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BROADWAY: Who Is Stanislavsky?

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TIME

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Why was the blind girl riding the roller coaster? People on the amusement pier in Wildwood, N.J. were wondering about it one sunny day last summer. They watched her clutching her escort’s arm during the stomach-wrenching ride; it seemed to freeze her into terrified silence.

A little later at a seaside diner, the same girl was struggling with her dessert. “I can’t see,” she complained huskily as the melting ice cream slithered from her spoon. “Well, you can feel, can’t you?” said her escort. Just within earshot, a waitress hefted her tray with barely controlled anger at the callous young man.

Some hours later, the girl walked into her hotel room. Slowly she took off her dark glasses and peeled heavy strips of adhesive tape from her eyelids. Her night-black eyes blinked in the sudden brightness. “My God,” said Actress Anne Bancroft to the fellow actor who had accompanied her. “I never knew this room was so beautiful.”

From now on, there would always be the memory of the fear she experienced during her experiment with blindness. After weeks of work, Actress Bancroft was beginning to understand that last dimension of the role for which she was preparing. Already a part of her was onstage, creating with incredible vitality a superior human being: half-blind Anne Sullivan, whose stubborn skill lit up life itself for a deaf, blind and mute child named Helen Keller. Already, Anne Bancroft was The Miracle Worker of Playwright William Gibson’s impressive new play (TIME, Nov. 2).

Beginning of an Era. Even for the vast and vocal audience that recognized the Bancroft talent two years ago in Gibson’s Two for the Seesaw, this season’s Bancroft is a stunning spectacle. As Gittel Mosca, the heartbroken Bronx-to-Bohemia hoyden of Seesaw, the young star still had an uncertain luster. There was a feeling that perhaps the black-stockinged beatnik was only playing herself. What would happen if she really had to act?

With her second Broadway role, Anne Bancroft has given her answer—and upstaged her contemporaries. At the summit of the American theater, Julie Harris, Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley have a brilliant new competitor. Such names as Hayes, Cornell and Fontanne ring distant on the ear—echoes from another generation. “We’ve come to the end of gracious ladies in the theater,” says Producer Harold S. (Fiorello!) Prince. “Why, I don’t know. But this girl Bancroft is the greatest there is. She marks the beginning of an era.”

Somehow, the fresh and volatile Bancroft talent carries extra surprise, for the brief Bancroft career is a thunderous theatrical cliche. Even the name is a typical Hollywood banality: 28 years ago when she was born, Anne Bancroft was Anna Maria Italiano. She was the kid who scribbled on the back wall of her apartment house, “I want to be an actress,” and who kept showing off for the handsome stranger whom she took to be a

Hollywood producer—until she discovered that he drove an ice truck.

Annie is one of the countless hopefuls whom Hollywood could not appreciate, who came home after a broken marriage and 18 second-rate movies. But the corn grows even taller. Annie is also the girl who finally got a crack at Broadway and became the hottest ticket in town on her first try. And finally—most typical cliche of the times—she is the girl who is now trying to find herself in long, earnest hours of psychoanalysis.

Poet & Piano Mover. Her luminous eyes—so bright that Hollywood cameramen never liked to shoot her too close—and her fine, mobile mouth are often overshadowed by a carefully careless costume: thick, shapeless sweaters, flat shoes, coarse hair uncombed, and the rugged tongue of someone who takes refuge in being thought a “kook.” She loves to demonstrate eccentricity. One night she was sitting with a group of friends who were kidding her about her carelessness with money. Promptly Annie pulled a $20 bill from her purse and started eating it, nibbling the edges like a rabbit tackling lettuce. “I just love to eat money,” said she, savoring the effect. “I must take it up with my analyst some time.”

But behind the footlights, Anne Bancroft is always the serious, controlled artist, whose features can change from tenderness to humor to ferocity to sultriness with astonishing ease and conviction. Says her sometime acting coach, Herbert Berghof: “She is like a little daughter of Anna Magnani.” In Miracle Worker, she is completely in charge of an extraordinarily demanding role, a role that requires of the actress what it required of Annie Sullivan in real life: the sensitivity of a poet and the strength of a piano mover. It is a role that is doubly difficult because it demands a violation of one of the prime commandments of theatrical experience: never get on stage for too long with a child. But just as the triumph of Annie Sullivan’s fierce and unsentimental love was burnished by her battle against the afflictions of Helen Keller, so the triumph of Anne Bancroft’s stagecraft burgeons beside the improbable polish of her 13-year-old colleague, Patty Duke.

The miracle of The Miracle Worker is that night after night, the militant kook from The Bronx and the tireless kid from Manhattan tenements re-create with consuming vitality the remarkable collaboration between blind child and half-blind adult that blossomed in Tuscumbia, Ala. three-quarters of a century ago. So successful are the two actresses that Author Gibson is convinced they transcend the bounds of mere acting. “I’ve always felt the curtain call was haunted,” says Gibson. “A high percentage of the applause is for the people who really lived.”

Unlocking a Mind. That haunting effect begins with the eerie, keening scream of the infant Helen Keller’s mother (Patricia Neal) when she discovers that her child is deaf and blind. It is warmed by the first sound of the soft, self-assured brogue of Annie Sullivan arriving from Boston to take charge of Helen. It is nourished by the overwhelming urgency of Annie’s every action, her passionate need to dispense with the amenities—and with the Keller family’s sentimental softness—in order to get down to the awful business of unlocking a darkened human mind and heart. It is onstage through every moment of physical combat as the adult teacher descends to the role of animal trainer in order to subdue a furious and frustrated child.

Anne Bancroft, as Annie Sullivan, comes onstage in her drab grey traveling suit and black, high-laced shoes. The stiff back, the solemn, measured steps are at once determined and shy. It is the hard-jawed fighter who meets her charge for the first time and all but devours the child with her eyes. It is the troubled stranger, caught suddenly between youthful belligerence and a growing awareness of responsibility, who catches a doll full in the mouth, spits a broken tooth into her cupped palm, agonizes over a job she may not be able to handle.

The Fight. During the unrestrained violence of the dinner-table combat between Anne and Patty, the play reaches its peak—in one of the most nerve-shattering scenes ever acted on Broadway. Ordering the Kellers out of the room, Annie flails into the heroic task of teaching wild young Helen the rudiments of table manners. Food and silverware explode across the room. Little Helen rushes to the door to pound out a plea for freedom. Annie promptly wrestles her back to her seat. Again and again and again, the child escapes and is captured. Again and again, Annie meets the near-demented girl on her own level, exchanging wild slaps and pokes. Still Helen breaks away, feinting her tormentor out of position, crawling under the table, perching on her chair with a kind of prim furor, and refusing to eat. With only the exhausted movement of hip or hand, Annie expresses the depths of her combined determination and despair. She is reduced to a disheveled wreck, chest heaving, shoulders slumped, slovenly hair sloping across her face.

Captured at last, and seated forcibly at table, Helen Keller still does not yield. She flings her spoon away. Annie slaps another into her hand—and another and another. In the end Teacher Annie Sullivan stands triumphant above her charge. She has won a signal victory: Helen has eaten with a spoon and folded her napkin.

Kneepads, shin guards beneath her stockings, and sponge rubber tucked under her garter belt have not been enough to protect Patty from assorted cuts, bruises and a chipped tooth. Similar padding from ankle to bustle have not saved Anne from equally painful accidents. “The impulse during rehearsal,” says Director Arthur Penn, “was to set the fight scene, to plan every move and response.” But then he saw his stars at work. Once Actress Bancroft had persuaded Patty not to hold back (“Naw! You come on and hit me!”), the scrap quickly developed into impromptu reality, a little different every night. The big fight has run as briefly as 8 minutes 10 seconds; at its best, one night in Philadelphia, it lasted longer than 12 minutes. “It was,” says Penn, “one of the greatest things I have seen in the theater. Everyone, including myself, was too moved to do anything rational, let alone punch a stop watch. The audience came out of its seats yelling.”

Italian from Galway. What Anne Bancroft nightly brings to Annie Sullivan, besides sheer physical stamina, is an extraordinary talent for observation, an ear and an eye for the small, significant detail that transforms mimicry into understanding. So the coarse, curbside intonations of The Bronx were erased with intuitive skill at the flare of a footlight and the rise of a curtain. Seesaw’s Gittel spoke with an inflection that convinced thousands of theatergoers that the actress must be Jewish (“I didn’t even know what a Jew was until I was grown up,” says Anne Bancroft). As Annie Sullivan, Actress Bancroft erases her Italian heritage so completely that, after seeing Miracle, Novelist Edwin (The Last Hurrah) O’Connor said: “This is the most astonishingly accurate Irish accent I’ve ever heard. It sounds as if she’d been born in Galway.”

To achieve such precise stagecraft, Actress Bancroft worked hard with a variety of teachers, still submits to the rigorous and introspective training of the Actors’ Studio. What sets Anne apart from other Method actors is the stubborn perseverance with which she has kept her quick and sensitive emotions unfettered by theory and cant. “I’ve never liked to read,” says she. “But I don’t cover up my ignorance ; if I admit it, people will teach me. On the third TV show I ever did, Rod Steiger told me about Stanislavsky. I said, ‘Who’s he?’ Rod gave me Stanislavsky’s book about acting. I still have it, but I’ve never read it.” Happily she maintains, if not the innocence, at least the ingenuousness of the grown-up little girl who never stood on a Broadway stage until two years ago. “She’ll be a grande dame of the theater by the time she’s 40,” says Director Penn, “but today she’s marvelously uncivilized. Just about the only thing she couldn’t do is a comedy of manners—and that’s because she doesn’t have them.”

Mamma Was Boss. So much of Anne Bancroft seems never to have left home that one friend still describes her as “a Girl Scout of The Bronx, leading Brownies through Palisades Park.” Anne likes to disagree. “I get so tired of saying I was born in The Bronx,” says she. But the continuing search for herself keeps taking her back to the series of low-rent apartments in the neighborhood of St. Peter’s Avenue. “We were a typical Italian family,” says Anne, “very lower middle class.” Mamma was the boss. It was Mamma, working as a telephone operator at Macy’s, who ordained that of her three daughters chubby Anna Maria would become an actress. “I sometimes wonder if it was worth putting her through all this,” says Mrs. Italiano today.

But Mamma knows that she only ordained the obvious. Her Anna Maria was born to entertain. “I was the personality kid,” Anne remembers. “When I wasn’t sick, I was singing. Even at school they took me from classroom to classroom; I could really put over a song. I put everything into it. I shook my shoulders, rolled my eyes and twitched. I was just a repulsive kid, I guess. I used to break up the class.”

By the time she entered high school, Anne was a slick, style-conscious teen-ager —far more “sophisticated” than she is today—with a great interest in the boys. But always Mamma was there to keep her in check. “Once,” says Anne, “my mother caught my older sister having sneak dates and beat hell out of her. I didn’t want a licking, so I didn’t do too much of that.” And another time, when Annie smoked a cigarette onstage in an amateur production of Night Must Fall, her Aunt Kate yelled terrifyingly from the back of the hall: “I’m going to tell your mother!” Sometimes, Annie revolted against such domination; once she grabbed her mother’s modest jewelry and sold it for pennies to the first comers in the street.

With hypercritical hindsight, Anne has now decided that “I was very phony in high school. I was terribly shy, and I got aggressive to cover up that awful shyness.” But what bothers her most about those years is the memory of someone else winning the school drama medal. The teacher’s explanation—that the winner of her choice needed encouragement more than Anne—still rings false. The grown woman seethes with rage and searches for understanding of her girlhood slight.

No Money for Dates. Bronx neighbors still remember the thin, dark-haired girl on the way home from school, munching a 5¢ pickle and reading plays as she walked. But in her senior year Anne inexplicably decided to become a lab technician and work nobly at the side of some great researcher. Mamma again called the shots, scraped up the $500 tuition to send Anne to the august American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It was just two weeks before graduation from the Academy that she was discovered practicing alone on the school’s darkened stage while everyone else was out to lunch. That chance encounter eventually got her a part in a TV production of Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring. “Look,” says Annie as she tries to find some modest explanation for the fact that she worked even during her lunch hours. “I had no money for malteds and no dates. What the hell was there for me to do but stay onstage when the other kids were out?”

Anne Marno: CDXX. After the family celebration, after the gilded sign (“Welcome home, star!”) came down from the Italiano door, other acting jobs came slowly. Anne kept busy peddling chocolate-covered cherries in drugstores and giving English lessons to Peruvian Singer Yma Sumac. Then she got a running part in the TV version of The Goldbergs. Danger, Suspense, and other CBS shows began to use “Anne Marno,” as she then called herself. Her acting reputation grew. In his files, TV Director Franklin Schaffner still keeps a card for Anne Marno with the coded notation: CDXX. Translation: can play comedy, or drama, is excellent actress.

In 1951, 20th Century-Fox screen-tested an aspiring actor named Doug Rogers, and Anne agreed to help him out by playing opposite. Result: no one noticed Rogers (says Anne: “I don’t know where the kid is now”), but Fox signed Anne. Of course Mamma went along to Hollywood—on Anne’s first plane ride. She had to see her daughter settled in a small Sunset Boulevard apartment before she felt it safe to return to Macy’s.

On her own at last, Anna Maria Louise Italiano chose the Hollywood name, Anne Bancroft, from a list handed out by Darryl Zanuck; it was the only name, she thought, that “did not sound like I should look like Lana Turner.” Hollywood historians remember her first movie, Don’t Bother to Knock, chiefly because it was the first big role for a future star named Marilyn Monroe. Anne Bancroft was just an added starter.

She played Impresario Sol Hurok’s wife in a George Jessel-produced turkey called Tonight We Sing. She played a Roman lady in Demetrius and the Gladiators, a Civil War widow, a carnival aerialist, a gangster’s daughter and an interminable list of Indian girls. For one movie (The Last Frontier), with Robert (Music Man) Preston, Anne even became a blonde.

Eccentric Alliance. Hollywood gossips kept track of Anne’s long and apparently aimless list of dates. Says she: “I wanted to get married—just about anybody would have done. I’d even thought of marrying Jessel.” She finally married Martin A. May, nine years her senior, the son of a wealthy ranching family. It was an alliance that seemed eccentric even for Hollywood. Martin was studying law when he met Anne (after five failures at the bar exam, he gave up the effort). He wanted to keep the marriage a secret until he could tell his mother in person; the newlyweds moved into separate apartments, which they occupied for six months. Her husband always slept with a loaded revolver under his pillow. It made her nervous, she admits, but years later she told Playwright Bill Gibson: “I thought all husbands had guns under their pillows.”

After the couple moved into one apartment, it was often filled with young actors sitting up all night reading plays. “Annie was intense about everything,” May remembers now. “She’d lie on the floor and watch television by the hour, or she’d fry an egg, standing there leaning over the skillet staring as if the fate of the city depended on that egg. She was either a hungry tiger or a lovable lap dog.”

On their first wedding anniversary the Mays were remarried in the Roman Catholic Church to please Anne’s parents. But the marriage was already beyond salvage. In 1957 Anne tried for a church annulment and failed; Martin then got a divorce on the ground of mental cruelty. Anne no longer enjoyed the life of a Hollywood bachelor girl. “One can always be popular with the boys,” she says, “but the rules are different in Hollywood than The Bronx. Out there you play for keeps.”

“Lousy, Huh?” After six years, Hollywood was beginning to pall in other ways, too. “The studios wanted to give me the Monroe-type sex buildup,” she says. “I wanted to develop my acting, not my body.” When TV Actor Richard Basehart recommended Anne to Producer Fred Coe as an ideal Gittel for Two for the Seesaw, Anne was only too anxious to try. She was going East for a sister’s wedding anyway; she read the play and decided that she would impress Coe, not by acting, but by being Gittel. “I made sure he found me with one shoe off, scratching my foot,” she recalls. “And when I got inside his office, the first thing I said was, ‘Where’s the John?’ It was just the sort of thing Gittel would have said. I didn’t have to go, really, but I went. He asked me to come back the next day.”

GITTEL LIVES, wired Coe to Director Arthur Penn in Hollywood. Next day Playwright William Gibson was equally convinced. Anne was Gittel for him too. “So how was the Coast?” she greeted him. “Lousy, huh?” The Seesaw team, which had already signed Henry Fonda for the male lead, had found its real star.

“At first,” recalls Director Penn of the Seesaw rehearsal, “she could hardly find the stage. She couldn’t stand. She couldn’t turn. She’d play with her back to the audience. She was too broad and too vulgar. Even the lawyers and agents connected with the show said, ‘She’s no good; dump her.’ ” But Penn had already recognized something Anne’s critics had not: she took direction admirably. “I even had to tell her where the jokes were, but once was enough.” On the road Gibson would “write a funny line for Fonda and a question for Annie, and she’d get the laugh and leave Hank standing there with the line in his hand.”

Silent Humor. Anne had known that she would be tapped for the part of Annie Sullivan ever since Gibson started working on the new play while Seesaw was still on the road. In the meantime, Anne became engaged, this time to Mario Ferrari-Ferreira, distantly related to the Italian auto family. But by the time Seesaw began its tryout in Washington, Annie was again fed up with the idea of marriage. “The play had become vitally important to me,” she says matter-of-factly. “There was no time or energy for anything else.” There was also another complication: her Catholicism. Says she: “The church is still a big part of me.”

To prepare for Miracle Worker, Anne worked at the Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Manhattan; she attended a workshop sponsored by Northwestern University and the American Foundation for the Blind; she practiced the manual alphabet at a camp for deaf-blind adults in Spring Valley, N.Y. And she suffered through her experience as a blind girl on a roller coaster. Finally she met the child who would become her partner in one of the finest performances of a theatrical generation—Patty Duke.

The little girl and the grown woman seemed to recognize each other at once. Like Anne’s, Patty Duke’s childhood belonged to the streets of New York. Her father (a taxi driver) and her mother (a checker at Schrafft’s) were separated; before Patty got her first TV roles, the family teetered on the edge of poverty. In Miracle Worker, it was Anne to whom Patty looked for approval; it was Anne who became her particular pal. Soon, says Arthur Penn, “Patty and Anne were carrying on conversations in the manual alphabet behind our backs, cracking jokes and having themselves a time.”

Out the Window. Patty’s preparation was almost as painstaking as Anne’s. Her agent and his wife taught her what it means to be blind by making her navigate with eyes shut around obstacles set up in their apartment; they made her practice deafness by teaching her to ignore telephone bells, suddenly clashed pot covers, unexpectedly fired questions. Conditioned reflexes to sight and sound came under control. The cast still remembers with amazement the night at Manhattan’s Playhouse theater when a cable snapped with a loud crack high over the stage. Anne and the spaniel that plays the Keller family dog jumped a foot. Patty Duke, as the deaf Helen Keller, did not even start.

Patty’s voice is almost as versatile as Anne’s; she supplied the young boy’s tones for Playwright Gibson’s recorded offstage “voices.” Although she turns 13 this week—notwithstanding the pressagentry that kept her ten years old for three years—Patty backstage is still often the grade-school child, an inveterate lap sitter. Onstage she is a polished professional who can think on her feet. Once, when a set door stuck and Anne Bancroft swore helplessly under her breath, Patty promptly began making her “noises,” the grunts of the speechless, to cover Anne’s indiscretion. When Anne finally whispered, “I’m going to shove you out the window,” Patty made the drop and managed to make her way to her stage mother on cue.

Bronx to Broadway. The approaching maturity which Patty—and her agent—would dearly love to delay, is exactly what her backstage friend Anne Bancroft has been hunting down for years. At 28, Anne has progressed from The Bronx to Broadway, where the people she portrays still seem more meaningful and manageable than Anne Bancroft herself.

She is a wealthy woman now, with a $150,000-a-year income, but she gets only a $50-a-week allowance from her business manager. When she does not cook aftertheater snacks for herself, she relies on what Mamma sends down from Yonkers, where the Italianos now live. She owns Manhattan real estate, has an interest in a California bank and a Texas oil well, but she keeps warm by huddling in the kitchen of her Greenwich Village apartment, with both stove and oven going full blast.

“I’m still an ignorant slob,” she insists with a belligerence that suggests she intends to remain just that. But she strives mightily to make herself over, with psychiatry, acting lessons, voice lessons (she hopes to do a musical next). Twice a week she still goes to Manhattan’s Institute for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation to work with blind disturbed children. It seems almost by design that she has little time left for dates, except for her platonic friendship with the Three Bears—the fatherly trio of Penn, Coe and Gibson—and with a couple of boys from the Actors’ Studio.

Anne keeps talking of marriage, but when she told her psychiatrist not long ago that she had put a piece of a friend’s wedding cake under her pillow, he answered ironically: “At last you’re taking active steps.” Says she: “I don’t know why, but I can’t make a mature relationship based on trust, respect and recognition.” She adds: “Most of Annie Sullivan is myself. It’s my own blindness I draw on, my unawareness of myself.”

Perhaps more revealing than this sort of couch talk are some lines that Playwright William Gibson wrote into Seesaw while the show was trying out on the road. The middleaged, Midwestern lawyer tells Gittel: “I said [you are] a beautiful girl; I didn’t mean skin-deep—there you’re a delight. Anyone can see. And underneath is a street brawler. That some can see. But under the street brawler is something as fresh and crazy and timid as a colt.” And that, right now, is probably as good a description of Anna Maria Italiano as can be found.

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