A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender – Books

A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender
by Stephen Rebello
FFC rating: 7/10

by Walter Chaw I’m not alone in quoting passages from Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho in lectures and conversation over the years. Written in a user-friendly, almost conspiratorial style, it has a breathlessness that makes old history and twice-told tales alive and urgent again. Would Hitch burn all the capital he’d earned from the success of North by Northwest on a grimy little project about a serial killer and something-something a decapitation in the shower by the same? The book’s final moments, with Hitchcock conducting the audience like a symphony from the projection booth, deliver a payload of dopamine like the clash of cymbals at the end of a particularly stirring concerto. Rebello’s latest, A City Full of Hawks: On the Waterfront Seventy Years Later―Still the Great American Contender, is more of the same: a deeply researched yet slender volume that recounts well-known (and more obscure) stories from the making of another masterpiece–in this case, Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

I swept through A City Full of Hawks buoyed by the same clean prose and balanced reportage between background players and the drama of the day. Elia Kazan is painted as exacting, brusque, defensive-unto-deluded about his naming names before HUAC. Rebello immediately establishes that Kazan’s detractors read On the Waterfront as an apologia but clarifies that Kazan thought of it not as the casting of himself as a martyr for being forced to give up his friends as communists, but rather as an “allegory” for the plight of all working men. It’s a hair worth splitting. Rebello writes in detail about playwright Arthur Miller’s involvement in the early stages of development. Miller wrote the first version of the story, and Rebello insinuates he might have done so in repayment of a debt to Kazan either for essentially saving Miller’s career after a major flop by directing All My Sons and Death of a Salesman on Broadway or for introducing Miller to future wife Marilyn Monroe. Rebello isn’t explicit, but the context implies causality. Did Kazan pander to Miller to secure the services of one of his greatest stage collaborators? It’s almost too scandalous to be true.

My objections with Rebello have mainly to do with these occasional dips into the gossip pool. They are doubtless fun places to explore, but I seem to be past the Peter Biskind variety of history as secret diary of sinful behaviour. What’s more, the times seem to be passing Rebello by rather rapidly: his use of words like “crippling” and his ungenerous description of Marilyn Monroe as “anatomically astonishing” leave a rancid aftertaste. Against my better judgement, I enjoyed his naughtily proposing that Kazan conspired to gaslight Miller, though I don’t love how he refers to Kazan as a “satyr” while intimating that Monroe was an overripe fruit made for the plucking. And his insistence on clarifying how “intelligent” women like Monroe and Jean Peters actually were feels a bit like when white people call Black people “articulate.” Sir? Your surprise is showing.

With his betrayal of his friends exacerbated by a vociferous, self-congratulating diatribe published in the NEW YORK TIMES that finally and properly alienated Miller, Kazan turned to Budd Schulberg to complete what was then known as “The Hook.” Schulberg had also testified as a friendly witness in the HUAC trials and, at the time of On the Waterfront, was presumably in as much need of an ideological ally/echo chamber as Kazan. I have long wrestled with this film. What to say about something so obviously excellent that is also so obviously a statement in defense of disloyalty before a kangaroo court? Every individual draws a line, and I have been on either side of it during my time with On the Waterfront. I will say that a lyric from Lloyd Cole and the Commotions‘ song “Rattlesnakes”–“She looks Eve Marie Saint in On the Waterfront/she reads Simone de Beauvoir in her American circumstance”–is one of the most evocative lyrics in 1980s pop precisely because of how the image of her character, how she is lit and shot by Boris Kaufman and coached by Kazan, is the picture of lost innocence and betrayed conviction. I loved On the Waterfront before I grasped Kazan’s role in the Blacklist, and after a period of uncertainty and mourning in which I couched my affection for it with irresolvable conflicts about its creation, I have returned to loving it. Terrible, even loathsome people are capable of beautiful things. Human beings are complicated, and the relationship I have with any piece of art is mine alone.

Because of A City Full of Hawks, I now know more about Daryl F. Zanuck’s sexual proclivities than I ever wanted to. I especially savoured the parts with the barest suggestion that the decision to shut Jessica Tandy out of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire may have had something to do with Tandy thinking Brando was a psychopath. Although I’ve read it before, I appreciated the inclusion of Kazan’s letter to Brando asking the actor to reconsider his stance that he wouldn’t work with a “squealer,” and, in general, Rebello’s real strengths are as a completist: a provider of receipts. I was charmed by the recollections he gleaned from Saint, who’s still alive at the age of 100 as of this writing, and her adoration of both “dear” Marlon Brando and her “saviour,” Elia Kazan. What a kind, gentle person.

Still, I could have done with fewer details and anecdotes that fail to speak directly to the film and its production. For these, Rebello affects a hepcat voice I think is meant to approximate a “Hush Hush” tabloid style as he lists one producer’s inexhaustible parade of starlet conquests and calls out another’s paperweight that is a plaster cast of his genitals painted gold. He alleges that Kazan is infatuated with the ex-boxers and street toughs he’s hired as extras and bodyguards and they with him–because, apparently, they saw each other as equals in experience and suffering. Rebello curiously compares the rigours of the shoot to those afflicting notorious nightmares Fitzcarraldo and Nanook of the North, and uses hyperbole to sensationalize his reportage. It certainly keeps things humming, but I wonder if the most unsubstantiated, unquantifiable stuff doesn’t ultimately threaten Rebello’s credibility.

Fortunately, the good outweighs the purple by a wide margin. Rebello’s recounting of the turbulent set and the rapidly crumbling relationship between volcanic Kazan and megalomaniac producer Sam Spiegel speaks to the tempestuousness of the film itself. (Billy Wilder, we learn, dubbed Spiegel a kind of Robin Hood who “steals from the rich and steals from the poor.”) Kazan’s powers of seduction reverberate throughout. Take Leonard Bernstein’s involvement with On the Waterfront, from his initial reluctance to his eventual rapture with the project: another example, Rebello intimates, of Kazan’s ability to manipulate geniuses. Kazan somehow hypnotizes Bernstein into submission with a combination of flattery and aggression, conjuring a star-studded dinner party where he introduces Bernstein to his idol, Bette Davis, and makes clear that only Bernstein’s unique gifts could be the equal of Kazan’s own. Alas, Rebello can’t resist making the odd, out-of-place critique of Bernstein’s work. I would not have had the same confidence to impugn Bernstein.

I enjoyed reading of Frank Sinatra’s ire at getting, then losing, the lead role in On the Waterfront, only to lose to Brando again on Guys and Dolls when Cary Grant convinced Brando to take the Sky Masterson role, relegating Sinatra to comic relief Nathan Detroit. Never fun to be a Salieri, but for Ol’ Blue Eyes to play second fiddle to non-singing Brando in a popular musical is especially rich. Rebello suggests Frank got his revenge with the help of some underworld pals, though that’s more delicious apocryphal tale than provable in any way. Having already said I don’t appreciate this sort of gossipmongering, I confess I did relish the Sinatra stories. I’m only human. Rebello’s coda–his mic drop, if you will–is a resounding call to not forgive acts of disloyalty and dishonour, even in an artist as profoundly influential as Kazan. While Rebello is at his best as an archivist, the quality of his outrage is not strained in this instance. A City Full of Hawks is neither long nor deep, but as an eminently readable introduction to this genre of reportage paired with a film simultaneously as fraught and as incandescent as On the Waterfront, it hits the spot.

224 pages; November 19, 2024; ISBN: 1493077805; Applause