March 5, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

Yesterday was my birthday. I share the date with an actor born in 1913, who is (unfortunately) largely unknown today. But through the 1930s and 40s, he had an intensity on both stage and screen that made him the precursor to James Dean, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. In fact, he was offered (and turned down) Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire before Brando’s name was brought into the conversation. His name was John Garfield, born Jacob Julius Garfinkle (forever called Julie by his friends), and was one of a tiny handful of Jewish leading men in Hollywood during the 1940s.

Garfield came up the hard way, born on the New York's Lower East Side to immigrants from Zhytomyr (now a part of the Ukraine). After his mother’s death when he was only seven, his father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, raised him. Later, after his father remarried, the move to a rough and tumble Bronx neighborhood made a boxer out of him, more out of self-defense due to his short stature. It would come in handy as he portrayed boxers in more than a few of his Hollywood films.

As a teenager, Garfield was something of delinquent, a gang leader and a terrible student. When his parents enrolled him in a school for difficult children, it was at this last place for hope and redemption where an insightful teacher saw the actor in Garfield and introduced him to the world of the theatre. Along the way, he came under the tutelage of Richard Boleslavski and Maria Ouspenskaya, seeped in the works of Konstantin Stanislavski with whom they studied in their native Russia, and whose teachings would begin the spread of what would later become “the Method.”

In the early 1930s, Stanislavski devotees and future major theatre directors Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Harold Clurman, formed the decidedly left-wing and extremely influential Group Theatre, of which Garfield was a founding member. Playwrights such as Sidney Kingsley, Irwin Shaw and especially Clifford Odets, wrote specifically for “The Group,” of which John Garfield was one of its brightest young stars alongside Lee J. Cobb, Morris Carnovsky, Frances Farmer and Franchot Tone.

When casting began for what would become one of the Group Theatre’s most successful productions, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, its director Harold Clurman had a problem, which he wrote about in The Fervent Years, his autobiographical book about the company. “Odets had promised the central role to Jules Garfield—Odets, like many playwrights, had a habit of making promises to actors even before he had written a word of his script. Garfield was obviously the type, but he had neither the pathos nor the variety, in my opinion, to sustain the role.” This was not an opinion shared by Garfield. When Clurman cast Luther Adler, another group member—and the brother of Clurman’s soon-to-be wife—Stella, later to become one of the most famous acting teachers in America, Garfield had to settle for the supporting comedy role of Ziggie in the play. He was so incensed about it, he took off for Hollywood mid-run, earning the enmity of his fellow Group members.

Garfield got off to an auspicious start, nominated for his debut in 1938's Four Daughters for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The New York Times critic wrote that he “bites off his lines with a delivery so eloquent that we still aren’t sure whether it is the dialogue or Mr. Garfield who is so bitterly brilliant.” But the role was a secondary one to a female star and with the serious theatre work behind him that won him his Warner Bros. contract, he was yearning to play parts offering greater challenges than just playing an ingenue. He thought that role would be the one Odets claimed to have written for him, Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy—a part he already lost out on once before. But Columbia Pictures owned the rights and studio head Harry Cohn was feuding with his counterpart at Warners, Jack Warner. The result was Warner refusing to loan out Garfield for Golden Boy, which instead went to another up and coming young actor, William Holden, launching what would be a major film career for the next forty years.

Garfield struggled a bit with the tribulations of being a contract player in Hollywood, often taking work that didn’t entirely please his artistic ethics. He would return to the theatre periodically, even once more to the Group Theatre before it dissolved in 1941. Unable to serve in World War II due to a chronic heart condition caused by rheumatic fever as a young man, he threw himself into working for the war effort. After the war, he made a film as a personal favor to his old friend Elia Kazan, although he might have done it for anyone as he thought the role sent an important message. His vital contribution to 1947s Gentlemen’s Agreement is one of the reasons it won that year’s Best Picture Oscar. In Moss Hart’s screenplay, based on the book by Laura Z. Hobson, Garfield played best friend to journalist Gregory Peck, who decides to write a piece on anti-semitism by posing as a Jew to find out personally what discrimination is like. Garfield, as his Jewish best friend, steals every scene he’s in. Peck, who always had a somewhat wooden quality (never used more effectively than as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird), blends into the wallpaper when sharing the screen with Garfield.

The same year as Gentleman's Agreement, Garfield found himself competing at the Oscars against Peck, as he was nominated for Best Actor in Body and Soul, perhaps his finest performance. Now a freelancer and unattached to any studio, Garfield also produced Body and Soul; very rare for an actor in those days. However, shining in the light of such back-to-back successes was a brief one. After years of being hounded by the government for his so-called leftist leanings, Garfield's name was officially on the newly-minted Hollywood blacklist. Called to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1951, the news cameras were rolling in the hopes to see and hear Garfield grovel and name names of people the committee wanted to hear from the lips of a famous movie star (even if they already knew the names). Though he fit the profile as the son of Russian immigrants, a Jew, and a member of the Group Theatre—indeed rife with Communists—he was not one. But by lending his name to causes like First Amendment rights for Black Americans and Jews, there was enough ammunition to raise "suspicions." Hounded for nearly a decade by Congress, the FBI, and the "patriotic" heads of the movie studios, Garfield made for a juicy sacrificial lamb. And with the bloodletting on camera in front of Congress for all the world to see, the stage was set.

In his statement after being subpoenaed, Garfield said: "I hate Communism. It is a tyranny which threatens our country and the peace of the world . . . I will be pleased to cooperate with the Committee."

But when push came to shove, Garfield had had enough and refused to cooperate. "I have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide," he told them during three hours of testimony. They got nothing from him which infuriated those out to get him, thus ending the major roles that were then being offered to him on a regular basis.

He struggled and eventually took to the theatre for employment and, in an ironic turn, returned to Broadway in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, finally performing the role he had once hoped to originate. A year after his testimony, he was still under surveillance by the FBI, who made his living a living hell. With the pressures of supporting his wife and two small children, and work difficult hard to come by, Garfield succumbed to a heart attack on May 20th, 1952. He was thirty-nine years old.

It has been written that Garfield’s funeral was the largest in New York since Rudolph Valentino’s, with over ten thousand people crowding the streets outside Riverside Memorial Chapel on the Upper West Side.

I close with a story told to me by the prolific theatre producer Emanuel Azenberg when I interviewed him in 2013: “When I was fourteen, I went to see my uncle, who was an actor, in a play called Skipper Next to God. It starred John Garfield, who I loved because he grew up in the Bronx like I did. Afterwards, I’m backstage and I pass Garfield’s dressing room and instead of a star on the door it had a Jewish star and it says “Julie,” which was his real first name. Julie Garfinkle. You gotta love that.”

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.