysteria his biography and the logic of the star system that underpinned it. “I’m sick of talking about myself,” Garfield told the author. “As a person, I’m unimportant.”85 Mook further drove home Garfield’s exceptionality by characterizing his aversion to self-publicity as “rank heresy” for an actor and by challenging his commitment to the stage in such a way that it provided the newcomer a platform to pronounce his stage idealism and screen skepticism to readers. His stated, and repeated, aversion to financial motives only reinforced this. “Money is never going to run me—or my life,” Garfield said.86 He added that he would remain in Southern California so long as he was given good roles and did not stagnate as a performer. “But,” he warned, “if they try to type me or cast me in pictures that don’t mean anything I’ll be long-gone from here before they realized what’s happened.” Beneath the “tough mugg” exterior, Mook concluded about the profile’s subject, “I see an idealist and a dreamer.”87 Such sentiment would for years underwrite Garfield’s Tinseltown wariness that appeared throughout fan magazine and newspaper coverage, reminding readers not just of his theatrical clause but of his preference—often credited to the influence of the Group Theatre—for the stage and the working-class artistic (rather than bourgeois financial) motives underpinning his approach to the craft.88 In asking whether “the rebel John Garfield” had “gone Hollywood,” Mary Parkes posited a rhetorical question that within months spread to fan magazines, newspaper articles, and syndicated columns across the country.89 It aligned with profiles by Mook and others that entwined Garfield’s idealistic commitment to stage performance with a skepticism about “going Hollywood.” It also implied that such commitment and skepticism informed Garfield’s criticism of, and resistance to, exploitative conditions of screen acting and stardom. Such resistance was not unique to Garfield, but its appearance barely a year into his film career suggested importantly that the actor was already vocally dissatisfied with Warner Bros.’ typecasting and genre exhaustion. “He hopes they won’t give him any more prison pictures,” Parkes relayed to Modern Screen readers.90 Elsewhere, Screenland asked readers if Garfield’s overlords would release him from prison pictures (fig. 4.2). Garfield, depicted atop a stool in the accompanying photo and isolated against a barren background, appeared to provide the answer.91 Hedda Hopper told her millions of readers that Warner Bros. was cultivating tension and squandering their talent by “[lining] up three B pictures for him, knowing all the time that he should do nothing but A’s.” The conflict, she noted, had made an actor who was “so good” into a “problem child.”92 Indeed, the very tough-guy narrative upon which his star persona had been and would continue to be built had already proven irksome for the performer and others. The aforementioned 135

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Figure 4.2. Screenland’s December 1939 image, titled “‘Prisoner’ of Pictures,” presents readers with a vivid representation of the discourse already circulating about Garfield’s restrictive typecasting little more than a year after his screen debut. “When will Warners ‘pardon’ John Garfield,” the caption asks, “and lift him out of the crime picture cycle?” Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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History in Hysteria effort—characterized by one commentator as an “unusual experiment”—of scripting Garfield’s Dust Be My Destiny character around the purportedly innate features of his tough-guy speech had literalized a figurative trend: the actor and his performance style were quickly being written into a corner.93 Garfield’s widely reported clashes with Warner Bros. regarding the toughguy type quickly escalated.94 He received the first of his nine studio suspensions in November 1939 for refusing the project And It All Came True.95 “We understand that Warner Brothers Studio has put John Garfield smack into the doghouse,” Hollywood Screen Life informed readers in January 1940, “following his bitter complaint that he has been typed. John is tired, he says, of playing neurotic roles as in Four Daughters and others that followed, and threatens to return to the stage unless he receives better parts.”96 Coverage of Garfield’s desire to portray George Gershwin was rooted in his eagerness to eclipse recurring “mug” roles. “It would be something different,” Garfield offered, as “I’ve looked like a bum in every picture.”97 The fatigue narrative juxtaposed the actor’s tough-guy roles with his and others’ ongoing attention to the studio’s burdensome and restrictive casting of said type, often providing a venue for Garfield to articulate his idealism about his past and future as a performer and the productive capacities of performance generally. It also belied the tensions between Garfield’s professed working-class progressive politics and Warner Bros.’ range of roles constrained by the studio’s signature gritty style, and the lack of creative freedom afforded most performers.98 Many of Garfield’s contemporaries, such as the reactor John Wayne, approached screen performance as entertainment. Garfield, echoing statements by the Group’s Harold Clurman from years before, told Screenland’s S. R. Mook in April 1940 that he saw performance as a political commitment to socioculturally relevant stories. His tenure in Hollywood was thus a protracted conflict between artistic and commercial motives. “I don’t fit into the scheme of things,” he told Mook. “I’ve been out here two years now and I wish I had never come.”99 Chafing against the constraints of their roles was certainly nothing new for Tinseltown’s feature players during the years of Hollywood’s studio system, where vertically integrated studios monopolized commercial film production and exercised far-reaching power over their performers.100 Studios sought to manage talent accordingly during this era by simultaneously enhancing stars’ value and micromanaging the terms and conditions of their employment. As both precious commodities and regimented but potentially powerful employees, stars resided in dynamic rather than static positions. Jane Gaines has argued that industrial and broader sociocultural contexts shifted these performers’ “ambiguous” relation to Hollywood from more labor-aligned 137

Imagining the Method positions in the 1930s to something more proximate to capital following the 1948 Paramount Decree.101 In the pre–Paramount Decree era, “certain stars became as or even more important than the picture product itself . . . [yet] in the daily reality of the industry, despite their value, those same stars possessed very little control over their careers.”102 The exclusive seven-year “term” contracts in place at the time of Garfield’s 1938 arrival exemplified such exploitation. They were viewed by producers and performers alike as extensions of the star’s on- and off-screen signification. As a result, contract negotiations could reflect competing studio and actor priorities with respect to a star’s image and labor. Even as rhetoric about Garfield’s expressed disinterest in financial motives faded from press accounts, his ascribed idealism continued to permeate newspapers and fan magazines with respect to his and Warner Bros.’ contrasting approaches to screen performance. Herbert Cohn’s 1938 reflections on the film industry devoted considerable time to Garfield’s exceptional acting in his screen debut, providing an alternative to the tough-guy language prevalent in other Four Daughters discourse and anticipating the very rhetoric of inhabiting roles popularly employed more than a decade later to praise “Method” acting and actors: His playing of Mickey Borden had soul to it—the kind of playing that [the British actor and writer] Leslie Howard has said is nearly impossible in the movies, where acting is not the natural result of “living the part,” but a series of emotions manufactured on a couple of minutes’ notice from a director. That was not the case with Garfield; he was living the cynical Mickey Borden at the Warner lot just as he had lived “Golden Boy” on the Belasco stage.103 Hollywood’s December 1938 review of Four Daughters painted a similar picture of Garfield’s acting, observing that he “brings .  .  . a powerful, telling under-playing that will take him far.”104 The craft of acting also seemed to be on Garfield’s lips in his interactions with the press. His 1938 contract specifically linked his annual stage dispensation to Group Theatre productions, a detail repeatedly recounted in the press. The Group also figured prominently in the routinized tough-guy biographies, where the organization was depicted as vital to Garfield’s creative evolution and self-identified working-class subjectivity.105 Garfield repeatedly extoled the virtues of the Group’s approach to performance in newspaper and magazine interviews. While he was light on specifics (thus perpetuating the epistemological evasiveness so important to the exceptionality of methodness), he 138

History in Hysteria suggested time and again that the troupe’s extraordinariness as performers— the ideal against which he frequently compared the inadequacy of Hollywood screen roles and star motives—arose from a lengthy, in-depth commitment that eschewed commercial imperatives. “Probably when I go back to the [G] roup I’ll have to prove to them all over again that I am an actor,” Garfield told the syndicated columnist Milton Harker. “They don’t take you because you’ve got your name in big letters on the marquees of movie theaters.”106 Even as his much-discussed theater clause was effectively quashed by a new contract two years into his tenure with Warner Bros., Garfield remained defiant. “I told you a year ago I’d never scrap for money,” he told Screenland in April 1940, “only for parts. . . . I came out here with ideals and I’m still clinging to them, and fighting for them.”107 In the pursuit of such artistry, Garfield frequently informed writers and readers that one had to be willing to suffer. Recounting his critical education with the Group to Clarke Wales of Screen and Radio Weekly, the reluctant film star relayed this by way of an example of the organization’s relegation to poverty in the pursuit of socially significant theater. Hearing of how “the future of American drama” (as Garfield characterized the Group) had taken to eating potatoes for their artistic ideals, Wales was convinced of Garfield’s fervor for exceptional acting. “He has to be sincere,” the writer informed his readership, “to live on potatoes.”108 Hoping to sway Hedda Hopper to recast his relationship with Warner Bros. and theater in a more nuanced light to her millions of readers, Garfield implored the gossip columnist in a June 19, 1940, letter to understand—and perhaps subsequently to emphasize—his idealism regarding acting (fig. 4.3). While other screen actors “have their yachts or their race-horses or their big ranches,” Garfield wrote, “to me the real fun I get out of life is acting on the stage, as well as in pictures. Everybody says that I’ve just come back from New York a very chastened young man because my play wasn’t a tremendous success, that I’m not going to be ‘a bad boy’ any more. Well, they’re wrong.”109 Reiterating the hard-won theater clause in his Warner Bros. contract, Garfield devoted much of his missive to the already-familiar narrative linking his conflicts with the studio to their contrasting approaches to performance. “Maybe I ought to be satisfied with the check I collect every Wednesday and let the producers decide what roles I should play,” Garfield wrote, setting up the contrast between financial and artistic motives that often animated his critiques of Hollywood. Rehashing his own experience in typecasting, Garfield acknowledges the business logic but returns to the question of what medium best suits his desire to continuously hone his craft. “[Typecasting] doesn’t give the chance of becoming an actor. . . . I can’t learn to be an actor unless I can try out several different kinds of parts and acquire more and 139

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Figure 4.3. John Garfield’s June 19, 1940, letter to Hedda Hopper seeking to clarify his preference for stage performance and his artistic motives. Courtesy of the Margaret Herrick Library.

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Imagining the Method more experience. . . . I don’t expect it to be easy,” Garfield confessed to Hopper before adding, “I wouldn’t want it that way.”110 Warner Bros.’ routine offers of unsatisfactory roles might have been part of the studio’s deliberate cost-saving measures, and stars such as Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Bette Davis also had widely publicized rifts over unacceptable working conditions and “ruthless typecast[ing].”111 Still, Garfield’s constant clashes and numerous suspensions were distinctive in that they made visceral the disjunction between his avowed (if elusive) approach to performance and the priorities of commercial film production. The frequency with which Warner Bros.’ new talent was expected to work afforded little of the in-depth, studied preparation Garfield had praised as part of the Group Theatre’s received exceptionalism. Having starred in seven films in his first two years with the studio, and twenty-four overall during his nine-year tenure with Warner Bros. (1938–1946), in addition to multiple suspensions, Garfield had little time or agency to select or prepare for roles compared to what Method-identified performers such as Brando enjoyed just a few years later. Garfield’s repeated pining for the Group Theatre and its lengthy, studious approach to performance nevertheless tacitly conveyed a desire to replicate such a process for the screen, while his numerous suspensions and vocal dissatisfaction with studio offerings made tangible the limits of his agency under the working conditions of the studio system. Contracts, Jane Gaines argues, represented one of the few spaces for performers to exercise agency within the onerous conditions of the studio system. Garfield’s widely reported insistence on a theater clause in his original Warner Bros. pact offered indication of—enshrined on paper, at least—a film studio giving credence to the actor’s Group- and stage-aligned performance style. Garfield’s alternative, Group-originated approach to acting that subsequently suffused newspaper and fan magazine discourse enjoyed, in Warner Bros.’ cosigning of the contract, seeming Hollywood corroboration of his stage/screen contrast, infusing with exceptionalism the actor’s emphasis on suffering, preparation, and sociocultural significance even as specifics of his acting style proved elusive.112 For the duration of his nine-year contract with Warner Bros., Garfield “was the most democratic of star performers on the movie lots,” through his noted hard work as an actor, his fights for better roles and greater agency, and his continued insistence on being an industry outsider.113 His turn toward independent production following the end of his Warner Bros. contract marked both a break from the onerous conditions of term employment and a continuation of the same tough-guy outsider discourse that had accompanied him since the outset of his film career. As star and producer, Garfield 142

History in Hysteria was among the vanguard of Hollywood performers whose shift from labor to capital presaged stars’ post–Paramount Decree free agency that put them on more equal footing with studios and afforded a new talent like Marlon Brando the time to immerse himself in the Birmingham VA Hospital ahead of his 1950 screen debut in The Men—as well as the publicity to exceptionalize such behavior. By contrast, comparatively little publicity focused on Garfield’s preparations for what would turn out to be the final phase of his career. Instead, his increased agency manifested in the kinds of significant roles and stories that he had for years characterized as the heart of his contentious relationship with Warner Bros. As would be the case for the Group Theatre, producing material on pressing sociocultural issues attracted more than progressive projects and collaborators by the mid–twentieth century. For his part in producing and headlining films such as Body and Soul and Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)—as well as his long-outspoken proletarian sympathies— Garfield drew the scrutiny of both Hollywood and the House Un-American Activities Committee.114 Set against a backdrop of heightened tensions between studios and labor unions, not to mention broader sociocultural headwinds leaving the film industry faced with substantive reorganization, Garfield’s rebelliousness suddenly became grounds for expulsion rather than suspension.115 Like his “tough guy” ethnicity, Garfield’s politics were deemed too excessive and unassimilable within the contexts of the studio system, even as its grip on American film production eroded around the Paramount Decree. Though Garfield was not a communist, his long-entrenched symbolism all but ensured he could never fully absolve himself of suspicion, and his de facto blacklisting following He Ran All the Way (John Berry, 1951) literalized his outsider status to devastating effect. “John Garfield, who wasn’t even a fellow traveler, refused to speculate, refused to name names on the grounds he couldn’t remember anyone who was a member of the Communist party, not in the Group, not in Hollywood, not anywhere,” recalled his Force of Evil and Body and Soul collaborator Abraham Polonsky years later. “For years the federal government used their resources to prove he had perjured himself, and for years they failed, but they did succeed in killing him.”116 The extraordinary yet abbreviated outpouring of Garfield-related discourse immediately following his untimely death a year later rehashed familiar prevailing and alternative readings of the deceased. The posthumous memorialization and accompanying rumination on his career suggested that his motives as a performer operated at cross-purposes with those of his studio and the commercial film industry writ large.117 These seemingly confrontational threads of studio imposition and idealistic insubordination were in fact 143

Imagining the Method mutually constitutive. They rationalized (in the case of the former) his restrictive typecasting and the expectations surrounding him as a performer, and outlined (in the case of the latter) the industrial and sociocultural constraints that made him too transgressive during his life and career. Taken together, these two ostensibly conflicting narratives reveal aspects of methodness once associated with the Group Theatre, elements embedded in the heart of the reactor and actor juxtapositions of John Wayne and Marlon Brando, and features reshaped to suit the regressive agendas of Hedda Hopper and others. In the case of Garfield, the latent presence of these characteristics belied the conspicuous absence of an explicit Method attribution. The omission is all the more noteworthy given his proximity to both the midcentury Method moment and arguably its most popular avatar, Brando. Garfield’s reclamation decades later—which sought to reframe him as the first “Method” star and the prototype for the likes of Brando—highlights the contingent nature of methodness and the importance of paratexts and interpretive landscapes to the implicit and explicit attributions of Method discourse.

Brando before Brando Media coverage of John Garfield all but vanished within days of his 1952 death. He reappeared only sporadically over the next two decades, and then almost always in the form of quiz questions about his birth name, reader requests for general biographical details, mentions of his films replaying on television, or news of revived stage plays in which he had once starred.118 It was not until the 1970s that the actor began to reemerge in popular discourse, and the volume of information was (and continues to be) far smaller than that which coalesced around his life and death. In 1971, the general-interest magazine Liberty reprinted a July 1939 profile of Garfield, while Show magazine published a new interview with the actor’s surviving family members the same year. Books and film retrospectives were prime reanimators of the resurgent posthumous discourse that began in the 1970s. They were also the principal purveyors of a narrative at once largely consistent with that which prevailed upon audiences through 1952 and notably different for its revisionist linkage of Garfield and Method acting. Joe Morella and Edward Z. Epstein’s 1971 book Rebels: The Rebel Hero in Films and Larry Swindell’s 1975 biography Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield offered their general readership a somewhat recontextualized framework for making sense of Garfield’s alienated outsider roles. Though Morella and Epstein retrod much of the familiar Garfield biography (including the 144

History in Hysteria purported synonymy between the real-life man and his tough-guy characters), they importantly detailed the star’s—and the audience’s—genre fatigue and his struggle against Warners’ typecasting, as well as the studio’s failure to take advantage of his full potential. The coauthors also aptly suggested (in the very title of their chapter on Garfield) that the actor served as a model for later screen rebels but was the lone figure of his kind in the 1940s and was “almost lost” to time.119 “Prototype and archetype,” Swindell similarly wrote of Garfield, “he was the first of the rebels.”120 As the prototypical rebel, Garfield was implicitly afforded a primordial place within the revised public-facing genealogy of midcentury Method acting iconoclasts such as Brando, Dean, and others whose ascribed rebellion fused their perceived performance style with their on- and off-screen escapades.121 Swindell went on to make the association more explicit, further bolstering Garfield’s indebtedness to the Group Theatre and its performance style. “Julie [John] desired growth as a performer above anything else,” wrote Swindell. He added that Garfield “needed the kind of intense study the Group had offered, and a chance to prepare a role thoroughly, even to become lost in it.”122 Swindell unambiguously characterized the actor’s long-established relationship with the Group Theatre as an education specifically in the Method at the hands of fellow members Stella Adler and Clifford Odets, despite the fact that Adler (like Brando) had long rejected the Method label.123 Other biographies and accompanying media coverage made similar revisions in the decades that followed, with Robert Nott’s 2003 He Ran All the Way going so far as to say that Maria Ouspenskaya had instructed the young Garfield in proto-Method acting in 1929, well before he joined the Group and two years before its founding.124 Turner Classic Movies’ 2003 The John Garfield Story, as well as a review of the documentary in the Los Angeles Times, placed Garfield firmly within the Method’s genealogy, calling him “one of cinema’s most influential actors. He was the first rebel without a cause,” the film asserted, “the precursor to the likes of Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Sean Penn.”125 Film retrospectives burnished the literary and documentary revivals, reacquainting familiar and new audiences with Garfield’s work. These events contextualized the performer, lending the imprimatur of industrial and critical authority to his rediscovered importance and promoting him as a rebel within a revised history of Method acting, without reckoning with the terms and conditions of his long-standing erasure from the narrative. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 1978 “Three Rebel Heroes” series offered familiar Method pairings, grouping Garfield with Montgomery Clift and James Dean as “rebel heroes . . . men at odds with themselves and society.”126 The Film 145

Imagining the Method Society of Lincoln Center’s 1996 “Running All the Way: The Films of John Garfield” program stated its intent to shine a light on “among the least known of Hollywood’s studio-era stars,” whom it labeled both the Depression-era equivalent of James Dean and the precursor to Dean, Brando, and Clift.127 Scholarly and critical revisitations lent added legitimacy to such revisionism through comparative and contextualized analyses. In his incisive review of decades-long scholarly efforts to unpack the reactionary midcentury purges of Hollywood progressives, Thom Anderson argues that Garfield was not only axiomatic of the Jewish working class and film gris but also the first—and greatest—Method actor.128 Similar allusions to the actor’s significance appear elsewhere as well. Sklar’s study of the “city boy” figure offers the most substantive scholarly analysis of Garfield to date, providing both invaluable insight into his trying labor conditions under Warner Bros. and a perceptive rationale for his significance as an archetypal sociocultural figure. J. Hoberman more recently brings together many of these threads into arguably their most explicit form, arguing for Garfield’s reclamation through the rationale that he was “Brando before Brando” and “the Jewish Brando.”129 Why Garfield was recouped in such a way—or at all—is a question with no singular answer. There is little self-reflection in the reclamation efforts that addresses the factors spurring Garfield’s late twentieth-century revival. Swindell claimed that the actor was “rehabilitated” by the “Film Generation,” whose reevaluation of Hollywood protagonists and stardom led them to embrace the anti-hero archetype and look for the progenitor of the legacy carried on by Brando and Dean and through Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.130 Scholars have similarly rationalized that bringing Garfield to the fore offers varied instructive lessons in film history, screen stardom, and the studio system. These are all true, yet other relevant factors have escaped notice. The ongoing reckoning with midcentury anti-communist panic was no doubt critical, as it spurred consideration of Garfield as both the epitome of the period’s tragic outcomes and an emblematic case study of laborcapital conflict during the studio era. Tectonic industrial shifts in the decades following Garfield’s death would also have played an important role in his reclamation. The majors’ 1940 consent decree to cease totalizing blind- and block-booking practices, the increased availability of capital, and the boom in World War II–era film theater attendance spurred the emergence of independent productions and star-producers such as Garfield following the 1946 expiration of his Warner Bros. contract.131 The Paramount Decree further decentralized production, giving rise to the package-unit system of production and imbuing stars (as well as producers and agents) with greater power in selecting film projects and roles and more control over their publicity. The 146

History in Hysteria declining fortunes of studios in the following decades continued to place stars in advantaged positions to negotiate key production and publicity details. The industrial constraints foisted upon Garfield therefore threw into stark contrast the experiences of successors such as Brando and Dean—as well as the next generation’s Pacino, De Niro, and Hoffman—and invited speculation about the delimiting effects of Garfield’s impediments on his potential. So too should this revisionism be understood in relation to the white ethnic revival. A movement that began in earnest in the 1960s and encompassed a far-reaching social and cultural revision of then-prevailing historical narratives of nation and race, the revival attempted to evade the increased scrutiny of whiteness coming out of postwar civil rights movements. Adopting hyphenated ethnic modifiers for their American identities, the revival’s adherents fetishized white ethnicity within a heavily modified version of the nation’s past that diminished the depth and breadth of white supremacy and appropriated the rhetoric of historically marginalized communities. The movement recast the story of America as beginning with white ethnic immigrants at Ellis Island, consequently eliding the nation’s foundations in white supremacy and Black oppression. The culture industries, particularly Hollywood, were essential in providing the signature motifs around which popular culture and its prevailing interpretive landscape reoriented notions of history, nation, and identity.132 These effects reverberated back on Hollywood as well, ushering in a revisionist interpretive landscape that brought the newly prized (and characterized) marginalized white ethnic man into alignment with Garfield’s lingering reception. Within these shifting arrangements of race and ethnicity, class, gender, and history, Garfield’s on-screen and off-screen personas were not simply recognized for their methodness. Often cast as a working-class hero who struggled, and failed, to elude authority’s sanction, Garfield—with his espoused progressivism and working-class Jewish background—epitomized the newly modified figure of the white ethnic outsider and was consequently deemed the Method prototype. The white ethnic revival lent sociocultural rationale and momentum to the excavation of Garfield and his transformation from long-forgotten, ill-fated studio type to prototypical Method screen star, the mold out of which successive WASP actors, including Clift, Brando, and Dean—as well as their decidedly white ethnic successors Pacino, De Niro, and Hoffman—would emerge. Crucially, the features of Garfield’s prevailing reception changed very little. It was the contexts for making sense of Garfield’s identity in relation to his perceived performance style that had shifted. His Jewishness was no longer too excessive, no longer grounds for rationalizing his perceived limitations as 147

Imagining the Method a signifying performer. So too had his rebelliousness gone from too problematic to emblematic of a celebrated postwar sociocultural archetype and industrial maverick. What had functioned as constraints on his earlier recognition as a Method actor became instrumental to his reclamation as a key figure within a revisionist Method-adjacent narrative. Decades after his death, John Garfield was formally acknowledged as the kind of actor John Wayne had pitted himself against—a Brando before Brando.

Almost an American Legend In his perceptive analysis of the “city boy” figure, Robert Sklar argues that “the circumstances of [Garfield’s] death and the aura of his screen persona combined to fix an impression of Garfield for history.” That fixed impression, Sklar continues, included “the man-child from the teeming streets, the ‘natural’ who put his soul on the screen and gave his heart to ideology, and ultimately to the inquisition.”133 This interpretation of Garfield’s star image is astute but invites revision in one crucial respect. I have argued in this chapter that “tough guy” readings were available to audiences both throughout John Garfield’s fourteen-year film career and in the “hysteria” following his death and memorial. Garfield’s signifiers were largely fixed during these periods and have remained so since, though with a caveat. While Garfield had been regarded as an archetypal index of a fixed sociocultural phenomenon—the tough guy—this chapter has shown how his enduring characteristics illuminate the importance of the shifting contexts of meaning making. Circumstances initially elided Garfield’s recognized “Method” status during his life and career, and yet, drawing on the same features, they reclaimed him as not only a Method actor but in many ways the prototypical Method actor within an accordingly revised genealogy of the perceived performance style. In other words, while his symbolic ties to Jewishness, to the Group Theatre, to preparation and suffering in acting, to rebelliousness, and so on have remained largely static in the decades since his career and life ended abruptly, the interpretive landscapes within which impressions of those symbols took shape have changed considerably. Those alterations are of the utmost importance, for they call attention to the terms and conditions under which the characteristics—as well as the prominence and providence—of methodness cohere in the discursive, paratextual ecosystem operating around and between Garfield’s movies. Talking about Garfield here is not merely a matter of correcting the historical record regarding his place in twentieth-century American screen 148

History in Hysteria performance. Just as important, it is about asking why the historical narrative played out this way, why Garfield’s Method qualifications were largely overlooked and even used to ignore his proximity to methodness. John Garfield straddled this world and the next, bridging the more covert methodness swirling around the Group Theatre in the 1930s and the overt embrace of methodness in the 1950s with the revisionism of the Method’s primordial history beginning in the 1970s. The tenuousness of his received relationship with methodness is emblematic of its elusiveness, for while Garfield had the training, characteristics, and affiliations that were core to others’ later acclaim as Method performers, he remained for quite some time a man without the Method. Over the same period that saw his reclamation, methodness found itself thoroughly ensconced in the interpretive landscape of popular culture. An entrenched epistemological framework that brought together the politics of celebrity, identity, and distinction, methodness operated as a vernacular language for making sense of performances and performers but also a shared meta screen language. Method acting and actors became subjects either explicitly identified as such or implied through the mutually understood discursive features of methodness. In the next chapter, I examine methodness during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, unpacking how these embedded discourses rely on the duality of reverence and revulsion that further inscribes methodness to the point where white male performers are routinely exceptionalized with barely a mention of Method at all.

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CHAPTER 5

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Methodness to the Present

Penetrated American Popular Consciousness Writing in June 1956, four years after John Garfield’s death and nine months after James Dean’s fatal car crash, the theater critic Walter Kerr confessed to readers of his nationally syndicated column two things that had surprised him in his recent public lectures on drama. The first involved audience familiarity with the Actors Studio, which he remarked was “widely known and discussed thousands of miles from New York City.”1 The other concerned audience assumptions that Kerr and his fellow critics opposed the Method. He wondered how the public had arrived at this incorrect conclusion and surmised that the Method’s emergent status and offbeat practitioners invited presumptions that the critical establishment would resist it. For Kerr, who was in fact a proponent of the Method, one thing remained unambiguous: the Studio and the Method itself had impressed upon its practitioners “a character that is peculiarly American.”2 Kerr credited the Studio with raising awareness of Method acting throughout postwar US culture in less than a decade’s time, concluding that it had thoroughly “penetrated American popular consciousness.”3 His sentiments about the Method’s ubiquity and strict alignment with the Studio and Strasberg reflected broader popular and critical conclusions that would retain their purchase in the US popular imagination well into the next century. For all his pronouncements that the Method was “literally” the “clearest, most carefully defined” of any performance style 151

Imagining the Method created for the American stage, Kerr’s impressionistic descriptions of Method actors and acting epitomized the exceptionality ascribed to the omnipresent yet elusive features of methodness.4 Less than a year later, Maurice Zolotow’s May 1957 proclamation in the Saturday Evening Post that “the Actors Studio is here to stay” reiterated Kerr’s sentiment, prognosticating the institution’s longevity while gesturing figuratively to its enduring role buttressing a Method mythology.5 Zolotow’s profile provided as detailed a portrait of the Studio and the Method as any popular account at the time. It also captured the prevailing reception of methodness that, because of the deluge of discourse surrounding the many “Method” film stars as well as anti-Method figures such as John Wayne and Hedda Hopper, had become entrenched by the mid-1950s in the interpretive landscape of US popular culture. Zolotow detailed the anti-commercial ethos permeating Method actors’ thinking about performance, where “the prospect of financial success” was “a problem that trouble[d]” them.6 Indeed, the writer noted, Method actors had already developed a reputation for disrupting stage, television, and film productions by clashing with directors and insisting dogmatically on following their own idiosyncratic interior processes. Method actors were therefore polarizing in their perceived excessiveness, revered by some and reviled by others. Zolotow described the Method in broad strokes as “a system of vocal, physical, and emotional exercises.” He provided slightly more specific overviews of acting techniques such as “justification” (“requir[ing] an actor to find some emotional, logistical or factual causation for every action he performs”) and “objectification” (“trying to relate yourself emotionally to all the physical objects of a scene”), while alluding to still more techniques that collectively honed the Studio disciple’s craft. Arguably the most well-known of these at the time, “sense memory” and “emotional memory,” were said to require performers “to summon up, at will and in all their intensity, great emotional experiences and sensations from [the] past.”7 Individually, these elements and their somewhat esoteric descriptions tantalized readers with specific labels and outcomes while still withholding the most crucial information. Cumulatively, it was clear that the extraordinary hyperrealism produced by the Method—which Zolotow wrote distinguished its practitioners from other performers—demanded mastery of these techniques in a manner that was simply inscrutable to the masses. The culmination of the practice was exceedingly difficult for Studio members to access, let alone for readers of a Saturday Evening Post profile to understand. The mystique of the Method played out in the interiority of a select few performers, when the idealized outcomes of Strasberg’s techniques were realized and 152

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats the performer reached a state of “concentration” that, Zolotow told readers (quoting Strasberg), brought out “the purest achievements in acting.” “The highest form of this state,” Zolotow continued, was “the condition called ‘public solitude,’” equal to the Buddhist state of nirvana in the purity of the truth it brought to the theater.8 Here, as elsewhere in the profile, Zolotow used religious metaphor in his efforts to make the culture around this New York studio and its offbeat Method practitioners more relatable to the Post’s five million subscribers across the country. Religious metaphor also provided a resonant analogue for the way in which the ascribed transcendence of Method actors and acting hinged on faith in the unknowable. In other words, the prevailing construction of methodness by the mid-1950s was predicated on surface readings of Method actors and acting (e.g., disruptive and dogmatic performers, names of techniques, extraordinary hyperreal outcomes) that attributed their exceptionality to the inaccessible, impenetrable process by which performers used techniques to reach heightened states of stage and screen truth unmatched by other performance styles. In this chapter, I argue that this midcentury entrenchment of methodness exceptionalized purported Method actors and acting, yet not in a uniformly positive register. As its ubiquity in popular culture increasingly precluded the need for explicit mentions of Method at all, the underlying singularity of methodness persisted through an emphasis on its contentiousness in the form of a reverence/revulsion binary. Utilizing trailers, making-of documentaries, studio publicity, star profiles, newspaper and magazine discourse, and other paratextual materials, I explore the last four decades of methodness to illustrate this reception trend at work. Focusing first on the motion picture Tootsie as a popular culture touchstone whose narrative is built around viewers’ shared binaristic reception of methodness, I consider how methodness situates the ascribed “Method” actor Dustin Hoffman as a passionate stage/screen performer whose characteristics (e.g., dogmatism and clashes with directors) frame him as a Method performer without explicitly using the label. The rhetoric surrounding the film before and after its release also trafficked in methodness rather than Method mentions, affirming the analogue between Hoffman and his character, Michael Dorsey, through tales of commitment, immersion, and transformation. Dorsey’s transformation into Dorothy Michaels exemplified those characteristics within the film and the discourse surrounding it, fooling all other characters and disproving Michael’s/Dorothy’s agent’s contention that “no one will hire you.” This paralleled Hoffman’s own reception as a difficult actor who clashed with director Pollack and became so immersed in Dorothy that he fooled people off set and, he claimed, came to occupy a woman’s subjectivity. 153

Imagining the Method I then turn to a contemporaneous film to illustrate an alternative engagement with Method actors and acting and thus possibilities for different forms of methodness. Returning to lead another Dean-related film after codirecting 1957’s The James Dean Story, Robert Altman adapted Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, from the Broadway play he also helmed. The resulting film featured an emotionally raw performance by the Method actor Sandy Dennis but was otherwise uninterested in affirming methodness’s prevailing form. Instead, Come Back operated as a meditation on Dean’s place within the fraught relationships, memories, and traumas populating the interpretive landscape, particularly for Dean’s fans, in the decades following his untimely death. That the film received little attention and even fewer plaudits reflected in part its incoherence with the ingrained received wisdom about Method actors and acting. I argue that Come Back illustrated both the possibilities and the pitfalls of cultural productions that eschew the prevailing form of methodness. Finally, this chapter looks to more recent twenty-first-century screen performances to track the ongoing cultural entrenchment and metamorphosis of methodness. Comparing the receptions surrounding Heath Ledger’s, Jared Leto’s, and Joaquin Phoenix’s respective film portrayals of the comic-book villain the Joker, I consider how reverence and revulsion have become even more integral to the prevailing reception of methodness. I contend that the stakes of Method acting’s purportedly heightened state of realism have risen considerably, tying terms such as “immersion,” “commitment,” and “transformation” not just to unseen psychological work but often to visibly extreme bodily metamorphosis. These roles have continually animated reverence/ revulsion debates and underwritten the actors’ commercial and critical viability. Turning to Jennifer Aniston’s and Charlize Theron’s receptions in Cake and Tully, respectively, I argue that this twenty-first-century intensification offers superficial inclusion of women that ultimately couches their “make-under” and “going ugly” transformations within temporary deviations from—rather than acting-intensive breaks with—strict gender and sexual body norms. These seeming exceptions, I conclude, serve to reinforce methodness’s use to simultaneously exceptionalize white men’s acting labor and diminish the physical and psychological performances of women and people of color.

“No One Will Hire You” Tootsie (Sidney Pollack, 1982) was conceived, disseminated, and interpreted amid seismic industrial shifts in Hollywood, where corporatization’s 154

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats conservative creep sought to suppress “the kind of rebellious artistry generally associated with the Method,” while studios sought to maintain “its audacious reputation” (i.e., its methodness) in order to capitalize on its prestige and star associations.9 Popular culture, Sharon Marie Carnicke argues, has played a vital role in underwriting myths about Method acting.10 Method’s received tenets became so enmeshed in Hollywood productions that years before Tootsie, “it became dominant as well as invisible as the accepted acting practice.”11 That the Actors Studio alum Hoffman was playing an actor “fired for conscientiously but inappropriately applying the Method in his work” would not therefore have been lost on Tootsie’s audiences, owing both to his widely publicized decades-long ties with that performance style and his reputation for being a difficult, dogmatic actor.12 Few Hollywood productions have epitomized the entrenchment of methodness like Tootsie. In fact, the film relied on the popular understanding of Method acting to drive its plot and the protagonist’s personal development without mentioning Method at all. Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) is a New York–based actor who, the audience learns during Dorsey’s visit to the office of his agent, George Fields (Sydney Pollack, who also directed the film), is plagued by a professional reputation for being too disruptive in his stage and screen productions. A figure who could have stepped right out of Zolotow’s description of uncompromising Method actors twenty-five years earlier, Michael has little interest in commercial success. He recoils at the thought of acting for money, much to the dismay of his agent. His focus is on craft, and his approach to acting is so extreme that he once bickered endlessly with a commercial director over the motivations of the tomato he was portraying. Exhausted after what the film implies is the latest in a long series of arguments with his client, the beleaguered Fields tells Michael matter-of-factly, “No one will hire you.” There is no need to worry about financial success, as those Actors Studio students did decades before, since Michael has foreclosed that possibility by alienating every producer from New York to Los Angeles. Fields repeats himself to ensure that Michael understands how his dire professional circumstances are the direct result of his polarizing method. Rather than respond to this revelation by engaging in critical selfreflection (Fields recommends therapy), Michael turns to his acting acumen to resolve the matter. Doubling down in response to Fields’s comment with “Oh yeah?,” Michael puts his immersive acting approach to use via extensive makeup and character work to create the actress Dorothy Michaels. As Dorothy, Michael promptly lands a supporting role on the television soap opera Southeast General.13 Michael’s metamorphosis proves more profound than even he intended, sparking Dorothy’s meteoric rise to fame in addition 155

Imagining the Method to Michael’s reckoning with his feelings for Dorothy’s costar Julie (Jessica Lange), as well as her father Les’s (Charles Durning) affection for Dorothy. Michael’s immersion into his Dorothy character creates such an extraordinary bond between the two that Michael begins to assume a woman’s point of view. The transformation changes Michael even after he has publicly revealed Dorothy to be a role rather than a person; he begins to confront his own sexist worldview, including his complicity in the misogynist stage and screen production cultures that surround him.14 As he tells Julie in the film’s closing minutes, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man. I just gotta learn to do it without the dress.” Tootsie was an unmitigated commercial smash for Columbia Pictures, becoming the secondhighest domestic grossing film of the year. It was also a critical darling, garnering ten Academy Award nominations. The film critic Michael Sragow has argued that Tootsie “created the popculture archetype of the driven, idealistic stage artist known as ‘the New York actor.’” In most people’s minds,” Sragow continues, “that phrase will always mean Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey.”15 But Hoffman’s associations with the out-of-work, hungry, frustrated, yet respected actor long predated Tootsie, in large part because of his well-cemented star image as an ardent practitioner of Method acting whose commitment allegedly stalled productions, created conflicts with cast and crew, and drew contradictory reactions both exalting and excoriating his singular style. Not long after his star-making turn in his second film, The Graduate (1967, Mike Nichols), directed by a former Actors Studio student, Life magazine went so far as to situate Hoffman opposite John Wayne in the reiterative juxtaposition of acting styles and identities crucial to Wayne’s star image and the coalescence of methodness evidenced decades earlier.16 In the intervening years since then, Duke had continued to employ his megawatt star status to prop up supposedly stark contrasts between his role as a reactor and the likes of Method actors such as Brando, Clift, and eventually Hoffman. “New York actor” also connoted Hoffman’s Jewishness, which (unlike the era in which John Garfield’s career unfolded) did not preclude his renown as a Method performer. A consequence of the white ethnic revival’s alterations in popular understandings of white ethnicity, Jewishness was no longer regarded as restrictive, unassimilable otherness. Under such a revised racial imaginary, Hoffman’s proximity to whiteness afforded him the opportunity to be cast as the adrift WASP Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate as well as the coded Jewish Michael Dorsey in Tootsie without being subject to the double bind that had hindered Jewish performers for much of Hollywood history.17 Hoffman’s synonymy with Tootsie’s demanding actor Michael Dorsey 156

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats carried over from such existing reception and was front and center in the paratexts surrounding the film’s production and theatrical run. An October 16, 1982, syndicated entertainment gossip column informed Anniston Star readers in Alabama that “Dustin Hoffman has been shocking his co-workers on the set of his new film ‘Tootsie’” with his frequent outbursts and temper tantrums.18 Syndicated columns from Robin Adams Sloan appeared in newspapers from Mansfield, Ohio, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, echoing the same alleged behind-the-scenes behavior and adding that Hoffman was antagonistic with coworkers as well as the director Pollack.19 The Columbia Pictures–produced documentary The Making of Tootsie (Rocky Lang, 1982) gave credence to these accounts. It is unclear if the documentary was intended to be a promotional tool at the time (it would later be included in the film’s 1991 Criterion LaserDisc release), or if it was in fact deployed during Tootsie’s theatrical run at all, yet The Making of Tootsie is unambiguous about Hoffman’s role as the instigator of the production’s widely reported tensions. While Pollack informs the audience that he took on the film specifically to work with Hoffman, the star opines that fights between actors and directors are “necessary for a good film.”20 Lang’s documentary depicts the two achieving rapprochement after each day’s battle, yet the recurrent and protracted nature of their clashes leaves little doubt that Hoffman’s combative modus operandi dictated on-set dynamics. Commentary from costars Jessica Lange and Teri Garr underline that Hoffman’s excellence and combativeness in the production were intertwined. The documentary offers apparent confirmation of Hoffman’s mythologized “Method” style, articulated in Tootsie’s discursive surround as well as the actor’s preexisting star image, recalling the apocryphal quip said to him several years earlier by his Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) costar Laurence Olivier: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” Narrated by Tootsie director and supporting actor (not to mention a former student of Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner) Sydney Pollack, the film’s first trailer further stressed the credibility of Hoffman’s performance and, in doing so, rendered Hoffman and his character, Michael Dorsey, virtually indistinguishable. “He was a fine actor, maybe a great actor,” Pollack says, presumably in character as Michael’s agent, George Fields, “but for every role he wanted, there was a reason why he wasn’t right.” In the ensuing montage, disembodied hands discard Michael Dorsey headshots with appraisals such as “too moody” and “too stubborn.” Back in his office, Fields tells the actor, “You’re too much trouble,” leading to another montage of familiar criticisms: “too tough,” “too temperamental,” “too pushy,” “too difficult.” “Michael, no one will hire you,” Fields subsequently tells his client. “Just watch me,” 157

Imagining the Method

Figure 5.1. In both Tootsie and its trailer, the response of Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) to his agent’s declaration that “no one will hire you” is the iconic reveal of Dorsey’s/Hoffman’s transformation into Dorothy Michaels. Screen capture by the author.

Michael replies, a sly look crossing his face as the trailer cuts to Tootsie’s signature shot of Hoffman, as Dorothy, walking down a crowded New York City sidewalk (fig. 5.1). “Boy, did he show us,” Fields responds to the iconic scene, as if to further emphasize the effectiveness of Dorsey’s/Hoffman’s act. Method acting is never explicitly named in Tootsie or its trailers, and it was rarely, if ever, identified in the paratexts surrounding the film’s production and distribution. Instead, language about transformation, dedication, preparation, and absorption mobilized methodness through Tootsie as well as allusions to the prevailing understandings of Hoffman and his ascribed performance style. 158

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Such language recalled less the narrative of a “New York actor” type and more the texts such as Zolotow’s Saturday Evening Post profile and Life magazine’s laudatory account of Brando’s preparations for The Men decades earlier. These narratives circulated alongside production accounts of the film praising Hoffman’s daily metamorphosis and highlighting his commitment to the grueling transformation process, as well as his convincing performance as a woman on-screen and away from the set. Billed as the unprecedented behind-the-scenes account of the film’s production, Susan Dworkin’s book Making Tootsie (1983) repeatedly affirms Hoffman’s exceptionalist commitment to the project. “The whole trick with Tootsie was to get Dustin Hoffman to look like a real woman,” Dworkin begins. “In Hoffman’s contract,” she continues, “there was actually a clause stipulating that reality had to be achieved before shooting could begin.”21 Dworkin devotes considerable space 159

Imagining the Method in Making Tootsie to the lengthy, punishing effort to get Hoffman’s makeup to meet such an exacting standard. This was both a matter of practical concern (i.e., ensuring that his beard would not show on camera), she informs readers, and a response to Hoffman’s dictates regarding Dorothy’s appearance. As if to further help readers contextualize the extremity of the actor’s commitment and transformation, Tootsie’s costume designer, Ruth Morley, asserts that Hoffman’s immersion in his roles was on par with that of her previous client, Robert De Niro.22 For Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Hoffman’s extraordinary commitment to the role and convincing performance was most aptly illustrated by his ruse with his former Midnight Cowboy costar Jon Voight, who failed to recognize him in costume as Dorothy when the two crossed paths in New York City’s legendary Russian Tea Room. These behindthe-scenes revelations focused attention on Hoffman’s presumed capacity as an exceptional performer to find a woman inside of himself, which Dworkin portrays as a sign of his singular commitment to character. The narratives exemplified the exceptionalism afforded to select white male actors such as Hoffman under methodness—not only to traffic in other identities but to plumb unparalleled depths of their subjectivity for the benefit of the character as well as the performer. Widely disseminated anecdotes about Hoffman’s conventional attractiveness in costume—seemingly intended to differentiate his performance from drag—bolstered the purported authenticity of his performance as well as the preparation that informed it.23 When Life magazine reporter Cyndi Stivers visited the Tootsie set in the summer of 1982, she wrote that Hoffman’s transformation into “a thoroughly credible female” owed to the actor’s “exacting desire to really become Dorothy rather than settle for easy laughs as a man obviously impersonating a woman.”24 Gene Siskel’s syndicated profile of Hoffman’s work in the film affirmed the latter’s status as an “uncompromising” actor by directly correlating his convincing metamorphosis with a physical and emotional absorption in the role so profound that it forever transformed the performer’s sense of self. Recurring coverage of Hoffman’s crying in recounting his Tootsie role epitomized this thread. These accounts paired Hoffman’s desire for deeper Dorothy preparations with his realizations about what it meant to be a woman.25 Hoffman has continued, decades after Tootsie, to shed tears as he recounts how the profundity of the Dorothy transformation changed his understanding of himself and women. The virtual synonymy of Hoffman’s and Dorsey’s approaches to acting and their reputations gave further credence to the likelihood that popular familiarity with the star’s image and with Method acting was widespread enough for the film to trade on that knowledge for significant plot elements. 160

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Hoffman was, after all, an established performer with an Academy Award for his previous role in Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979). He was also accompanied by rumors of being difficult on set for his idiosyncratic acting methods (including accounts of disturbing behavior toward Kramer costar Meryl Streep during filming); such notoriety lent credence to and was consequently reinforced by his apocryphal exchange with Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man several years earlier.26 Even as Hoffman admitted to Dworkin that he was not part of the Strasberg “cult,” the accumulated significance of acting within Hoffman’s star image suggested that the Michael Dorsey role represented the continuation of Hoffman’s methodness-rich reputation rather than served as the origin point for a “New York actor” type.27 The “New York actor” was instead more likely a euphemism for the preexisting archetype of the “Method actor” embodied by the likes of Brando, Dean, Hoffman, and others. In its continued mythologizing, popular culture propped up Tootsie and Hoffman at the expense of alternate renditions of Method acting in contemporaneous films, including Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982). Released just months before Tootsie, Come Back adapted the early 1982 play of the same name and featured Altman and the cast reprising their respective roles. The film alternates between the 1955 meetings of the Disciples of James Dean fan club in the fictional McCarthy, Texas, Woolworth’s store (near the production of the Dean starrer Giant) and the group’s reunion in the same locale twenty years later. The most fanatical among the Disciples group, Mona (Sandy Dennis) longs to purchase Giant’s Reata mansion so she, Joe (Mark Patton), and Sissy (Cher) can live there forever. Mona’s obsession with Giant and Dean leads to her becoming an extra in the film and to an alleged encounter with her idol in which she conceives a child she later names Jimmy Dean. Mona never recovers from the actor’s unexpected demise. Her delusions animate Come Back’s every conflict as she attempts time and again to impose her own interpretation of Dean on her fellow Disciples. What was for everyone else an indelible mark on their isolated lives that catalyzed the hopefulness and community of fandom has for Mona metastasized into a corrosive possessiveness that steadily unravels the Disciples’ relationships with Dean and each other. It alienates Mona from her closest friend, Joe (Mark Patton), who was the actual father of her baby and who returns in 1975, having transitioned to Joanne (Karen Black). Come Back represented Robert Altman’s own return to Dean, a subject he had mined more than two decades before in The James Dean Story. Where the latter attempted to exert interpretive authority from the top down by drawing on Warner Bros.’ sole domain over the star’s limited screen presence, Come 161

Imagining the Method

Figure 5.2. In Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Mona (Sandy Dennis) stares at the Woolworth’s Dean paraphernalia, symbolizing her intense affective bond with the star. Screen capture by the author.

Back approached Dean from the bottom up. In their isolated West Texas village of McCarthy, the Disciples are in no position to dictate their beloved star’s meaning to anyone but themselves. With their access restricted to studio films and industry-adjacent fan magazines, the Disciples rely heavily on their own interpersonal network for information. The arrival of Giant’s production in nearby Marfa promises to radically alter that relation, to plug the Disciples in to the culture industry and grant them unfettered access to their idol. Come Back’s mise-en-scène (fig. 5.2) manifests these outsider/insider dynamics. The Disciples use the Woolworth’s as their home base for fan club meetings and information sharing, treating the space as a repository for their accumulated Dean artifacts that festoon the baroque store. The film’s mirrored set, designed to allow for movement back and forth between the events of 1955 and 1975 without editing, turns the Woolworth’s into a palimpsest, carrying traces of the Disciples’ earlier lives into the group’s reunion and reckoning in that same space two decades later. These oftenoverlapping time jumps work to convey some connective tissue between the Disciples, yet the deterioration of those dynamics by 1975 and the group’s increasingly tenuous relation to Dean suggest an alternative form of methodness that is transitory rather than enduring. Come Back’s jarring end credits sequence continues this trend, transforming the once-vibrant community 162

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Figure 5.3. Underneath Come Back’s end credits, a scan of the now-dilapidated Woolworth’s presumably signals another twenty-year time jump (this time to 1995). In the now-abandoned store, the tattered remnants of its once-extensive Dean memorabilia make for a haunting postscript about the survival of the Disciples fan group and the remembrance of James Dean. Screen capture by the author.

space into a virtual graveyard. Jumping ahead presumably another twenty years to the same, now-abandoned Woolworth’s, the camera tours the hollowedout store where the once-abundant Dean memorabilia is either missing or in tatters. The only voice in the space belongs to the West Texas wind. Come Back articulated a tragic deterioration of hope and community, where exceptionalism had less to do with the Method and more to do with one fan’s efforts to impose her own self-serving interpretation of Dean to mitigate her own traumas and regrets. Keri Walsh argues that by troubling the memorialization of such an iconic Method actor, Come Back “queers genealogies of the Method [by] asking audiences to revisit, rethink, and rebuild them.”28 The choice of Dean as the gravitational center of this fan community across decades is particularly important, given the ways in which his ambiguity in life and death has continually lent itself to straight and queer crossover appeal.29 The film’s engagements with memory and fandom through Dean’s queer possibilities push against normative strictures of gender and sexuality to make space for trans* fantasies and fandom.30 The result, Sarah Sinwell argues, is a “feminine, 163

Imagining the Method elegant, and straightshooting” performance from Karen Black that parallels the “remembering and rewriting of queer histories” within a film that imagines trans* presence in the past.31 Despite, or perhaps because of, Come Back’s nonnormative meditations on Method, remembrance, gender, and queerness, its actors and performances drew little recognition compared to Hoffman in Tootsie. Black’s honest, complicated portrayal of gender and sexuality, Sinwell suggests, led to its critical and popular marginalization compared with Hoffman’s widely touted turn. Press accounts overlooked Black’s own (albeit brief) connection to Method acting in favor of syndicated tales about her independent stardom.32 Costar Cher was, alongside Black, the focus of the bulk of the film’s paratexts, yet her turn from music to the stage and screen, rather than her specific performance style, dominated press materials. In fact, neither Come Back’s narrative nor the promotional or reception discourse surrounding the film (or the Altman-directed play from which it was adapted) touted any cast member’s transformative preparations or on-set dedication to characters. The notable exception, the self-identified Method actor Sandy Dennis, lacked the contemporaneous paratextual praise afforded Tootsie’s methodness tropes. Writers refrained from identifying Dennis as a Method actor and instead bemoaned both her performance decisions and Altman’s persistent closeups on them. Although “neurotic” often signaled methodness’s ascribed exceptionalism of the performer’s elusive creative process, the term was used here dismissively to condemn Dennis’s purportedly reiterative acting. Her “notorious mannerisms,” as Newsweek’s Jack Kroll phrased it, amounted to little more than “an elaborate Sandy Dennis impression” set amid a cast of histrionic, “emotionally starved” characters. That these “pathetic failures,” according to another critic, allegedly suffered from “misplaced adulation” unironically promulgated the same strain of haughty rhetoric surrounding young women mourning the deaths of John Garfield and James Dean decades earlier.33 Such overwhelmingly negative reactions to Dennis’s turn as Mona fixated on her performance style, as if its very reiteration—her “notorious mannerisms”—made for a painful reminder of Dennis’s acting overall. Conversely, Tootsie’s reception drew on the purportedly Hoffman-esque features of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels to opposite effect, rationalizing a narrative made all the more prominent by widely circulated stories praising Hoffman’s noteworthy process during production.34 In other words, while Hoffman was repeatedly praised for playing a version of himself, Dennis was largely panned for doing the same. Walsh observes that “it was finally possible [in the 1970s] for female Method actors to inhabit the role that Pauline Kael had attributed to Marlon Brando in the 1950s—that of the ‘representative 164

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Figure 5.4. Discrepancies in publicity between Come Back and Tootsie, as illustrated in the December 13, 1982, Centre Daily Times (State College, PA), resulted in disparities in page space as well as details about the films. Courtesy of Newspapers.com.

type’ of their society, the one who ‘really strikes a nerve,’ and whose conflicts and concerns embodied widely shared political and social questions.”35 Reactions to Come Back did not afford such possibilities to Dennis; her typage appeared instead to further discredit her in the eyes of commentators across the film’s few paratexts. Come Back also lacked the promotional investment vital to the depth and breadth of its cultural footprint (fig. 5.4). The first film produced and distributed by newly formed Cinecom Pictures, Come Back did not possess the financial and logistical resources of larger studios to widen Come Back’s critical and popular recognition. Cinecom’s executive vice president Ira Deutchman promised prospective audiences an advertising campaign that “emphasize[d] Robert Altman and the three female stars” and a distribution strategy focused on the twenty largest US cities. Following relative success at the Venice, Montreal, and Chicago Film Festivals, however, just a handful of cities ultimately advertised or exhibited the film.36 Come Back’s press buildup was likewise meager compared to that for Tootsie and focused primarily on the short-lived stage play that shared the same director and principal cast as 165

Imagining the Method its screen adaptation, albeit with the latter production drawing more positive critical responses. Though more widely reviewed than the play, the film experienced only moderately more positive notices. There were even fewer mentions of Altman’s long-standing filmic ties to Dean, an oversight made even more perplexing given Altman’s renown and Dean’s enduring resonance. Come Back would go on to earn four nominations and a single win during awards season (the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo for Best Feature), while Tootsie garnered thirty nominations and twenty-five wins (including ten Academy Award nominations and one win). Come Back’s stage play folded after two months, and the film, while profitable, generated $840,000 at the box office, compared to Tootsie’s $177 million. Tootsie’s overwhelmingly positive reception, unqualified success, and accompanying exposure constituted a touchstone for the entrenched status and reverence/revulsion binarism of methodness. Tootsie’s paratexts provided the interpretive groundwork for understanding the film itself, presaging the latter by trading on such a binaristic understanding of Hoffman’s performance style to animate its crucial plot points. In many ways, Siskel’s assertion that the film is a comedy that made Hoffman cry captured this duality that both passed judgment on the purported extremes of methodness and praised such an ascribed performance style as uniquely effective. Tootsie predicated its comedic premise on a shared understanding of the “uncompromising” actor Dorsey and the lengths (played largely for laughs) to which he will go to find work and prove a point to his agent, his industry, and his audience. At the same time, the film validated Dorsey’s approach to acting—and by extension methodness—since he was so absorbed in the transformation that the subsequent performance made him a soap star, a convincing woman, and ultimately a better man. Siskel’s article worked alongside others to corroborate this last point by featuring a weeping Hoffman talking about how getting into the Dorothy character allowed him to access women’s subjectivity. By the 1980s, the philosophies and techniques often referred to as Method acting had lost their pride of place in the acting world. Challenged by an array of diverse performance styles, and constrained by the passing of the charismatic first-generation teachers (many of whom were former Group Theatre members), the Method could no longer command the kind of attention in education that it had over the prior thirty years.37 This trend did not extend to the interpretive landscape of the era, however, as methodness had already woven itself into the prevailing discourse regarding screen performance. Rather than signal Method acting’s dissipation or decline, then, Tootsie’s reliance on audience understandings of Method acting epitomized the embeddedness of methodness, its synonymy with quality via discourses of 166

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats transformation, dedication, and sacrifice, as well as its accepted (and, crucially, acceptable) potential for excess and transgression. In previous chapters, I have shown that many of these associations predated Tootsie and Hoffman, yet their pairing in the early 1980s epitomized the ensconced status of methodness. Its ascribed absurdism routinely served to legitimate its extremity, revealing an ambivalence that has remained decades later encrusted in the seeming contradictions of “Method” discourse. The next section considers the ongoing tensions in the context of the present, where compliments and condemnations alike have trafficked in a shared vocabulary—as was the case in Tootsie—contingent upon methodness and light on explicit Method mentions.

From Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Transformation, commitment, sacrifice, and other connotations of methodness have continued to proliferate in the discursive landscape surrounding screen performance in the four decades since Tootsie and Come Back. Robert De Niro’s much-cited sixty-pound weight gain for Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), Sylvester Stallone’s publicized fattening up for the prestige drama Copland (James Mangold, 1997), and Leonardo DiCaprio’s endurance of the “living hell” of production for The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015) are among many stories of drastic body alteration and intense suffering entangled with efforts (by studios, performers, the press, etc.) to legitimatize the actor, the performance, and the film.38 The trope of actorly metamorphosis has become common enough that some outlets have resorted to publishing annual lists of the “biggest actor transformations.”39 So too have accounts of “Method” absurdity rivaled that of Michael Dorsey’s illogical-tomato fiasco in Tootsie. Nicholas Cage’s “self-indulgent performance” in Vampire’s Kiss (Robert Bierman, 1988), for instance, “dominated and destroyed” the film, according to Caryn James’s 1989 New York Times review. Cage’s reported behavior on set, including his antagonism toward costar Jennifer Beals, and his acting choices (including eating a live cockroach) outshined the film and continue decades later to be characterized directly as Method and indirectly as emblematic of Cage’s inaccessible, idiosyncratic style—even as expressionistic “American gonzo” would be a more accurate characterization of his approach.40 Still more productions, such as The Hard Way (John Badham, 1991), Ellie Parker (Scott Coffey, 2005), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008), Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019), Holiday Date (Jeff Beesley, 2019), and others, have featured 167

Imagining the Method Method actor–described characters playing into the purported zealousness of Method adherents for comedic and dramatic effect. More references abound in broader media culture that rely on audience familiarity with methodness. Paula Schwartz’s 2005 New York Times article about the actor Jude Law’s infidelity toward his partner, Sienna Miller, titled “Art Imitates Life, or Maybe It’s Method Acting,” never referenced Method acting beyond its title. Schwartz instead attempted to play with shared understandings of the Method, sarcastically suggesting that Law’s infidelity was the result of his absorption into a playboy character for a role.41 Elsewhere, the insurance company GEICO’s 2022 NCAA March Madness advertisement featured a family of spectators marveling at Candace Parker intensely dribbling multiple basketballs on the court while dressed in a suit. “She’s a Method broadcaster,” the child sincerely informs the parents to clear up their confusion. Just two days later, the telecommunications company AT&T’s NCAA tournament advertisement featured the actor Rosario Dawson greeting an AT&T Store customer as if she were a spam call. “I was dramatizing,” Dawson informs the confused patron (seemingly acknowledging that she is portraying herself) before assuring him that “it’s Method. It’s what I do.”42 Alongside these trends has emerged a class of performers whose star images and screen performances are inextricably bound up in methodness’s binarism of extremes, a kind of “flashy disappearing act” calling attention to its inaccessibility.43 From Christian Bale’s touted body transformations for films such as The Machinist (Brad Anderson, 2004), Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007), The Fighter (David O. Russell, 2010), American Hustle (David O. Russell, 2013), Vice (Adam McKay, 2018), and Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold, 2019), to Daniel Day-Lewis’s and Jared Leto’s insistence on remaining in character at all times and Joaquin Phoenix’s mercurial self-presentation on-screen and off-, such performers’ supposed excessiveness and ascribed processes are prevailing now more than ever upon the popular vernacular for discussing, as well as valorizing and mocking, screen acting and actors.44 Though there are many examples worthy of consideration, these figures emblematize the reverence and revulsion typical of contemporary methodness and the anomalies that valorize the work of performers of color while limiting their access to the mantle of “Method actor.” Paul McDonald has argued that “suffering constitutes another product” of the all-encompassing commodification of stars that extends from their on-screen bodies to their personal travails, and which “belong to the public market as well.”45 Method acting’s reputation had long been particularly entangled with suffering, harkening back to its explosion in the popular 168

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats consciousness through 1950s avatars such as Brando, Dean, and Clift. Hollywood’s increasingly risk-averse turn through the 1970s and 1980s “evoked the Method’s behavioral extremes at the same time that it fetishized discipline.”46 Robert De Niro’s considerable weight gain for Raging Bull embodied this, as it dominated the film’s reception and bifurcated reactions into camps extolling or excoriating the actor’s physical transformation.47 Kevin Esch identifies this type of performance as “actorly transformation,” distinguishing it from other, long-established modes of acting involving changes in appearance, made famous by Paul Muni, Lon Chaney, and others. “Actorly transformation,” by contrast, entails the metamorphosis of the performer’s body not simply through prosthetics but rather “through concentrated, film-specific, selfimposed body alteration—especially weight gain or loss.” Such modification must also be motivated by “greater fidelity of performance, not merely screen idolatry and/or sexual appeal.”48 Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) garnered extensive buzz for his singular dedication to the role during production. His sudden death six months before the film’s theatrical release further endowed the interpretive landscape with a tangible example of suffering and transformation taken to their presumptive extremes. Out of Ledger’s tragic demise emerged methodness’s familiar narratives of commitment. Posthumous characterizations of his process for The Dark Knight often referenced Ledger’s November 2007 profile in the New York Times, where the affable but restless actor confided that “my body was exhausted, and my mind was still going,” in a role the feature’s writer described as “physically and mentally draining” because of both the nature of the character and Ledger’s dedication to the part.49 Adding to the account’s veracity, former Joker portrayer and ascribed Method actor Jack Nicholson purportedly responded to news of Ledger’s death with a cryptic statement that “I warned him,” paving the way for endless speculation that his caution was directly related to Ledger’s dangerous process.50 Writing shortly after the actor’s death, A. O. Scott of the New York Times opined that “Ledger’s work will outlast the frenzy” of such discourse.51 The salacious coverage of the circumstances surrounding Ledger’s death might have subsided, but the attention afforded his alleged commitment to the Joker role remained and, thanks to the power of methodness, blurred his screen work with the paratexts surrounding it. Warner Bros.’ Oscar campaign on Ledger’s behalf “walk[ed] the line between elegy and ghoulishness,” according to David Carr of the New York Times. “You don’t have to veer too far into semiotics,” Carr added, to notice the parallels between Ledger’s fate and the studio’s Oscar campaign advertisements of Joker driving a stolen police car with his head hanging out. Carr 169

Imagining the Method affirmed the actor’s supposed absorption into the role, adding, “That man [in the adverts] is on his way to a reckless, chaotic death.”52 The journalist also vouched for Ledger’s anti-commercialism and his inaccessibility, which proved particularly resonant because of his absence from the campaign on his behalf. Altogether, such discourse sanctioned the myth that Ledger’s transgressive devotion had both produced a peerless performance and exacted the heaviest imaginable toll. “Though widely acclaimed at the time,” recalled Jason Bailey in his October 2019 New York Times ranking of Joker screen performances, “Ledger’s performance seems to only expand in our popular imagination with the passing years.”53 Little more than a decade after Ledger’s posthumous Oscar win for the performance, Joaquin Phoenix’s turn as the eponymous unemployed clown and aspiring comedian turned murderer in Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019) was also regarded as an awards season front-runner. Despite the film’s polarized reception, Joker’s champions and detractors often concurred that Phoenix’s performance was the film’s most distinguishing feature.54 Methodness suffused such points of agreement among otherwise divergent readings, and as with previous iterations, the presuppositions underlying that discourse were rarely if ever interrogated. In Joker’s trailers and critics’ responses to the film, for example, Phoenix’s turn was framed to both emphasize his substantial weight loss and conflate the achievement of that emaciated state with great acting. Consciously or unconsciously, these same discourses entangled Phoenix’s received performance with methodness via connections among his perceived work in Joker and his other screen labor, other Jokers, and, by extension, the exclusive club of “Method” practitioners. The “alignment of Method acting to male celebrities not only confers prestige on the actor ‘becoming the role,’” Nina K. Martin has argued about previous Phoenix roles in I’m Still Here (Casey Affleck, 2010) and The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012); it also “excuses obsessive behavior by linking Method acting with genius.”55 Deepening his immersion in methodness, Phoenix avowedly disdained the industry trappings of screen acting and stardom, especially awards and their associated ballyhoo. Together with the links critics made between his roles, he was attributed greater authenticity and stoked perceptions that his screen work merited critical and industrial plaudits. Such behavior lent itself readily to what Paul McDonald calls “prestige stardom,” where stars seem to “gesture against the market” and display “economic disinterest” in the commercial imperatives of their films and their own fame. This type of renown “exemplifies the autonomous principle of artistic interest,” even as such figures remain a critical part of the overall economy of Hollywood stardom.56 170

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Even Phoenix’s much-maligned turn in the widely vilified I’m Still Here invited links between his perceived process and those in the “Method” pantheon. In response to the question of whether Phoenix’s performance was “some kind of method actor thing,” James Gray (who directed Phoenix in We Own the Night [2007] and The Immigrant [2013]) responded, “It’s entirely possible.” He continued, “I wouldn’t put it past him. . . . If it’s some kind of weird method exercise, that’s commitment. I’ll give him that. He reminds me a bit of Brando.”57 Joker’s April 3, 2019, teaser trailer, which was likely audiences’ first exposure to footage from the film, insisted that viewers focus on Phoenix’s gaunt body early and often. Ten seconds in, the camera follows the hunched lead, Arthur Fleck, whose slight frame, loose-fitting clothing, and sluggish gait intimated the character’s diminished physical, mental, and social status. Two shots of the topless Phoenix follow, revealing his attenuated state. The effect is heightened when, for the third time in forty seconds, Arthur’s exposed torso appears. Fleck’s voice-over (“Is it just me, or is it getting crazier out there?”) accompanies the camera’s slow, foreboding approach toward Phoenix’s bare back. Bones push the skin almost to its breaking point as Fleck strains to stretch his leather clown shoes, producing a sound of twisting flesh that could just as easily be emanating from his body. A later image of him dancing with arms stretched over his head (fig. 5.5) again accentuates his skeletal physique, while glimpses of action (primarily running) juxtapose his earlier sluggishness with a flailing freneticism that, though fully clothed, nevertheless showcases the angularity of Phoenix’s frame. The film’s August 2019 second (and final) trailer sustained this corporeal emphasis, rehashing the shoe-stretching scene from a different angle while retaining its fixation on Phoenix’s wrenching and audibly groaning flesh. Fleck stares into the kitchen sink as his protruding ribs catch the grim fluorescent light. Soon after, his sunken face reacts to the perceived treachery of the late-night television host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Later still, an again shirtless Fleck looks up from a hunched position, arms spread wide as if to call further attention to his wasted physique (fig. 5.6). As in its predecessor, the final trailer (released on the verge of the film’s triumphant debut at the Venice Film Festival) paired the stark visualizations of Phoenix’s bodily transformation with action shots that further emphasized how his skeletal state, even though clothed, manifested the character’s motion and psychology as he made his way through the “wasted spaces” of New York, reflecting decades of neoliberal rot for both Fleck and the city.58 From select screenings in Venice and Toronto to its wide release, critical discourse surrounding Joker echoed the trailers in devoting outsized attention 171

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Figure 5.5. In Joker’s second and final trailer, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) dances with arms stretched over his head, accentuating Phoenix’s skeletal physique. Screen capture by the author.

to Phoenix’s weight loss, connecting it to Fleck’s trauma and mental illness, and suggesting it was indicative of the commitment of the actor’s extraordinary performance style. Allusions to sacrifice, transformation, immersion, mutation, embodiment, commitment, and other superlatives underwrote otherwise negative assessments of Joker too, with the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips expressing the consensus opinion that Phoenix was “a virtuosic actor destroying his body” to hold together a film with otherwise fatal shortcomings.59 Such consistently exceptionalizing discourse led, perhaps unsurprisingly, to widespread speculation about Phoenix’s award-worthiness, distilled in the Deadline writer Pete Hammond’s declaration that “you might as well start engraving his name on the Oscar right now.”60 Phoenix would in fact go on to win the Academy Award, joining Ledger’s rendition of the Joker as the only two Oscar-winning portrayals of comic book characters and lending greater legitimacy to Phoenix’s critical reputation in tandem with, not in spite of, his unpredictability. Such superlatives about Phoenix’s acting existed alongside other paratexts that painted him as enigmatic, difficult, and idiosyncratic. Figuring prominently in Phoenix’s popular reception were Vanity Fair’s November 2019 profile of his mercurial behavior, his on-set meltdown captured and replayed 172

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Figure 5.6. In Joker’s second and final trailer, Fleck/Phoenix looks up from a pose reminiscent of other similarly unnatural postures that figured prominently in the film and its paratexts. Screen capture by the author.

during the film’s press tour (including during his October 2019 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!), and the air of overall intensity surrounding him and his ascribed acting style. A September 2019 New York Times profile linked Phoenix’s specific turn as Fleck/Joker to the actor’s earlier performances and his overall star image, as well as those of other actors explicitly and implicitly identified as Method practitioners. Methodness entangled Phoenix’s sacrificial weight loss and his intensity, absorption, and inscrutability with the long-entrenched popular reception of Method acting that selectively conferred award-worthy prestige. Comparisons with Heath Ledger were unsurprising, not simply because they had portrayed the same character but because both performances were underwritten by the same interpretive framework. Ledger’s hyperintensive absorption in his version of the Joker, which prompted rampant speculation that Method acting might have killed him, bore resemblance to characterizations of Phoenix’s comparatively muted ferocity manifested by his radically altered body.61 While Ledger’s turn as the crown prince of crime was met with almost universal praise, and Phoenix’s portrayal earned positive reviews in addition to some backlash against him and his process, Jared Leto’s performance as the Joker in Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016) was widely derided. Such discourse exemplified methodness as well, situating Leto’s transformation alongside the supposed excesses and self-importance of Method actors and acting that have been lampooned for decades. Leto had undergone noted bodily 173

Imagining the Method transformations for earlier films, particularly his reported twenty-five-pound weight loss and living on the street to play a drug addict in Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) and his reported sixty-pound, gout-inducing weight gain to portray John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman, in Chapter 27 (J. P. Schaefer, 2007). Deemed “full Method” or fully immersive, Leto’s process had become part of his star image prior to his most celebrated turn as the trans woman Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2013).62 With Leto’s weight loss for the role and his insistence on remaining in character throughout the production, Dallas Buyers Club was often framed as a continuation of the actor’s “exercise in total immersion.”63 Jean-Marc Vallée gave credence to such reportedly extraordinary commitment, telling the press that Leto arrived to the production in character and remained so throughout: “I don’t know Leto. . . . Jared never showed me Jared.”64 Leto’s Oscar win for Best Supporting Actor followed a long, dubious trend of industrial and critical celebrations of cisgender, heterosexual white men playing LGBTQ+ characters, including Academy-recognized portrayals of trans women in films such as Kiss of the Spider Woman (Héctor Babenco, 1985) and The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper, 2015). The award nevertheless lent the Academy’s imprimatur of prestige to Leto’s much-publicized process. Leto’s high-profile turn as the Joker in Suicide Squad illustrated that, like earlier roles, his reportedly extreme acting style often loomed larger in popular discourse than the screen performance that ultimately resulted. Well before the film’s release, stories circulated about Leto remaining in character and, as the Joker, sending obscene gifts to his costars. In a February 2016 interview with Vanity Fair roughly six months before Suicide Squad’s release, costar Viola Davis characterized Leto’s extreme character immersion much as Vallée had years earlier. Leto “had a henchman ‘come’ in [to the rehearsal room] with a dead pig and plopped it on the table,” Davis recalled, and “that was our introduction into Jared Leto.” The behavior had Davis wondering about his sanity but not questioning his commitment.65 In addition to other gifts, such as a live rat, bullets, used condoms, and anal beads, Leto’s “method giftgiving” entailed a video that, according to costar Adam Beach, demonstrated his commitment to the Joker character. “We realized that day,” said Beach, “this is real.”66 Like Vallée, costar Will Smith testified that Leto’s extreme commitment and immersion in the role was so complete that “I literally have not met him yet. . . . He was all in on the Joker.”67 The extent of the prerelease publicity around Leto’s extraordinary degree of commitment played easily into caricatures of the pretentious actor along the lines of Michael Dorsey decades earlier. The Joker’s drastically reduced role in the theatrical version of Suicide Squad invited further scrutiny of the imbalance between the actor’s 174

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats widely publicized process and his minute amount of screen time, heightening the backlash to the kind of acting Leto was said to practice. Similar stories of Leto’s extraordinary immersion circulated around contemporaneous productions, maintaining the focus on his process. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) director Denis Villeneuve acknowledged his own familiarity with the tales of Leto’s extreme commitment, telling the Wall Street Journal’s Josh Eells in the lead-up to the film’s release that “we all heard stories about Jared, how he transforms into the characters. . . . But even this didn’t prepare me for what was to come.” What was to come, Eells informed readers, was a transcendent experience exceeding even the director’s expectation of Leto’s Method-style devotion, but one consistent with earlier immersive preparations, such as the actor’s time spent “[hanging] out with homeless junkies in Manhattan’s East Village to portray a heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream.” Villeneuve elaborated on his specific experience in Blade Runner 2049, detailing how Leto utilized custom opaque contact lenses throughout the production to inhabit his character’s blindness. “Everyone was in awe,” the director added in describing Leto’s dedication to his role. “It was so beautiful and powerful—I was moved to tears. And that was just a camera test!”68 As with other productions, the decision to remain in character throughout distanced the actor from the rest of the cast, in this instance because Leto reportedly never glimpsed his costars. Reiterating the extremity of it all, Villeneuve told Eells, “That, for me, was insane .  .  . but he really created something.”69 An interview with another Leto collaborator, Morbius (2022) director Daniel Espinosa, shortly after that film’s release confirmed yet another rumored case of extreme character immersion. Committed to his character Michael Morbius’s mobility challenges, Leto insisted on continuing to use crutches during restroom breaks. The resulting production delays led to a deal between the actor and the production team to expedite him to and from the restroom facilities in a wheelchair.70 Leto himself expressed appreciation for his Method label but observed that “it’s a little cloudy, the definition. And it . . . could also be really pretentious as well.”71 Regardless of Leto’s own pronouncements on the topic, the prevailing discourse around him has remained deeply invested in methodness both for the occasional plaudits and a significant amount of ridicule for the purported absurdities of his process. Leto’s own participation in parodying this association did little to alter the swirl of methodness around him. In the promotional run-up to House of Gucci (Ridley Scott, 2021), he told Vice’s Douglas Greenwood that his “deep dive” into the character of Paolo Gucci involved “snorting lines of arrabbiata sauce,” having “olive oil for blood,” and developing parmesan cheese for skin.72 Clearly intended as a facetious 175

Imagining the Method description playing on his reputation for extreme preparations, Leto’s absurdist comments were nevertheless taken up and recirculated as likely sarcasm that (given his reputation) rang closer to truth for him than it would have for others. Unlike contemporaries Daniel Day-Lewis and Jeremy Strong, who practice but do not claim Method acting, Leto’s willingness to embrace the label has affected “the reputation of Method actors.”73 Given the depth and breadth of discourse surrounding Leto’s process, which routinely outstrips popular discussion of his actual screen performances, it is difficult to imagine that he could effectively intervene in the prevailing reception that persistently attaches the contradictions of methodness to him. The Daily Beast’s Kendall Cunningham illustrated how this through line has transcended any singular performer but has linked several together into a historical narrative in the popular imagination. Leto, Cunningham writes, “has become widely known as one of Hollywood’s top method-acting nightmares, rivaling maybe only Dustin Hoffman.”74

Scarring the Gilded Purity James English argues that the Academy Awards have been central to the vast expansion of the prestige economy in American culture. “The desire to be regarded as an ‘equivalent to the Oscar,’ which today is an integral part of the promotional rhetoric for hundreds of prizes,” notes English, “did not really become visible until the early 1970s.75 The marquee status of the Academy Awards has only seemingly heightened the stakes of securing an Oscar, which has contributed to the steady extension of the awards campaign season. Year after year, indefatigable industry lobbying joins individual film promotion, the omnipresent publicity apparatus of Hollywood’s star system, and an ever-expanding chattering class of legacy and new-media commentators to form a self-perpetuating swell of Oscar-related discourse. Conscientious as many have become about the industry politics that often inform Academy votes, the prominence of performers and performances in these campaigns, as well as the terms and assumptions that scaffold those debates, have continually evaded scrutiny. Foregrounding the prominence of methodness in these actor and acting discourses sheds light on the endemic gendered and racialized predilections among industry, critical, and popular sources, complicating conversations around the industry’s enduring lack of diversity by exposing the ingrained logics underpinning the uneven field of interpretation for nonwhite male and female performers, queer performers, and performers with disabilities. 176

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats Such an intervention would, for example, call much-needed attention to the illusory exceptionalism surrounding transformation in women’s screen performances. Routinely framed as “getting ugly,” glamorous turns into the unglamorous are not new to post–twentieth-century acting but have taken on increased visibility as well as critical and industrial recognition over the last two decades. “Look at a list of recent winners of the Academy Award for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, and you’ll [see] some commonalities,” Sarah Marshall wrote for the New Republic in 2015. Marshall noted that “within the past 15 years, Hilary Swank, Anne Hathaway, Melissa Leo, Marion Cotillard, Helen Mirren, and Meryl Streep have all taken home gold statuettes for roles that not only stripped them of their Hollywood trappings, but also rendered them almost unrecognizable: wreathing her in a rime of sweat and grime, submerging her slender frame in fat, or making her look, simply, like someone else.”76 In part this reflects aspirations toward prestige status conferred by the perception of artistic rather than financial motives, with the performer laboring to transform her body into unexceptional form to suit the project rather than adhere to strict bodily surveillance to maintain her attractiveness. Viewing commentary like Marshall’s as predicated on methodness also enables one to see this “dramatic make-under trend,” as Vanity Fair’s Joanna Robinson once put it, as an effort to enter the hallowed halls of the exceptional Method-associated transformations of male actors such as Day-Lewis, Bale, Ledger, Phoenix, and even Leto.77 Robinson’s inversion of the popular expression “makeover” was an apt encapsulation of the bodily transformation of select women performers departing from industry expectations of gendered bodily maintenance and surveillance. Used specifically in the context of Jennifer Aniston’s gritty turn in Cake (Daniel Barnz, 2014), where she “eschew[ed] makeup for prosthetic scars, a back brace, and a serious chip on her shoulder,” the visible “makeunder” transformation led critics such as Deadline’s Pete Hammond to conjecture that the film could earn her the same Academy recognition that the other conventionally beautiful screen stars Charlize Theron and Halle Barry had garnered for Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and Monster’s Ball (Marc Forster, 2001), respectively.78 Aniston’s specific role failed to generate an Oscar nomination, yet it elicited numerous responses calling attention to the phenomenon of “going ugly.”79 A “particularly irritating trend,” as the Daily Dot’s EJ Dickson put it, the make-under has often been characterized as a cynical ploy to exploit Academy members’ penchant for dramatic and downbeat Oscar bait.80 Men had been transforming their bodies for specific film roles well before Aniston in Cake, yet Charlize Theron was frequently identified as the “trend’s epicenter” because of the extent of her deglamorization for Monster 177

Imagining the Method and her Oscar win for portraying Aileen Wuornos.81 “When it came to undercutting her glam loveliness for the sake of a meaty role,” wrote one critic, “Charlize Theron is the champ of champs.”82 Together with Nicole Kidman, whose turn in prosthetics as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002) also earned her an Academy Award and whose ascribed deglamorization for Destroyer (Karyn Kusama, 2018) left her “unrecognizable,” according to multiple commentators, the two remain decades later the epitomes of these actorly transformations as well as the limits under the prevailing gendered logic of methodness.83 Method acting rarely figures explicitly into “getting ugly” and “makeunder” discourse, even as methodness influences these transformation narratives and underwrites the limits of their exceptionalism. Writing about Theron’s and Hilary Swank’s Oscar-winning performances in Monster and Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999), respectively, Megan Carrigy asserts that “Theron’s weight gain and elaborate latex makeup in Monster placed her performance at the top of surveys suggesting that difficult and unflattering physical transformations give actors an ‘edge’ in the Oscars race.” The promotion for both films connected the actors’ transformations to physical work and, crucially, to empathy for these characters rooted in their own biographical suffering.84 Carrigy notes that “by emphasizing the similarities between Theron’s and Swank’s personal experiences” and the histories of the real-life figures they portrayed, “the publicity for Monster and Boys Don’t Cry implied that the actors had the capacity to connect with and be touched emotionally by the lives of their subjects.”85 Such implied biographical links were critical to both the authenticity that the paratextual narratives afforded their performances and the veracity claimed by the films and their producers.86 Whereas the truthfulness of Theron’s turn in Monster was often said to be rooted in her own biographical trauma, her reception nearly two decades later for Tully (Jason Reitman, 2018) remained firmly anchored in her transformation for Monster. Theron’s April 17, 2018, Tully press junket focused largely on linking her fifty-pound weight gain for the role with the actor’s consequent depression. Even as some accounts acknowledged that she was “a dedicated actress,” Theron’s weight gain and subsequent loss dominated the conversation. “I wanted to feel what this woman felt, and I think that [gaining weight] was a way for me to get closer to her and get into that mindset,” she told Entertainment Tonight’s Kevin Frazer in what amounted to the most direct, albeit still limited, attention to Theron’s acting process.87 Process of another sort prevailed upon the junket and dominated the discourse around the film. This narrative detailed Theron’s initial pleasure with undisciplined eating, the dawning realization that her diet of processed and sugary foods was affecting 178

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats her mood, her ultimate discovery that her altered diet had brought about depression, and the ultimate “hell” of shedding the weight in the year and a half following completion of the film.88 Rather than focus on the weight gain as a commitment to the character or a show of extraordinary preparation for the role (as often happened for Theron’s white male peers), this strain of critical reception focused on the actor’s deviation from and subsequent return to her ideal body. It linked Theron’s depression not to the psychological process of inhabiting her character but rather to the ingestion of processed foods. People placed the article in its “health” section, further lending to the psychologization of Theron rather than her character, rendering the actor accessible and at the same time depriving audiences of an awareness of the performer’s labor-intensive craft on par with her male peers. The food narrative actively shaped Margy Rochlin’s line of questioning in an interview with Theron for the Los Angeles Times seven months later. Rochlin followed her observation of Theron’s weight gain with two questions that highlighted the absence of acting process from these conversations. Rather than inquire about Theron’s methodology for approaching her character’s body type, Rochlin instead asked if she had considered wearing a padded suit instead of gaining weight. Rochlin followed up by asking if Theron had ever “stepped on a scale and seen that number.” Theron answered, “No,” but the conversation proceeded to focus on the results rather than the acting choices behind them. Yet the opportunity to delve into the actor’s performance choices was tantalizingly close; recalling her conversation with Tully director Jason Reitman, Theron told Rochlin that Reitman “did say jokingly, ‘Well, you know what you have to do,’ and I said, [resigned] ‘I know, I know.’”89 What that “doing” entailed was never fleshed out. Tully’s paratexts varied slightly in how they situated Theron and her performance. Released four months ahead of its theatrical bow, the film’s ninety-second teaser trailer largely eschews dialogue for a montage of pastoral suburban motherhood flipped on its head. Out-of-focus and cropped framings yield only partial glimpses of what will eventually be revealed to be Marlo’s (Theron’s) body as she silently and single-handedly carries out the exhausting day-to-day drudgery of childcare. For nearly a minute the trailer withholds a full shot of Theron, finally revealing her pumping breast milk and propped up in bed in such a way as to accentuate her heavier upper body (fig. 5.7). Subsequent shots offer a glimpse of Marlo in further states of exhausted immobility, huddled with her two eldest children under a tent fort and passed out on the couch as the children play behind her. It is only at the end of the teaser that Theron speaks, and she can only muster a sigh as she sits at the dining table after having served her children. Indeed, the only spoken words 179

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Figure 5.7. The first full-body shot of Marlo in Tully compresses Charlize Theron’s upper body as if to accentuate its size. Screen capture by the author.

in this moment belong to her otherwise absent husband, Drew (Ron Livingston), who arouses Marlo’s wearied stare by affably welcoming the premade pizza she’s just taken out of the oven. Seated at the dinner table with her larger body fully visible, Theron presents overall body language that would be paralleled in the second trailer with yet another (albeit shirtless) scene presented as the nadir of Marlo’s exasperation. Released two months later, Tully’s full (and final) trailer delved further into Marlo’s/Theron’s plight. The teaser trailer’s familiar parenting grind quickly gives way to more of the toll motherhood is taking on Marlo. Exhaustion, a genial but disengaged husband, spilled breast milk: despite her compounding hardships, an overwhelmed Marlo refuses an offer from her brother Craig (Mark Duplass) to pay for a night nanny. Matters quickly reach a crescendo when Marlo’s son Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica) knocks over a glass at dinner and spills liquid all over his visibly beleaguered mother. Her demeanor remains unchanged; she simply peels off her shirt and sits at the table in her bra with her postpartum belly in full view above the table (fig. 5.8). Further calling attention to Theron’s physique, Marlo’s daughter Sarah (Lia Frankland) asks incredulously, “Mom, what’s wrong with your body?” Marlo’s brief but wearied stare in response to her daughter’s inquiry showcases Theron’s lack of conventional beautifying makeup and closely resembles the corresponding moment in the teaser trailer. As with the teaser, the discontented dinner gives way to the introduction of the night nanny, Tully (Mackenzie Davis), and 180

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Figure 5.8. An exhausted Marlo (Theron) removes her filthy shirt in Tully, drawing stares and incredulity from her children. Screen capture by the author.

ushers in voice-overs and dialogue between Marlo and Tully outlining the terms of Marlo’s internal depletion, which viewers have already seen externally displayed in the trailers’ formal emphasis on Theron’s body. Tully’s final words to Marlo, “You can’t fix the parts without treating the whole,” encapsulate the trailer’s efforts to expand on the Marlo/Tully relationship that drives the plot. As encapsulations of Theron’s physical transformation, these dinner scenes figured prominently in Tully’s reviews as well. For Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, Marlo’s shirtless scene in particular constituted “an ironic glance at Theron, who, as proven by her Oscar-winning turn, in Monster, sometimes uses her screen appearances to scar the gilded purity of her modeling image.”90 Some reviews bypassed Theron’s weight gain or called attention to the contrived nature of deglamorizing, applauding Theron’s performance and observing the cliché that routinely underwrites “praise for actors, especially female actors, for their alleged lack of vanity” in roughing up their appearance for a role.91 Richard Lawson’s Vanity Fair review was emblematic of such a strain, making it an exception that differentiated Theron from pretentious performers whose over-the-top antics screamed rather than represented “acting.” Lawson observed, “Playing all that exhaustion and discomfort (and then invigoration), Theron is terrific. . . . Though much hay has been made about Theron’s physical transformation, there’s no actorly grandstanding going on in Tully.”92 181

Imagining the Method Winding through the critics’ reactions was a thread insisting that Theron’s transformation stood apart in its sincerity from a calculated vogue—implied to exist primarily among women performers—of deglamourization, getting ugly, and letting oneself go to earn critical acclaim.93 Reviews such as Lawson’s were indicative of Theron’s overwhelmingly positive reception, which often tied praise to her distinction from other performers. These included the banal women actors who reportedly underwent deglamourizing out of cynical calculation, as well as the overly self-serious performers (those “grandstanding,” in Lawson’s words) whose processes attracted derision and revulsion for routinely outshining their performances and alienating their coworkers. These latter actors bore the hallmarks of methodness in the guise of the reviled “bad” Method actor like Jared Leto, whose transformations were perceived to be self-indulgent and even obstructionist rather than integral to a story or role. Theron’s received exceptionalism relied significantly on her purported distinction from these groups (non-Method actors and “bad” Method actors), as such boundaries have been informed by methodness. At the same time, methodness also marked the limits of Theron’s exceptionalism. Despite transformative roles and critical and industrial plaudits, she was not widely regarded as a Method actor. The answer as to why also serves to explain how the logic of methodness entangles exceptionalism and exclusion in historical as well as contemporary narratives of Method acting.

“I Can’t Do Method Acting” In a 2018 interview with the Guardian, the Tony- and Emmy-nominated actor Brian Tyree Henry spoke to the experience of being a black male stage and screen performer and “constantly walking into reset buttons” of white ignorance regarding his acting expertise and experience.94 When asked by the journalist Touré if he was a Method actor, Henry laughed and replied, “I’m black. . . . I can’t be method.” Henry’s response, and its adaptation for the eye-catching headline “I’m Black, I Can’t Do Method Acting,” spoke not to a question of his capabilities but rather to the disparate sociocultural affordances for performers of color and their white male colleagues on set. “If I was method I’d get fired,” Henry continued. “If I walked into [the set of the television series Atlanta] with a real gun, selling drugs, they would fire my ass.”95 A shared understanding of methodness allowed the rest to go unsaid, particularly that such behavior from white male actors has not only been allowed but has often been critically and industrially rewarded. This is not for a lack of attention to instances of able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative 182

Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats male “Method” appropriations of disability and queerness, or characterizations of “Method” acting as a cover for unprofessional, antisocial, and sometimes violent behavior.96 The Moscow Art Theatre–trained actor Jon Bernthal captured the essence of such criticism in an April 2022 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, where he accused actors of abusing the Method, misunderstanding Stanislavsky, and not benefitting the craft.97 Rather than demystify Method acting, however, such objections have inadvertently reaffirmed methodness’s entrenched, mutually constitutive logic of reverence and revulsion that informed Tootsie’s plot decades earlier and has long animated the popular reception of Method acting. Critiques of aberrant behavior find ready avatars in fictional characters such as Michael Dorsey and real performers such as Jared Leto and Jeremy Strong, whose reported methods have elicited no shortage of disbelief and disapproval. Yet these periodic controversies have not sparked a reevaluation or disruption of the underlying logic of methodness that continues to underwrite how we talk about performance. On the contrary, methodness often imbues the actor with a degree of authenticity that short-circuits accountability. Rachel Dubrofsky has argued that authenticity can be made to undercut critiques of bad behavior—and insulate whiteness from liability—by locating the source of the transgression inside the subject, where it cannot be controlled, or by outwardly embracing the transgression as a barometer of one’s honesty in self-presentation.98 Though methodness operates by withholding the purported interiority of the performer from the public, the actor’s ascribed exceptionality carries with it the inference that what does emerge in the actor’s behavior comes from that elusive, authentic interiority. In other words, the actor’s genius under methodness is said to originate from an elusive and exclusive space, and while audiences may not be able to access that knowledge, they will witness its aftereffects, regardless of whether those outcomes are indelible performances or acts of deviant set behavior. Moreover, by lending credence to the notion of the “bad” or “rogue” Method actor, the prevailing discourse shores up the mutually constitutive binaristic thinking that predicates reviled aspects of the dangerous performer and performance on an inversely idealized opposite. This framework has long been part of the interpretive landscape in which methodness cohered. Now, more than ever, these poles of revulsion and reverence have become the primary points of orientation for popular conversations about actors and acting, which, thanks to the Academy Awards and the advent of internet-based media platforms, have dramatically expanded the discourse without questioning its shared assumptions or vocabulary.99 The result means that despite incremental improvements in Hollywood’s systemic lack of diversity, methodness continues to police the boundaries 183

Imagining the Method of exceptionalism, allowing for slightly more expansive uses of hyperrealist rhetoric, especially that of “transformation,” without compromising the gendered and racialized logics of its overall exclusivity.100 Charlize Theron’s exceptionalism, for example, still forecloses her Method label in part by situating her distinction in relation to other women and her performances as temporary deviations from glamour rather than inaccessible feats of sacrifice for her craft. Methodness further undercuts Theron’s exceptionalism in the way her transformative performances are framed as proximate to her biography and subjectivity. As Megan Carrigy illustrates, the discourse surrounding Theron’s Oscar-winning turn in Monster (often cited in Tully reception) relied heavily on the purported links between the performer’s subjectivity, especially her traumatic past, and the character she portrayed. While this could lead to conversations about the actor employing affective memory to tap into those experiences for the characterization, Theron was instead implied to have less work to do to reach that place, given her preexisting proximity to the demanding features of the role. By contrast, the discourse surrounding Tootsie situated Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-nominated and explicitly Method transformation in his character’s professional grudge, yet the revulsion once afforded the actor Michael Dorsey melted away as he came to inhabit Dorothy Michaels’s marginalized subject position and (as Hoffman himself would reiterate for decades after the film) became a better man by becoming a woman. This book has shown how methodness was born out of and nurtured by an exclusionary history of exceptionality that has repeatedly been silent on both the screen labor of nonwhite male practitioners as well as the involvement of women and people of color in the classrooms and organizations emerging as part of the Method’s and methodness’s genealogical expanse. Rather than disappear in recent decades, methodness has become entrenched within the taken-for-granted discourses of performance suffusing screen promotion, critical and popular reception, and industry rhetoric, underwriting white male performers’ privilege by giving outsized attention (be it praise or protest) for their distance from the margins. Such distance provides the pretext for the purported transformation, immersion, and commitment required of the actor to achieve a rarefied Zen-like state of truth. It is a mobility afforded white male actors to momentarily embody marginality, to suffer, and to be celebrated for the purported work it took to get there. The logic of methodness conversely presumes that marginality is baked into the subjectivities of women and people of color, foreclosing praise for performances presumed to have some proximity to who they are and what they have experienced. In other words, methodness invests the paratexts so crucial to our popular

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Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats understandings of performance with disproportionate praise for what Jack Halberstam calls “men behaving sadly,” which simultaneously lionizes the privileged position from which they act while purposefully avoiding scrutiny of their processes or the exclusionary narratives of “Method” acting that they uphold.101

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Facing a Future Methodness

Revising the Oft-Played Script Press and commentator reactions to Marlon Brando’s July 2004 death would likely not surprise readers of this book. Characterizing Brando as the most significant screen performer of his era (and arguably the twentieth century), the New York Times “rehearse[d] an already oft-played script” of his prevailing reception rather than using the occasion to reassess his biography and the mythology that had ossified around it.1 Brando’s ascribed exceptionality rang through the Times obituary and many others, contrasting a later career of confounding behavior and unrealized potential with his revolutionary early years and his immutable identification with the Method.2 These accounts outlined the contradictions attending his reception, yet they relied upon wellworn questions and reached familiar conclusions that corroborated rather than reevaluated the dominant reception of Brando and Method acting. Indeed, they often reiterated Brando’s links to Method acting, which he had spent decades repudiating, and sidelined Stella Adler, the teacher and mentor he had repeatedly touted for his modern performance style. Just a few years earlier, Stella’s daughter Ellen Adler had questioned the continued conflation of Brando, Strasberg, the Actors Studio, and the Method as presented in a New York Times article by the theater critic Mel Gussow.3 Beyond Gussow’s erroneous claims about Brando’s tutelage and the consequent erasure of her mother’s labor and expertise, Ellen wondered aloud “why this myth persists decade after decade despite anything Brando or anybody else has said.”4 To unpack this persistent myth, this book has argued for a fundamental shift in how we inquire into the meaning of Method actors and acting. 187

Conclusion Scholarly interventions over the last quarter century have sought to complicate monolithic readings of “Method” acting through text-based film analyses of performer agency and studies of the complex philosophical and technical genealogies misleadingly collapsed under the singular term in question. Taken together, these vitally important projects make clear that there is more than one Method and that there exist sizable gaps between philosophical texts and techniques, classrooms, films, and critical and popular interpretations. This book looks past the long-standing question and the interminable debates about what Method acting is to explore what Method acting does as a negotiated body of values and practices circulating through circuits and spaces of the interpretive landscape, and affixed to or withheld from particular figures, institutions, and movements. These coalesced meanings—what I have termed “methodness”—feature characteristics (e.g., inscrutability, transformation, and rebelliousness) that have come to be distinct from formal (or institutional) acting philosophies and practices. Methodness has come to stand in for explicit references to Method actors and acting, and (via paratexts) its features have seeped into the popular imagination and informed readings of performances and performers. Though the terms “Method acting” and “Method actor” are rarely invoked today, the particular strain of methodness examined here has prevailed upon popular discourse for decades and has become the lingua franca for discussing screen performance. This book’s intervention calls for renewed scrutiny of the historical forces and ideological currents that produced discourses about actors and acting, their evolution through the past and present, and underlying racial and gender hierarchies mobilized through the entrenched yet indirect language of methodness. Altering this core question opens up epistemological frameworks and new forms of evidence, yielding alternative histories to the long-ingrained narrative of the Method and its practitioners. It provokes us to shift where we look for the meaning of acting; accordingly, this book homes in on the construction of performance style in the paratextual, discursive terrain surrounding motion pictures and suffusing film culture. Looking for screen acting beyond the screen suggests, in part, that “the Method” has no singular history or meaning but has witnessed a prevailing set of characteristics coalesce around certain “Method” figures, institutions, and values. Brando’s death and other touchstone moments have illustrated that Method acting as well as key figures such as Lee Strasberg and institutions such as the Actors Studio retain their purchase on popular understandings of acting via a history that often resembles hagiography. This book largely sidelines prominent Method fixtures such as Strasberg and the Actors Studio to focus instead on others—some obvious and some surprising—involved in molding the 188

Conclusion popular reception of Method acting and actors. As a construct, methodness expresses that these discourses, as well as the values and identities sutured to them, are connected to yet distinct from the techniques and philosophies encapsulated in actual practices of Method and Modern performance. This book has explored emblematic moments in the coalescence of methodness to foreground negotiations of Method meaning and underline historical contexts and uneven social relations that have narrowed understandings of this performance style to a mutable set of characteristics applied to some and withheld from others. Methodness has both antagonized and been celebrated by the Hollywood film industry and by agents of popular culture. It is often anti-commercial yet commercially viable. It is supposedly marginalized but vital to underwriting white male exceptionality. Methodness has relied upon vague and inaccessible skills ostensibly rooted in the performer’s interiority, effectively linking its exclusivity with that which made it superior. Early twentieth-century reformists, looking to fashion legitimate American theater forms, embraced a primordial version of methodness as well as its translator, Richard Boleslavsky. The Polish émigré’s alien status was mitigated by his ascribed knowledge at the expense of his overlooked fellow Stanislavskian pedagogue Maria Ouspenskaya. Methodness was also swept up in the ideological currents of the Group Theatre’s rural retreats. It not only buttressed Lee Strasberg’s and Harold Clurman’s respective authoritative claims on the organization’s private form and public function but also merged with white-male-centric notions of nature-based rejuvenation to strengthen its exceptional status. Method acting surfaced under these conditions, highlighted by Strasberg’s 1934 conjuring of the “method” descriptor to parry Stella Adler’s challenge to his presumed authority of Stanislavskian acting and the power such knowledge conferred within the Group. The move was emblematic of the regressive conjunctures of race, gender, knowledge, and power that underwrote methodness and permeated the Group’s hierarchal structure and popular reception. This prevailing construction of methodness carried over into US film culture in sometimes unexpected ways. Avowedly non-Method figures such as the “reactor” John Wayne tacitly shored up the cultural legitimacy of methodness as much as a decade before Hollywood’s explicit postwar celebration of Method and Method-adjacent actors. The remarkable similarities between methodness and the qualities of the “actor” foil against which Wayne staked his own mode of performative labor primed audiences to make sense of new screen figures such as Marlon Brando through notions of anticommercialism, inscrutability, and exclusivity. This actor/reactor binarism further conflated methodness and marginality, imbuing Method acting’s most 189

Conclusion prominent men with outsider status even as they modeled an alternative, but nevertheless exceptionalist, white masculinity. That same logic simultaneously precluded the overtly progressive and Jewish performer John Garfield from being received as a Method actor during his career, even though he preceded Brando and others, often portrayed the archetypal rebel, and was vocal about his Group Theatre training and anti-commercial, proletarian ethos. Garfield’s reclamation as the prototypical Method-acting rebel two decades after his 1952 death spoke volumes about the shifting interpretive landscape for methodness in the 1970s, which, like the white ethnic revival in which methodness became firmly embedded, reclaimed white ethnic distinction as a reactionary effort to sidestep civil rights–era indictments of whiteness through revisionist social and cultural histories. Whereas Garfield’s death invited outcries of mourning but silence regarding his methodness, the aftermath of James Dean’s death three years later saw methodness mobilized immediately to cohere a community of like-minded individuals and to spur a highly politicized campaign to memorialize their idol, “Jimmy.” Though Jimmy’s reception relied largely on his connections to Brando, Elia Kazan, and the Actors Studio, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and many of her letter-writing audience members intensified perceptions of the star’s exceptionality in their posthumous readings and transformed his outsider status into victimization at the hands of Hollywood’s forces of cultural degeneracy. This reception read the actor’s rebellion as undertaken against so-called liberal establishments such as Hollywood, whose purported anti-traditionalism had spurred (according to Hopper and her epistolary community) Dean’s repeated acts of defiance. His escalating rebellion and consequent death confirmed for the gossipist and many in her audience both Dean’s heteronormative desire for a nuclear family and the urgency with which they needed to concretize their interpretation of Jimmy and his performance style. In this way, some audiences and a powerful figure in America’s midcentury discursive landscape sought to appropriate methodness and to instrumentalize “Method” actors such as Dean as resonant symbols of white male victimhood and the heteropatriarchal status quo. The mode of methodness under study in this book has in the decades since Dean’s death become so firmly entrenched and popularly propagated that it often precludes any need for explicit references to Method. Its ubiquity is such that many moviegoers, from professional critics to casual fans, traffic in its terms and assumptions without much thought. These discourse communities thus bear responsibility for the spilling over of methodness into other contexts. Engaging in such discourse, however, remains distinct from embodying this mode of methodness. In fact, broad participation in the 190

Conclusion circulation and enculturation of methodness does not lead to broader participation in “Method” but rather reproduces its elusiveness and exceptionality, thereby foreclosing claims to it and embodiments of it to all but a few. It is for these same reasons that methodness enhances the exceptional dimensions of celebrity for select performers by lending them the invaluable exceptionalizing feature of inscrutability. It helps to distinguish some celebrities from others, whether through the reputational enhancements of being an elusive artist or by courting scandal (as in the case of a figure like Jared Leto) through outrageous preparations that often overshadow the roles and the films that house them. As a film like Tootsie illustrates, methodness has become so widely known that it can animate the plot of a highly successful film and simultaneously serve as the object of revulsion and reverence without any mention of Method at all. That duality persists well into the twenty-first century. The stars most frequently associated with methodness make periodic disavowals of “going Method” while still benefiting from critical and industrial praise for their commitment and dramatic transformation. These primarily white male performers are attributed a unique ability to embody and perform the experiences of others through their access to exceptional acting knowledge and labor, an access typically denied to women and people of color. This book’s exploration of performer diaries, newspaper and magazine articles, studio correspondence, promotional documents, trade press, trailers, audience letters, film reviews, fan magazines, gossip columns, and more reflects the many parties and artifacts contributing to the construction of methodness. These materials also constitute much of the connective tissue linking the discursive circuits and spaces that surround films and together comprise the interpretive landscape in which methodness coheres and does its work. More broadly speaking, this book’s paratextual approach serves as an example of the generative possibilities that reception brings to studies of screen performance. It highlights the importance of discourse communities in creating and contesting the meaning(s) of screen actors and acting, as well as the uneven terrain upon which these processes play out. Accordingly, it also decenters the film text, reimagining it as one of many crucial sources contributing to meaning in a performer’s or performance’s reception. As a historically received amalgamation of encodings and decodings, performance is bound up in numerous cultural contexts and processes, accruing meaning as paratexts anticipate, surround, and follow up on-screen actors and acting in ways that may align with or diverge from performers’ actual processes and philosophies. More than a matter of screen representation, this circulating body of meanings and its ascribed links to values as well 191

Conclusion as associated figures, institutions, and movements does considerable ideological work in suturing signifiers of social identity to both actors and their imputed acting styles. In the case of methodness, its embeddedness in US popular culture has historically obscured the regressive politics of whiteness and male exceptionalism beneath a veneer of inscrutable rebels and revolutionary postwar masculinities. The racialized and gendered constructions of difference inextricably entangled in this prevailing methodness result in stark disparities in the historical reception of performer interiority and subjectivity. White male performers continue to be granted universal access to diverse subject positions, often through transformative journeys celebrated for their dedication to craft, while women and performers of color tend to be denied access to such complex interiority and capacity to transform, often through omitting methodness from their reception and overlooking performances in the contexts of industrial and critical recognition. Where self-transformation is acknowledged as part of the acting process, it is often preoccupied with deviance from body norms, especially in the case of women, queer, and disabled performers. These characteristics and their implications have long eluded scholarly efforts to reclaim the importance of screen performance, making this book a critical contribution in a broader endeavor to reach more comprehensive understandings of screen actors and acting.

Facing a Future Methodness In the opening moments of Stevan Riley’s 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon, the eponymous Brando pontificates (via decades-old audio recordings) on the convergence of actor and computer. Having just been 3D scanned (fig. 6.1) in the hopes of creating a “digital equivalent,” he believes this future has arrived.5 “Actors are not going to be real,” he says confidently. “They’re gonna be inside a computer. You watch. It’s gonna happen. So maybe this is the swan song for all of us.” Brando’s desire to create a digital double fully capable of acting on his behalf did not come to fruition, and the specific experimental film set to utilize this technology, Software, ultimately fell through.6 Two decades later, and more than a decade after his death, however, footage originally created for Software would make its way to audiences. Used to open Riley’s documentary, Brando’s blue, pixelated facsimile flickers as his old audio recordings recount having just been digitally scanned (fig. 6.2). The juxtaposition offers an ambivalent version of Brando’s prophecy. The visage is often recognizable, and its aesthetic connotes a cool futurity, yet its most grounded, realistic 192

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Figure 6.1. Scans of Marlon Brando were part of the actor’s 1990s-era collaboration with the cinematographer Scott Billups to create a digital double of himself. Courtesy of Scott Billups.

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Figure 6.2. Visualizations of Marlon Brando’s face that open the 2015 documentary Listen to Me Marlon. Screen captures by the author.

element is the analogue recording of Brando’s voice. Though this digital equivalent is geared toward the future, the actor’s voice unequivocally chains this performance to the past. Marlon Brando was one of many to prognosticate about the future of digital actors, a broad category that now includes posthumous, de-aged, and entirely synthetic performances. Four years after Listen to Me Marlon, Magic City Films announced in November 2019 that they were set to digitally resurrect the actor James Dean for a significant role in their motion picture Finding Jack, a Vietnam War film about military dogs. They suggested that the fullbore digital resurrection of Dean was a logical choice, given the enduring legacy of his film roles and his continued popularity in advertising campaigns. The response to this casting of the long-dead icon was swift and chilly. Some painted the producers’ endeavor as “shameful” in its lack of understanding of the performer; the actor Chris Evans acerbically captured the prevailing bemusement and skepticism, proposing that “maybe we can get a computer to paint us a new Picasso.”7 Months later came buzz of a similar exercise in “creative casting” when it was announced that “Erica” had become the first artificial intelligence actor to land the leading role in a motion picture, b.8 The creation of Japanese scientists Hiroshi Ishiguro and Kohei Ogawa as part of their robotics research, Erica also reportedly received instruction in Method acting from her creators, 194

Conclusion because, as the film’s producer Sam Khoze put it, “in other methods of acting, actors involve their own life experiences .  .  . but Erica has no life experiences.”9 Khoze’s statement was a curious one: tapping into life experiences, or “affective memory,” remains an oft-cited foundational element of the Method, even as it stoked bitter divisions between Strasberg, Adler, and others. What Method acting entailed was, perhaps unsurprisingly, difficult to parse for the producer and the scientists with no discernable training in the techniques or histories popularly collapsed under the “Method” moniker. Khoze was clear, however, that the robotics scientists Ishiguro and Ogawa were responsible for building or encoding Method acting into artificial intelligence. As of this writing, Finding Jack remains in development, and Erica’s feature debut in b has yet to be released. Whether these specific projects come to fruition or not, they have been propelled by profound developments at the conjunction of performance and digital technology. Charting the “disintegrate[d] and reconstitute[d] moving images” of deceased actors for posthumous performances, Lisa Bode asserts that “we should consider the ways in which our experiences of performances may be inflected by knowledge of how they are constructed.”10 This book’s historical revisionism deepens this inflection, reemphasizing the importance of the past not as an idyll threatened by the future. Foregrounding the interpretive landscapes where people made sense of the meanings of actors and acting also highlights the entanglements of interpretation and construction. The advent of digital performances, either through digitally rendered actors or AI thespians, raises urgent questions about the terms upon which particular understandings of performance style are rendered by those engaged in the creative process, including programmers, graphics teams, and producers. It is these parties, and not performers, who tend to be most responsible for metaphorically and literally codifying digital performance.11 This book’s exploration of the circuits and spaces between performances offers points of departure for assessing these present- and future-oriented forms of acting. This would involve, for example, examining the cases of James Dean and Erica through the lens of what I call “speculative acting.” Across historical iterations, different forms of “speculation” are connected by their “hypothetical, ungrounded, constantly protean connotations.”12 Gayle Rogers argues that “both the theoretical and applied understandings of machines have pointed to their speculative potential.”13 Such potential, arguably, rests with the human factors at work in these machines, including the parameters and presumptions baked into the code that organizes computational functions. In speculative acting, I argue, faces and bodies may move closer to achieving verisimilitude, but as algorithmic and machine learning–based 195

Conclusion performances, they (as well as their creators) maintain a more fraught relationship with acting. With little acting experience of their own, engineers would draw on the interpretive landscape for performance and performer to speculate about what it means to act and how acting signifies. Such performances encode acting possibilities in ways that, for example, could invest methodness discourse with even more power by integrating received notions of Method acting into future generations of digital performers. This may prove especially important in the case of so-called Method actors who have historically strained studio resources through their excessive, risky behavior and their unwillingness (in the case of figures like Brando) or inability (in the cases of Clift and Dean, who died young) to allow producers to capitalize on their fame. Digital reanimation could provide studios with the desired and predictable field of control—as well as the breadth of time—to “recoup lost capital” and maximize investments well into the future.14 Relatedly, this book’s emphasis on the significance of screen-acting discourse also invites future explorations of the “black box” rhetoric employed in discussions of digital performance. Such rhetoric undergirding discussions of machine learning, algorithms, and AI resonates with prevailing understandings of Method acting that attribute its exceptionality to its purported unknowability. “Blackboxing,” writes Bruno Latour, “refers to the way scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success,” to the extent that the “internal complexity” of the machine becomes a matter of accepted fact even as the details of its internal features become more opaque.15 “As a cultural trope and symbol” of a “mysterious .  .  . obscure object of desire,” Greg Siegel contends, “black boxes turn up time and again in the history of communication and media” to “invit[e] suspicion” and “induc[e] unease.”16 Conceiving a future for Method acting and screen performance generally in the age of deepfakes, for example, this book invites a consideration of the neglected historical symmetries between discourses surrounding data and acting, utilizing reception to connect those pasts to more capacious understandings of speculative, enigmatic performance going forward. Speculation, Allyson Nadia Field argues, is not simply a future-oriented outlook. Its power also lies in “its irreverence toward established methods, evidentiary norms, and disciplinary conventions . . . borne out of the necessity of the exhaustion—or unsuitability—of other approaches.”17 Following Field’s lead, speculation could also prompt expansions in revisionist explorations of Method actors and acting that examine the absences of those private spheres and informal networks where alternative—and potentially counterhegemonic—forms of methodness are located. Such irreverence also opens up marginalized figures such as Rose McClendon and Maria Ouspenskaya 196

Conclusion to more sustained critical attention. Such a speculative approach may reveal additional, previously overlooked players and/or histories of methodness not considered in this archive-focused book. Barbara Klinger has argued persuasively that “cinematic immortality does not signify immutability.”18 The same is certainly true for screen performances and performers; both will continue to exist in cinema’s future forms, but how they will be conceived and received is yet to be determined. Selfevident though they may seem, Method acting and actors are sites of longlived tensions between performer techniques and philosophies, on the one hand, and interpretations of their performances, or methodness, on the other. These have long been popularly regarded as coeval, when in fact their divergence predates popular overt recognition of Method acting by some time. Looking back to revise the histories that grow out of these interpretive landscapes also necessitates reflecting on the significance of the past for the present and future of methodness. After all, I have argued, we are not simply talking about the Method. We are actively participating in its cultural production.

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Acknowledgments

This all began with a question many years ago. While researching The Conqueror (Dick Powell, 1956) for a graduate seminar, I repeatedly encountered reactions to the film that earnestly postulated that Marlon Brando would have made a better Genghis Khan than the actual performer portraying the thirteenth-century Mongolian ruler—John Wayne. The bar was low, of course, as Wayne’s portrayal had been one of many disasters to plague the production (some, like the proliferation of irradiated sand from a nearby atomic testing site, proved far more consequential). Still, I wondered, why would one white man be deemed such an obviously superior fit for this role than another? There were some rather obvious answers, including the normalization of Hollywood’s racist casting practices and representational regimes. Beyond that, I realized, there was a baseline set of assumptions at work informing the perceived capacities of Wayne and Brando to inhabit other subjectivities, to perform. Investigating that interpretive landscape gave rise to a dissertation and eventually to this book. Like an unpracticed actor who suddenly finds themself at a podium with a long list of people to thank and a short time to do it, I will try my best— and will most assuredly fail—to acknowledge everyone who helped make this project happen. Indiana University’s (dearly departed) Department of Communication and Culture provided a rich interdisciplinary education and intellectual community. Thanks to Travis Vogan, Seth Friedman, Andrea Kelley, Amanda Keeler, Jennifer Lynn Jones, Shana Bridges, Brittany Starr, Zeynep Yasar, James Paasche, Eric Harvey, Mark Hain, Mack Hagood, Michael Lahey, Allison Chellew, E. Cram, Brian Amsden, Mark Benedetti, Lorrie Palmer, Shira Segal, Laura Ivins, Valerie Weiskamp, Byron Craig, Landon Palmer, Suncem Kocer, Shelley Bradfield, and Katie Williams for being wonderful colleagues and even better people. The Program in American Studies was my second home at Indiana, and I was fortunate enough to work alongside many talented scholars and kind human beings, including Tanisha Ford, Susan Eckelmann, Kimberly Stanley, Jeremy Young, Siobhan Carter-David, and Shannon Smith. In each of your own ways, you all enriched my thinking and invigorated my spirit. I benefitted tremendously from the wisdom and assistance of my professors and committee members at Indiana. Barbara Klinger, Greg Waller, 199

Acknowledgments Yeidy Rivero, and Matt Guterl were with this project since its infancy. Their generative feedback, probing questions, and unflagging encouragement got me through the most challenging stages, when it felt like I was adrift in a sea of archival materials. Deborah Cohn and Shane Vogel stepped in at a critical moment to lend invaluable insights and support as well. I especially want to acknowledge my incalculable debt to Barbara Klinger. It was her Hitchcock course that made me realize film and media studies could be a career, and her guidance continues to make me a better thinker, writer, and teacher. I owe much to her mentorship. I know I’m not alone. Imagining the Method took me to thirteen archives across the United States over the course of a decade, a feat that would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and organizations. Indiana University Graduate School’s Grant-in-Aid of Dissertation Research and the University of California, Los Angeles’s Archive and Research Study Center Visiting Scholar Stipend enabled me to explore the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the UCLA Archive and Research Study Center, the UCLA Performing Arts Special Collections, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Margaret Herrick Library, the University of Southern California Cinema Arts Library, and the USC Warner Bros. Archive. The Indiana Credit Union Dissertation Fellowship enabled lengthy visits to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as well as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Oral History Archives. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin also generously provided a Dissertation Fellowship to enable archival research in their collections. Funding from the University of Tulsa enabled me to return to New York for additional research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. At each site, skilled and passionate staff helped me synthesize voluminous amounts of material while calling my attention to hidden gems I otherwise would have missed. I especially want to thank Edward Comstock from the Cinema Arts Library; Sandra Joy Lee Aguilar, Jonathon Auxier, and Bree Russell from the Warner Bros. Archive; Jenny Romero, Barbara Hall, and Caroline Jorgenson from the Margaret Herrick Library; Bridget Gayle Ground and Steve Wilson from the Ransom Center; and Erika Giddens from the Lilly Library for their extraordinary assistance. I also want to acknowledge the generosity of Walt Odets and Scott Billups for so graciously giving their time to answer my questions, share materials, and approve access to crucial artifacts. Special gratitude goes out to the incredible university staff members who have helped me manage the logistics of such a project, who have always been there to answer my questions, and who work tirelessly to ensure that faculty and students are in the best possible position to succeed. Thank you, Kathy 200

Acknowledgments Teige, Amy Cornell, Sabrina Walker, Leya Taylor, Paula Cotner, Carol Glaze, Randi Boyd, Kathie Whitcraft, Janet Whitman, Jan Reynolds, Adam O’Connor, Amy Howe, Gina Rubio-White, Stephanie Boulden, and Steven Buchele. Colleagues at each of my institutions have graciously assisted me in more ways than I can count. Thank you to my Purdue University Fort Wayne Department of Communication colleagues Irwin Mallin, Michelle Kelsey, Art Herbig (and Alix Watson!), Steve Carr, Dan Tamul, and Assem Nasr. Irwin, whose playful spirit and unfailing enthusiasm made all feel welcome in higher ed, unfortunately passed away before this book was completed. His energy sustained me during moments of struggle early in this project, and given his generous spirit, I know he would have been quick to celebrate this book’s arrival. He was the kind of person who championed others, and the world is a less joyful place without him in it. Thank you to the faculty at DePauw University’s Department of Communication and Theatre, especially Seth Friedman, Jonathan Nichols-Pethick, and Andrew Hayes, for helping me figure out how to balance teaching and research. At the University of Tulsa I have had the tremendous fortune of being in two departments with outstanding colleagues. Thanks to Benjamin Peters, Mark Brewin, Emily Contois, Zenia Kish, Joli Jensen, John Coward, Jeff Van Hanken, Joseph Rivers, and Jennifer Jones for their continued support. Thank you, Jeff, for giving me a role in your film as a grumpy professor. In honor of the Method, I’ve remained in character ever since! I have presented portions of this research in multiple venues over the years. Thanks to fellow panelists and audience members at the annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the American Studies Association. Special thanks go to Alan Nadel and my working group at the Futures of American Studies Institute as well as Sabine Sielke and my working group at the Clinton Institute for American Studies Summer School. Thanks as well to the University of Iowa’s Department of American Studies for inviting me to speak on this project. This book has benefited from the probing questions and incisive observations of all of these audiences. Along the way I’ve been fortunate to have a social network that challenges my thinking, lends valuable advice, and punctures the anxiety of book writing with well-timed laughs (and tremendous Werner Herzog impressions). Thanks to Phoebe Bronstein, Christian and Jessica Lander, Andy and Carrie Brown, Danielle MacDonald, Bethany and Mark Theiling, Lauren Hirshberg and Ian Zuckerman, Travis Vogan and Caitlin Owens, Elizabeth Mesok and Tarik Khan, Erin Meyers, Madeleine Fairbairn and Robbie Guertin, Alfred Martin, Cynthia Baron, Jenny Kelly and Marisol LeBrón, AJ Bauer, Amanda Berry, Catherine Clepper, Eva Hageman, Colin Tait, Molly Schneider, Emily 201

Acknowledgments Carman, Isaac Butler, Andrew Owens, Alice Leppert, Eric Hoyt, Christopher Grobe, Scott Balcerzak, Eli Jacob Boonin-Vail, Sean Redmond, Jennifer Airey, Leslie Barnes, and the Ringenberg/Kelley family. There are many more unlisted here, but you know who you are. Together, you all sharpened my thinking, pointed me toward invaluable resources, graciously hosted me during research trips, and opened my eyes to new perspectives. Will Scheibel and Kate Fortmueller in particular merit immense gratitude for going the extra mile to give me indispensable manuscript feedback and encouragement that proved essential to getting this project over the finish line. Thanks to Sarah McGavick and Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press for working so hard to publish this book. Sarah was a fierce advocate for this project. She was also a sympathetic ear as I tried to figure out how to write a book, and we each navigated the unfamiliar world of having young children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jim and Mia Uribe Kozlovsky worked their tails off to get this book through production and very patiently answered my many, many questions. Thanks as well to Danni Bens, Lynne M. Ferguson, Abby Webber, and the design team for making this book look and read better. Morgan Blue’s indexing skills are second to none, and this book is stronger for her contribution. My sincere gratitude to the book’s reviewers for such thoughtful engagement and willingness to see the potential in this project. Their input absolutely sharpened the book’s argument. Thanks to Chris Janka and Daniele Goldchain at Shutterstock for helping arrange image licenses for the book. I count myself incredibly fortunate to have had two families whose support for me and my research has never wavered. Ben and Sheila Rawlins instilled in me the instinct to ask questions and the stubbornness to pursue the answers regardless of how difficult they were. My parents are not academics, but I would not have become an academic—and I certainly would not have written this book—if not for their faith in the world-changing potential of education. Katie and Chris Horton have been supportive siblings all the way and somehow seem to know precisely when I need a work break. I can’t wait to introduce their son Mitchell to John Garfield movies when he’s older. The Kish/Semeniuk/Pryshlak/Pidwerbecki clan that constitutes my Canadian family took me in as one of their own just as this project began, and they have shown me immeasurable kindness ever since (even when I’m being an obnoxious American). There is no other family in the world I would rather have married into than this one. My in-laws, Walter and Daria Kish, in particular merit special thanks for the many ways they have repeatedly stepped up to help me write this book, from providing words of encouragement (and

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Acknowledgments a good beer on occasion) to helping with childcare during especially busy periods (as they are at the very moment I type this). Zenia’s and Maksym’s arrivals in my life bookended this project. There is no way to adequately describe what Zenia means to this book and to me. From the outset, she has been an attentive listener, a discerning reader, a razor-sharp questioner, and an empathetic soul. She has an astute eye for an argument’s turns, its strengths, and its weaknesses. Zenia read every word of this book multiple times, and she could probably give a better summary of it than I could. She is kind, generous, and hilarious. She is my best friend, collaborator, and partner in all things. We welcomed Maksym into our lives just as Imagining the Method was coming to an end. His unconditional love for us and complete disinterest in the work we do has been grounding, and his sense of performativity and wonder reminds me to keep my heart and mind open to creativity and joy. Imagining the Method is dedicated to the two of you.

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Notes Introduction. What We Talk about When We Talk about the Method 1. I use the term “American” in this project aware of its multiple significations and contested geopolitical meanings. Unless otherwise noted, this book employs the term interchangeably with “US” to denote the contexts of US culture under study. This does not imply US exceptionalism but rather delimits the geographic parameters of Method acting’s historical reception for practical reasons of scale. 2. “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Life, December 15, 1947, 101–102. 3. “Preparing for Paraplegia,” Life, June 12, 1950, 129–130, 132; Theodore Strauss, “The Brilliant Brat: Rude, Moody, Sloppy and Prodigal, Actor Marlon Brando Captivates Hollywood,” Life, July 31, 1950, 49–50, 52, 55–58. 4. Doss, introduction to Looking at “Life” Magazine, 2–3. 5. Kozol, “Life”’s America, 43. 6. Baron, “Method Moment,” 93; Kouvaros, Famous Faces, 51–54. 7. Cynthia Baron studiously demarcates the distinctions between Modern and Method philosophies and practices in Modern Acting. Given this book’s focus on Method reception, I will often refer to “Method” with respect to received applications of the term rather than its actual adherents and characteristics. 8. Examples include Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus; Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance; Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, More Than a Method; Krasner, Method Acting Reconsidered. 9. Examples include Medovoi, Rebels; Springer, James Dean Transfigured. 10. Examples include Cohan, Masked Men; Scheibel, “Rebel Masculinities”; DeAngelis, Gay Fandom; McCann, Rebel Males. 11. Examples include Balcerzak, Beyond Method; Walsh, Method Acting; Berke, “Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment.” 12. Examples include Moston, “Actors Studio”; Wexman, Creating the Couple; Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus. Exponentially more newspapers and magazines addressed the Actors Studio and Strasberg, often interweaving the two with the star mythologies of past and present students. 13. Naremore, review of A Method to Their Madness, 43. 14. R. Williams, Keywords, 16. 15. Gallagher-Ross, Theaters of the Everyday, 75. Other examples include Walsh, Method Acting; Hollinger, Actress; Enelow, Method Acting; Malague, An Actress Prepares; Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, More Than a Method. 16. The phrase “interpretive landscape” is inspired by Barbara Klinger’s and Dana Polan’s concept of the “discursive surround.” See Klinger, “Film History,” 109. 17. Given my argument about the interpretive landscape and the foregrounded role of reception in culture making, I use the phrase “popular imagination” interchangeably with “popular culture” throughout this book. 18. Howard Taubman, “The Mystery of ‘the Method,’” review of Strasberg at the

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Notes to Pages 7–12 Actors Studio, by Robert H. Hethmon, New York Times Book Review, December 26, 1965, 10. 19. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus; Gordon, Stanislavsky in America. 20. Many Slavic figures covered in the US press saw their names spelled several different ways. “Konstantin Stanislavsky” and “Constantin Stanislavski” were both used, as were “Richard Boleslavsky” and “Richard Boleslawski.” For the sake of continuity, I will use “Konstantin Stanislavsky” (and “Stanislavskian”) and “Richard Boleslavsky” when referring to these individuals. Examplar or pertinent cultural histories include Lears, Rebirth of a Nation; Rieser, Chautauqua Moment; Van Slyck, Manufactured Wilderness; Canning, Most American Thing; Currell, March of Spare Time; Chansky, Composing Ourselves. 21. Maltby, “New Cinema History,” 300. See also Benson-Allott, Stuff of Spectatorship, 11–13. 22. Field, “Editor’s Introduction,” 1. 23. Klinger, “Film History,” 110. Cynthia Erb calls upon reception studies to expand its conceptualization of evidence but importantly also observes the perpetual incompleteness and corresponding dilemmas of recuperation. See Erb, Tracking King Kong, 17. See also Drake, “Reconceptualizing Screen Performance.” 24. Klinger, “Film History,” 108. 25. Klinger, 109. 26. Staiger, Interpreting Films, 80. 27. Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” 90–103. 28. A. Martin, Generic Closet, 8. 29. J. Gray, Show Sold Separately, 25. 30. Brookey and Gray, “Steps in Paratextual Research,” 102. 31. Gates, Double Negative, 13. 32. Drake, “Reconceptualizing Screen Performance,” 86. 33. Drake, 86. 34. Drake, 86. 35. DeCordova, Picture Personalities. 36. Geraghty, “Re-examining Stardom.” 37. Scheibel, Gene Tierney, 9; Baron and Carnicke, Reframing Screen Performance, 17; Wexman, Creating the Couple, 143. 38. Summarizing the work of the film scholars Virginia Wright Wexman and Richard Maltby, Karen Hollinger suggests that Method acting offers an “expressive incoherence” compatible with various needs of postwar masculinity. Such linkages are certainly possible, as Wexman, Steven Cohan, Michael DeAngelis, Graham McCann, and others have shown. Yet again, the connection hinges on Method acting’s de facto signification, an internal coherence that paradoxically holds the Method’s inscrutability to be both stable and fixed. While perhaps unintended, the allusion nevertheless eschews the conditions under which methodness intertwines with particularized white and male identities. See Hollinger, Actress, 14–15; Wexman, Creating the Couple; Cohan, Masked Men; DeAngelis, Gay Fandom; McCann, Rebel Males. 39. Philip Hope-Wallace, “Books on the Film: acting,” Sight and Sound 18, no. 71 (Autumn 1949): 22. Hope-Wallace’s newspaper, then called the Manchester Guardian, would change to its current name, the Guardian, in 1959. 40. Baron, “Method Moment,” 93.

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Notes to Pages 12–17 41. Philip Hope-Wallace, “Books on the Film: acting,” Sight and Sound 19, no. 4 (June 1950): 167. 42. Carnicke, “Uncensored and Unabridged”; Benedetti, Stanislavski. 43. Malague, An Actress Prepares. 44. Malague echoes Carnicke’s statement that Richard Boleslavsky “quite literally established himself as Stanislavsky’s English-language spokesperson” before founding the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923. Malague identifies Maria Ouspenskaya as an important colleague in the System-to-Method transition, yet no mention is made of the fact that Boleslavsky’s acting discourse far outstrips that of Ouspenskaya in the popular imaginary and affects their respective popular identities as acting gurus. Malague, An Actress Prepares, 17. 45. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 15. 46. Naremore defines the “performance frame” as “more or less ambiguous, eliciting different sorts of interaction between two social groups.” Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 3. Richard Dyer and Virginia Wright Wexman, respectively, similarly call for kinesthetic analysis as a means of extracting meaning from the actor’s physical performance. Both deviate from Naremore’s emphasis on formal characteristics of movement, however, in favor of more textual and star-oriented analyses. Dyer, Stars, 132–150; Wexman, “Kinesics and Film Acting.” 47. Baron, “Acting Choices,” 38. 48. See Hollinger, Actress; Carnicke, “Guru to Hollywood Star”; Carnicke, “Lee Strasberg’s Paradox.” 49. Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, introduction to More Than a Method, 2. 50. Baron, Carson, and Tomasulo, 1. 51. Krampner, Female Brando, 41. 52. Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow, 2–3. 53. Maurice, 3. 54. Berger, Sight Unseen, 1. 55. Dyer, White, 1–14; Nygaard and Lagerwey, Horrible White People, 12. 56. Guerrero, Framing Blackness, 2; Diawara, “Black American Cinema”; Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation, 22. See also Robinson, Forgeries of Memory; Bernardi, “Race and Contemporary Hollywood”; Bernardi, “Voice of Whiteness,” 109. 57. Cedric J. Robinson details how such screen fictions seek to forge a shared white identity through Lost Cause–oriented narratives of the Civil War, specifically to erase Black people from said conflict (as participants and as witnesses to the horrors of slavery) and to renew shared commitments to an acutely racialized agenda aimed at rolling back civil rights victories. See Robinson, Forgeries of Memory, 59. See also Blight, Race and Reunion, 394. For Daniel Bernardi, the white family unit is central to the racialized logic of Hollywood representation. White women represent the vulnerability of social reproduction to racial impurities, thus sanctioning white violence against perceived transgressors. These tropes trade on the unassimilable difference of nonwhite people and rationalize their ensuing “servitude, segregation, and punishment” because of their potential threat to screen normativity embodied broadly by the (white) family and exemplified particularly by the (white) woman. See Bernardi, “Voice of Whiteness,” 112–113. 58. Bernardi, “Hollywood Style,” xv. 59. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 4.

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Notes to Pages 18–31

60. Bell-Metereau and Glenn, introduction to Star Bodies, 6. 61. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 4. 62. Dyer, x. 63. Enelow quoted in Berke, “Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment,” 38.

Chapter 1. Methodists and Method-ists 1. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 54. The House of Connelly bowed on September 29, 1931, while the second Group production of that year, the Paul and Claire Sifton– penned 1931–, opened on December 10. The Group averaged roughly two productions per calendar year, peaking at five in 1935. 2. Kuftinec, Staging America, 33. 3. Crawford, One Naked Individual, 54. 4. From this point forward, I refer to the proto-Method idea simply as “protomethodness.” 5. Smoodin, “‘Compulsory’ Viewing,” 5. 6. Allen, Republic in Time, 15. 7. Sharon Marie Carnicke provides a thorough overview of the fraught translation history of Stanislavsky’s teachings. Carnicke, “Uncensored and Unabridged.” 8. Benedetti, Stanislavski, 72–73. 9. Though “alternative,” “modern,” “avant-garde,” and “art” can carry very different meanings, I deploy them interchangeably so as to reflect the overall sentiment among commentators and critics that such terms overlapped substantially with respect to turnof-the-century continental theater. 10. Percy Hammond, “Oddments and Remainders: Discovering the New ‘Laboratory Theater’ among the Hills of Westchester,” New York Tribune, June 12, 1923. 11. H. I. Brock, “Grand Street Art Theatre: The Neighborhood Playhouse Imports the Russian Method for Irish Plays,” New York Times, October 28, 1923. 12. I use the terms “camp cultures” and “rural retreats” interchangeably to convey their shared investment in the intertwined personal and societal transformations offered by nature. These terms bring together secular and sacred initiatives, more and less commercial enterprises, and even institutions (such as mechanics’ institutes) that are primarily urban but seem to draw upon and perpetuate similar faith in the critical importance of self- and social improvement to buttress the modern individual and society against the deleterious effects of modern life. 13. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 5. 14. Herbert Croly coined the term “new nationalism” in his 1909 book The Promise of American Life. Roosevelt first used the term in a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910. See Gerstle, American Crucible, 7, 65–66. 15. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 11. 16. Van Slyck, Manufactured Wilderness, xix. 17. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 11. 18. Canning, Most American Thing, 8; Rieser, Chautauqua Moment, 101. 19. Rieser, Chautauqua Moment, 98. 20. Rieser, 3. 21. Rieser, 42. 22. Rieser, 6. 23. Canning, Most American Thing, 227.

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Notes to Pages 31–36 24. Rieser, Chautauqua Moment, 213. 25. Canning, Most American Thing, xx. 26. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 11. 27. Canning, Most American Thing, 208–209. 28. Currell, March of Spare Time, 4. 29. Currell, 32. 30. Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 2. 31. Chansky, 2–3, 14. Dorothy Chansky argues that while the term “movement” typically represents “a collectivity with continuity, some coherence, and particular goals regarding either promoting or resisting change,” the Little Theatre Movement’s relationship to Progressivism, which “lacked unanimity or purpose either on a programmatic or on a philosophical level,” freed it somewhat to be a movement while still retaining its inconsistencies. Chansky does add that the Little Theatres’ professionalization in the 1920s moves toward convening a slightly different kind of collective national status that was rooted in formally networked organizations across the country. 32. Chansky, 3, 5. 33. Chansky, 4. 34. P. Gray, “From Russia to America,” 144. 35. Smoodin, “‘Compulsory’ Viewing,” 9. 36. Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 3. 37. Chansky, 15; Kuftinec, Staging America, 33. 38. Chansky, Composing Ourselves, 15; Roediger, Working toward Whiteness. 39. Boleslavsky was not the only former MAT member working in the United States at the time. Tamara Daykarhanova performed in the successful La Chauve-Souris revue at New York’s 49th Street Theatre. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 18–19. 40. “Rich in Experience Is Boleslawski, Who Directs ‘Revue Russe,’ at Booth,” New York Tribune, October 15, 1922. 41. As early as January 15, 1922, the New York Times mentioned the MAT in relation to the anticipated arrival of the successful La Chauve-Souris. See William B. Chase, “The Last Laugh Out of Russia,” New York Times, January 15, 1922. On February 18, the United Press newswire circulated a nationwide story about the same show. See also “Gossip of the Rialto,” New York Times, May 28, 1922; “Moscow Art Theatre Coming Here,” New York Times, June 3, 1922. 42. Oliver M. Sayler, “When Moscow and New York Negotiate,” New York Times, July 16, 1922. 43. Brault, “Theory and Practice,” 8–9. 44. Kenneth MacGowan, “Russians Stir Play Lovers: Actors from Moscow Art Theatre Win High Compliments,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, January 14, 1923. 45. Butler, The Method, 118. 46. New York’s Wanamaker Bookstore ran advertisements for the books The Moscow Art Theatre Series of Plays, The Russian Theatre, and The Moscow Art Theatre and Its Distinguishing Characteristics. See John Wanamaker, advertisement, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 13, 1923. 47. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 35–36. 48. Blair, Acting, ix; Butler, The Method, 124. 49. Blair, Acting, 65. 50. Blair, 32.

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Notes to Pages 36–40 51. Butler, The Method, 125. 52. Boleslavsky, “Stanislavsky,” 27, 74, 80. 53. Blair, Acting, 65. 54. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 21. 55. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 24–25. 56. Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 23. 57. Studlar, This Mad Masquerade, 154. 58. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 79. 59. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 57. 60. Brault, “Theory and Practice,” 28. 61. In one article, Boleslavsky, likely ironically, complains about the poor English spoken by American actors. See “A Play about Hollywood, but Not a Shot: Bird’s-Eye Interviews with Some of the Best People,” New York Herald Tribune, August 24, 1924. 62. Boleslavsky would gain US citizenship in 1928. 63. “A Play about Hollywood.” 64. Willis, “American Laboratory Theatre,” 2–3. 65. Hammond, “Oddments and Remainders,” 8. In her regular column on Little Theatres for the Billboard, Elita Miller Lenz not only included the American Laboratory Theatre with the Little Theatre Movement but characterized the former company as Boleslavsky’s “work.” See Elita Miller Lenz, “Little Theaters,” Billboard, May 9, 1925, 45, 64. See also “Inside Stuff on Legit,” Variety, January 17, 1924. 66. Boleslavsky, “Laboratory Theatre,” 244–250. 67. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 22. 68. Richard Savage, “A Theatre That Is Different,” Theatre Magazine 43 (March 1926): 22–23, 66. 69. Gray, “From Russia to America,” 149; Willis, “American Laboratory Theatre,” 388. 70. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 27. 71. Savage, “Theatre That Is Different,” 22–23, 66; Brault, “Theory and Practice,” 25, 81. 72. Blair’s reading closely parallels Stella Adler’s in crediting both Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya for their pedagogical contributions. See Blair, Acting, x–xi. 73. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 26; Blair, Acting, 183. 74. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 26; Blair, Acting, 183. 75. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 23. 76. Stella Adler was among the few Group members to identify Maria Ouspenskaya as a prominent force and influence. She credited both Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya for giving the “sense of craft” to students who used it to establish a similar American theater, the Group. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 507. Mel Gordon intimates that Boleslavsky might have publicized Ouspenskaya’s exercises or their collaborations as strictly his own work in ALT lectures and articles for Theatre Arts Monthly. He would not be the last to fail to credit Ouspenskaya for her influence. The famed Hollywood drama coach, and former Ouspenskaya student, Sophie Rosenstein also neglected to attribute her 1936 acting publication, Modern Acting: A Manual, to her teacher. See Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 23–28; Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 38. 77. Ashby, “Alla Nazimova,” 182, 185. 78. “‘The Saint’ Reveals Lofty Aim and Beauty: Stark Young’s Delicately Written Play

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Notes to Pages 40–49 as Acted, However, Has Only Flashes of Life,” New York Times, October 13, 1924; “Critical Digest,” Variety, October 15, 1924, 13; “News of Theaters,” New York Herald Tribune, October 11, 1924. 79. The New York Times did categorize Ouspenskaya among the prominent people of the stage in December 1926. “Who’s Who on the Stage,” New York Times, December 5, 1926. 80. John Franchey, “Meet the Madame,” Modern Screen, November 1940, 6. 81. “Actress-Coach Deserts Coast for Calm East: Tutor of Noted Stars Gets Fill of Films in Hurry; Hollywood Jottings,” Washington Post, June 24, 1936. 82. “Actress-Coach Deserts Coast.” 83. Gordon, Stanislavsky in America, 23; Weston East, “Here’s Hollywood,” Screenland, June 1941, 62. 84. Harriet Pratt, “Notes on Acting with Maria Ouspenskaya,” American Repertory Theatre: The Art Magazine, October 1954, November 1954, December 1954, January 1955. 85. Dickey, “Sophie Treadwell’s Summer,” 112. 86. H. I. Brock, “Grand Street Art Theatre: The Neighborhood Playhouse Imports the Russian Method for Irish Plays,” New York Times, October 28, 1923. 87. Smith, Real Life Drama, 4. 88. Smith, 28; Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 37. 89. Smith, Real Life Drama, 28; Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 37. 90. Smith, Real Life Drama, 28. 91. Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 37. 92. Harold Clurman, “The Group Theatre Speaks for Itself,” New York Times, December 13, 1931. 93. “As to the Group Theatre,” New York Times, September 27, 1931. 94. “Hanging Out a Shingle,” New York Times, October 15, 1933. 95. Smith, Real Life Drama, 28. 96. Hirsch, Method to Their Madness, 74. 97. Smith, Real Life Drama, 34. 98. Butler, The Method, 147. 99. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 64–136; Patton, Cinematic Identity. 100. Butler, The Method, 146. 101. Group Theatre Brookfield Center Journal (hereafter cited as Brookfield Journal), 1931, Odets Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 102. Gerald Sykes, Brookfield Journal, August 9, 1931, 112, 114. 103. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 528. 104. Chinoy, 530. 105. Clifford Odets, Brookfield Journal, June 12, 1931, 7. 106. Fanny Belle DeKnight, Brookfield Journal, July 8, 1931, 58. 107. Rose McClendon, Brookfield Journal, July 9, 1931. 108. Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 46. 109. Lewis, 46. 110. Lewis, 46. 111. Fanny Belle DeKnight, Brookfield Journal, July 8, 1931, 58. 112. Denning, Cultural Front, 363. 113. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 48.

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Notes to Pages 49–61 114. Mary Morris, Brookfield Journal, June 13, 1931, 10–11; Eunice Stoddard, Brookfield Journal, June 20, 1931, 21. 115. Rose McClendon, Brookfield Journal, July 9, 1931. See also Fanny Belle DeKnight, Brookfield Journal, July 8, 1931, 58. 116. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 514. 117. Harold Clurman, Brookfield Journal, June 19, 1931, 18. 118. Clifford Odets, Diary, June 9, 1931, Odets Mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 119. Art Smith, Brookfield Journal, June 17, 1931, 15. 120. Butler, The Method, 152; Franchot Tone, Brookfield Journal, June 15, 1931, 13. 121. Harold Clurman, Brookfield Journal, June 19, 1931, 19. 122. Clurman, 19. 123. Eunice Stoddard, Brookfield Journal, June 20, 1931, 21. 124. Helen Deutsch, Brookfield Journal, July 19, 1931, 88. 125. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 516; Smith, Real Life Drama, 39. 126. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 502; Butler, The Method, 150. 127. Butler, 157. 128. Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 39–40. 129. Virginia Farmer, Brookfield Journal, 1931, 35. 130. Butler, The Method, 151. 131. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 514–515. 132. Chinoy, 514–515. 133. Chinoy, 515. 134. Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 30. 135. Butler, The Method, 170–171. 136. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 516. 137. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 60; Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 32. 138. Chinoy, “Reunion,” 516. 139. Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 32. 140. Lewis, Slings and Arrows, 71. 141. Sharon Carnicke contends that neither Strasberg nor Adler dispensed with Stanislavsky, as Adler frequently claimed to be an ambassador for his System, and Strasberg based much of his emotional memory technique on the man’s early theories on performance. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 61; Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 32. 142. Baron, Modern Acting, xvii; Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 33–34. 143. Balcerzak, 211. 144. Baron, Modern Acting, 248; Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 34. 145. Balcerzak, 30. Chapter 2. Acting a Foil 1. Kirtley Baskette, “Gentleman Johnny,” Modern Screen, February 1943, 47. 2. Baskette, 111. Modern Screen had more than 600,000 subscribers in 1940, and that number nearly doubled to 1.13 million by 1945, giving it one of the largest subscriber bases of any fan magazine and likely exposing several times that number of overall readers. See Derek Long and Eric Hoyt, “N. W. Ayer and Son’s Newspaper Annual Directories: Data on Media Publications, 1900–1960,” Media History Digital Library, September 10, 2013.

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Notes to Pages 61–65 3. Silver Screen chronicled Wayne’s meteoric ascent from thirty-third- to secondmost popular box office figure in America by 1949, while Morgan MacNeil of Modern Screen observed more pointedly that Wayne was by this time “the most widely seen motion picture actor in the world.” Bev Barnett, “No Overnight Sensation,” Silver Screen, August 1951, 42; Morgan MacNeil, “John Wayne’s Double Life,” Modern Screen, August 1948, 37, 99. MacNeil introduced this claim by way of an exchange between Betty Grable and Harry James, who, upon researching prospective shows, realized that Wayne films occupied virtually all of Los Angeles’s theater screens. Harold Heffernan added in 1950 that between the quantity and quality of Wayne’s work, his fame was at the moment unmatched; see Heffernan, “Hollywood in Person: John Wayne at Peak of Great Popularity,” Dallas News, February 26, 1950. Motion Picture Herald named Wayne their top star for 1950 and 1951; see William Weaver, “The Top Money-Making Stars of 1951 Season,” Motion Picture Herald, December 29, 1951, 12. That same year, Wayne garnered the top spot in both the National Poll of Fame and the National Popular Actor Poll; see Barnett, “No Overnight Sensation,” 42. Movieland declared Duke “one of the hottest box office attractions in Hollywood today,” accentuating his popularity by noting that he was “‘booked’ for the next two years—to make more ‘he-man’ vehicles!”; see “The Wayne Wollop: Whenever Rugged John Puts His Dukes Up, He’s a Box-Office Knockout,” Movieland, May 1951, 32. See also Wexman, Creating the Couple, 67. 4. Lenihan, Showdown, 91, 99; Lehman, Running Scared, 62–63. 5. Baskette, “Gentleman Johnny,” 110. 6. Gladys Hall, “The Anti-Phony: Meaning John Wayne,” Screenland, January 1948, 24. 7. Lears, “Screw Ambiguity,” 38. See also Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem, 29–41; Molly Haskell, “Wayne Westerns and Women: An Eastern Movie Critic Meets the Duke, and Promptly Falls in Love,” Ladies Home Journal, July 1976; Andrew Sarris, “John Wayne’s Strange Legacy,” New Republic, August 4, 1979, 33–36. 8. On containment culture, see Nadel, Containment Culture. 9. Meeuf, John Wayne’s World, 4. 10. Various spellings of “react,” “reactor,” and “reacting” utilize a hyphen (e.g., “re-act”). I use a nonhyphenated spelling to maintain consistency. 11. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 76. 12. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 195; Lears, “Screw Ambiguity,” 38. 13. The “Method moment” is the midcentury period in which shifts in discourses of screen acting subsequently rendered visible the work of performance previously obfuscated under the studio system. See Baron, “Before Brando.” 14. “Inside Stuff—Pictures,” Variety, September 17, 1930, 55. 15. “Talkie Pioneers,” Motion Picture Classic, September 1930, 59. 16. “Talkie Pioneers,” 59. 17. “Haunted Gold Is Another John Wayne Western,” Hollywood Filmograph, November 26, 1932, 6. Bert Silver of the Greenville, Michigan, Silver Family Theatre wrote to the Motion Picture Herald’s “What the Picture Did for Me” section for exhibitor feedback in April 1934 to recommend West of the Divide (Robert N. Bradbury, 1934) and said of Wayne that “none of them [other players] has a thing on this man in Westerns”; see Bert Silver, letter to the editor, Motion Picture Herald, April 28, 1934. “A few more like [West of the Divide],” predicted J. J. Medford of the Oxford, North Carolina, Orpheum Theatre, “and he will be leading the western stars”; see Medford, letter to the

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Notes to Pages 65–67 editor, Motion Picture Herald, April 28, 1934. Motion Picture identified Wayne among the top “cowboy stars” in 1936; see Sara Hamilton, “Yip-ee! The Cowboy Rides Again!,” Motion Picture, June 1936, 72. 18. Alexander Kahn, “Westerns Out, Wayne Hopes,” New York World-Telegram, October 18, 1940. This sense of genre fatigue arose sporadically and offered opportunities for readings of Wayne’s performances. See Hubert Cole, “After All These Years,” Picturegoer, March 1941, 8. 19. By 1950, audiences could also find old Wayne films on their television screens. See Elizabeth Wilson, “History Repeats Itself and How!,” Silver Screen, February 1950, 60. 20. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 512. 21. Stagecoach (1939) exemplified many of the collaborations between Ford and Wayne that cemented this link on a grander scale. It not only expanded the circulation of Wayne’s image in ways that previous pictures did not but also connected the performer to symbolic conventions of Ford’s westerns. As Richard Slotkin observes, Stagecoach invoked and transformed B staples such as the stagecoach chase sequence and cavalry rescue to the “good-badman” plot. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 304. 22. Slotkin, 512–513. 23. Slotkin, 512–513. 24. Dyer, White, 3. 25. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. 26. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 113. 27. The open-endedness of Stagecoach’s denouement—with Dallas and the Kid’s fledgling union bound for a destination unknown but most assuredly still located within the frontier—suggested an abiding faith in the self-evident certainty of the future homestead. Hightower’s narrative-long redemption in 3 Godfathers from stickup artist to saint relied solely upon the Wayne character’s ability to protect his temporary ward from the foreboding western landscape and to shepherd the child to the safety of Welcome, Arizona, a town whose name unambiguously conveyed the promise of a family and homestead. 28. The love triangle between Lieutenant Flint Cohill (John Agar), Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru), and Second Lieutenant Ross Pennell (Harry Carey Jr.) animates the Wayne character Captain Nathan Brittles’s paternal/protector role, as Brittles’s constant intervention is essential in stabilizing the often-volatile Cohill-Dandridge dynamic. 29. Studlar, “Sacred Duties, Poetic Passions,” 62. 30. Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 14. 31. Using the juxtaposition in Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) of Duke’s rigid gender performance and the transgressive gender and sexuality modeled by his younger male counterpart, Montgomery Clift, Steven Cohan locates the elder star’s virility in two interrelated traits. Cohan reads Red River as a critical source text for tracing the symbolic economy through which Wayne’s rigid and virile masculinity—and the transgressive masculinities of the young men against which “he-men” such as Wayne are contrasted—are made legible. Among the many implications of this claim is Cohan’s seeming agreement with others regarding Red River’s critical place in Wayne’s postwar star image. See Cohan, Masked Men. 32. Cohan, 207. 33. Cohan, 202.

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Notes to Pages 68–71 34. Cohan, 201–203. 35. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 82–83; Cohan, Masked Men, 201–263. Cohan repeatedly describes Wayne as the “he-man” against which new postwar masculinities trouble gender binaries and strict correlations with sexuality. Richard Dyer asserts that the frontier “is about the act of bringing order in the form of borders to a land and people without them.” See Dyer, White, 33. 36. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 83. 37. Staiger, Interpreting Films, 101–123. See also Maurice, Cinema and Its Shadow. 38. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 103. “The South seems to be the myth that both most consciously asserts whiteness and most devastatingly undermines it,” observes Dyer, “where the West takes the project of whiteness for granted and achieved” (36). Moreover, Dyer finds that the anxieties underneath white women’s sexual purity are fundamentally at odds with the imperative to perpetuate white supremacy through reproduction. See Dyer, White, 29, 209. See also L. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 7, 87. 39. Wexman, Creating the Couple, 101; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 115. 40. Singh, Black Is a Country, 19. 41. Daniel Bernardi asserts that whiteness “cross[ed] audiences, authors, genres, studios, and styles” in the Classical Hollywood era. See Bernardi, “Hollywood Style,” xv. 42. Russell Meeuf argues that Wayne’s appeal is less a product of a normative conjuncture of whiteness and masculinity than it arises from “the often unspoken and contradictory pleasures” of his masculinity and “the visual spectacle of [his] dynamic body.” See Meeuf, “John Wayne as ‘Supercrip,’” 92. 43. MacNeil, “John Wayne’s Double Life,” 37. Other articles described Wayne in similar fashion, teasing possible revelations about his private life but ultimately using his silence to confirm that he had nothing to hide. See Tom Carlile, “Wonderful Lug,” Modern Screen, August 1950, 30–31, 71, 73. 44. The patio shot is located in MacNeil, “John Wayne’s Double Life,” 37. The chess match, film review, and croquet match photos are all found in Carlile, “Wonderful Lug,” 30–31. Similar photographs of John and Esperanza at home also appeared in “The John Waynes at Home,” Silver Screen, March 1948, 48–49. 45. Cuordileone, Manhood, 137. 46. MacNeil, “John Wayne’s Double Life,” 100; Carlile, “Wonderful Lug,” 30. 47. John Wayne and Josephine Saenz wed in 1933 and split in 1944. Although he and his third wife, Pilar Pallete, would never officially divorce, their 1954 union effectively ended in separation in 1973. 48. Carlile, “Wonderful Lug,” 71. An article credited to Wayne’s eldest daughter, Toni, spoke at length to her father’s role as not only a financial provider but also an emotional supporter. See Toni Wayne, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” Movieland, April 1952, 24–25, 66–67. 49. Mrs. John Wayne, “Almost a Movie Widow,” Screenland, December 1950, 36–37. 50. The feature “The Duke Produces” not only shows John kissing Esperanza goodbye as he departs for Angel and the Badman (James Edward Grant, 1947) but also provides photographs of him performing in both his performer and producer roles. He was shown behind the camera and in front of it, work so exhausting that another image captures him sleeping on set. See “The Duke Produces,” Movie Stars Parade, March 1947, 22.

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Notes to Pages 72–74 51. “What Hollywood Itself Is Talking About,” Screenland, July 1951, 74. 52. Tom Carlile, “Look Out for This Guy,” Modern Screen, August 1951, 54. 53. Carlile, 64. 54. Carlile, 64. 55. Kirtley Baskette, “Top Man,” Modern Screen, January 1952, 78. 56. “The Wages of Virtue,” Time, March 3, 1952, 66. 57. “Wages of Virtue,” 66. 58. “I Cannot Go On,” Movieland, November 1952, 17–18; Richard Dexter, “It Had to Happen,” Modern Screen, November 1952, 28, 68. Coverage of the deteriorating marriage became more frequent as 1952 wore on. Other representative articles included “John Wayne’s Fight to Save His Marriage,” Movieland, May 1952, 30–32; Marsha Saunders, “The On Again, Off Again Waynes,” Modern Screen, September 1952, 58–59, 64–65. 59. Meeuf, John Wayne’s World, 3. 60. Cohan, Masked Men, 224. 61. Cohan, 66. 62. This oft-repeated narrative varied in terminology, characterizing Wayne as a “property man,” “prop man,” “property boy,” “prop boy,” and “stagehand.” For the sake of simplicity, I refer to it as the “property man” story. 63. An April 1930 issue of Hollywood Filmograph provided the first account of the property-man narrative. See “Wayne Morrison, Extra, Gets ‘Oregon Trail’ Lead,” Film Daily, April 20, 1930, 5; “Raoul Walsh Selects a Novice to Play Lead in ‘The Big Trail’— Arouses Ire of Artists Who Have Given Much to Built [sic] Up Great Industry,” Hollywood Filmograph, April 26, 1930, 21. 64. Robbin Coons, “Hollywood Sights and Sounds,” Bergen Evening Record, April 29, 1930; Coons, “Hollywood Sights and Sounds,” Benton Harbor News-Palladium, April 20, 1930; Coons, “Hollywood Sights and Sounds,” Billings Gazette, October 23, 1930. 65. “Fox ‘Props’ Graduates into Feature Roles,” Motion Picture News, July 19, 1930, 31. See also “Talkie Pioneers,” Motion Picture Classic, September 1930, 59; “Cinema Shots from Coast to Coast and Back to Coast Again,” Motion Picture Classic, October 1930, 54; “Motion Picture Classic Talks,” Motion Picture Classic, November 1930, 23. 66. “Biography of John Wayne; Playing ‘Breck Coleman’ in ‘The Big Trail,’” 1930, John Wayne Clippings File, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California (hereafter cited as MHL). 67. The story appears too many times to comprehensively list here, but indicative early examples include Mary Howard, “Watch Them!,” Screenland, January 1931, 55, 108; Henry Blair, “3 Boys Who Won,” New Movie Magazine, February 1931, 51. 68. Howard, “Watch Them!,” 108. Miriam Hughes’s December 1930 Photoplay profile similarly relied upon the property-man narrative, stating that Wayne had no intention of becoming an actor and “won [the role] by a walk. Literally!” See Hughes, “Oh, for a Hair Cut!,” Photoplay, December 1930, 45. 69. In October 1939, Variety reported United Artists’ buildup of Wayne and Republic Pictures’ move to approve the big-budget film projects Dark Command (Raoul Walsh, 1940) and Wagons Westward (Lew Landers, 1940) with Wayne attached. See “Republic’s $500,000 Budgeters for Wayne,” Variety, October 1939, 18. 70. Elizabeth Wilson, “He’s the Hottest Thing in Pictures Today!,” Silver Screen, December 1943, 85.

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Notes to Pages 74–82 71. Carlile, “Wonderful Lug,” 71. Writers rarely minced words when it came to Wayne’s loyalty. Kirtley Baskette’s February 1943 profile provides an apt example: “There isn’t a more loyal and honest friend in Hollywood than John Wayne.” See Baskette, “Gentleman Johnny,” 111. 72. Lila Stuart, “Regular Guy,” Screen Stars, August 1945, 35, 76. 73. John Franchey’s 1942 Hollywood feature captures a quintessential Wayne critique of Hollywood phoniness. Franchey, “Life with Father,” Hollywood, August 1942, 26. 74. Don Allen, “It’s been fun, but . . . ,” Motion Picture Magazine, June 1951, 37, 72. 75. “Wages of Virtue,” 64. Ford wrote, “Duke has come to know a respectable amount about the way motion pictures are made. During his twenty years in this business, he has been a prop man, electrician, stunt man, extra, bit player, assistant director, producer, and a star. It would not surprise me to see him direct a movie that would make people sit up and take notice.” See John Ford, “Man Alive!” Photoplay, March 1951, 84. 76. Howard, “Watch Them!,” 55, 108. 77. Donald Hough, “I Can’t Act!,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1941. 78. Hough, “I Can’t Act!” 79. Baskette, “Gentleman Johnny,” 110. 80. Baskette, 111. 81. Baskette, 64. 82. Baskette, 64. 83. Don Allen, “He Says He Can’t Act,” American Weekly, November 30, 1952. Allen’s article was also publicized by Motion Picture Daily; see “National Pre-selling,” Motion Picture Daily, November 26, 1952, 5. See also Baskette, “Top Man,” 78. 84. Cohan, Masked Men, 224. 85. Cohan, 224. 86. Hough, “I Can’t Act!,” H6. 87. “Wages of Virtue,” 65. 88. Walsh, Method Acting, 1–5. 89. Cohan, Masked Men, xv. 90. Cohan, 201–241. 91. Cohan, 224–225. 92. Cohan, 262–263. 93. Cohan, 262–263. 94. Doss, introduction to Looking at “Life,” 11. The Life feature, like The Men, was also related to what Noah Tsika has called the phenomenon of postwar cinematic psychodrama. Tsika, Traumatic Imprints, 128–129. 95. Doss, introduction to Looking at “Life,” 2–3; “Preparing for Paraplegia,” 129. 96. “Preparing for Paraplegia,” 130, 132. 97. “Preparing for Paraplegia,” 129. 98. Tsika, Traumatic Imprints, 128–129. For Shonni Enelow, Method acting’s claims to mastery of the performer and character belied the fact that it collapsed the two and “reveal[ed] the impossibility of demarcating the boundary between the theatrical and the psychic.” Enelow, Method Acting, 29. 99. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson quoted in McRuer, Crip Theory, 171. 100. “Preparing for Paraplegia,” 130. 101. Kouvaros, Famous Faces, 82.

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Notes to Pages 82–90 102. Scott Balcerzak incisively observes that Brando’s “appeal was routinely sold as something new and exciting in acting. This conception of him as a new kind of actor was not in addition to his desirable muscular and youthful body but viewed as an extension of it. In early press, his body was celebrated as an actor’s instrument while his voice was initially viewed as bizarre in contrast to his impressive physicality.” Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 43. 103. Strauss, “Brilliant Brat,” 49. 104. Louise Levitas, “Portrait of the Actor as a Young Man,” P.M. magazine, May 16, 1948. 105. Levitas, “Portrait of the Actor.” 106. Levitas, “Portrait of the Actor.” 107. Marlon Brando, “My Press Agent’s Scars,” Promenade, May 1949. 108. Hedda Hopper, “Actor Defies Usual Movie City Customs,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1950. 109. Sidney Skolsky, “Hollywood Is My Beat,” Hollywood Citizen-News, July 27, 1950. 110. “Here’s Brando,” Collier’s, November 1, 1952, 24. 111. Kouvaros, Famous Faces, 74. 112. Kouvaros, 55–80; Doss, introduction to Looking at “Life,” 1–21. 113. Kouvaros, Famous Faces, 27. 114. Kouvaros, 55–80. 115. Baron, Modern Acting, 77. 116. Bausch, He Thinks He’s Down, 6. 117. Gabbard, Black Magic, 20. 118. Walsh, Method Acting, 25. 119. Savran, Taking It Like a Man, 55–56. 120. Conroy, “Acting Out,” 239–263. 121. Strasberg quoted in Baron, Modern Acting, xvii. 122. Baron, 61–84. 123. Baron, 72. 124. Esch, “‘Any Method at All,’” 102. Chapter 3. James Dean’s Story 1. Mike Connolly, “This Was My Friend Jimmy Dean,” Modern Screen, December 1955. See also Connolly, “This Was My Friend,” in The Real James Dean, 301. 2. Hedda Hopper, “Dean Disgusts Hedda—Then Charms Her,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1963; Hopper and Brough, Whole Truth, 177. 3. Parsons repeatedly noted the extraordinary outpouring of audience grief in her “Louella Parsons in Hollywood” section of Modern Screen; see her columns from January, February, May, and June 1956. Modern Screen also devoted three pages to select fan letters in its March 1956 issue; see “Goodbye Jimmy,” Modern Screen, March 1956. 4. Emily Belser, “Fan Mail Continues to Arrive for Dean,” Daily Defender (Chicago), August 8, 1956. 5. “Birth of a Legend,” The James Dean Story file, folder 703, Warner Bros. Archives, Los Angeles, California (hereafter cited as WBA); Springer, James Dean Transfigured, 27. 6. Ezra Goodman, “Delirium over Dead Star,” Life, September 24, 1956, 80. 7. Goodman, 75.

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Notes to Pages 91–95 8. Smyth, “Jim Crow,” 23. 9. “Birth of a Legend,” The James Dean Story file, folder 703, WBA. 10. “The Big Research,” 1957, The James Dean Story file, folder 703, WBA; “Production Notes: ‘The James Dean Story,’” 1957, The James Dean Story file, folder 2018, WBA. 11. Michael DeAngelis, Claudia Springer, and Leerom Medovoi, respectively, are among the scholars who have specifically traced the contestations surrounding Dean. DeAngelis examines shifting narratives regarding Dean’s authentic identity and charts the contested terms of the young man’s gender and sexual ambiguity in the two decades following his death. Springer, meanwhile, suggests that while the actor’s rebellious iconicity might have become commodified and politically defanged domestically, it has retained a radical transnational significance for postcolonial efforts to resist US cultural imperialism. Medovoi contends that Dean’s rebel image has in fact retained its political power domestically, serving as the “guarantor of the nation’s anti-authoritarian democratic character” and encouraging leftist identity formations among historically marginalized communities in the 1960s and 1970s. See DeAngelis, Gay Fandom; Springer, James Dean Transfigured; Medovoi, Rebels. 12. I use the phrase “epistolary community” at various points throughout this chapter to convey the ways in which individual affective responses to Dean were shared with Hedda Hopper, with other millions of Hopper’s readers through her periodic publication of letters, and quite possibly with other letter writers (though this particular collection of materials includes no hard evidence of that). These materials were what Diana G. Barnes has called “a sociable genre,” even though Hopper’s fans were not as familiar to each other as Barnes’s subjects, nor did their letters speak for the community rather than the individual. These letters to Hopper sprang from the individual and often spoke to an imagined community. See Barnes, Epistolary Community in Print, 1. 13. Mike Todd, letter to Elia Kazan, February 10, 1955, East of Eden files, WBA. 14. Todd, letter to Kazan. 15. Dorothy Manners, “‘East of Eden’ Carries Impact,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 17, 1955. 16. “New Actors Being Groomed by Hollywood for Stardom,” New York Herald Tribune, November 21, 1954; Thomas M. Pryor, “Warners to Seek Fresh Film Faces,” New York Times, February 4, 1955. 17. Carl Combs, Publicity Files, February 11, 1955, East of Eden files, WBA. 18. Combs, Publicity Files. 19. Elia Kazan, letter to J. L. Warner, March 10, 1954; J.  L. Warner, letter to Elia Kazan, March 10, 1954, both from East of Eden files, WBA. 20. Publicity Files, February 15, 1955, East of Eden files, WBA; Lee Ferrero, Publicity Files, August 26, 1954, East of Eden files, WBA. 21. “Production Notes on ‘East of Eden,’” Publicity Files, East of Eden files, WBA; Philip K. Scheuer, “A Town Called Hollywood: Kazan Sure That ‘Eden’ Has Unite Despite Cuts in Story,” Los Angeles Times, July 11, 1954. 22. This comparison presented itself in numerous ways. On the heels of Brando’s own affiliation with pugilism in On the Waterfront, the “pugnacious” Dean’s documented boxing lessons could well have corroborated widely expressed opinions that he was mimicking his counterpart. Kazan also informed readers that Dean was a former student of the Actors Studio. Moreover, East of Eden’s New York premiere at the Astor Theatre on March 10, 1955, capped a fundraising drive by the Actors Studio to purchase

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Notes to Pages 95–97 a permanent home. See “Pugnacious Dean,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 9, 1954; Elia Kazan, “Actors Studio Alumni Working East of Eden,” New York Herald Tribune, February 27, 1955. 23. “Marlon Brando: Unaccustomed As I Am . . . ,” Modern Screen, October 1955. 24. Gerald Weales, “The Crazy Kids Take Over,” Reporter, December 13, 1956. See also Scott Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 16. 25. Philip K. Scheuer, “Jimmy Dean Says He Isn’t Flattered by Being Labeled ‘Another Brando,’” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1954. 26. It is unclear where the quote first emerged. It appeared in Philip K. Scheuer’s November 7, 1955, column. Newsweek’s review of East of Eden repeated the quote verbatim months later. See Scheuer, 3; “East of Eden,” review, Newsweek, March 7, 1955, 90–91. 27. Lee Ferrero, Publicity Files, August 26, 1954; Ted Ashton, Publicity Files, August 5, 1954; Carl Combs, Publicity Files, February 11, 1955; Anonymous, Publicity Files, February 15, 1955; Ted Ashton, Publicity Files, February 15, 1955; Ted Ashton, Publicity Files, June 24, 1954; Carl Combs, Publicity Files, March 9, 1955, all from East of Eden files, WBA. 28. “East of Eden,” review, Showmen’s Trade Review, February 19, 1955. 29. Howard Thompson, “Another Dean Hits the Big Screen,” New York Times, March 13, 1955. 30. The newcomer “could be accused of using the same mumbling incoherence of Marlon Brando,” Coe reasoned, but such a pattern actually implicated the influence of their shared director. For Marsh, Kazan’s specific brand of realism obscured the actor’s signifying agency and was “bound to make many feel that Kazan has influenced his new player toward copying Marlon Brando.” Richard Coe, “Even in Eden, Life Is Earnest,” Washington Post and Times Herald, April 13, 1955; W. Ward Marsh, “‘East of Eden,’ Allen, Rated Harsh and Turbulent Drama Not Helped by CinemaScope,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 13, 1955. Though he provided no further evidence to substantiate the claim, Thomas M. Pryor argued in December 1954 that Dean’s turn in the yet-unreleased Eden “caused excitement in movie circles not matched since Marlon Brando came on the scene.” See Pryor, “Film Star Traffic to TV on Increase,” New York Times, December 25, 1954. 31. William K. Zinsser, “Slowness Is a Virtue in Elia Kazan’s ‘Eden,’” New York Herald Tribune, March 13, 1955. 32. Philip K. Scheuer, “Kazan Has Another Offbeat Film Classic in ‘East of Eden’: ‘Eden’ Joins Offbeat Classics,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1955; Scheuer, “Unique Spell Cast by ‘East of Eden,’” Los Angeles Times, March 17, 1955. Bosley Crowther’s withering evaluation of the young performer, in which he asserted that Dean’s simulation of Brando’s style was unprecedented, suggested, like Scheuer, that similarities between the actors were obvious and incriminating. See Crowther, “The Screen: ‘East of Eden’ Has Debut,” New York Times, March 10, 1955. R. H. Gardner added that Dean’s “gestures, cadence, account—even the tone of voice—all belong to Brando.” See Gardner, “Of Stage and Screen: Like a Furry Feeling in the Stomach,” Baltimore Sun, April 12, 1955. 33. Hedda Hopper, “New Film Type, the Slouch, Gives Writer the Creeps,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 7, 1954. 34. Hopper, “New Film Type.” 35. Louella Parsons did not use the word “Method” but did ascribe performers of

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Notes to Pages 97–102 the school the familiar, loaded characterization of “unconventional.” See Parsons, “James Dean—New Face with Future,” Cosmopolitan, March 1955, 44. 36. Louella Parsons, “Hollywood Is Talking About .  .  .” Los Angeles Examiner, December 26, 1954. 37. Mark Dayton in Screenland described Dean as “spooky, an oddball, a nonconformist, sullen and withdrawn, a member of the dirty shirt school of acting, a crazy mixed-up kid, a working eccentric—and yes, a 14-karat, ball-bearing genius.” See Dayton, “Excitement for the Lovelorn?,” Screenland, July 1955. Richard Moore’s August 1955 profile in Modern Screen, appropriately titled “Lone Wolf,” rehashed a familiar narrative of the uncooperative iconoclast resistant to the promotional apparatus of the star system. Dean is said to have arrived late to a Giant press event, to have refused to engage with reporters, and to have alienated coworkers. Then again, Moore reasoned, such behavior was typical of “a free-wheeling individualist who breaks all the rules except one—he travels fastest who travels alone.” See Moore, “Lone Wolf,” Modern Screen, August 1955. 38. Dayton, “Excitement for the Lovelorn?” 39. Hedda Hopper, “Dean—Hollywood’s Rebellious ‘Genius,’” Baltimore Sun, March 27, 1955. 40. Ezra Goodman quoted a fan magazine writer’s contention that women constituted roughly seventy-five of the one hundred positions in the field. See Goodman, FiftyYear Decline, 74. See also Slide, Hollywood Fan Magazine, 169. 41. Slide, 8. 42. This roster of luminaries included (but was not limited to) Edith Gwynn, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Rona Barrett, Sheilah Graham, May Mann, Radie Harris, Gladys Hall, Jimmy Starr, Dorothy Kilgallen, Florabel Muir, Hazel Washington, Irv Kupcinet, and Earl Wilson. 43. Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 18. 44. Frost, 4. 45. Frost, 26. 46. “The Gossipist,” Time, July 28, 1947, 60. 47. “The Gossipist,” 61. 48. “The Gossipist,” 61. 49. Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 27. 50. Frost, 27. 51. The conversational style employed by Hopper and her epistolary community also resulted in spelling and grammatical errors. This is especially true in the case of letters written to Hopper, and I have made minor corrections to letters featured here to improve their legibility without altering their content. 52. Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 51–52. 53. The Hopper family bequeathed these materials to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1966, shortly after Hedda Hopper passed away. 54. Stacey, Star Gazing, 49. 55. Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 54. 56. Hills, Fan Cultures, xi. 57. Hills, x–xi. 58. Babs Smith, letter to Hedda Hopper, February 10, 1956, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL.

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Notes to Pages 102–107 59. Beverley Laskey, letter to Hedda Hopper, January 27, 1956, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 60. Marguerite McGuire, letter to Hedda Hopper, January 20, 1956, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 61. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 245–268. 62. Jensen, “Fandom as Pathology,” 9–11. 63. Bode, “Fade out,” 90. 64. Goodman, Fifty-Year Decline, 80. Faced with letters asking her to confirm rumors of Dean still being alive but horribly mutilated, Parsons advised Modern Screen readers to “please do not believe such morbid gossip.” See Parsons, “Louella Parsons in Hollywood,” Modern Screen, September 1956. In September 1956, Time detailed the “weird new phenomenon” that emerged around the late James Dean. The author characterized Dean’s ongoing fame as “a teen-age craze” that became a morbid fixation. Gothic imagery abounded (e.g., in the phrases “the bandwagon that looks disconcertingly like a hearse” and “boy meets ghoul”), and the author suggested that the dead actor’s haunting of multimedia platforms was made all the more unsettling by the way in which it outsized his productivity in life. See “Dean of the One-Shotters,” Time, September 3, 1956, 54. 65. J. Gray, Dislike-Minded, 60. 66. David Myers, “Your James Dean Memorial Medallion,” Modern Screen, October 1956. Within the same issue was an advertisement for The Official James Dean Anniversary Book. 67. “Report to Sponsors,” Sponsor, May 14, 1956, 1–2. “The Unlighted Road” first aired on CBS on May 6, 1955. It is unclear when the rerun aired. Time noted that Playhouse was part of larger network strategies to participate in the “hysteria” of the Dean “cult.” See “The Dean Cult,” Time, November 26, 1956, 65. 68. “The Dean Cult,” 65. 69. Margaret Moran, letter to the editor, Life, October 15, 1956, 19. 70. Harold Thompson, letter to the editor, Life October 15, 1956, 19. 71. Hills, Fan Cultures, xiii. In the same vein, Matt Hills has argued that cult stardom “cannot be understood as a binaristic matter of fan agency versus industry structure: it is not simply ‘bottom-up’ but is instead recursively produced through the duality of structure and agency.” See Hills, “Cult Movies,” 34. 72. Barbara Ocilak, letter to Hedda Hopper, November 1955, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 73. Barbara Ocilak, letter to Hedda Hopper, November 1955, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 74. Hopper, “New Film Type”; Hopper, “Hollywood’s Rebellious ‘Genius’”; Hedda Hopper, “Producer Spots Ina Claire,” Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1955. 75. Hopper, “New Film Type.” 76. Hedda Hopper, “Ex–Farm Boy Now Is Making Hay in Movies,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1955; Hopper, “Keep Your Eye on james dean,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1955. 77. Sanford Roth, “The Late James Dean,” Collier’s, November 25, 1955, 65. Hopper would later reciprocate, saying, “Nobody knew young Dean any better, if as well, as Sandy and his wife.” Given their disproportionate visibility, it remains unclear how much Hopper’s endorsement of Roth elevates his popular image as a Dean expert. See

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Notes to Pages 107–115 Hedda Hopper, “Wyler Will Costar Hepburn and Perkins,” Los Angeles Times, September 28, 1956; Hopper, “Her ‘Discoverer’ to Star Audrey Hepburn Again,” “Looking at Hollywood,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1956. 78. Roberta Stubbs, letter to Hedda Hopper, January 3, 1956, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 79. Fred Mann, letter to Hedda Hopper, February 26, 1956, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 80. Jeanne Pitruzzello, letter to Hedda Hopper, November 25, 1955, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 81. Pitruzzello, letter to Hopper. 82. Vicki Golonka, Lucy Alessi, Mary Alessi, Ann Spracale, Carol Barnes, and Barb Schmidt, letter to Hedda Hopper, November 26, 1955, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 83. Barbara Tocci, letter to Hedda Hopper, December 10, 1955; Joanne Rocioppi, letter to Hopper, December 10, 1955; Barbara Ocilak, letter to Hopper, December 11, 1955; Jimmy Madden, letter to Hopper, December 12, 1955; Joyce Santner, letter to Hopper, December 13, 1955; Nancy Pasquenza, letter to Hopper, December 13, 1955; Ellen Bohen, letter to Hopper, December 14, 1955; Jane Leone, letter to Hopper, December 14, 1955; Dolores D’Elicio, letter to Hopper, December 16, 1955; Delphine Schwartz, letter to Hopper, December 16, 1955; Lucille Jennings, letter to Hopper, December 17, 1955; Mary Sue Stearns, letter to Hopper, December 17, 1955; Marie Ferrier, letter to Hopper, February 20, 1956, all from Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 84. “Jimmy’s Fans,” letter to the editor, Modern Screen, March 1956, 68. 85. Louella Parsons, “Louella Parsons on Hollywood,” Modern Screen, June 1956, 23. 86. Parsons, “Louella Parsons on Hollywood.” 87. R.  G., letter to Hedda Hopper, October 14, 1955; Eleanor Nichols, letter to Hedda Hopper, October 10, 1955, both from Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 88. Marguerite M. McGuire, letter to Hedda Hopper, January 20, 1956; V. M. Lamberton, letter to Hedda Hopper, December 8, 1955, both from Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 89. Rhea Burakoff, letter to Hedda Hopper, October 5, 1955, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 90. “In the crudest sense,” Leerom Medovoi states, “Fordism represents an economic system in which an assembly-line model of mass production was articulated with a culture of mass consumption, all under the regulatory guidance of an expanded professional managerial class and a Keynesian welfare state.” See Medovoi, Rebels, 15. 91. May, Homeward Bound, xiv–xi; Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men, 7–12. 92. Mitchell, “Jim Stark’s ‘Barbaric Yawp,’” 131–137. 93. Medovoi, Rebels, 21. That Hollywood’s 1950s-era output participated in the often-contradictory celebration of prosperity and repression of nonnormative deviance has by now become axiomatic. Alan Nadel succinctly summarizes the relationship between the celebration of prosperity and the repression of nonnormativity: “Celebratory postwar prosperity . . . is counterbalanced by the intimations of the surveillance state, which compromised privacy in order to vouchsafe a return to normalcy.” See Nadel, “Partial History,” 224. Quoting Thomas Hine, Claudia Springer states that the term “teenager” first emerged in 1941. See Springer, James Dean Transfigured, 101–104. 94. Springer, 3. 95. L. Williams, Playing the Race Card, 43.

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Notes to Pages 115–123 96. L. Williams, 43. 97. Jennifer Frost provides an in-depth study of Hedda Hopper’s political use of gossip and the tremendous power she wielded. This included her successful campaign to have James Baskett awarded an honorary Oscar for his turn as Uncle Remus in Song of the South (Wilfred Jackson and Harve Foster, 1946). Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood, 141–149. Chapter 4. History in Hysteria 1. Polonsky, introduction to Films of John Garfield, 8. 2. Polonsky, 9. 3. United Press and International News Service would merge in 1958 to form United Press International. 4. Additional coverage of Garfield’s memorial that invoked such dystopian imagery made its way to readers from Baltimore, Maryland, to Helena, Montana, and parts in between. 5. “10,000 Line Streets for Garfield rites,” New York Times, May 24, 1952; Rabbi Louis I. Newman, “John Jules Garfield: In Memoriam,” May 23, 1952, John Garfield Papers (Film Collection MS-04916), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter cited as HRC); emphasis added. 6. Bode, “Fade Out,” 90. 7. Levitt, “Death on Display,” 62; Bode, “Fade Out,” 90. 8. Robert Wahls, “The Loss of John Garfield Is Marlon Brando’s Gain,” New York Daily News, September 9, 1947. At the time, Garfield gave conflicting explanations as to why he had turned down the Kowalski role, attributing his decision to the supporting nature of the part and to financial considerations. See Gelman, Films of John Garfield, 8, 33. 9. Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 225–263. 10. Both articles offered eyewitness testimony from Iris Whitney, the last person to see Garfield alive, as to the validity of his tough yet sensitive nature. See “Tough Guy with a Soft Heart, Garfield Fought Way to Success,” New York Post, May 21, 1952; Irving Lieberman, “He Was Troubled . . . He Needed Help,” New York Post, May 21, 1952. 11. United Press, “Death Claims John Garfield,” Idaho State Journal (Pocatello, ID), May 21, 1952; United Press, “John Garfield Dies,” Fort Pierce News-Tribune (Fort Pierce, FL), May 21, 1952. 12. Associated Press, “John Garfield, Actor, Dies of Heart Attack,” Baltimore Sun, May 22, 1952. 13. “Garfield Dies, Blonde Locks Door on Cops,” New York Daily News, May 22, 1952; “John Garfield, Actor, Dies.” 14. “Garfield Last Rites Slated,” Times Standard (Eureka, CA), May 22, 1952; United Press, “John Garfield Dies of Heart Attack in New York Apartment,” Pottstown Mercury (Pottstown, PA), May 22, 1952; United Press, “Funeral Services Set for Actor John Garfield,” El Paso Herald-Post (El Paso, TX), May 22, 1952. 15. Silberstein-Loeb, International Distribution of News, 2. 16. Garfield petitioned to legally change his name four years later. International News Service, “John Garfield Asks to Drop Real Name,” Daily Dispatch (Moline, IL), May 19, 1942.

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Notes to Pages 123–129 17. John Alden, “Seeing the Movies with John Alden,” Minneapolis Tribune, October 22, 1938. 18. Schreiber, “‘Mass of Contradictions,’” 249–264. 19. Ada Hanifin, “‘Four Daughters’ Is Fine Entertainment,” San Francisco Examiner, September 16, 1938. 20. McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, 41. 21. Robert S. Taplinger, “Press Release,” Warner Bros. Studio, 1938, John Garfield Collection, MHL. 22. Taplinger, “Press Release.” 23. “A Star from the Slums,” Screen Book advertisement, Hollywood, December 1938. 24. The association with the immigrant working class evoked comparisons to James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, though Mook contended that their struggles were not as pronounced as Garfield’s. The comparison nonetheless informed the use of the term “another” in the profile’s title. See S. R. Mook, “Another East Side Genius,” Silver Screen, December 1938. 25. Mary Parkes, “Little Orphan Julie,” Modern Screen, November 1939, 40–41, 72. 26. Parkes, 72. 27. Parkes, 41. 28. Alexander Kahn, “Hollywood Film Shop,” Oroville Mercury Register (Oroville, CA), August 16, 1938. 29. Boyd Martin, “Latest Movie ‘Find’ Not Cut Exactly to Hollywood Pattern,” CourierJournal (Louisville, KY), September 11, 1938. 30. Ida Zeitlin, “The Taming of a Tough Guy,” Modern Screen, April 1940, 36–37, 93, 95. 31. Taplinger, “Press Release.” 32. Taplinger, “Press Release.” 33. The syndicated columnist Harold Heffernan said “no two [were] as unalike” as Garfield and Lynn. He twice noted the contrast in appearance, identifying Garfield as “short, dark-haired,” and “short, not at all good-looking,” while characterizing Lynn as “tall, blond and handsome.” Harold Heffernan, “‘Four Daughters’ Lifts Two to Top,” Chattanooga Daily Times (Chattanooga, TN), October 7, 1938. 34. Sklar, City Boys, 9. 35. Sklar, 6; Wilson, Gangster Film, 36. 36. Wilson, 36. 37. Sklar, City Boys, 6. See also Joshua D. Rothman, “When Bigotry Paraded through the Streets,” Atlantic, December 4, 2016; Young, “Beyond Borders”; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 93. 38. Schatz, Genius of the System, 302–303, 311. 39. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 92. 40. Goldman, American Jewish Story, 2. 41. Goldman, 2. 42. Carr, Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, 13–14. 43. Carr, 3. 44. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 20; Friedman, Hollywood’s Image, 64. 45. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 182. 46. Rode, Michael Curtiz, 228.

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Notes to Pages 129–131 47. Cohan, Masked Men, 97–106. 48. Dyer, Stars, 49. 49. Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 23. 50. Bodnar, Blue-Collar Hollywood, 112. 51. “Follow-Up Comment,” Variety, July 26, 1939; “Information Desk,” Modern Screen, October 1939, 102; “Charting the Stars” Modern Screen, February 1940, 49, 96, 98. 52. Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 43. 53. Dickos, Street with No Name, 72. 54. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 20. 55. Diner, Lower East Side Memories, 19, 41–44, 57; Hasia Diner quoted in Baker, “Midtown Jewish Masculinity,” 169. 56. Diner, Lower East Side Memories, 57. 57. “John Garfield Bidding for Gershwin Role in Picture Biography,” Hollywood Citizen-News (Hollywood, CA), May 11, 1939. Sheilah Graham’s syndicated article appeared all over the country, from Spokane to Scranton. 58. Louella Parsons, “Biography of George Gershwin Will Be Filmed by Warner Brothers Soon; John Garfield Chosen for Lead Role,” Daily Times (Davenport, IA), June 10, 1938. 59. Rode, Michael Curtiz, 247. Claude Rains would ultimately be cast in the Salomon role. 60. Helen Zigmond, “Our Film Folk,” Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle (Milwaukee, WI), December 2, 1938; “Warner Product Continues to Play Americanism Theme,” Box Office, February 25, 1939, 27. 61. Robert Sklar terms this break an “interlude.” See Sklar, City Boys, 91. 62. The May 13, 1939, write-up in Harrison’s Reports was indicative of this trend. Muni, Davis, and Aherne are singled out specifically for commentary on their performances as Benito Juárez, Empress Carlota, and Emperor Maximilian, respectively, while Garfield is merely listed among other cast members. See “Juarez,” Harrison’s Reports, May 13, 1939, 75. 63. The July 1939 Silver Screen review of the film exemplified this trend. “Review,” Silver Screen, July 1939, 80; Burns Mantle, “Stage Takes Beating from the Screen in ‘Wuthering Heights,’” New York Daily News, May 4, 1939. 64. “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay, July 1939. 65. Arthur Pollock, “Playthings,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 7, 1939. 66. Patricia Sloan, letter to the editor, Photoplay, September 1939. 67. Sheilah Graham, “Giant ‘G.W.T.W.’ in Three Parts,” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), May 6, 1939, 5. Graham’s column was syndicated nationally by the North American Newspaper Alliance. 68. Gentlemen’s Agreement joined Crossfire as the only two “social message” Hollywood films to explicitly tackle anti-Semitism in the immediate aftermath of World War II; see Goldman, American Jewish Story, 74. Omer Bartov argues that the film does manage to improve upon earlier flawed Hollywood efforts to address anti-Semitism in films such as Mr. Skeffington (Vincent Sherman, 1944); see Bartov, “Jew” in Cinema, 36–37. Lester Friedman contends that the picture does “little more than skirt the issue of American anti-Semitism,” as, like Body and Soul, “the Jews in both films are Americanized to the point where little of their heritage remains”; see Friedman, Hollywood’s Image, 128.

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Notes to Pages 132–135 69. Bartov, “Jew” in Cinema, 37. 70. Goldman, American Jewish Story, 70–71. 71. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 184. 72. For more on what Patricia Erens calls the low point of Jewish screen representation during the 1940s, see Erens, 195. 73. The syndicated columnists Louella Parsons, Edwin Schallert, and Sheilah Graham reported Garfield’s rumored casting in the remake of the 1927 Richard Barthelmess picture to millions of readers from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Louella Parsons, “Garbo May Return to Work on Sept. 1,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 6, 1938; Edwin Schallert, “‘Patent Leather Kid,’” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1938; Sheilah Graham, “Muni May Be Seen as Beethoven,” Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT), June 15, 1938; “Production Index,” Box Office, August 12, 1939, 119; “On the Aisle,” Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, PA), May 6, 1939; Grace Wilcox, “Hollywood Reporter,” Detroit Free Press, May 14, 1939. 74. Stanfield, “Monarch for the Millions,” 86. 75. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 182. Glenn Frankel has similarly suggested that Garfield “was perhaps Hollywood’s most recognizably Jewish actor and certainly its biggest Jewish star” by the late 1940s. See Frankel, High Noon, 134. Thom Andersen contends that “John Garfield managed to embody in his screen persona a group that had never before appeared in American films, the Jewish working class.” See Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 258. 76. Erens, Jew in American Cinema, 181. 77. At the bottom of the first page, the contract notes the right of the studio to suspend Garfield without pay and to add that suspension period to the end of his contract. Moreover, at the end of this “stage appearances” section, the contract adds that the studio may extend his contract for the period in which he’s been released to do the play (even if he follows the studio’s rules for requesting the release to do the Group Theatre play guaranteed in his contract). Jules Garfield Agreement with Warner Bros. Pictures, April 15, 1938, John Garfield Papers, HRC. 78. “‘Four Daughters’ Is a Music Hall Sensation,” New York Daily News, August 19, 1938. 79. Read Kendall, “Around and About in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1938. 80. Clarke Wales, “Eyes Wide Open,” Detroit Free Press, September 18, 1938. 81. Mayme Ober Peak, “Stars in the Making,” Boston Globe, December 21, 1938. 82. Jerry Asher, “John Garfield Unmoved by Film Success,” San Francisco Examiner, September 25, 1938. 83. Ed Jonesboy, “Tough Guy,” Hollywood, November 1938; Faith Service, “Born to Be a Mug,” Modern Screen, February 1939; Leo Townsend, “Good News,” Modern Screen, December 1938. Press reports claimed that Garfield had been declining studio overtures since his debut with the Group Theatre in their 1935 production Awake and Sing! See Elizabeth Yeaman, “Gotha[m] Leading Man, Signs [for] Roles in Wanger Films,” Hollywood Citizen-News, ca. 1937, John Garfield Papers, HRC. 84. Louis Sobol, “New York Cavalcade,” New York Evening Journal, October 11, 1940. 85. Mook, “Another East Side Genius,” 74. 86. Mook, 74.

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Notes to Pages 135–137 87. Mook, 74–75. Several months later, Mook reiterated this characterization by conveying “one of my biggest and best medals” on Garfield, “because he is not only a superb actor but because he is modest and because I don’t believe Hollywood will ever ‘get’ him.” S. R. Mook, “Medals and Birds,” Screenland, March 1939, 94. 88. Examples include Sheilah Graham, “John Garfield—Bewildered and Sad,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), September 17, 1938; Wales, “Eyes Wide Open.” Lois Svensurd wrote for Modern Screen in August 1939 that “fame and fortune will never turn the Garfield head.” Lois Svensrud, “Good News,” Modern Screen, August 1939. In CBS’s October 3, 1946, episode of the Strolls with “Hollywood Players” radio profile series, Garfield noted that seven years after becoming a star, he still remained unaccustomed to the Hollywood lifestyle. 89. Parkes, “Little Orphan Julie,” 41; “Hot from Hollywood,” Screenland, November 1939, 15; J. D. Spiro, “On the Lots,” Detroit Free Press, May 21, 1939; Frederick James Smith, “No Glamour Boy, But—!,” This Week, March 26, 1939, 5–6, 12. 90. Mary Parkes elaborated, noting that “each time he faced his press agent and plaintively said, ‘Must I tell the story of my life again?’ ‘Indeed you must,’ was the answer. And indeed he did.” Parkes, “Little Orphan Julie,” 41, 72. 91. “‘Prisoner’ of Pictures,” Screenland, December 1939. In March, the same magazine had posted a similar image of Garfield under the title “Menace” as part of its “Screenland Salutes” pictorial series, suggesting perhaps that this magazine, like others that featured criticisms of Garfield’s typecasting, had been party to the typage’s perpetuation in the first place. See “Screenland Salutes: Menace,” Screenland, March 1939. 92. Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 1, 1939. 93. Kahn, “Hollywood Film Shop.” 94. Sheilah Graham’s nationally syndicated newspaper column featured Garfield talking about his concerns over how his lack of power might lead to studio exploitation: “If I let them, they’ll rush me from picture to picture whether or not the parts are good for me.” Graham, “John Garfield—Bewildered and Sad,” Dayton Daily News (Dayton, OH), September 17, 1938. See also Norvell, “Preview of Your Future,” Screenland, March 1940. 95. “Hedy Loses Coin Tiff, Back to M-G at $500 Wk.; Garfield-WB Accord,” Variety, November 29, 1939. “When Warner Bros. refused to loan [Garfield] to Columbia for the film version of Golden Boy,” writes Thom Andersen, “and he lost another chance at the role Clifford Odets had written for him, he took the first of nine suspensions without pay for refusing an assigned project. When his Warners contract expired, Garfield didn’t give any serious thought to a renewal. He immediately formed his own production company with producer Bob Roberts.” Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” 259. 96. Elmer Sunfield, “Hollywood Newsreel,” Hollywood Screen Life, January 1940, 6. 97. “The Talk of Hollywood,” Evening Sun (Baltimore, MD), May 12, 1939. 98. Modern Screen’s November 1939 review of Dust Be My Destiny suggested that the studio’s insistent casting of their new star in familiar roles and genres had stagnated Garfield’s performance: “John Garfield, still the cynical, embittered character, doesn’t fulfill the promise he gave of great ability in earlier pictures.” See “Movie Reviews,” Modern Screen, November 1939, 17. 99. S.  R. Mook, “Garfield Breaks Loose!,” Screenland, April 1940; Weston East, “Here’s Hollywood,” Screenland, March 1939, 69. 100. McDonald, Star System, 66.

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Notes to Pages 138–144 101. Gaines, Contested Culture, 150. 102. Regev, Working in Hollywood, 109. 103. Herbert Cohn, “The Sound Track,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 9, 1938. 104. Llewellyn Miller, “Important Pictures,” Hollywood, November 1938, 13. 105. Garfield’s tenure with the organization coincided with the conflicts over interpretation that marked the 1934 invocation of “Method” acting and the birth of methodness, as I detailed in chapter 1. Garfield was among the members who eventually defected to Hollywood on a more permanent basis, while others (e.g., Harold Clurman, Clifford Odets, and Stella Adler) flirted briefly with the commercial film industry before returning to the stage. 106. Milton Harker, “In Hollywood,” Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), May 12, 1939; Harker, “Garfield Worrying, Says Film Capital Makes a Man Soft,” Austin American Statesman, May 12, 1939. 107. Mook, “Garfield Breaks Loose!,” 34. 108. Wales, “Eyes Wide Open,” 3. 109. John Garfield, letter to Hedda Hopper, June 19, 1940, John Garfield File, Hedda Hopper Papers, MHL. 110. Garfield, letter to Hopper. 111. Jane Gaines notes how Warner Bros. employed a form of deliberate “miscasting” that would provoke talent to reject unsuitable offered roles and trigger unpaid suspensions that would save the studio money while also tacking on the suspension period to the end of the star’s contract. Gaines, Contested Culture, 152; Schatz, Genius of the System, 137–139. 112. An emblematic 1939 item in Silver Screen cast Garfield’s interest in a research visit to Mexico for Juarez as the act of an industry outlier. Garfield’s stated desire to become “Mexico conscious” was greeted with dry humor by fellow Hollywood star Olivia de Havilland, who reportedly told others after learning of Garfield’s postproduction travel plans that “John is going to Mexico to get atmosphere.” “Juarez: Life Story of a Movie,” Photoplay, May 1939, 22–23, 93; “Silver Screen Topics for Gossip,” Silver Screen, September 1939, 58. 113. Gelman, Films of John Garfield, 21. 114. As “Red Hollywood’s leading personality,” according to Andersen, Garfield undertook Jewish characters and proletarian, socially oriented themes that functioned as centers of gravity for the Left, a fact well known to progressives and regarded by reactionaries as potential communist propaganda. Thom Andersen quoted in Naremore, More Than Night, 124, 126. See also McGilligan and Buhle, Tender Comrades, 475, 545; Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood; Ross, Hollywood Left and Right; Barranger, Unfriendly Witness. 115. Naremore, More Than Night, 123. 116. Gelman, Films of John Garfield, 9. 117. One day after Garfield’s passing, the New York Herald Tribune insisted upon the importance of the tough-guy type not as an inherent feature of the performer’s meaning but rather as the central object of contention between the actor and Hollywood’s conservative casting, genre production, and star system. “John Garfield, 39, Found Dead in Woman Friend’s Apartment,” New York Herald Tribune, May 22, 1952. 118. “TV Mailbag,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 24, 1960; “TV Mailbag,” Elmira Advertiser (Elmira, NY), May 24, 1961; “TV Fans’ Mailbag,” Times (Munster, IN),

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Notes to Pages 145–152 February 3, 1963; Harold V. Cohen, “At Random,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 18, 1964; William Hyder, “Stepping Stones to Stardom,” Baltimore Sun, April 18, 1965; “Michele Will Tell,” Sentinel (Carlisle, PA), March 30, 1985; Bob Thomas, “Whatever Happened to the Days When the Stars Had Simple Names,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), June 14, 1986. 119. Morella and Epstein, Rebels, 10–31. 120. Swindell, Body and Soul, 2. Howard Gelman’s less detailed contemporaneous biography, also released in 1975, makes similar assertions about Garfield’s significance as a rebel; see Gelman, Films of John Garfield. 121. Garfield was also periodically invoked as a comparison for non-Method actors such as Elliott Gould for their “distinctly urban identity.” Smith-Rowsey, Star Actors, 138. 122. Swindell, Body and Soul, 159–160. 123. Swindell, 67, 99. 124. Beaver, John Garfield; Knox, “John Garfield”; Nott, He Ran, 29–30. 125. Susan King, “A Star’s Brief Shining,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2003. 126. “Museum Series on Three Film Rebels,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1978. 127. “Running All the Way: The Films of John Garfield,” playbill, Film Society of Lincoln Center, July 1996, John Garfield Clippings and Ephemera, 1937–1959, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 128. Anderson, “Red Hollywood,” 257–263. 129. Notably, although J. Hoberman seeks to argue that Garfield predates Brando, his framing (“Brando before Brando” and “the Jewish Brando”) muddies the relationship and makes the not-uncommon move of treating Brando as the North Star for orienting others in the “Method” world. Jon Krampner pulls a similar move in his study of Kim Stanley. J. Hoberman, “Arts and Letters: The Jewish Brando”; Krampner, Female Brando. 130. Swindell, Body and Soul, 271. 131. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 331–332. 132. Jacobson, Roots Too. 133. Sklar, City Boys, 225. Chapter 5. Illogical Tomatoes to Inscrutable Feats 1. Marianne Conroy uses Walter Kerr’s observation as a point of departure for exploring the place of the Actors Studio at the heart of larger contestations over postwar national culture and taste. See Conroy, “Acting Out,” 239. 2. Walter Kerr, “Actors Studio Gives Virile Approach to Craft,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1956. The article also appeared in the New York Tribune, among other newspapers. 3. Conroy is paraphrasing Kerr’s observation; Conroy, “Acting out,” 239. Much of this discourse revolved around the “Method” stars Marlon Brando and James Dean, but more studio-centric coverage also emerged. See, for example, Arthur Gelb, “Behind the Scenes at the Actors Studio: Basic Formula Informal Attire,” New York Times, April 29, 1951. 4. Kerr, “Virile Approach to Craft.” 5. Maurice Zolotow, “The Stars Rise Here,” Saturday Evening Post, May 18, 1957, 44–45, 83.

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Notes to Pages 152–160 6. Zolotow, 84. 7. Zolotow, 86. 8. Zolotow, 88. 9. Esch, “‘Any Method at All,’” 96. 10. Carnicke, “Uncensored and Unabridged,” 22. 11. Richard Maltby quoted in Hollinger, Actress, 14. 12. Print discourse characterized Hoffman’s character in related ways. Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column that Hoffman was an “out-of-work actor . . . who gets in drag in order to act.” Liz Smith, “Burt, Sophia May Co-star in HBO’s ‘Rose Tattoo,’” Detroit Free Press, October 13, 1982. 13. The director Sydney Pollack’s commentary (recorded for the 1991 Criterion LaserDisc release of the film) reveals that he cut from the script Dorsey’s entire training montage of learning to be a woman. Hoffman wanted those training scenes included so as to show how important the preparation was. 14. It bears pointing out that Michael’s ruse and reveal provide him growth at the expense of others, especially Julie and Les, who are left unmoored by Michael’s deceit. 15. Michael Sragow, “Tootsie: One Great Dame,” Current, the Criterion Collection, December 17, 2014, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/3404-tootsie-one-great​ -dame. 16. Harris, Mike Nichols, 42. 17. Some concerns about Hoffman did resonate with the historical othering of Jewish performers, from Hoffman’s own surprise at being cast as a WASP to allusions to his purported lack of conventional attractiveness. The latter of these echoed frequent observations in John Garfield paratexts that he was less physically appealing than his WASP costars, including Jeffrey Lynn. 18. “TV Chatter!,” Anniston Star (Anniston, AL), October 16, 1982. 19. Robin Adams Sloan, “Valerie Harper Itching for New Series,” News-Journal (Mansfield, OH), November 11, 1982. 20. The Making of “Tootsie,” directed by Rocky Lang (1982; New York: Criterion Collection, 2014). The Hoffman/Pollack contrast obscures the fact that Sydney Pollack was also ostensibly a “Method” actor by the prevailing interpretation of the term. He trained with the Group Theatre alum Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he eventually became a teacher. Dworkin, Making Tootsie, 11. 21. Hoffman and the filmmakers asserted their desire to differentiate Some Like It Hot and the character of Dorothy from that film’s use of an unconvincing gender switch strictly for laughs. Dworkin, Making Tootsie, 1. 22. Susan Dworkin returns to something Hoffman mentions frequently in the Tootsie making-of documentary and in interviews decades later: that the role of Dorothy helped him learn something about himself. “Dustin concentrated on understanding women by being Dorothy,” Dworkin writes. Pollack added, “Michael doesn’t know shit about being a woman. But at least he can say in the end: ‘I learned something about myself.’” Dworkin, Making Tootsie, 30, 88–89. 23. Hoffman explicitly disavowed readings of his performance as drag in the September 1982 issue of Life: “It offends me when they use the word ‘drag,’ carps Dustin. ‘I’m not in drag. I’m playing a character.’” See Cyndi Stivers, “Life Magazine Visits Dustin as Tootsie,” Life, September 1982, 55. 24. Stivers, 55.

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Notes to Pages 160–167 25. Gene Siskel, “It’s a Comedy, but Playing a Woman Makes Dustin Cry,” San Francisco Examiner, September 1, 1982. 26. Isaac Butler details several unsettling incidents during the production of Kramer, including Hoffman slapping Streep and taunting her about the recent death of her partner, John Cazale—all supposedly in Hoffman’s effort to cultivate an on-set environment he believed would be most conducive to generating the right performances. See Butler, The Method, 353. 27. “I spent two years in Strasberg’s class,” Hoffman recalled to Dworkin. “I wasn’t one of his ‘followers,’ but he was great to listen to. I always thought it was terrible the way they’d follow him around like he was God and could make them be Jimmy Dean or Marlon Brando.” Dworkin, Making Tootsie, 62. 28. Walsh, Method Acting, 128. 29. DeAngelis, Gay Fandom, 7. 30. I replicate Sarah Sinwell’s use of “trans*,” with an asterisk, which she says “mark[s] Jack Halberstam’s concept of trans* as a term that ‘puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the contingent forms of trans identity.’” Sinwell, “Fantasies and Fangirls,” 169–170. 31. Sinwell, 166, 168–169. 32. That Karen Black initially enrolled in and promptly withdrew from the Actors Studio because of her dissatisfaction with its pedagogy did not figure into Come Back’s stage or screen reception. Segrave and Martin, Post-Feminist Hollywood Actress, 85. 33. Robert Hatch, “Films,” Nation, December 18, 1982, 668. 34. Kroll, “Saint Jimmy,” Newsweek, March 1, 1982, 73. John Beaufort characterized Dennis’s performance as an impression of Dennis. John Beaufort, “‘Jimmy Dean’ Crumbles as ‘Sally and Marsha’ Generates Warm and Affecting Comedy,” Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 1982. Jay Sharbutt said that “once again she’s playing one of those pathetic but funny women who have a cog loose.” Jay Sharbutt, “Cher Makes Broadway Debut in ‘Jimmy Dean’; Altman Directs,” Associated Press, February 18, 1982. Frank Rich was even less charitable, asserting that Dennis’s performance “creates a non-Texan character indistinguishable from those she recently played in ‘The Supporting Cast’ and ‘The Four Seasons.’” Frank Rich, “Stage: Robert Altman Directs Cher,” New York Times, February 19, 1982. 35. Walsh, Method Acting, 128. 36. Aljean Harmetz, “Altman Films His ‘Jimmy Dean’ Play,” New York Times, September 22, 1982. 37. Butler, The Method, 343–355. 38. For an indicative characterization of DiCaprio’s legitimizing sojourn into methodness, see Julie Miller, “Leonardo DiCaprio Slept in Animal Carcasses and Ate Bison Body Parts for The Revenant,” Vanity Fair, October 20, 2015, https://www​ .vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/10/leonardo-dicaprio-the-revenant. 39. See, for example, Amy Mackelden, “The Biggest Transformations Actors Have Made for Movie Roles,” Harper’s Bazaar, February 7, 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar​ .com/celebrity/latest/g30713295/biggest-actor-movie-transformations/; Hannah Flint, “15 Biggest Movie Transformations of 2017,” Yahoo Entertainment, December 19, 2017, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/15-biggest-movie-transformations-2017​ -slideshow-wp-171348564.html. 40. Caryn James, “The Woman He Adores, It Turns Out, Is a Vampire,” New York

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Notes to Pages 168–171 Times, July 2, 1989; Butler, The Method, 350; Zach Schonfeld, “Truly Batshit: The Secret History of ‘Vampire’s Kiss,’ the Craziest Nicolas Cage Movie of All Time,” The Ringer, June 13, 2019, https://www.theringer.com/movies/2019/6/13/18663380/nicolas-cage​ -vampires-kiss-breakout-performance-30-years; Sarah Lyall, “Nicolas Cage Is in on the Nicolas Cage Jokes,” New York Times, April 20, 2022. 41. Paula Schwartz, “Art Imitates Life, or Maybe It’s Method Acting,” New York Times, December 13, 2005. 42. “GEICO TV Spot, ‘March Madness: Dribbling’ Featuring Candace Parker,” March 17, 2022, https://www.ispot.tv/ad/bnX6/geico-march-madness-dribbling​ -featuring-candace-parker; “AT&T Wireless Active Armor TV Spot, ‘Rosario Covers for Lily’ Feat. Rosario Dawson,” March 19, 2022, https://www.ispot.tv/ad/btZL/at-and​ -t-wireless-active-armor-march-madness-rosario-covers-for-lily-feat-rosario-dawson. 43. Writing for the New York Times, Dennis Lim characterized Christian Bale as having a knack for flashy disappearing acts. Dennis Lim, “Letting His Role Do the Talking,” New York Times, December 3, 2010. 44. Derek Lawrence’s November 2019 Entertainment Weekly feature on Ford v Ferrari encapsulated the spirit of such discourse, observing that Bale is as talked about for the transformations for his performances as the performances themselves. Derek Lawrence, “Christian Bale Says He’s Done with Drastic Weight Changes for Roles,” Entertainment Weekly, November 8, 2019. 45. Paul McDonald quoted in Bell-Metereau and Glenn, introduction to Star Bodies, 7. 46. Esch, “‘Any Method at All,’” 96. 47. Esch, 95–96. It is also worth noting that De Niro’s metamorphosis overshadowed other performers’ transformational labor of the era, including Meryl Streep’s turn in Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982), where the actor lost more than twenty pounds for flashback sequences and immersed herself in learning to speak Polish and German. See Butler, The Method, 354. 48. Esch, “‘Any Method at All,’” 96. 49. Sarah Lyall, “In Stetson or Wig, He’s Hard to Pin Down,” New York Times, November 4, 2007. 50. “Jack Nicholson on Drugs Death of Brokeback Mountain Star Heath Ledger: ‘I Warned Him,’” Evening Standard, April 12, 2012. 51. A. O. Scott, “Ledger’s Work Will Outlast the Frenzy,” New York Times, February 3, 2008. 52. David Carr, “Delicately Campaigning for a Star Now Departed,” New York Times, February 5, 2009. 53. Jason Bailey, “The Jokers, Ranked,” New York Times, October 4, 2019. 54. Stephanie Zacharek, “Joker Wants to Be a Movie about the Emptiness of Our Culture; Instead, It’s a Prime Example of It,” Time, August 31, 2019, https://time.com​ /5666055/venice-joker-review-joaquin-phoenix-not-funny/; Richard Brody, “‘Joker’ Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness,” New Yorker, October 3, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/joker-is-a-viewing-experience-of​ -rare-numbing-emptiness. 55. N. Martin, “‘Does This Film,’” 42. 56. McDonald, Hollywood Stardom, 251. 57. N. Martin, “‘Does This Film,’” 42, 49.

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Notes to Pages 171–175 58. Sean Redmond talks of the “wasted spaces” in Joker as a reflection of the film’s pervading “unhomely feeling.” Sorcha Ní Fhlainn notes that “Fleck’s unstable subjective transformation in Joker acts as a hauntological narrative of neoliberalism’s three decades of social rot.” Redmond, “Madly Walking and Dancing,” 36–37; Fhlainn, “‘Happy Face,’” 119. 59. Kate Walsh, “Controversy Aside, ‘Joker’ Is All Setup, No Punchline,” Chicago Tribune, October 2, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sns-tns-bc​ -joker-movie-review-20191002-story.html; Jake Coyle, “Funny How? In ‘Joker’ a Villain Turns ’70s Anti-hero,” Associated Press, October 2, 2019, https://apnews.com/f7cd3e5 c71e24a6c9a0f71d7db11a9f8; Ty Burr, “‘Joker’: The Dark Villain Rises,” Boston Globe, October 2, 2019, https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/movies/2019/10/02/joker-the-dark​ -villain-rises/Dc4KhfL0KvBv6cpke7vnIO/story.html. 60. Pete Hammond, “Joaquin Phoenix Kills It in Dark, Timely DC Origin Movie That Is No Laughing Matter,” Deadline, August 31, 2019, https://deadline.com/video​ /joker-review-joaquin-phoenix-robert-de-niro-dc-comics-venice-film-festival/. 61. Triangulating the Joker performances of Nicholson, Ledger, and Phoenix, Fhlainn avers that each embodied the failed neoliberal economic promises that took root in the 1980s and the rot that ensued. Fhlainn, “‘Happy Face,’” 120. 62. “9 Times Jared Leto Went Full Method for a Role,” Elle, August 4, 2016; John Patterson, “Jared Leto: ‘I Road-Tested My Character to Get a Little Judgment, Some Meanness, a Little Condemnation,” Guardian, February 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian​ .com/film/2014/feb/01/jared-leto-dallas-buyers-club. 63. Patterson, “Jared Leto.” 64. Matt Stevens, “5 Things to Know before Joining the Dallas Buyers Club with Matthew McConaughey,” E! News, November 17, 2013, https://www.eonline.com​ /news/482006/5-things-to-know-before-joining-the-dallas-buyers-club-with-matthew​ -mcconaughey. 65. Nick Romano, “Suicide Squad: Jared Leto, Joker Actor, Sent Dead Pig to Cast,” Entertainment Weekly, February 20, 2016, https://ew.com/article/2016/02/20/suicide​ -squad-viola-davis-jared-leto-cast-dead-pig/#:~:text=Jared%20Leto%20went%20to​ %20great,horrific%20gifts%2C%E2%80%9D%20she%20said. 66. Marc Malkin, “Jared Leto’s Gifts to His Suicide Squad Co-stars: A Live Rat, a Dead Hog and Some Bullets?!,” E! News, June 25, 2015, https://www.eonline.com/news​ /670674/jared-leto-s-gifts-to-his-suicide-squad-co-stars-a-live-rat-a-dead-hog-and​ -some-bullets. 67. “9 Times Jared Leto Went Full Method.” 68. Josh Eells, “Hanging Out with Jared Leto,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/hanging-out-with-jared-leto-1504791535 69. Eells, “Hanging Out with Jared Leto.” 70. Mike Ryan, “‘Morbius’ Director Daniel Espinosa on What the Heck Happened Here,” Uproxx, April 4, 2022, https://uproxx.com/movies/morbius-director​ -daniel-espinosa-interview/; Billy Givens, “Morbius: Jared Leto’s Method Acting Process Included 45-Minute Bathroom Breaks,” IGN, April 4, 2022, https://www.ign.com​ /articles/morbius-bathroom-breaks-jared-leto. 71. Jenelle Riley, “Jared Leto on Resolutions, Method Acting and How His ‘The Little Things’ Character Is Like the Joker,” Variety, December 31, 2020, https://variety.com​ /2020/film/awards/jared-leto-the-little-things-the-joker-podcast-1234875738/.

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Notes to Pages 175–178 72. Douglas Greenwood, “‘I Was Snorting Lines of Arrabbiata’: Interviewing the House of Gucci Cast,” i-D, November 25, 2021, https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article​ /bvnz95/house-of-gucci-adam-driver-interview. 73. Dais Johnston, “Jared Leto’s Weird Acting Style Isn’t ‘Method’—It’s Just Weird,” Inverse, April 6, 2022, https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/jared-letos-method​ -acting-morbius-joker. 74. Kyndall Cunningham, “Jared Leto’s Most Absurd ‘Method-Acting’ Stories, from ‘Morbius’ Peeing to Sending a Rat on ‘Suicide Squad,’” Daily Beast, April 6, 2022, https://www.thedailybeast.com/jared-letos-most-absurd-method-acting-stories-from​ -morbius-peeing-to-sending-a-rat-on-suicide-squad. 75. English, Economy of Prestige, 72. 76. Sarah Marshall, “From ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf ’ to ‘Gone Girl,’” New Republic, February 18, 2015. 77. Joanna Robinson, “Did Jennifer Aniston Just Enter the Oscar Race?,” Vanity Fair, October 27, 2014; Marshall, “From ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf ’ to ‘Gone Girl.’” 78. Robinson, “Did Jennifer Aniston Just Enter the Oscar Race?”; Pete Hammond, “Toronto: Jennifer Aniston Sparks Oscar Buzz with Game-Changing Drama ‘Cake,’” Deadline, September 9, 2014, https://deadline.com/2014/09/toronto-jennifer​ -aniston-causes-oscar-buzz-at-fest-with-startling-and-surprising-performance-in-cake​ -831638/. 79. For articles employing “ugly” to describe Aniston’s and others’ deglamorizing, see Marshall, “From ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf ’ to ‘Gone Girl’”; EJ Dickson, “Stop Applauding Actresses Who ‘Go Ugly’ for a Movie Role,” Daily Dot, December 1, 2014, https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/cake-jennifer-aniston-ugly-going-theron/; Dre Rivas, “To Win an Oscar, It Pays to Be Ugly,” MTV News, November 28, 2011, https://www.mtv.com/news/avoiq8/to-win-an-oscar-it-pays-to-be-ugly; Ellen A. Kim, “Getting Ugly for Oscar,” January 30, 2004, https://www.today.com/popculture/getting​ -ugly-oscar-wbna4113650. 80. Dickson, “Stop Applauding Actresses Who ‘Go Ugly.’” 81. Sarah Marshall, “Why Do So Many Women ‘Act Ugly’ in Pursuit of an Oscar?,” New Republic, February 18, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/121092/oscars-2015​ -why-do-so-many-women-act-ugly-pursuit-oscar. 82. Ella Taylor, “In ‘Tully,’ Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis Make a Great (Au) Pair,” NPR, May 3, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607868574/in-tully-charlize​ -theron-and-mackenzie-davis-make-a-great-au-pair. 83. Multiple critics across national outlets, including USA Today, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Washington Post, used some form of the term “unrecognizable” to describe Kidman. 84. In Theron’s case, the biographical proximity to violence was said to be rooted in her experience as a fifteen-year-old who had witnessed her mother fatally shoot her abusive father in self-defense. Carrigy, “Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron,” 80–81, 83. 85. Carrigy, 84. 86. Carrigy, 84. 87. Liz Calvario, “Charlize Theron Reveals ‘Very Long Journey’ to Lose 50 Pounds Packed on for ‘Tully,’” Entertainment Tonight, April 17, 2018, https://www.etonline.com​ /charlize-theron-reveals-very-long-journey-to-lose-50-pounds-packed-on-for-tully​ -exclusive-100564.

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Notes to Pages 179–183 88. Calvario, “Charlize Theron Reveals ‘Very Long Journey.’” Other articles drew heavily on this interview, including Amy Mackelden, “Charlize Theron Gained 50lbs for Her New Movie by Eating Mac and Cheese at 2AM,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 19, 2018, https://www .harpersbazaar.com/celebrity/latest/a19864757/charlize-theron-weight-gain-movie​ -tully/; Julie Mazziotta, “Charlize Theron Developed Depression While Gaining 50 Lbs. for Tully: ‘It Was a Huge Surprise,’” Yahoo News, April 18, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com​ /news/charlize-theron-developed-depression-while-163558540.html; Korin Miller, “Charlize Theron Gained 50 Pounds for a Movie–-And Said It Was Insanely Hard to Lose,” Women’s Health, April 19, 2018, https://www.womenshealthmag.com/weight-loss​ /a19860878/charlize-theron-50-lb-weight-gain-tully/. 89. Margy Rochlin, “Q&A: Charlize Theron Bulks Up, De-Glamorizes and ‘Deflates’ to Revisit Motherhood for ‘Tully,’” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2018, https://www​ .latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/la-en-mn-charlize-theron-tully-20181108-story​ .html. 90. Anthony Lane, “Charlize Theron Explores Motherhood’s Discontents in ‘Tully,’” New Yorker, May 14, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/charlize​ -theron-explores-motherhoods-discontents-in-tully. 91. Justin Chang, “Review: Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis Breathe the Miracle of Life into the Dark Motherhood Story of ‘Tully,’” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-tully-review-20180503​ -story.html. For examples of reviews that eschew discussion of Theron’s transformed body, see Manohla Dargis, “Review: In the Comedy ‘Tully,’ Mom’s Struggle Is Real,” New York Times, May 3, 2018; Brian Lowry, “‘Tully’ Shines and ‘Overboard’ Sinks during Break from Blockbusters,” CNN, May 3, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/05​ /03/entertainment/tully-overboard-review/index.html; Alonso Duralde, “‘Tully’ Film Review: Charlize Theron Is a Real Mother in Bleakly Hilarious Parenthood Tale,” The Wrap, May 4, 2018, https://www.yahoo.com/news/tully-film-review-charlize-theron​ -real-mother-bleakly-154919535.html. 92. Richard Lawson, “Tully Review: Charlize Theron Gets Caught in the Parent Trap,” Vanity Fair, May 1, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/05/tully​ -charlize-theron-diablo-cody-review. 93. Julie Miller, “Jennifer Aniston Describes Letting Herself Go for Her Least Glamorous Role Yet,” Vanity Fair, September 9, 2014, https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood​ /2014/09/jennifer-aniston-cake-make-under. 94. Touré, “‘I’m Black, I Can’t Do Method Acting’: Brian Tyree Henry on Atlanta and Widows,” Guardian, November 3, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio​ /2018/nov/03/widows-atlanta-brian-tyree-henry-im-black-i-cant-do-method-acting. 95. Touré, “‘I Can’t Do Method Acting.’” 96. Cooper Peltz, “Andrew Garfield, Representation, and the Method,” Film School Rejects, July 7, 2017, https://filmschoolrejects.com/andrew-garfield-representation​ -method/; “The Winner Is . . . Only Acting Gay,” New York Times, November 20, 2005; Fallon Fox, “Forget the Oscar: Jared Leto Was Miscast in Dallas Buyers Club,” Time, March 4, 2014; Scott Jordan Harris, “Able-Bodied Actors and Disability Drag: Why Disabled Roles Are Only for Disabled Performers,” RogerEbert.com, March 7, 2014, https://​ www.rogerebert.com/features/disabled-roles-disabled-performers. Actors periodically critique “Method” acting as a cover for bad behavior. Examples include Matthew

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Notes to Pages 183–187 Chernov, “Robert Pattinson Says Actors Only Go Method When They’re Playing A-holes,” Variety, November 13, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/film/news/robert​ -pattinson-the-lighthouse-actors-on-actors-1203400184/; Ellie Harrison, “Will Poulter: ‘Method Acting Shouldn’t Be Used as an Excuse for Inappropriate Behaviour—And It Definitely Has,’” Independent, April 9, 2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts​ -entertainment/tv/features/will-poulter-guardians-of-the-galaxy-dopesick-b2047322​ .html; Zack Sharf, “Mads Mikkelsen Rails against Method Acting: ‘It’s Bulls–-’ and ‘It’s Just Pretentious,’” Variety, April 11, 2022, https://variety.com/2022/film/news/mads​ -mikkelsen-slams-method-acting-1235229778/. 97. Julian Sancton, “David Simon, Jon Bernthal and the Makers of HBO’s ‘We Own This City’ on Dirty Cops, the Drug War and the Legacy of ‘The Wire,’” Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 2022, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/we-own​ -this-city-simon-pelecanos-bernthal-green-1235132991/. Bernthal’s specific comments about Method acting were picked up elsewhere. See Samantha Bergeson, “Jon Bernthal ‘Doesn’t See Any Benefit’ in Method Acting: ‘I Don’t Roll Like That,’” IndieWire, April 21, 2022, https://www.indiewire.com/2022/04/jon-bernthal-method-acting-1234718553/. 98. Dubrofsky, Authenticating Whiteness, 4–6. 99. The essayist and critic Angelica Jade Bastién’s assertion that “Hollywood has ruined Method acting” specifically calls out the domination of “Method” marketing over technique, which (while it oversimplifies the roots and implications of methodness) brings it the closest among popular commentary to identifying some of the deleterious impacts of Method discourse while separating those features from actual Method practice. See Angelica Jade Bastién, “Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting,” Atlantic, August 11, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/08​ /hollywood-has-ruined-method-acting/494777/. See also Chris Bodenner, “Hollywood Has Ruined Method Acting, Cont’d,” Atlantic, August 12, 2016, https://www.theatlantic​ .com/culture/archive/2016/08/method-acting/623375/. 100. As the sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen notes, it remains to be seen whether efforts to diversify the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will succeed, “because the Academy’s diversity problem is not just numerical but also ideological.” Yuen, Reel Inequality, 24. 101. Jack Halberstam, “White Men Behaving Sadly,” Bully Bloggers, February 2017, https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/white-men-behaving-sadly-by-jack​ -halberstam/. Conclusion 1. Cynthia Baron quoted in Esch, “‘Any Method at All,” 101. Brando’s prevailing reception also established that early period as a benchmark against which the performance talents of other actors have been gauged for decades. As mentioned earlier, Jon Krampner titled his biography of Kim Stanley—Brando’s Streetcar co-star and an Actors Studio alum—Female Brando. Esquire characterized Willem Dafoe “as the next Brando” in 1989, while the magazine’s 1995 profile of Johnny Depp says, “Some are born Brando; some achieve Brando; Depp had Brando thrust upon him.” See Krampner, Female Brando; Mark Kram, “Ladies and Gentleman, the Next Brando,” Esquire, January 1989, 78; David Blum, “The Buzz on Johnny Depp,” Esquire, April 1995, 74. 2. Rick Lyman, “Marlon Brando, Oscar-Winning Actor, Is Dead at 80,” New York

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Notes to Pages 187–197 Times, July 2, 2004. Other examples include Claudia Luther and Elaine Dutka, “Movie Legend Marlon Brando Dies at 80,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2004; Richard Schickel, “Hostage of His Own Genius,” Time, July 12, 2004, 74. 3. Mel Gussow, “Demystifying the Method: Once-Exclusive Actors Studio Reaches Out to the Public,” New York Times, May 20, 1997. 4. Ellen Adler, letter to the editor, New York Times, May 30, 1997; Balcerzak, Beyond Method, 1–6. 5. Jordan Zakarin, “Marlon Brando Was a Secret Tech Geek and Photoshop Ace,” Yahoo Entertainment, July 15, 2015, https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/marlon​ -brando-was-a-secret-tech-geek-and-photoshop-124061824672.html. 6. Brando’s collaborator in the virtual performer effort, the visual effects artist Scott Billups, recalled that he and Brando did in fact produce a film with digital actors (Marlon Brando and Faye Dunaway), Earth Ring. According to Billups, Earth Ring screened once at Cannes. While the film was warmly received overall, Billups added that the concept of digital actors was not. Scott Billups, email to the author, December 22, 2022. 7. Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans), “I’m sure he’d be thrilled. This is awful. Maybe we can get a computer to paint us a new Picasso. Or write a couple new John Lennon tunes. The complete lack of understanding here is shameful,” Twitter, November 6, 2019, https://​ twitter.com/chrisevans/status/1192137540842733568?lang=en. 8. The journalist Courtney Linder abruptly jumps from the Erica story to that of Dean, citing the latter as evidence that the former was not the first time Hollywood had “gotten creative with its casting.” See Courtney Linder, “James Dean, Dead for 64 Years, to Be Not Dead in New Movie,” Popular Mechanics, November 6, 2019, https://www​ .popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a29715260/james-dean-cgi/. 9. Rebecca Keegan, “A.I. Robot Cast in Lead Role of $70M Sci-Fi Film,” Hollywood Reporter, June 24, 2020, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ai-robot-cast-lead​ -role-70m-sci-fi-film-1300068. 10. Bode, “No Longer Themselves?,” 47. 11. This was reportedly the case with Ishiguro and Ogawa and the actor Erica. 12. Rogers, Speculation, 5. 13. Rogers, 177. 14. Esch, “‘Any Method at All,’” 101. 15. Latour, Pandora’s Hope, 304. 16. Siegel, Forensic Media, 89, 94–95. 17. Field, “Editor’s Introduction,” 1. 18. Klinger, Immortal Films, 7.

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Selected Bibliography Allen, Thomas M. A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Andersen, Thom. “Red Hollywood.” In “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, 225–263. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Ashby, Clifford. “Alla Nazimova and the Advent of the New Acting in America.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 45, no. 2 (1959): 182–188. Baker, Aaron. “Midtown Jewish Masculinity.” In City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination, edited by Murray Pomerance, 167–182. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Balcerzak, Scott. Beyond Method: Stella Adler and the Male Actor. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2018. Barnes, Diana G. Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Baron, Cynthia. “Acting Choices / Filmic Choices: Rethinking Montage and Performance.” Journal of Film and Video 59, no. 2 (2007): 32–40. Baron, Cynthia. “Before Brando: Film Acting in the Hollywood Studio Era.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1996. Baron, Cynthia. “The Method Moment.” Popular Culture Review 9, no. 2 (1998): 89–106. Baron, Cynthia. Modern Acting: The Lost Chapter of American Film and Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Baron, Cynthia, and Sharon Marie Carnicke. Reframing Screen Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Baron, Cynthia, Diane Carson, and Frank P. Tomasulo, eds. More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004. Barranger, Milly. Unfriendly Witness: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Bartov, Omer. The “Jew” in Cinema: From “The Golem” to “Don’t Touch My Holocaust.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Bausch, Katharine. He Thinks He’s Down: White Appropriations of Black Masculinities in the Civil Rights Era. University of Chicago Press, 2020. Beaver, Jim. John Garfield: His Life and Films. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1979. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bell-Metereau, Rebecca, and Colleen Glenn. Introduction to Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering. Edited by Bell-Metereau and Glenn, 1–25. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Benedetti, Jean. Stanislavski: An Introduction. London: Methuen Drama, 2008. Benson-Allott, Caetlin. The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

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Selected Bibliography Berger, Martin A. Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Berke, Annie. “Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment.” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 35–60. Bernardi, Daniel. “Introduction: Race and Contemporary Hollywood.” In The Persistence of Whiteness, edited by Bernardi, xv–xxvi. New York: Routledge, 2008. Bernardi, Daniel. “Introduction: Race and the Hollywood Style.” In Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, edited by Bernardi, xiii–xxvi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Bernardi, Daniel. “The Voice of Whiteness: D. W. Griffith’s Biograph Films.” In The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, edited by Bernardi, 103–128. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Blair, Rhonda, ed. Acting: The First Six Lessons; Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre, by Richard Boleslavsky. New York: Routledge, 2010. Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Bode, Lisa. “Fade Out / Fade In: Dead 1920s and 1930s Hollywood Stars and the Mechanisms of Posthumous Stardom.” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 1–2 (2014): 90–92. Bode, Lisa. “No Longer Themselves? Framing Digitally Enabled Posthumous ‘Performance.’” Cinema Journal 49, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 46–70. Bodnar, John. Blue-Collar Hollywood: Liberalism, Democracy, and Working People in American Film. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Boleslavsky, Richard. “The Laboratory Theatre.” Theatre Arts Magazine 7, no. 1 (January 1923): 244–250. Boleslavsky, Richard. “Stanislavsky: The Man and His Methods.” Theatre Arts Magazine 7, no. 2 (April 1923): 27, 74, 80. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Brault, Margueritte Elaine Bryan. “The Theory and Practice of Actor Training at the American Laboratory Theatre.” Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1979. Brookey, Robert, and Jonathan Gray. “‘Not Merely Para’: Continuing Steps in Paratextual Research.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 2 (2017): 101–110. Butler, Isaac. The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022. Canning, Charlotte M. The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. “From Acting Guru to Hollywood Star: Lee Strasberg as Actor.” In Contemporary Hollywood Stardom, edited by Thomas Austin and Martin Barker, 118–134. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. “Lee Strasberg’s Paradox of the Actor.” In Screen Acting, edited by Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer, 75–87. New York: Routledge, 1999. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2009. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. “Stanislavsky: Uncensored and Unabridged.” Drama Review 37, no. 1 (1993): 22–37. Carr, Steven. Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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Selected Bibliography Carrigy, Megan. “Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron: Empathy, Veracity, and the Biopic.” In Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering, edited by Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Colleen Glenn, 80–98. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Carroll, Hamilton. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Chansky, Dorothy. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. Chinoy, Helen Krich. “Reunion: A Self-Portrait.” Educational Theatre Journal 28, no. 4 (1976): 445–552. Cohan, Steven. Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Connolly, Mike. “This Was My Friend Jimmy Dean.” In The Real James Dean: Intimate Memories from Those Who Knew Him Best, edited by Peter L. Winkler, 301–312. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016. Conroy, Marianne. “Acting Out: Method Acting, the National Culture, and the Middlebrow Disposition in Cold War America.” Criticism 35, no. 2 (1993): 239–263. Courtney, Susan. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Crawford, Cheryl. One Naked Individual: My Fifty Years in the Theatre. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977. Cuordileone, K. A. Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War. New York: Routledge, 2005. Currell, Susan. The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure in the Great Depression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. DeAngelis, Michael. Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 2011. Diawara, Manthia. “Black American Cinema: The New Realism.” In Black American Cinema, edited by Diawara, 3–25. New York: Routledge, 1993. Dickey, Jerry. “Sophie Treadwell’s Summer with Boleslavsky and Lectures for the American Laboratory Theatre.” In Experimenters, Rebels, and Disparate Voices: The Theatre of the 1920s Celebrates American Diversity, edited by Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb, 111–118. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Didion, Joan. Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Diner, Hasia R. Lower East Side Memories: A Jewish Place in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Doss, Erika. Introduction to Looking at “Life” Magazine. Edited by Doss, 1–21. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Drake, Philip. “Reconceptualizing Screen Performance.” Journal of Film and Video 58, no. 1–2 (Summer 2006): 84–94. Dubrofsky, Rachel E. Authenticating Whiteness: Karens, Selfies, and Pop Stars. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022.

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Selected Bibliography Dworkin, Susan. Making Tootsie: A Film Study with Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack. New York: New Market Press, 1983. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: Routledge, 2004. Dyer, Richard. Stars. New ed. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York: Anchor Books, 1983. Enelow, Shonni. Method Acting and Its Discontents: On American Psychodrama. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Erb, Cynthia. Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Erens, Patricia. The Jew in American Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Esch, Kevin. “‘I Don’t See Any Method at All’: The Problem of Actorly Transformation.” Journal of Film and Video 58, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 95–107. Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní. “‘Put on a Happy Face’: The Neoliberal Horrors of Joker/s.” In Breaking Down Joker, edited by Sean Redmond, 119–130. New York: Routledge, 2022. Field, Allyson Nadia. “Editor’s Introduction: Acts of Speculation.” Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (Summer 2022): 1–7. Frankel, Glenn. High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist, and the Making of an American Classic. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018. Friedman, Lester. Hollywood’s Image of the Jew. New York: Frederick Unger, 1982. Frome, Shelly. The Actors Studio: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001. Frost, Jennifer. Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Gabbard, Krin. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Gaines, Jane. Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Gallagher-Ross, Jacob. Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. Garfield, David. A Player’s Place: The Story of the Actors Studio. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Gates, Racquel J. Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Gelman, Howard. The Films of John Garfield. New York: Citadel Press, 1975. Geraghty, Christine. “Re-examining Stardom: Questions of Texts, Bodies and Performance.” In Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader, edited by Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, 98–110. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2007. Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Goldman, Eric A. The American Jewish Story through Cinema. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

242

Selected Bibliography Goodman, Ezra. The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961. Gordon, Mel. Stanislavsky in America: An Actor’s Workbook. New York: Routledge, 2010. Gray, Jonathan. Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Gray, Paul. “From Russia to America: A Critical Chronology.” In Stanislavski and America: An Anthology from the Tulane Drama Review, edited by Erika Munk, 137–177. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image on Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, 90–103. New York: Routledge, 1993. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Harris, Mark. Mike Nichols: A Life. New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Hills, Matt. “Cult Movies with and without Cult Stars: Differentiating Discourses of Stardom.” In Cult Film Stardom: Offbeat Attractions and Processes of Cultification, edited by Kate Egan and Sarah Thomas, 21–54. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Hirsch, Foster. A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio. 2nd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2002. Hoberman, J. “Arts and Letters: The Jewish Brando.” Tablet, March 4, 2013, https://www​ .tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-jewish-brando. Hollinger, Karyn. The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star. New York: Routledge, 2006. Hopper, Hedda, and James Brough. The Whole Truth and Nothing But. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Horne, Gerald. Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Jensen, Joli. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 9–29. New York: Routledge, 1992. Joseph, Gilbert, and Deborah N. Cohn. The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. Kennedy, Jay Richard. Prince Bart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953. Klinger, Barbara. “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies.” Screen 30, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 107–128. Klinger, Barbara. Immortal Films: “Casablanca” and the Afterlife of a Hollywood Classic. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. Knox, Mickey. “John Garfield.” In American Rebels, edited by Jack Newfield, 247–254. New York: Nation Books, 2003. Kochhar-Lindgren, Kanta. “Disability.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies,

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Selected Bibliography edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 81–84. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Kouvaros, George. Famous Faces Yet Not Themselves: The Misfits and Icons of Postwar America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Kozol, Wendy. “Life”’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Krampner, Jon. Female Brando: The Legend of Kim Stanley. New York: Back Stage Books, 2006. Krasner, David, ed. Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Kuftinec, Sonja. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theatre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Latour, Bruno. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lears, T.  J. Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. Lears, T.  J. Jackson. “Screw Ambiguity.” Review of John Wayne: American, by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson. New Republic, April 22, 1996, 38–41. Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Lenihan, John. Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Levitt, Linda. “Death on Display: Reifying Stardom through Hollywood’s Dark Tourism.” Velvet Light Trap 65 (2010): 62–70. Lewis, Robert. Method—or Madness? New York: Samuel French, 1958. Lewis, Robert. Slings and Arrows: Theatre in My Life. New York: Stein and Day, 1984. López, Ian Haney. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Malague, Rosemary. An Actress Prepares: Women and “the Method.” New York: Routledge, 2012. Maltby, Richard. “New Cinema History and the Classical Hollywood Cinema.” In Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited, edited by Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring, 300–308. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Martin, Alfred L., Jr. The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021. Martin, Nina K. “‘Does This Film Make Me Look Fat?’ Celebrity, Gender, and I’m Still Here.” In Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering, edited by Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Colleen Glen, 29–54. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2015. Maurice, Alice. The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1999. McCann, Graham. Rebel Males: Clift, Brando and Dean. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. McDonald, Paul. Hollywood Stardom. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

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Selected Bibliography McDonald, Paul. The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. London: Wallflower Press, 2005. McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Medovoi, Leerom. Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Meeuf, Russell. John Wayne’s World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. Meeuf, Russell. “John Wayne as ‘Supercrip’: Disabled Bodies and the Construction of ‘Hard’ Masculinity in The Wings of Eagles.” Cinema Journal 28, no. 2 (2009): 88–113. Mikhail, E. H., ed. The Abbey Theatre: Interviews and Recollections. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988. Mitchell, Jon. “Jim Stark’s ‘Barbaric Yawp.’” In Rebel without a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork, edited by J. David Slocum, 131–147. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Morella, Joe, and Edward Z. Epstein. Rebels: The Rebel Hero in Films. New York: Citadel Press, 1971. Moston, Doug. “The Actors Studio.” In Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future, edited by David Krasner, 285–289. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Munk, Erika. Preface to Stanislavski and America: An Anthology from the Tulane Drama Review, edited by Munk, 11. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Nadel, Alan. “A Partial History of American Film in the Cinematic Century.” Review of Screen Decades: American Culture / American Cinema, edited by Lester D. Friedman and Murray Pomerance. American Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2011): 215–227. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Naremore, James. Review of A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actor’s Studio, by Foster Hirsch. Film Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1985): 43–45. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Nott, Robert. He Ran All the Way. New York: Proscenium, 2003. Nygaard, Taylor, and Jorie Lagerwey. Horrible White People: Gender, Genre, and Television’s Precious Whiteness. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014. Patton, Cindy. Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Polonsky, Abraham. Introduction to The Films of John Garfield, by Howard Gelman, 7–10. New York: Citadel Press, 1975. Rawlins, Justin. “Over His Dead Body: Hedda Hopper and the Story of James Dean.” Velvet Light Trap 71, no. 1 (2013): 27–41. Rawlins, Justin. “What’s in a Frame? Paratexts, Performance, and Joaquin Phoenix in

245

Selected Bibliography Joker.” Flow, October 29, 2019, https://www.flowjournal.org/2019/10/paratexts​ -performance-and-joaquin-phoenix-in-joker/. Redmond, Sean. “Joker: Madly Walking and Dancing through Space.” In Breaking Down Joker, edited by Redmond, 36–46. New York: Routledge, 2022. Regev, Ronny. Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Rieser, Andrew C. The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Cult of Modern Liberalism, 1874–1920. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Robinson, Cedric J. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race and American Theater and Film before World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Rode, Alan K. Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Roediger, David. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Rogers, Gayle. Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Ross, Steven J. Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Savran, David. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Scheibel, Will. Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2022. Scheibel, Will. “Rebel Masculinities of Star/Director/Text: James Dean, Nicholas Ray, and Rebel Without a Cause.” Journal of Gender Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 125–140. Schreiber, Michele. “‘A Mass of Contradictions’: Michael Curtiz and the Women’s Film.” In The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance, 249–264. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. Segrave, Kerry, and Linda Martin, The Post-Feminist Hollywood Actress: Biographies and Filmographies of Stars Born after 1939. New York: McFarland, 1990. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge, 1994. Siegel, Greg. Forensic Media: Restructuring Accidents in Accelerated Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Silberstein-Loeb, Jonathan. The International Distribution of News: The Associated Press, Press Association, and Reuters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Sinwell, Sarah. “Fantasies and Fangirls: Gender and Sexuality in Robert Altman’s Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.” In ReFocus: The Later Films and Legacy of Robert Altman, edited by Lisa Dombrowski and Justin Wyatt, 159–171. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Sklar, Robert. City Boys. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

246

Selected Bibliography Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Wendy. Real Life Drama: The Group Theatre and America, 1931–1940. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Smith-Rowsey, Daniel. Star Actors in the Hollywood Renaissance: Representing Rough Rebels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Smoodin, Eric. “‘Compulsory’ Viewing for Every Citizen: ‘Mr. Smith’ and the Rhetoric of Reception.” Cinema Journal 35, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 3–23. Smyth, J. E. “Jim Crow, Jett Rink, and James Dean: Reconstructing Ferber’s Giant (1952– 1956).” American Studies 48, no. 3 (2007): 5–27. Springer, Claudia. James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge, 1994. Staiger, Janet. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Stanfield, Peter. “A Monarch for the Millions: Jewish Filmmakers, Social Commentary, and the Postwar Cycle of Boxing Films.” In “Un-American” Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter Stanfield, 79–96. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Studlar, Gaylyn. “Sacred Duties, Poetic Passions: John Ford and the Issue of Femininity in the Western.” In John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era, edited by Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein, 43–74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Studlar, Gaylyn. This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Swindell, Larry. Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Tsika, Noah. Traumatic Imprints: Cinema, Military Psychiatry, and the Aftermath of War. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Van Slyck, Abigail A. A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Walsh, Keri. Women, Method Acting, and the Hollywood Film. New York: Routledge, 2021. Weinbaum, Alys Eve. “Nation.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, 175–180. New York: New York University Press, 2014. Wexman, Virginia Wright. Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Wexman, Virginia Wright. “Kinesics and Film Acting: Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.” In Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television, edited by Jeremy G. Butler, 203–213. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

247

Selected Bibliography Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Willis, Ronald Arthur. “The American Laboratory Theatre, 1923–1930.” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1968. Wilson, Ron. The Gangster Film: Fatal Success in American Cinema. New York: Wallflower Press, 2015. Young, Elliott. “Beyond Borders: Remote Control and the Continuing Legacy of Racism in Immigration Legislation.” In A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965, edited by Maddalena Marinari, Madeline Y. Hsu, and María Cristina García, 25–44. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. Yuen, Nancy Wang. Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018.

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Index Note: Page numbers signifying illustrations are in italics. Academy Awards (Oscars), 12, 156, 166, 174, 176, 183, 224n97; and James Dean, 108–109, 116–117; and John Garfield, 123; and Dustin Hoffman, 161, 184; and Heath Ledger, 169–170, 172; and Maria Ouspenskaya, 40; and Joaquin Phoenix, 170, 172–173; and Charlize Theron, 177–178, 181, 184 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 221n53, 237n100 Actors’ Lab, 87 Actors Studio (New York), 230n1; and Stella Adler, 2, 4, 57, 86–87, 187; and Karen Black, 232n32; and Marlon Brando, 2, 84–85, 237n1; and James Dean, 91, 93–96, 116, 190, 219n22; and Dustin Hoffman, 155–156; and Lee Strasberg, 2, 4, 14, 57–58, 86–87, 91, 151–152, 187–188, 205n12 Adler, Ellen, 187 Adler, Luther, 132 Adler, Stella, 40, 195, 210n72, 212n141; and Actors Studio, 2, 4, 57, 86–87, 187; and Group Theatre, 19, 21, 28–29, 53–58, 145, 189, 210n76, 229n105; Stella Adler Conservatory, 57 affective memory, 184, 195. See also emotional memory Altman, Robert: Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, 22, 154, 161, 164–166, 232n34; The James Dean Story, 20, 91–93, 104, 107, 154, 161 American Laboratory Theatre (ALT), 11, 55, 59, 122; and Richard Boleslavsky, 18, 27, 34, 37–42, 52, 207n44, 210n65; and identity politics, 27–28, 34, 38,

210n65; and Maria Ouspenskaya, 27–28, 39–42, 210n76; in Pleasantville, NY, 42–43, 45, 53 Andersen, Thom, 146, 227n75, 228n95, 229n114 Aniston, Jennifer, 23; in Cake, 154, 177, 235n79 anti-Semitism in cinema, 128–132, 226n68, 227n72 artificial intelligence (AI) actors, 23, 196; Brando’s digital double, 192–194, 238n6; Erica, 194–195, 238n8, 238n11 Ayer, David: Suicide Squad, 173–174. See also Leto, Jared b (Ishiguro and Ogawa), 194–195, 238n11 Balcerzak, Scott, 57, 218n102 Bale, Christian, 168, 177, 233nn43–44 Barnes, Diana G., 219n12 Barnz, Daniel: Cake, 154, 177. See also Aniston, Jennifer Baron, Cynthia, 2, 14, 86, 205n7 Bartov, Omer, 226n68 Baskette, Kirtley, 61–62, 75, 217n71 Bastién, Angelica Jade, 237n99 Baur, Esperanza, 70–72 Bausch, Katharine, 85 Beat movement, 85 Benedetti, Jean, 26 Bernardi, Daniel, 207n57, 215n41 Bernthal, Jon, 183, 237n97 Big Trail, The (Walsh), 64–66, 73–75 Billups, Scott, 193; Earth Ring, 238n6 Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, 1–2, 79–80, 82, 143 Black, Karen, 161, 163–164, 232n32

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Index black box rhetoric, 196 Black performers, 37, 85, 154, 168, 182, 207n57; and Group Theatre, 15, 25, 46, 48, 55. See also DeKnight, Fanny Belle; Henry, Brian Tyree; McClendon, Rose; performers of color; racism; white supremacism Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve), 175 Blair, Rhonda, 210n72 bobby-soxers, 103, 105, 119. See also teenagers Bode, Lisa, 195 Body and Soul (Rossen), 119, 132–133, 143, 226n68 Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield (Swindell), 144 Boleslavsky, Richard, 189, 206n20, 210nn61–62; Acting: The First Six Lessons, 38–39, 42; as authority on acting, 13, 16–18, 26–28, 32, 34–40, 207n44, 210n65; and Maria Ouspenskaya, 18–19, 39–42, 55, 189, 210n72, 210n76; at Steinway Hall, 42–43, 53; Theatre Arts essays, 36, 38–39, 210n76 Brand, Phoebe, 49, 53–56 Brando, Marlon, 7, 11, 218n102; and Broadway, 1, 79, 82–83; comparisons to John Garfield, 120–121, 126–127, 132, 144–148, 190, 224n8, 230n129; comparisons to John Wayne, 59–60, 82, 86–88, 144, 156, 189; James Dean linked to, 93–97, 190, 219n22, 220n30, 220n32, 232n27; and digital actors, 192–194, 196, 238n6; as measure of Method acting, 1–2, 15, 82, 161, 164–165, 171, 187–188, 230n129, 232n27, 237n1; in The Men, 1, 20, 64, 79–83, 85, 143, 159, 217n94; Pennebaker Productions, 84; in A Streetcar Named Desire, 1, 82–83, 120, 126, 132–133, 237n1 Broadway, 33, 35, 40, 48, 154; and Marlon Brando, 1, 79, 82–83 Brock, H. I., 43, 53 brownface performance, 47 Butler, Isaac, 36, 46, 54, 232n26

Cage, Nicholas, 167 Cake (Barnz), 154, 177. See also Aniston, Jennifer camp cultures, 28, 30, 32, 34, 49, 51, 58, 208n12. See also American Laboratory Theatre (ALT); Chautauquas; Group Theatre Carlile, Tom, 71, 215n44 Carnicke, Sharon Marie, 155, 207n44, 208n7, 212n141 Carnovsky, Morris, 46, 53–54 Carrigy, Megan, 178, 184 Chansky, Dorothy, 32, 209n31 Chautauquas, 11, 28, 30–32, 34, 51, 59. See also American Laboratory Theatre (ALT); camp cultures; Group Theatre Chinoy, Helen Krich, 44 Cinecom Pictures, 165 class status, 49, 74, 156, 223n90, 231n17; and John Garfield’s image, 121, 123, 125–126, 128–130, 132–133, 135, 137–138, 147–148, 225n24; and white, middle-class ideals, 16–17, 19, 31–34, 53, 58–59, 63, 70, 85, 102, 113–114, 207n57 Clift, Montgomery, 64, 82, 114, 120–121, 156, 169, 196; linked to John Garfield, 145–147; on-set reputation of, 87–88; in Red River, 77–78, 214n31 Clurman, Harold, 29, 43, 46, 57–59, 132, 137; and discrimination in Group Theatre, 19, 25, 42, 44–45, 47–48, 51–55, 189; The Fervent Years, 44, 48 Cohan, Steven, 75–78, 206n38, 214n31, 215n35 Cohn, Herbert, 138 colonialism, 7, 65, 67–68 Columbia Pictures, 156–157, 228n95 Combs, Carl, 91, 94 Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Altman), 22, 154, 161–167, 232n32 communism, fears of, 49, 119–120, 143, 146, 229n114 Conroy, Marianne, 230n1, 230n3 Crawford, Cheryl, 43, 50, 56–58; and discrimination in Group Theatre, 25,

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Index 44–48, 52–53; One Naked Individual, 44 Curtiz, Michael: Four Daughters, 122– 123, 126–127, 130, 132, 134, 137–138 Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée), 174 Dark Knight, The (Nolan), 169. See also Ledger, Heath Dean, James “Jimmy,” 7, 12, 101, 154, 163–166, 218n3, 219nn11–12, 220n35, 222n77; and digital actors, 194–195, 238n8; and East of Eden, 93–98, 219n22, 220n26, 220n30, 220n32; fan letters about, 20–21, 89–90, 102–107, 108–112, 116, 219n12, 222n64; and Giant, 98, 107, 161–162, 221n37; James Dean Memorial Foundation, 90; linked to Marlon Brando, 93–97, 190, 219n22, 220n30, 220n32, 232n27; as measure of Method acting, 91–92, 97–98, 161, 190, 220n35, 232n27; victim narrative about, 21, 88, 93, 107–109, 113–117, 190 DeCordova, Richard, 10 DeKnight, Fanny Belle, 25, 28, 46–49, 52–53 Denning, Michael, 49 Dennis, Sandy, 154, 161–162, 164–165, 232n34 Deutsch, Helen, 46–47, 51–52 Dieterle, William: Juarez, 131, 226n62, 229n112 Dillon, Josephine, 87 Diner, Hasia, 130 drag performance, 159–160, 231nn12–14, 231nn21–23 Drake, Philip, 10 Dubrofsky, Rachel, 183 Dworkin, Susan, 159–161, 231n22, 232n27 Dyer, Richard, 16, 207n46, 215n35, 215n38 Earth Ring (Billups), 238n6 East of Eden (Kazan), 20, 93–98, 219n22, 220n26, 220n30, 220n32 emotional memory, 55–56, 152, 212n141. See also affective memory

Enelow, Shonni, 23, 217n98 Epstein, Edward Z., 144–145 Erb, Cynthia, 206n23 Erens, Patricia, 133, 227n72 Esch, Kevin, 169 ethnicity, 8, 28, 31–34, 41, 49, 64; and anti-Semitism in cinema, 128–132, 226n68, 227n72; and John Garfield, 7, 22, 121, 126–133, 146–148, 190, 227n75, 229n114, 230n129; and slippage with race, 30, 37, 47, 128, 156; and stereotypes, 37, 131; and whiteness, 17, 22, 45, 52, 55, 113, 126, 128–129, 147, 156, 190, 231n17 Evans, Chris, 194, 238n7 Farmer, Frances, 54–55 Farmer, Virginia, 54 Ferber, Edna: Giant, 90 Fervent Years, The (Clurman), 44, 48 Fhlainn, Sorcha Ní, 234n58, 234n61 Field, Allyson Nadia, 7, 196 Finding Jack (Magic City Films), 194–195 Force of Evil (Polonsky), 119, 143 Ford, John, 65, 73, 75, 217n75; The Quiet Man, 72; Stagecoach, 67, 74, 214n21, 214n27 Fordism, 113, 223n90 Four Daughters (Curtiz), 122–123, 126–127, 130, 132, 134, 137–138 Frankel, Glenn, 227n75 Friedman, Lester, 226n68 Frost, Jennifer, 101, 224n97 Gabbard, Krin, 85 Gaines, Jane, 137, 142, 229n111 Garfield, John, 21–22, 140–141, 156, 225n24, 225n33, 227n83, 228nn87–88, 228n90, 229n105, 230nn120–121, 231n17; and Body and Soul, 119, 132–133, 143, 226n68; comparisons to Marlon Brando, 120–121, 126–127, 132, 144–148, 230n129; death of, 103, 119–121, 148, 151, 164, 190, 224n4, 224n10; and Enterprise Productions, 84; and ethnic identity, 7, 22, 121, 126– 133, 146–148, 190, 227n75, 229n114,

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Index 230n129; exclusion from Method histories, 21, 64, 117, 121, 148–149; and Four Daughters, 122–123, 126–127, 130, 132, 134, 137–138; and Juarez, 131, 226n62, 229n112; as Jules “Julie” Garfinkle, 53, 121–122, 145, 224n16; and The Patent Leather Kid, 132, 227n73; and A Streetcar Named Desire, 120, 132–133, 224n8; toughguy image, 22, 119, 122–126, 128–130, 132–138, 142–145, 148, 229n117; and Warner Bros., 121–127, 131, 133–135, 137–139, 142–143, 146, 227n77, 228n91, 228nn94–95, 228n98 Garfield, Roberta, 125–126 Garfinkle, Jules “Julie.” See Garfield, John Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 81 Gates, Racquel, 9 Gelman, Howard, 230n120 Gentleman’s Agreement (Kazan), 131–133 George, George W.: The James Dean Story, 20, 91–93, 104, 107, 154, 161 Geraghty, Christine, 10 Giant (Ferber), 90 Giant (Stevens), 98, 107, 161–162, 221n37 GI Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944), 113 Gilman, Sander, 129 “going ugly,” 154, 177–184, 235n79, 235n83. See also transformations, physical Golden Boy (Group Theatre), 49, 132, 138, 228n95 Goodman, Ezra, 90, 103–104, 107, 221n40 Gordon, Mel, 40, 210n76 Graham, Sheilah, 131, 226n57, 226n67, 227n73, 228n94 Gray, Jonathan, 9 Green, Paul: The House of Connelly, 25, 44, 46–48, 54, 208n1 Group Theatre, 33–34, 166, 211n79, 227n77, 227n83, 231n20; 1934 rift, 58; and Stella Adler, 19, 21, 28–29, 53–58, 145, 189, 210n76, 229n105; at Brookfield Center, 19, 25, 42, 45–54, 59; at Ellenville, 19, 54–56; and John Garfield,

21–22, 63, 120–122, 125–126, 131–135, 137–139, 142–145, 148–149; Golden Boy, 49, 132; The House of Connelly, 25, 44, 46–48, 54, 208n1; and identity politics, 19, 25–29, 42, 44–55, 189–190, 210n76; at Steinway Hall, 43–44, 46, 53, 59; Waiting for Lefty, 15, 49 Halberstam, Jack, 185, 232n30 Hall, Stuart, 8–9 Hammond, Pete, 172, 177 Hanifin, Ada, 123 Hawks, Howard: Red River, 77–78, 214n31 Heffernan, Harold, 213n3, 225n33 Henry, Brian Tyree, 182 Hills, Matt, 222n71 Hirsch, Foster, 45 Hoffman, Dustin, 22–23, 146, 176, 231n17, 231n20; and The Graduate, 156; on-set reputation of, 157, 161, 232n26; and Tootsie, 153, 155–161, 164–167, 184, 231nn12–14, 231nn21–23 Hollinger, Karen, 206n38 Hope-Wallace, Philip, 12–14, 206n39 Hopper, Hedda, 144, 152, 224n97; on Marlon Brando, 83; as James Dean authority, 92–94, 97–102, 106–109, 113, 115–117, 190, 219n12, 222n77; and fan mail, 12, 20–21, 89, 102–115, 219n12, 221n51; on John Garfield, 135, 139–142 Hough, Donald, 75–76 House of Connelly, The (Green), 25, 44, 46–48, 54, 208n1 House Un-American Activities Committee, 119, 143 Ishiguro, Hiroshi: b, 194–195, 238n11 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 128 James Dean Memorial Foundation, 90 James Dean Story, The (George and Altman), 20, 91–93, 104, 107, 154, 161 jazz acting, 85 Jenkins, Patty: Monster, 177–178, 181, 184. See also Theron, Charlize

252

Index Jensen, Joli, 103 John Garfield Story, The (Turner Classic Movies), 145 Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, 37, 128 Joker (Phillips), 170–173, 234n58. See also Phoenix, Joaquin Juarez (Dieterle), 131, 226n62, 229n112 Kael, Pauline, 164–165 Kahn, Alexander, 125–126 Kazan, Elia, 57, 116, 190; East of Eden, 20, 93–98, 219n22, 220n30; Gentleman’s Agreement, 131–133 Kerr, Walter, 151–152, 230nn1–3 Khoze, Sam, 195 Kidman, Nicole, 178, 235n83 Klinger, Barbara, 8, 197, 205n16 Lang, Rocky: The Making of Tootsie, 157, 231n20, 231n22 Latour, Bruno, 196 Lawson, Richard, 181–182 Ledger, Heath, 154, 169–170, 172–173, 177 Leto, Jared, 154, 168, 173–177, 182–183, 191 Lewis, Robert “Bobby”: Slings and Arrows, 44, 48, 53–54, 56–57 Listen to Me Marlon (Riley), 192, 194 Little Theatre (Chicago), 32 Little Theatre Movement, 11, 18, 27–28, 32–38, 42–43, 48, 209n31, 210n65 lyceum circuits, 30. See also Chautauquas MacNeil, Morgan, 70, 213n3 Magic City Films: Finding Jack, 194–195 Making of Tootsie, The (Lang), 157, 231n20, 231n22 Malague, Rosemary, 13, 207n44 Marsh, W. Ward, 96, 220n30 Marshall, Sarah, 177 Martin, Alfred L., Jr., 9 Martin, Nina K., 170 masculinity, 10–11, 28, 80–81, 95–97, 218n102; city-boy type, 127–129, 146, 148; and Montgomery Clift, 77–78; and Group Theatre, 45, 48, 53–55,

58–59; and national identity, 29, 32, 39, 62, 67–68, 87; tough-guy type, 22, 119, 122–126, 128–130, 132–138, 142–145, 148, 229n117; and victim narratives, 21, 88, 93–94, 107, 113–117, 147, 184, 190; and John Wayne, 61–73, 214n31, 215n35, 215n42; and whiteness, 6, 15–21, 64–65, 68–69, 84–85, 114, 182–184, 189–192, 206n38, 215n42 McClendon, Rose, 15, 25, 28, 46–50, 52–53, 196 McDonald, Paul, 168, 170 Medovoi, Leerom, 219n11, 223n90 Meeuf, Russell, 215n42 Meisner, Sanford, 53–54, 56, 157, 231n20 Men, The (Zinneman), 1, 20, 64, 79–83, 85, 143, 159, 217n94 Method acting, 3–6, 10, 237n99; and Americanness, 151, 205n1, 230n1; as cover for bad behavior, 170, 173, 176, 183, 185, 236n96; historicization of, 2, 7, 12–14, 26–29, 145, 189–190, 207n44, 213n13, 229n105; vs. Modern acting, 2, 56, 86–87, 205n7; techniques of, 79, 152–155, 166–170, 187–188, 194–195, 206n38, 217n98, 220n35; white male dominance of, 11, 13–16, 45–46, 48, 58–59, 77, 164, 170, 182–183, 185, 189–190, 206n38. See also Actors Studio (New York); American Laboratory Theatre (ALT); Brando, Marlon; Dean, James “Jimmy”; Garfield, John; Group Theatre; Hoffman, Dustin; methodness; System, The (Stanislavskian); transformations, physical methodness, 5–6, 188–189, 196–197; definition of, 5–7; and history of theater, 7–11, 14–18, 229n105; limits of, 120– 121, 133, 144, 148–149, 182–184, 192, 206n38; and outsider discourse, 83–88, 91–93, 96–98, 106–107, 113–117, 155–156, 189–191; and performer commitment, 77–78, 82, 87, 153–154, 158, 160–161, 164, 166–170, 173–178, 191. See also Brando, Marlon; Dean, James “Jimmy”; Garfield, John; Group Theatre; Method acting; protomethodness

253

Index methodology of book, 3–4, 8–10; “methodness” definition, 5–7 Modern acting, 2, 56, 86–87, 189, 205n7 Monster (Jenkins), 177–178, 181, 184. See also Theron, Charlize Mook, S. R., 123–126, 134–135, 137, 225n24, 228n87 moral panics, 103–104, 119 Morella, Joe: Rebels: The Rebel Hero in Films, 144–145 Morris, Mary, 49 Morrison, Marion. See Wayne, John “Duke” Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), 33, 45, 55, 183, 209n41; and Richard Boleslavsky, 13, 26–28, 32, 34–38, 40, 42, 209n39; First Studio, 36, 38, 40, 54; and Maria Ouspenskaya, 37, 40–41 Nadel, Alan, 223n93 Naremore, James, 4, 13–14, 207n46 national identity, 39, 47, 62, 84, 87, 209n31, 219n11; and ethnicity, 128, 147; and Method acting, 151, 205n1, 230n1; and nationalism, 37, 128, 208n14; and race, 29–34, 37, 58; and regionality, 68, 215n38 Nazimova, Alla, 40 Neighborhood Playhouse, 28, 33, 38, 231n20 Nelson, Ruth, 47, 54 Nolan, Christopher: The Dark Knight, 169. See also Ledger, Heath Ocilak, Barbara, 106 Odets, Clifford, 47, 49–51, 54, 132, 145, 228n95, 229n105 Ogawa, Kohei: b, 194–195, 238n11 One Naked Individual (Crawford), 44, 208n1 Ouspenskaya, Madame Maria, 13, 18–19, 55, 210n72, 211n79; as instructor at American Laboratory Theatre, 21, 39–42, 145; marginalization of, 27–28, 41, 189, 196–197, 207n44, 210n76; and Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), 37, 40–41; School of Dramatic Arts, 28

Page, Geraldine, 15, 77 Paramount Decree of 1948, 94, 138, 143, 146 Parkes, Mary, 125–126, 134–135, 228n90 Parsons, Louella, 97, 99–101, 220n35; and James Dean fan mail, 89–90, 109, 218n3, 222n64; on John Garfield, 103, 131, 227n73 patriarchy, 13, 21, 32; and Group Theatre, 29, 46, 56; and John Wayne’s image, 60, 63, 67–68 performers of color, 11, 16, 23, 34, 37, 154, 168, 182; and access to knowledge, 184, 191–192. See also Black performers; racism; white supremacism Phillips, Todd: Joker, 170–173, 234n58. See also Phoenix, Joaquin Phoenix, Joaquin, 154, 168, 170–173, 177, 234n58, 234n61 Polan, Dana, 205n16 Pollack, Sydney, 22, 88, 153–155, 157, 231n13, 231n20, 231n22. See also Tootsie (Pollack) Polonsky, Abraham, 119; Force of Evil, 119, 143 Popular Front, 49 Princess Theatre (New York), 36, 38, 43 Progressivism, 18, 29, 37, 64, 88, 92, 114, 190, 209n31; and American Laboratory Theatre, 27–28, 34, 39, 43; and Chautauquas, 11, 30–32, 34; John Garfield’s politics, 7, 21–22, 132, 137, 143, 146–147, 229n114; and Group Theatre, 11, 48, 59, 126, 143 protomethodness, 11, 28, 42, 46, 51–53, 208n4; of John Garfield, 7, 144–148, 190 queer critique, 3, 85, 103, 176, 183, 192; and Montgomery Clift, 77–78, 114, 214n31; and trans representation, 163–164, 174, 232n30 racism, 7, 16–17, 31–32; and Hedda Hopper, 114–115; in Method discourse, 7, 11, 23, 182, 184, 191; racial biologism, 28, 34, 37; and US policy, 113, 128. See

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Index also Black performers; performers of color; white supremacism Rebels: The Rebel Hero in Films (Morella and Epstein), 144–145 Redmond, Sean, 234n58 Red River (Hawks), 77–78, 214n31 Reitman, Jason: Tully, 154, 178–182, 184, 236n91 Republic Pictures, 61, 216n69 Rieser, Andrew, 30 Riley, Stevan: Listen to Me Marlon, 192, 194 Robinson, Cedric J., 207n57 Robinson, Joanna, 177 Rochlin, Margy, 179 Rogers, Gayle, 195 Roosevelt, Theodore, 29, 31, 208n14 Rosenstein, Sophie, 87, 210n76 Rossen, Robert: All the King’s Men, 12; Body and Soul, 119, 132–133, 143, 226n68 Roth, Sanford, 107, 222n77 Savage, Richard, 38–39 Savran, David, 85 Scheuer, Philip K., 97, 220n26, 220n32 sexism, 30, 32, 41, 67–69, 156, 191–192; and fandom, 103, 119–120, 164; and Group Theatre, 19, 44–45, 53–55; and Hollywood stardom, 10–11, 154, 177, 182, 232n34; in Method history, 3–4, 13–16, 27, 42, 77, 164, 184, 187, 189 Siegel, Greg, 196 Singh, Nikhil Pal, 68 Sinwell, Sarah, 163–164, 232n30 Siskel, Gene, 160, 166 Sklar, Robert, 127, 146, 148, 226n61 Skolsky, Sidney, 83–84, 99 Slings and Arrows (Lewis), 44, 48, 53–54, 56–57 Slotkin, Richard, 67, 214n21 Smith, Art, 50–52 social message films, 131, 226n68 speculative acting, 23, 195–197 Stagecoach (Ford), 67, 74, 214n21, 214n27 Staiger, Janet, 8 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 33, 35–37,

40, 46, 55–57, 183, 206n20, 208n7, 212n141; An Actor Prepares, 39; An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, 39. See also System, The (Stanislavskian) Stanley, Kim, 15, 230n129, 237n1 stardom, Hollywood, 10–12, 17–18, 67–68, 94–95, 99, 168, 222n71; actors’ resistance to, 88, 92, 121, 126, 133–143, 170, 196, 221n37, 227n77, 228n95; and miscasting, 229n111, 229n117; and performance frame, 13–14, 207n46; and prestige status, 131, 155, 170–171, 173–174, 176–177. See also individual performers Stella Adler Conservatory, 57 Stevens, George: Giant, 98, 107, 161–162, 221n37 Stoddard, Eunice, 49, 51 Strasberg, Lee, 23, 40, 116, 161, 212n141, 232n27; and Actors Studio (NY), 2, 4, 14, 57–58, 86–87, 91, 151–152, 187–188, 205n12; and Group Theatre, 19, 25, 29, 42–48, 50–59, 86, 189, 195; “Strasberg method,” 56–57 Streep, Meryl, 161, 177, 232n26, 233n47 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams), 1, 82–83, 120, 126, 132–133, 237n1 Suicide Squad (Ayer), 173–174. See also Leto, Jared Swindell, Larry: Body and Soul: The Story of John Garfield, 144–146 Sykes, Gerald, 46–47 System, The (Stanislavskian), 25–26, 28, 33–39, 58; and Stella Adler, 19, 55–56, 212n141; and Maria Ouspenskaya, 13, 27, 41–42, 207n44 teenagers, 105, 108, 110, 114, 119, 222n64, 223n93; and pathologized fandom, 102–104, 222n67 Theatre Guild Studio, 25, 43, 46. See also Group Theatre Theron, Charlize, 23, 236n88; and Monster, 177–178, 181, 184, 235n84; and Tully, 154, 178–182, 184, 236n91 Tone, Franchot, 46, 51 Tootsie (Pollack), 22–23, 88, 153–154,

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Index 158, 164–167, 183–184, 191; accusations against Dustin Hoffman, 157, 232n26; and drag performance, 159–160, 231nn12–14, 231nn21–23; making-of media, 157, 159–161, 231nn20–22, 232n27; synopsis of, 155–156 transformations, physical, 23, 167–175, 233nn43–44, 234n58; and Tootsie, 153–154, 156, 158–160, 164, 184; and women performers, 154, 177–184, 192, 233n47, 235n79, 235n83, 236n91 trans representation, 163–164, 174, 232n30. See also queer critique Tsika, Noah, 217n94 Tully (Reitman), 154, 178–182, 184, 236n91 United Fan Club and Fan Mail Service, 89–90 Valentino, Rudolph, 90, 97, 103, 119–120 Vallée, Jean-Marc: Dallas Buyers Club, 174 Veterans’ Readjustment Act of 1952, 113 Villeneuve, Denis: Blade Runner 2049, 175 Vincent, John Heyl, 31 Wales, Clarke, 134, 139 Walsh, Keri, 77, 163–164 Walsh, Raoul: The Big Trail, 64–66, 73–75 Warner, Jack, 95, 129 Warner Bros., 169, 229n111; and John Garfield, 121–127, 131, 133–135, 137–

139, 142–143, 146, 227n77, 228n91, 228nn94–95, 228n98; and publicity for James Dean films, 12, 90–98, 100, 102, 104, 107–109, 116, 161 Wayne, John “Duke,” 213n3, 213n17, 214nn18–19, 216n69, 217n73; Batjack Productions, 84; and The Big Trail, 64–66, 73–75; “Gentleman Johnny” image of, 61, 75, 217n71; “he-man” image of, 67–70, 214n28, 214n31, 215n35, 215n42; personal life of, 69–71, 215nn43–44, 215nn47–48, 215n50, 216n58; property-man image of, 62–63, 65, 72–77, 82, 216nn62–63, 216n68, 217n75; as reactor, 12, 19–20, 59, 62–64, 73, 75–78, 82–88, 91, 121, 137, 144, 156, 189, 213n10; and Red River, 77–78, 214n31; and Stagecoach, 67, 74, 214n21, 214n27 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 10, 63, 206n38, 207n46 whiteface performance, 85 white supremacism, 16–17, 29, 64, 67–69, 147, 215n38; and Group Theatre, 45–49, 52–53, 55. See also racism Williams, Raymond, 4 Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire, 1, 82–83, 120, 126, 132–133, 237n1 Yuen, Nancy Wang, 237n100 Zinnemann, Fred: The Men, 1, 20, 64, 79–83, 85, 143, 159, 217n94 Zolotow, Maurice, 152–153, 155, 159

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