Anne Frank (23 page)

In April 1953, Cheryl Crawford, alarmed by Levin’s increasingly litigious threats and demoralized by the financial loss she’d sustained staging Tennessee Williams’s
Camino Real,
withdrew from the negotiations. That fall, Kermit Bloomgarden signed on to produce. Though Bloomgarden showed little interest in Levin’s adaptation, Levin behaved as if Bloomgarden’s involvement signaled a new beginning. When Levin realized that Bloomgarden was not the ally he had hoped, his behavior further deteriorated. In a letter to Otto, Levin claimed that his passion for his play was exactly like Otto’s feelings for his daughter, and expressed his conviction that neither the play nor the child should have been killed “by the Nazis or their equivalent.”

It was around this time that Bloomgarden first contacted the husband-and-wife screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. They’d had glamorous careers in Hollywood, where their hits had included
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, The Virginian,
and
Easter Parade.
“The Hacketts of Hol
lywood,” Levin called them. They’d come with the highest credentials, recommended by Lillian Hellman who, as we have seen, felt that the diary needed just the sort of light touch that the Hacketts could provide. As the authors of
Father of the Bride,
they had demonstrated their ability to write about adolescents, just as the experience they’d had in doctoring the script of
It’s a Wonderful Life
had proved that they were able to brighten “dark material.” Who could balance charm and suspense? The adapters of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Thin Man.

Goodrich and Hackett hesitated, but were at last persuaded by the possibility of leavening the tragic story with “moments of lovely comedy which heighten the desperate, tragic situation of the people.” They saw it as a “tremendous responsibility” and were flattered by the invitation to be associated with a book that a major figure like Lillian Hellman considered serious literature. They even agreed to take a pay cut and to accept a fee far below that which they were accustomed to receiving for screenplays. In fact, they were working “on spec,” an almost unheard-of situation for professionals of their stature. They would get a thousand dollars if, and only if, Bloomgarden picked up the script.

They wrote Otto Frank to say that they felt honored to have been chosen to bring his daughter’s spirit and courage to the stage, and Otto wrote back, pleased that they had been so moved by the diary and offering his help. The Hacketts were less successful with their conciliatory note to Meyer Levin, which elicited a four-page, single-spaced disquisition on how badly he had been treated. When the Hacketts began their research, visiting Jewish bookstores and a rabbi in Los Angeles, the frosty receptions they received made them worry that Meyer Levin had managed to turn the community against them.

On January 13, Meyer Levin placed the following paid advertisement in the
New York Post:

Levin’s plea had the unintended effect of finally alienating Otto. Bloomgarden wrote the Hacketts, telling them that he would refuse to dignify Levin’s challenge with a reply. As further evidence of Levin’s disreputable character, Bloomgarden cited the fact that Levin had reviewed, in the
New York Times,
a book that he was representing, as its agent.

The Hacketts began work on the play. Writing eight drafts would involve great strain for both writers, elicit copious tears
from Goodrich (weeping she ascribed to guilt over not having known and done more about what happened to Anne and others like her), and spark numerous marital squabbles, some private, some public. In addition, they wondered whether, at a time when the United States was interested in cultivating Germany as an ally in the Cold War and as a market for American investment abroad, anyone would want to stage a drama that accused the Germans.

They scrapped the second draft when they realized that their fear of making the characters unsympathetic had kept them from making them human. Encouraged by having found an apparently workable ending, they sent their fourth draft to Bloomgarden and Hellman, both of whom hated it. Their spirits were further dampened by a letter from Otto Frank, who said that he could not approve a play that ignored Anne’s idealism, her moral vision, and her desire to help mankind. Oddly, what Otto seems to have wanted was something more like Meyer Levin’s rejected version. Otto complained about the “snappish” characterization of Margot, criticized the downplaying of Anne’s friction with her mother, and doubted that their adaptation would appeal to young people.

Meanwhile, royalties from the sales of the book had allowed Otto and Fritzi to move to Switzerland, where some of Otto’s family lived, having taken refuge there before the war. Despite his reservations about the Hacketts’ early efforts, he was relieved that the project was going forward. He reconciled himself to the fact that some of the changes he proposed—during the Hanukkah scene, the men should wear hats—were approved, while others—the actors should sing the solemn, traditional hymn in Hebrew rather than the raucous party song in English—were ignored. Bloomgarden also chose not to follow Otto’s suggestion that the theater program contain a note stating that the play was based on actual events. Later, Otto would
hear from a Dutch acquaintance that at one performance she had sat beside an American woman who had seen the play three times without having any idea that the actors were portraying real people.

Otto’s fragile peace was regularly broken by progressively more disturbing communications from Meyer Levin. For a while, Otto continued to defend himself on the subject of the play’s Jewish content, but later, probably on the advice of his lawyer, he circulated a statement expressing his confidence in his own ability to interpret and stand up for his daughter’s ideals and example.

Levin was unconvinced. He wrote to Otto questioning his right to decide how Anne would have wanted to be portrayed, accusing him of foisting his own interpretation on an unsuspecting public, and invoking Anne’s hatred of injustice to suggest that she might have sided with Levin, the victim of injustice, against her father, the perpetrator. Though he admitted that Otto might have known her as a daughter, Levin insisted that Otto could not have known her as Levin did, the way one writer knows another. That deeper intimacy, Levin claimed, should give him the right to decide—in Anne’s name—who should adapt her diary. And he was the person to do it.

Meanwhile, Otto continued to send amiable letters to Levin’s wife, who seems to have hoped, as did Otto, that the two friends could be reconciled. Levin responded with the most direct attack so far, claiming that Otto’s treatment of him was typical of the “cavalier” way in which Otto used and discarded his allies; Levin cited the example of one of the diary’s early translators, whose work Otto had decided against.

Even as we recoil from Levin’s claim to speak for Anne, something keeps compelling us to see things from his side, or at least to understand what made it so hard for him to give up. In his writings, he repeatedly emphasizes that he was present
when the camps were liberated, and that the memory of the dead prevents him from standing by and witnessing Anne’s transformation into just another teenage girl. But of course Otto Frank also had direct experience of the camps, not as a liberator, but as a prisoner—a fact that Meyer Levin appeared to forget as his obsession spun further out of control.

I
N
September 1954, as they struggled with the fifth draft of the play, the Hacketts consulted Lillian Hellman, who made a number of structural suggestions that Frances Goodrich called “brilliant.” Garson Kanin, whose triumphs included the popular Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy films
Woman of the Year
and
Adam’s Rib,
and the Broadway hit
Born Yesterday,
was hired to direct. It was Kanin’s idea to end the play with Anne’s statement about people being good at heart and to ramp up the tension by adding threatening noises—footsteps, sirens—from outside the attic.

Kanin advised Goodrich and Hackett to eliminate a conversation in which Peter expresses his outrage at the fact that they are suffering because they are Jews, to which Anne replies that, throughout history, Jews have always had to suffer. Kanin reminded the playwrights that every minority has experienced its share of persecution, and that for Anne to single out the Jews “reduces her magnificent stature.” Without such “embarrassing…special pleading…the play has an opportunity to spread its wings into the infinite.”

The Hacketts continued to produce drafts that disappointed Bloomgarden, who advised them that the romance with Peter was not intense enough, that the Anne they’d created was not enough like George Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc, that the character of Mrs. Van Daan was insufficiently shrewish, that Anne’s relationship with her father needed to be more loving, and that they were turning Anne into a sour and pessimistic young
woman. First the Hacketts were told that their play was too dark, and then that it was not dark enough.

In the fall of 1954, they met Garson Kanin in London, and the three of them spent long days collaborating on yet another draft. In December, they visited Otto Frank in Amsterdam for a week that Frances Goodrich described as “very harrowing.”

“I thought I could not cry more than I had,” she wrote. “But I have had a week of tears.” A photo shows the playwrights, Kanin, Otto Frank, Johannes Kleiman, and Elfriede Frank standing in front of 263 Prinsengracht. Kleiman and Fritzi wait patiently in the background, while their American visitors look suitably chastened and ennobled by the chance to walk in the footsteps of the girl who had so inspired them.

Dispatched to do research at the secret annex, a photographer documented every inch of the attic. Recordings were made of ambient street noise and the Westertoren bells. Goodrich described stretching out her arms in the room that Anne had shared with the dentist, while Kanin noticed that one of the pictures Anne had on her wall was a still photo of Ginger Rogers in
Tom, Dick and Harry,
a film he’d directed. Clearly, the project was meant to be.

Though the pictures on the walls of Anne’s room are occasionally rotated by the museum staff, the postcards, snapshots, and newspaper clips that decorate the room today are more or less the same ones that the American theater people must have seen. Yet the finished play suggests that the Hacketts and Garson Kanin factored only a few of those images into their version of Anne. They captured the starstruck Ginger Rogers fan, the giddy teen with a fondness for the royal princesses and Deanna Durbin, but seem to have missed the ironic humor of the child amused by the chimpanzee tea party, as well as the adolescent eroticism of the girl drawn to the languid Jesus in Michelangelo’s
Pietà.

Their understanding of Otto was equally skewed and incomplete. “In all my meetings with him,” Kanin said of Otto Frank, “he was unhurried, casual, old-worldish. He talked about the hide-out and the arrest without an ounce of emotion. ‘This is a cold fish,’ I told the Hacketts.” But Kanin changed his opinion on learning that Otto had collapsed after the American theater people left Amsterdam. “He had been crushed, but he had not shown it. He had been as he had been in the days when the Gestapo was outside the door—a tiny, tiny, modern miniature Moses. If he had shown a moment’s fear then, the whole annex would have crashed down.”

A few weeks after Kanin’s trip to Amsterdam, Meyer Levin, who had found a lawyer willing to take his case, filed suit in New York State Supreme Court against Cheryl Crawford and Otto Frank, charging them with breach of contract. He sought a monetary award of $72,500 from Crawford, while from Frank he asked that they forget the damage each had inflicted on the other and return to the point at which it had been understood that Levin would write the adaptation. Otto sent the Hacketts a reassuring letter. How this would have upset Anne, Otto wrote—Anne, who, like him, hated quarrels.

Otto Frank’s lawyer managed to have the suit set aside (but not dismissed) on a technicality: the summons could not be delivered to Otto, who was in Switzerland. Levin suffered an emotional collapse, but nonetheless found the strength to send Otto a letter vowing to fight the production, a struggle he compared to the Warsaw ghetto uprising.

M
EANWHILE,
in New York, the play was being cast. Joseph Schildkraut was chosen to play Otto, despite some hesitation on the part of Bloomgarden, who—according to Schildkraut—could not dispel his impression of the actor as the “flamboyant and dashing” character he had played in previous roles. In her
New York Times
piece about the production, Frances Goodrich reports having noted, on first meeting Otto Frank, his “uncanny” resemblance to Schildkraut. Susan Strasberg was picked for Anne, while Mrs. Frank would be played by Gusti Huber, an Austrian actress alleged to have acted in Nazi propaganda films.
(Echoes from the Past,
a documentary about the making of the 1959 Hollywood version of
The Diary of Anne Frank
that appears as supplemental material on the DVD, explains that Schildkraut and Huber, who re-created their stage roles on screen, were both Austrian and both “had first-hand experience of Nazi anti-Semitism.”)