Anne Frank (26 page)

AMONG THE TOUCHING ASPECTS OF ANNE FRANK’S ROOM
in the secret annex is how much it seems like, and how much it will always remain, the bedroom of a teenage girl. Mostly what freezes it in time and attaches it to a particular stage of life are the movie-star photos, reminders of that longing to be surrounded by celebrity idols whose head shots are, to an adolescent, the height of interior decor. As long as Anne had Greta Garbo on her wall, Hollywood was as near as an attic with blacked-out windows, hidden above the Prinsengracht in the middle of a war.

Anne was a passionate fan of the film magazines that Viktor Kugler brought her, and Hollywood seems to have been very much on her mind. In a diary entry that she cut in her revisions, she imagines going to Switzerland, where a film is being made of her skating with her cousin Bernd. She writes a treatment of the film, which will be in three parts. The first will show Anne skating in a fancy costume; the second will focus on Anne at
school, surrounded by other kids; the third will prominently feature Anne’s new wardrobe.

One of the stories in
Tales from the Secret Annex,
“Delusions of Stardom,” is subtitled “My answer to Mrs. Van Pels, who’s forever asking me why I don’t want to be a movie star.” Dated December 24, 1943, it begins, “I was seventeen, a pretty young girl with curly black hair, mischievous eyes and…lots of ideals and illusions. I was sure that someday, somehow, my name would be on everyone’s lips, my picture in many a starry-eyed teenager’s photo album.” The narrator, a Miss Anne Franklin, writes to three movie-star sisters, the Lanes, who write back, inviting her to visit them in Hollywood.

There, “where the three famous stars did more to help their mother than an ordinary teenager like me had ever done at home,” Anne Franklin is hired to model for a manufacturer of tennis rackets. But the work is harder than she anticipated. “I had to change clothes continually, stand here, sit there, keep a smile plastered on my face, parade up and down, change again, look angelic and redo my makeup for the umpteenth time.” After four days of this, Anne’s paleness and general exhaustion convince her hostess that she should quit her job, for which Anne is grateful. “After that I was free to enjoy the rest of my unforgettable vacation, and now that I had seen the life of the stars up close, I was cured once and for all of my delusions of fame.”

In October 1942, Anne, who had apparently not yet been cured of her dreams of (or at least her ambivalence about) movie stardom, pasted the photo of herself in her diary, the 1939 portrait that she hoped might improve her chance of getting to Hollywood. In her round, childish print, she spells Hollywood with one
l
. In the same entry, she writes that she had put more film stars up in her room, this time with photo corners, so that she could take them down when she tired of them.

Ironically, the photo did improve her chances of getting to Hollywood, though not in a way that anyone could have predicted, and again at a cost that no one would willingly have wanted to pay.

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1956, Samuel Goldwyn expressed interest in producing a film of Anne’s diary, which William Wyler would direct. But when Otto Frank insisted on retaining script approval, Goldwyn withdrew, a decision he later regretted. Otto signed a contract with 20th Century Fox to turn
The Diary of Anne Frank
into a film with a three-million-dollar budget. It would be adapted from the Broadway play and would also be written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

The Hacketts should have known better. The couple’s problems, which began almost instantly upon signing the new contract, this time included an emotionally draining ten-day visit from Otto and Fritzi, and a feud with Joseph Schildkraut, who felt that his stage role was being diminished in the film.

George Stevens, whose work included
I Remember Mama
and
Gunga Din,
was an obvious choice to direct. He’d won an Oscar for his last picture,
A Place in the Sun,
based on a Theodore Dreiser novel. He was a serious director who could nonetheless fill seats.

As a lieutenant colonel in the Army Signal Corps, Stevens had headed the combat motion-picture unit, whose members included seasoned Hollywood cameramen, among them William Mellor, who would photograph
The Diary of Anne Frank.
The so-called “Stevens irregulars” not only filmed the Normandy invasion (which provides a dramatic moment in the movie of the diary) but also the liberation of Dachau. His footage was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials and, today, plays continually on a video monitor that visitors see upon entering the exhibition space of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, D.C. The best-known image from the film is of two boys in their early teens, newly freed prisoners walking down the cobblestone path of the camp. One of them has his arm slung over the other’s shoulders, a Jewish Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in striped uniforms.

Stevens’s most recent films,
Giant
and
Shane,
had proved he could work with young actors.
Giant
had featured James Dean, whose restless brand of angst would serve as a template for the roiling adolescent emotions in the secret annex. But
Giant
had only done moderately well; ideally,
The Diary of Anne Frank
would be Stevens’s ticket back into the mainstream.

Another hope was that the Broadway cast would repeat their roles, but it soon became clear that Susan Strasberg would not play Anne on screen. The rumor was that she was involved in a distracting affair with Richard Burton; also, she had developed a reputation for being difficult to work with.

Stevens thought next of Audrey Hepburn. Not only had she been born in the same year as Anne Frank, but she was half Dutch and had spent the war in Holland, stranded throughout the occupation with her mother, a Dutch baroness. But that was part of the reason
why
Hepburn turned down the role. Anne’s story, she said, would revive too many painful memories. And her age was a problem. She, at least, understood that, at twenty-eight, she would find it hard to play a thirteen-year-old. Besides, she had already agreed to play Rima, the Amazonian bird girl, in the film of
Green Mansions.

Otto Frank traveled to visit Hepburn and to convince her to change her mind. Otto and Fritzi, Hepburn, and her husband Mel Ferrer spent a day at the tranquil Swiss villa where the actress went to escape the pressures of being a star whose first major appearance, in
Roman Holiday,
had won an Oscar. The Franks stayed through lunch and dinner. But despite the
persuasive case that Otto must have made, Hepburn declined. She and Otto stayed friends, and Hepburn, who put her fame behind causes, including campaigns against world hunger and for children’s rights, would become an active supporter of the Anne Frank Foundation.

When Stevens’s second choice for Anne—Natalie Wood—also passed, a casting call went out for an unknown to play the starring role. The most recent, heavily publicized nationwide search had found eighteen thousand young candidates seeking the title role in Otto Preminger’s 1957
Joan of Arc.
Now the hunt for a newcomer who could play Anne would be appropriately international.

In a newsreel-style promo piece about the making of the film, George Stevens explains that six months had already been spent casting the part of Anne.

“How many little girls have you talked to?” asks the reporter.

Six thousand, of which they’d met half, after which they’d reduced the list to “a hundred interesting possibilities.” Auditions were being held in France and Holland. The casting of a Dutch actress would not create a language problem, because “so much good English is spoken in Amsterdam. Many of the Dutch girls that we have heard from have written in very good English, and they wrote these letters themselves.”

The main thing was to find a fresh face. Asked if it was true that he didn’t want a professional actress, Stevens replied, “We
do
want an actress that hasn’t found that secret out yet about herself.” He hoped this would not only be the girl’s first role, but her
only
role, so that she would be forever associated with the part “and perhaps not others.” She need not have a “facsimile resemblance” to Anne. More essential was spirit and “the flavor of Anne Frank in appearance.”

They didn’t want another Shirley Temple, said Stevens, but someone
like
Shirley Temple in that “she must have charm, she must draw an audience to her, she must draw an audience’s affection and its sense of protection.” They were looking for a young girl, ideally around thirteen or fourteen. “She could play the younger part of the girl, and then when she puts on clothes, she will do what we often see in children that we know. When they wear their party dress and go out for the first time on a date, we see the youngster through the party dress.”

Stevens had visited Amsterdam and talked to Mr. Frank, “an extraordinarily fine gentleman and a survivor of this misfortune.” There were plans to do some filming on location in Holland, and when word got out that a Dutch girl might be picked, thousands of letters poured in; around seventy girls had been chosen to audition. The winner, a young, half-Jewish dancer, was ultimately rejected in favor of Millie Perkins, a New Jersey-born Audrey Hepburn lookalike. A former Junior Miss model who had appeared on the cover of
Seventeen,
Perkins was discovered for the part, Lana Turner style, having a snack in a coffee shop with her sister.

For her screen test, she told a story about going to the theater and being terribly annoyed by the people in front of her, a woman who threw her heavy fur coat on top of a little old lady, and a drunk who woke from snoring to guffaw at a serious drama. Aside from her physical resemblance to Hepburn, Millie Perkins’s most striking qualities are a brittle perkiness and a highly mannered affect. What she seemed to share with Anne was a mixture of confidence and terror, but a different confidence, and very different terrors.

Perkins would go on to star, opposite Elvis, in
Wild in the Country,
then disappear from the screen to return, decades later, in more “mature” roles. She was briefly married to Dean Stock-well, and, in 1985, played the Virgin Mary in a TV miniseries.
In the 2001 documentary about the filming of the diary,
Echoes from the Past,
Perkins recalls Otto Frank’s visit to the set.

“He approved of me and believed in me,” she says. As tears come to her eyes, she falls silent and taps her nose, rapidly and repeatedly, then says, “You see I did care.”

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banner headlines, the trailer for the 1959 film promised its audience that “no greater suspense story has ever been told than…20th Century Fox’s masterful production of
The Diary of Anne Frank!
Here is the thrill of her first kiss! Here is the wonder of her youth! The excitement of her first love! The miracle of her laughter!” These promises are delivered on by the film itself, a psychological thriller in which the erotic tension leading to a first kiss races against the heroine’s inevitable capture by the Gestapo. Presumably, the final cut incorporated the audience responses from test screenings of the film; comment cards (preserved in the Anne Frank archive) asked viewers which scenes and actors they liked most, if any elements of the story were confusing or unclear, if they would recommend the picture to friends. One audience, in San Francisco, objected to an ending in which Anne was shown in a concentration camp, and the closing scene was recut so that Anne was given another chance to proclaim her faith in human goodness.

Otto may have told Meyer Levin that the diary was not a war book, but George Stevens understood that war could keep the action moving. Faced by the problem of how to inject suspense into an essentially static story better suited to the stage, Stevens ramped up the danger outside the annex with footage of prisoners in striped uniforms and the sound of Nazi jackboots hitting the cobblestone streets. The merriment of the Hanukkah party is ended by the menacing hee-haw of Gestapo sirens. There are air raids, bombings, near misses. Dust and fragments of ceiling rain down on the cowering residents. The burglar
ies start earlier in the arc of the plot and take up considerable screen time. Anne’s dream of her starving, suffering friend Lies, altered in the play to an abstract nightmare from which Anne wakes in terror, has become a “dream sequence” in which a girl’s tormented face emerges from a background of female prisoners in striped suits.

The film puts Hitler, curiously absent from the Goodrich-Hackett stage drama, back into the picture. His demented voice squawks from the contraband radio around which the annex residents cluster. Stevens compelled his actors to watch the footage he shot in Dachau, and used a recording of crowds shouting, “Heil, Hitler!” to evoke anxiety and fear.

Despite Stevens’s efforts to immerse his cast in recent European history, the film seems even more “universal” than the play—that is, less about Jews. The script was sent for approval to the Jewish Advisory Council, an organization formed to monitor how Jews were portrayed on the big screen. Its director, John Stone, not only praised the screenplay but wrote that he preferred it to the play: “You have given the story an even more ‘universal’ meaning and appeal. It could very easily have been an outdated Jewish tragedy by less creative or more emotional handling—even a Jewish ‘Wailing Wall,’ and hence regarded as mere propaganda.”

After the more disturbing scenes were filmed, Stevens played a loud recording of “The Purple People Eater” to dispel the tension and loosen everyone up. During the shoot, which lasted almost six months, the actors were subjected to a range of physical discomforts intended to re-create the miseries that the annex residents endured. The set was overheated for the summer scenes and excessively air conditioned when the action shifted to winter. Shelley Winters was required to gain fifteen pounds for her portrayal of Petronella van Daan, and then to
lose the weight, together with her initially elaborate coiffure.