funny that I was convulsed every time I went there; jokes flew around the dinner table like bullets, half in Yiddish and half in English, and I laughed so hard that I nearly got a hernia.
Like all of us, Stella was an imperfect person, and her imperfections sometimes offended others. To some people, she was downright nasty. She would excoriate them in front of others, tear them apart and criticize them in the most vicious way, but she had great integrity as a teacher. During that troubled time of my life, she taught me not only acting, but about life itself. For reasons that I cannot understand, she was very fond of me and I am eternally grateful to her for it. I always sat next to her at dinner, and she was forever holding my hand. Sometimes I went into her bedroom before she went out to dinner and watched her while she was getting dressed. She would be sitting in front of the mirror in her panties and bra and would cover herself as I came in and say, “Oh, Marlon. Please, darling. I’m getting dressed.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, “in order to see that you’re dressed
properly.”
A couple of times I grabbed her breasts in my palms and she would say with a half smile, “Marlon, don’t do that or I’ll slap you.”
I would look at her and say, “You know you don’t want to do that to me.”
We had a lot of flirtatious exchanges, and I suppose that somewhere not far beyond the horizon there was the possibility of a real encounter, but it never materialized.
There were three important teachers in my life. Like Duke Wagner and my shop teacher in Santa Ana, Stella gave me emotional strength at a time when I needed it by making me feel I was capable of something. When I was suffering, disjointed and disoriented, experiencing shock and feeling physically and emotionally disordered, she offered me not only her skill and talent as a teacher, but her home, her family, the largess of her personality and her love. She introduced me to her daughter Ellen, who, like Stella, was a beautiful, intelligent woman with a great deal of charm and presence, but who was almost always shorn of individuality by the presence of her mother. She was very photogenic and could have been a great screen personality, but because of conflicts with her mother, she never pursued the acting career that she should have had. After I met Ellen, one thing led to another, and I began a relationship with her that continued, off and on, for many years.
While I was being given a home and an education by the Jews who befriended me in New York, World War II was ending. The war had been remote from my vantage point of the Adlers’ dinner table and the stage of the Music Box Theatre. No one had any real sense yet of what was happening to the Jews of Europe, and my knowledge of the war came mostly from the Translux Theatre on Forty-seventh Street and Broadway, where I went between shows to watch the pyrotechnics of mortal combat. While others were suffering and dying, to me the war hadonly meant not always getting the kind of cigarettes or candy I liked, crowded trains, a lot of people in New York wearing uniforms and the USO shows in which we performed. I had a sense that though the world had gone through a cataclysm, little had changed: in Harlem black people were still being treated as less than human, there was still rampant poverty and anti-Semitism and there seemed to be as much injustice as before. I was beginning to hear a voice in my head that said I had a responsibility to do something about it and that acting was not an important vocation in life when the world was still facing so many problems.
I was offered the chance to go on the road with
I Remember Mama
, but I was sick of it and turned it down. It had taken me only one role to realize how much I hated playing the same part eight times a week—six evenings and two matinees—in a long-running production. Luckily, before I ran out of money I was offered a part in a new Maxwell
Like all of us, Stella was an imperfect person, and her imperfections sometimes offended others. To some people, she was downright nasty. She would excoriate them in front of others, tear them apart and criticize them in the most vicious way, but she had great integrity as a teacher. During that troubled time of my life, she taught me not only acting, but about life itself. For reasons that I cannot understand, she was very fond of me and I am eternally grateful to her for it. I always sat next to her at dinner, and she was forever holding my hand. Sometimes I went into her bedroom before she went out to dinner and watched her while she was getting dressed. She would be sitting in front of the mirror in her panties and bra and would cover herself as I came in and say, “Oh, Marlon. Please, darling. I’m getting dressed.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, “in order to see that you’re dressed
properly.”
A couple of times I grabbed her breasts in my palms and she would say with a half smile, “Marlon, don’t do that or I’ll slap you.”
I would look at her and say, “You know you don’t want to do that to me.”
We had a lot of flirtatious exchanges, and I suppose that somewhere not far beyond the horizon there was the possibility of a real encounter, but it never materialized.
There were three important teachers in my life. Like Duke Wagner and my shop teacher in Santa Ana, Stella gave me emotional strength at a time when I needed it by making me feel I was capable of something. When I was suffering, disjointed and disoriented, experiencing shock and feeling physically and emotionally disordered, she offered me not only her skill and talent as a teacher, but her home, her family, the largess of her personality and her love. She introduced me to her daughter Ellen, who, like Stella, was a beautiful, intelligent woman with a great deal of charm and presence, but who was almost always shorn of individuality by the presence of her mother. She was very photogenic and could have been a great screen personality, but because of conflicts with her mother, she never pursued the acting career that she should have had. After I met Ellen, one thing led to another, and I began a relationship with her that continued, off and on, for many years.
While I was being given a home and an education by the Jews who befriended me in New York, World War II was ending. The war had been remote from my vantage point of the Adlers’ dinner table and the stage of the Music Box Theatre. No one had any real sense yet of what was happening to the Jews of Europe, and my knowledge of the war came mostly from the Translux Theatre on Forty-seventh Street and Broadway, where I went between shows to watch the pyrotechnics of mortal combat. While others were suffering and dying, to me the war hadonly meant not always getting the kind of cigarettes or candy I liked, crowded trains, a lot of people in New York wearing uniforms and the USO shows in which we performed. I had a sense that though the world had gone through a cataclysm, little had changed: in Harlem black people were still being treated as less than human, there was still rampant poverty and anti-Semitism and there seemed to be as much injustice as before. I was beginning to hear a voice in my head that said I had a responsibility to do something about it and that acting was not an important vocation in life when the world was still facing so many problems.
I was offered the chance to go on the road with
I Remember Mama
, but I was sick of it and turned it down. It had taken me only one role to realize how much I hated playing the same part eight times a week—six evenings and two matinees—in a long-running production. Luckily, before I ran out of money I was offered a part in a new Maxwell
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