Sam Wanamaker

A Global Performer

Diana Devlin

• Editore: Oberon Books
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786826275
• Edizione: 1

Actor. Director. Visionary. The fascinating life of Sam Wanamaker is explored for the first time in this biography by Diana Devlin, who worked closely with Wanamaker during the last twenty years of his life. Sam Wanamaker (1909 - 1993) is best known as the man who spent the last twenty-five years of his life campaigning to reconstruct Shakespeare's Globe near its original site in London. Born in the USA, he trained as an actor in Chicago and began his career during the golden age of radio drama, before moving on to Broadway. A vocal left wing activist, Wanamaker moved to the UK during the turbulent era of the anti-Communist witch hunts. Having crossed the Atlantic, he carved a successful international career as actor, producer and director. He directed the opening production at the Sydney Opera House. With his staunch sense of purpose, he made as many enemies as friends: charismatic and persuasive, he was also stubborn and domineering. But above all, he was a man of great vision, and it was that vision that inspired many to help make his dream of Shakespeare's Globe come into being, which opened to much fanfare in 1997

1

‘An American Chicago Born’

Saul Bellow

Samuel Watenmaker, later to be known as ‘Sam Wanamaker’, was born in Chicago, in June 1919, the younger son of Russian Jews from Ukraine. Theirs was a classic emigration story of the early twentieth century.

His father, Manes Wattenmacher, then fifteen years old, came to Chicago in 1910. He had travelled from Nikolaev (now Mykolaiv), a shipbuilding town in Crimea. It was a major Jewish centre about fifty miles from Odessa, within the Pale of Settlement, the western region of Russia where Jews were allowed to live. The family had moved there from Bessarabia, the year before he was born. The first anti-Semitic ‘pogrom’ (Hebrew for ‘storms in the south’) had taken place in 1821 in Odessa, and the worst was also there, in 1905, when 2500 Jews were reported to have been killed. The Wattenmacher family were among many who took on the lengthy, fraught task of emigration, paying their way step by step, starting on a journey full of physical, emotional and bureaucratic challenges.

The first to go was Manes’ sister, following her husband to Canada. His older brother Nathan was the next, in 1907. The family business was tailoring, and he soon found work in Chicago as a capmaker. He saved up money to send for his parents and siblings to make their way to him, first his brother Abraham, then, Manes, with his parents, and two sisters. They went from Nikolaev overland, packing a few belongings onto a wagon which took them to the railway station, where they embarked on a nine-hour journey to Kiev, on to Austria and then to Antwerp, where they boarded a Liverpool-built passenger ship, SS Mount Temple. The crossing was wretched, as they huddled in insalubrious quarters in steerage. (Yet they were fortunate, since, seven months later, the Mount Temple struck rocks outside Halifax, and was hit by a huge tidal wave, all the passengers having to be taken off and lodged on an island until they could be rescued.) When they disembarked at Port St John, in New Brunswick, their health was checked and the whole family was hospitalized. Finally, once they were declared fit, they took the Grand Trunk Rail Road from Montreal, and arrived in Chicago, to be greeted by the two brothers already there. By this time, Nathan was married and his wife gave birth two weeks after they arrived. But at exactly the same time, Manes’ mother, Gittel, died of heart disease, a sad start to his American life, as he began living in a city for the first time, and in a foreign country.

Manes joined his brothers in the Jewish quarter on the West Side. Chicago was the second city in the USA, after New York, and the third biggest Jewish city in the world, after New York and Warsaw. First incorporated in 1833 with a population of 350, it had developed rapidly, with a population of 4000 by 1840. In 1848, the opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal created a shipping route from the Great Lakes through Chicago to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Soon after that came the railroads, making it the transportation hub of the Midwest. The first European immigrants were the Irish, after the potato famine, and then Germans – Lutherans, Catholics and Jews. Next came Poles, and Polish Jews, and then, from the 1880s, Serbs, Czechs and Russians. The centre of an agricultural area, the city was nicknamed ‘Porkopolis’, because of its meat trade. After the introduction of refrigeration, thousands of thousands of hogs and cattle were shipped to Chicago for slaughter, preserved in salt and transported to eastern cities. The smell from the yards spread for miles around. In 1871 a great fire had destroyed much of the city. In rebuilding it, the developers put up the first skyscrapers, in the Loop, the central business section. Innovative architects and landscape designers arrived, creating parks and modern buildings. In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition, created to mark 400 years since Christopher Columbus’s arrival, had shown off the city at its best, with its mixture of classical buildings, amusements and technological marvels. But the splendour of the Exposition was in sharp contrast to the conditions in which many of the inhabitants lived. By 1905, 80% of the population of Chicago were immigrants or children of immigrants. Of the Russians, the overwhelming majority were Jewish, fleeing the Czarist régime, like Manes and his family. There were sharp economic divisions. Dominic A Pacyga, biographer of the city, wrote:

Since its foundation, the city had been a magnet for moneyed investors on the one hand, and men and women willing to do grueling labor on the other.¹

The Wattenmachers simplified their surname (which had already been changed from its Cyrillic version) to ‘Watenmaker’, and Manes became ‘Morris’. He soon found work, joining Hart, Schaffner and Marx, a garment factory, where his job was making pockets for vests (waistcoats). The business was run by German Jews, members of an immigrant group that had settled in the city long before the Russian Jews arrived, and were in a position to exploit them. Morris quickly became a member of the United Garment Workers Union. In September 1910, within months of his arrival, a strike broke out, when sixteen women protested at a cut in piece rate and a biased bonus system. By the end of the first week, 2000 women had joined. When the union and the Chicago Federation of Labor sanctioned the action, over forty thousand joined the strike, including Morris and his brothers. There was much violence, and five men lost their lives. Morris was out for the full twenty-two weeks of the strike, but as union support was beginning to drift away, the workers were forced to reach a deal. There were some improvements in conditions, and the strike paved the way for the foundation, three years later, of a stronger union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in which Morris soon became an officer, in the same branch as the woman who had started the strike. He had quickly become politicized. In 1911 he joined the Young Person’s Socialist League, and worked for the presidential candidacy of Eugene Debs, founder of the Socialist Party of America, who actually gained 6% of the popular vote in 1912.

In January 1914, Morris’s father died. Now an orphan, he still had his brothers and sisters and their families. When the war broke out, the immigrant communities were divided by their loyalty to their European roots, while the Americans were isolationist. Morris began courting another Russian Jewish immigrant, who was also working in the garment industry, Molly Bobele. She was three years younger, and came from Zhitomir (now Zhytomyr), in northern Ukraine, though the family was originally from Poland. She had emigrated to Chicago in 1913, when she was fourteen, with an uncle and aunt, leaving her sister and parents behind. Their town had suffered a pogrom in 1905, but the family had survived. Morris and Molly were married in March 1916.

In 1917, as Germany became more aggressive, the American government, under Woodrow Wilson, broke off diplomatic relations, and finally declared war that April. In June, Morris was required to complete a draft card. Under the influence of Eugene Debs, he declared himself a Conscientious Objector, but in fact escaped the draft because he had a young son, William, born that January. So he continued at Hart, Schaffner and Marx, and in June 1919, Morris and Molly’s second son was born, Samuel Watenmaker.

The Jewish writer, Israel Zangwill, who coined the term ‘melting pot’ to describe the absorption of immigrants into America, wrote:

While there is always a difference between the old and the new generations, the difference between the Jewish immigrant and his American child is that of ten generations.²

Certainly, the youth of the two brothers bore little resemblance to that of their parents. The ‘lingua franca’ was English. Morris and Molly learnt to speak it, but always with a heavy accent; they also learnt to read and write. The boys learnt some English even before they went to school, while at home the family spoke Yiddish. They were poor, but not destitute, living in a flat with two bedrooms and a kitchen; there was always food on the table, and occasional ice-creams and cakes. Morris’s staunch support of the ACWA meant that there were weeks when he was on strike. At those times, bread and potatoes were their principal foods. The Jewish community was close-knit, sharing the annual festivals, congregating in the temple, sometimes mulling around the busy Maxwell Street market, sometimes meeting at the Jewish People’s Institute, which ran a wide range of educational, social and recreational programmes.

When it was time to start school, William and Samuel, ‘Bill’ and ‘Sam’ to their friends and family, mixed with immigrants from other parts of Europe. Children from every immigrant group sat in the same classrooms; education was an important part of the process of assimilation and Americanization. But there, the boys first encountered anti-Semitism, which was rife in Chicago, as it had been in Russia. Catholic children, whether Irish, German, Austrian, Polish or Czech, were taught to hate the Jews. The playground was the worst. There they were met with yells of ‘Kike!’ and ‘Christkiller!’, and were often pelted with stones. Samuel, though younger, was stronger than his brother, and often got involved in physical fights to protect him. When, later in life, he looked back at those early battles, he felt that they formed a significant part of his character, giving him the conviction that he must stand up for himself. ‘Constant aggression and fighting shapes you.’³

There were compensating treats. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoon, the boys were given ten cents to see a movie at the Biograph cinema in their neighbourhood. Sometimes their father took them to see Yiddish actors and comedians at the Glickman’s Palace Theater near the Maxwell Street market, or at the Jewish People’s Institute, where the Yiddische Dramatische Gesellschaft presented classical and contemporary plays. (One local actor, Muni Weisenfreund, later became famous as the Hollywood star, Paul Muni.) Once, the famous New York Yiddish actor, Jacob Ben Ami, came to Chicago, giving Samuel his first taste of great acting. The boys’ sense of their cultural background was fed by plays like The Dybbuk and the work of Sholem Aleichem. Morris was also active in the Nicolaever Verein, which he helped to found in the 1920s, the local society for immigrants from his native town. Some of the Yiddish comedians were people he had known there.

During the 1920s, while still being a staunch union member, Morris began supplementing his income with a retail business, opening a haberdashery store in the neighbourhood. Prohibition had come in 1920, leading to the rise of bootleggers and gangsters. One family tale relates that members of Al Capone’s gang used to hide their guns in Morris’s shop after a raid.

In 1926, the family was augmented when Molly sent money for her parents to emigrate. Morris’s politics would have led him to look on the Bolshevik Revolution with approval. But the Soviet régime had been a disaster for his in-laws, who lost all that they owned, and escaped to Poland. There, they obtained immigration visas, made their way to Southampton, embarked on SS Romerio to New York in November, and eventually arrived in Chicago, penniless and broken in spirit.

Samuel was ten years old when the Wall Street crash happened, followed by the Great Depression, which directly affected the family. Their uncle Abraham moved to Los Angeles, where his wife had family. Morris lost his job at the factory but struggled on in Chicago. He gave up haberdashery, but made a tiny income selling old magazines and books. There were charitable organizations to which people could turn, but it was a period of dreadful hardship. ‘Starvation was a fact,’ Samuel remembered, ‘and particularly among the immigrant groups … The early thirties to me and to my family were filled with the despair of unemployment, the fear of starvation, and the humiliation of poverty.’⁴ His brother remembered seeing veterans on the street corners selling apples for 5c, long breadlines and a sense of desperation and despair everywhere.

Yet, when they entered high school, these years were fruitful for the boys. Public education in Chicago was well established. Educationalists saw it as a way of absorbing immigrants into American life, while for immigrant parents it was a way of advancement for their children. By 1909, the children of immigrants made up 67% of the pupils. The educationalist John Dewey, who believed in teaching ‘the whole child’, had taught at the University of Chicago for ten years. Partly through his influence, the Education Committee of the City Council introduced progressive ideas into the curriculum. The school that William and Samuel attended had been founded in 1888 as the Northwest Division High School. In 1917, it was renamed Tuley High School, in honour of Murray F Tuley, an eminent Illinois judge. In 1919, a major expansion was completed, with new classrooms, a swimming pool, shop rooms and one of the largest assembly halls in the city, seating 1500. It stood in the midst of an area of high illiteracy, and the majority of the students were from immigrant parents, including a large Jewish population. As well as traditional subjects, the students could make music, theatre and art, and participate in a variety of sports. Samuel took up wrestling and athletics. Many of the students were self-motivated and bent on improving themselves beyond what was offered by the school curriculum. They organized their own academy, offering lectures by fellow-students in the sciences, literature, anthropology and other subjects, in a church they were allowed to use. One such student was the future writer, Saul Bellow, who was in the same year as William. William described his time at the school as one of the most exciting and elevating experiences of his life. He entered Tuley High School in 1929, Samuel in 1931. Their education opened their minds and fostered their ambitions.

While the School offered opportunities for advancement, there were other kinds of education to be acquired in the city. During his time at Tuley, William got himself a job in a local drugstore. He loved the strange chemical smells, the bizarre colours of the drugs – not to mention candies and ice-creams – the strange ointments and the smart white jacket he was allowed to wear. He was also impressed at the power and knowledge of the doctors, ‘the sage, the keeper of those deep, dark secrets of life and death’.⁵ When he was offered the chance to clean the doctors’ offices for an additional 50c a week, he enlisted Samuel’s help, wrangling an additional 50c for him too, and they dragged pails and mops upstairs and scoured the doctors’ floor.

Gradually, William became aware that the drugstore was being used as a venue for bootlegging, with smart gentlemen driving up every few weeks in their Packard sedan, dressed in dark double-breasted suits, black fedoras, silk shirts, rings on their fingers, huge watches on their wrists. Cash was handed over, and then a case of whisky was carried out of the door. Soon William found himself involved in the game too, delivering hooch to various people about the city, and watching dollar bills passed to policemen, so that they would turn a blind eye. He only stopped when one day the gangsters had a disagreement with the drugstore owner, brutally attacked him, and thrust a dollar bill into William’s hand: ‘Listen, kid, you keep your god damn mouth shut, uh?’⁶ He never went back to the drugstore, but continued to be fascinated by the doctors, who were as smartly dressed as the gangsters and drove equally large cars. It was the beginning of his determination to become a doctor.

The paths of the two boys now began to diverge. They complemented each other, William quieter and more cautious than his outgoing brother. Samuel was to be a lawyer. He was already doing well in the debating class at Tuley, developing an eloquence that would stand him in good stead as an attorney. But there were other influences that began to work on him. He was fourteen at the time of the World Fair in Chicago. The Fair was intended to ameliorate the effects of the Depression and would rival the Columbian Exposition of forty years earlier. It was the brainchild of Anton Cermak, a Czech-born immigrant, elected as the Democratic Mayor in 1931, beating the Republican incumbent, ‘Big’ Bill Thompson, who had been associated with Al Capone. Cermak’s solution to the continuing economic depression was to prime the pump, a Keynesian strategy that would soon be adopted by Franklin D Roosevelt. In November 1932, Roosevelt was elected President for the first time. In February, Cermak went down to Miami to attend a reception for him. Roosevelt recognized him standing near the Presidential car and beckoned to him. Cermak approached, an assassin shot him in the lung, and he died a month later. A new Mayor was appointed, and the Fair went ahead.

The Fair was called ‘A Century of Progress’, but much of it was focused on the future, with a House of Tomorrow, futuristic architecture, a Rainbow City, spectacular events, music, modern art and architecture, a German airship, and the first Major League Baseball All-Star game. It is unlikely the Watenmaker family would have missed visiting, and Samuel was ever afterwards inspired by the idea of large-scale events that might raise the spirits of a community or an audience. But he remembered the following year more vividly, when the Fair was revived and expanded. Over fifty years later, he would tell an audience of students that he had two memorable experiences at the Century of Progress. One was of ‘a legendary lady called Sally Rand, dancing in the nude while manipulating two huge white fans’.⁷ The other was a model of the Globe playhouse. In contrast to the modern exhibits, a number of traditional ‘villages’ had been included that year. The playhouse was part of the English village designed by the British Board of Trade Overseas. Samuel watched a cut-down version of The Taming of the Shrew inside it, his first experience of Shakespeare, to add to his knowledge of Yiddish theatre.

There were more theatrical thrills to follow. More exciting than mopping the doctors’ floo...