His Greatest Novel Was Himself

Kaplan, Howard

HIS GREATEST NOVEL WAS HIMSELF An Appreciation of Michael Blankfort HOWARD KAPLAN It's Sunday night, July 18, 1982. 1 want it exact. The funeral was today. Michael Blankfort died last Wednesday....

...He had finished his 14th book and was carrying it under his arm when he had the accident...
...Oh, yes," she said, "jokes...
...His fiction is a remarkably eclectic yet cohesive body of work...
...And half a dozen others...
...What I meant but did not say was that I was saving it to read after he died, to hold onto him a little longer...
...His message was the importance of a vigorous, informed and committed identification as a Jew...
...He thought he wouldn't be disturbed as much if he kept his office unlisted, but the ploy never worked...
...Then he said, "But I'll read it anyway...
...For the first time Michael felt himself a part of a majority culture, and he reacted to the excitement of the time and place by throwing himself into an examination of his heritage...
...He was also Vice-president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1971-73 and on the Academy's Board of Governors in 1976-77...
...Always lunch...
...As he did with so many others, he called me frequently when I was wading through difficult personal periods...
...Similarly, Michael's humanity permeated his film work...
...It was the commitment that counted to him, not the way it was practiced...
...First there was Walter's Sandwich Shop, for the quick bite when only the talk mattered...
...On Monday, he took it home with him as he did each night, stood near the bottom of his steep driveway, the manuscript in one hand, the garage door clicker in the other, pushed the button, lost his balance and toppled backwards...
...Michael lent his precise eye and understanding to everything I wrote...
...collaboration on the film version of The Caine Mutiny...
...He did care about selling, but he refused to let the marketplace dictate what he wrote...
...The Brave and the Blind (1940), about the Spanish Civil War and the right of the Spanish people to live as they chose...
...Didn't Know I Would Live So Long (1973), about an out-of-fashion painter who perseveres by virtue of his integrity...
...He wanted to apologize and asked if I would forgive him...
...I found him later in the room Where I write, looking at my wall of novels, amazed, because of his haphazard shelves, that my books were alphabetized...
...Michael often told the story about how he was at the writer's table at the Fox commissary during the time he was working on Broken Arrow, when one of the writers asked, "Hey, is Jeff Chandler," then whispered, "a Jew...
...The eyes of the maitresse d' at the Swiss Cafe lit up when he came through the door...
...I would leave each of my manuscripts with him, then wait nervously...
...In the nine years we had known each other, it was the first time he visited my home...
...He was in a wonderful mood, bear-hugging friends as he always did, though a little nervous...
...then the dimly lit Swiss Cafe for better food and more social chatter...
...I was in the drama group and we performed his play about Maimonides, The Spaniard...
...Once he'd taken me to see The Juggler, screened as part of a Jewish Film Festival at UCLA...
...In 1948, when most of Hollywood's commitment to Judaism was matzah ball soup and knowing Louis B. Mayer, Michael had gone to Israel...
...He got the now highly acclaimed television writer-producer, Barry Oringer, his first screenplay assignment when Herman Wouk sent him to Michael with a letter of introduction...
...In a rush of nervousness, 1 explained that I had been interrogated by the KGB for four days, had been the first to meet with the Hebrew teachers in Moscow, told him I had written a book about my experiences and asked, hopefully, if he had time to read it...
...The battle this time is law versus morality...
...No cross talk,' he would instruct us...
...In the 30s, he had been one of the founders of the Theatre Union in New York, written articles for the Daily Worker and travelled to South Dakota to report on discontent among the farmers...
...The day before the accident, Michael came to my Third Annual 30th Birthday Party...
...I told him that was the only one I hadn't read and I was saving it for sometime special...
...he never turned anyone away...
...Singer and Saul Bellow, and this year to Elie Wiesel...
...What entwined Michael and me even more than our writing was our Jewishness...
...he was so accustomed to speaking openly about his heritage...
...But most important was Dorothy—Dossy—his wife, partner, companion...
...And he must have succeeded, for the 4,500 members of the Screenwriters' Guild elected him their President from 1967-69 and National Chairman from 1971-73...
...Books spilled from the shelves and there was always the volume (or more likely the two) that he was reading at the time, there on the narrow cot against the wall behind his chair...
...and The Exceptional Man (1980), which considers in a serious manner the provocative story of a psychoanalyst who falls into a sexual relationship with his adult daughter...
...Thirty years later, I committed myself to still another kind of radicalism . . . that of the artists, militants who in their way opened our eyes to new ways of seeing the world around us and who brought a new leavening into troubled and anxious years...
...All six feet of him...
...After I left his office this morning, 1 walked to the three tiers of Michael's lunchdom...
...His office was a single, small, cluttered room, where often, though it was warm outside, the coils of his electric Howard Kaplan, author of The Damascus Cover and The Chopin Express, is currently working with Simon Ramo on a novel about nuclear disarmament...
...I had returned from a year in Israel clutching a 300-page manuscript about my travels and arrest in the Soviet Union...
...1 had heard the name Michael Blankfort when I attended Brandeis Camp Institute in 1970...
...An old manual Royal typewriter sat on his desk beneath a cork wall crowded with pictures and clippings—from my favorite, the one of him kissing his grandson, to those of him with his daughters, his other three grandchildren and the dignitaries from the worlds of art, writing and Israel who always visited when they were in Los Angeles...
...There he stressed that he had never been a member of the Communist Party but affirmed that he, indeed, had supported many activities devoted to social change...
...There was a different name scribbled in pen every day at 12:45 in his little appointment book...
...He loved telling them, even though he was, far and away, the world's worst joke teller...
...But I also knew as I grabbed a notebook and pen and hurried to my car that I would be out of trouble before the long lunch was over—he would exhaust himself repairing my work during the time he should have been resting from his own...
...an academy award nomination for Broken Arrow...
...Always sometime during the dinner, there would be a scraping back of his chair and he would rise with a flourish and a toast—'To Mabel' or 'To Vicki' for this 'poetic chocolate souffle' or this 'sublime strawberry mousse.' And then, of course, one 'To Dossy, who managed to spend a fortune on this modest repast.'" Michael was far more than a writing mentor...
...So many memories jump through my mind...
...He stopped at the Blankforts— some he had given to me, some I had scrounged in used book stores—and I pointed to Goodbye, I Guess...
...They exchanged a few words and she kissed him on the lips, twice...
...He listened, shared his past problems with lovers and parents and was at my side as I attempted those hurdles myself...
...In the introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition of his and Dorothy's art collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he wrote: "In the 30s I shared with my generation a meaningful effort to alleviate social distress...
...And remarkably unknown to the public at large...
...For more than 25 years he lectured to entering members of the Brandeis Institute...
...Michael was undaunted in writing what was important to him, regardless of its commercial potential...
...A contract screen writer in the 40s at Columbia and 20th Century-Fox (among his numerous credits were Texas, My Six Convicts, Act of Murder, Blind Alley and Halls of Montezuma), he wrote screenplays at the studio during the day and novels at home in the evening...
...The only part of the movie he saw filmed was the scene of a hora danced around a fire, shot on a backlot in Hollywood...
...The Big Yankee (1947), a biography of Colonel Evans Carlson and his vision of democracy for military organizations...
...But for all of us who were privileged to know him, I suspect that Michael Blankfort's greatest 'novel,' his ultimate work of art— was himself...
...He returned in 1949 and at 42 began his second education at Brandeis Institute outside Los Angeles...
...Seventy-four years...
...But even more than jokes, he loved talk—good talk, discussion, argument...
...As Fay Kanin said in her parting words at the funeral, "Wfyen his last book is published, I intend to buy it and savor it and place it on the bookshelf next to the others...
...there was nothing small or petty about him...
...The day I looked him up in the phone book, I found only his home number...
...He was 65 and I was 23...
...He was blacklisted for a time and summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee...
...There was a lot of schoolmaster in Michael...
...he always had a few moments to smile that huge smile of his and talk to her...
...Either there would be praise or he would say quietly, "I've read your material...
...He went to see her every day, and if he didn't need anything, he'd buy a candy bar or some gum...
...No," came his response...
...1 watched Kirk Douglas, as a famous German juggler and a concentration camp survivor, frightened, running through the streets of Haifa, unable at first to accept either his new homeland or what had happened to him...
...Agnon Award that had previously been granted to I.B...
...It deals with a young woman who learns in her teens that her father was a concentration camp survivor and who murders a neo-Nazi...
...For the next nine years we had lunch together just about every ten days...
...He had remembered as he went to bed and, upset, had lain awake, much of the night...
...He discussed everything with her and made no major moves without her counsel...
...The phone rang constantly there, and with a humanity I came to be in awe of, he made time for everyone...
...It was the basic theme of his work— and of his life...
...Not knowing what to do now with this stack of pages, I looked up his number in the phone book and called him...
...I walked through his world in Beverly Hills this morning, stood outside the Writers and Artists Building on Santa Monica Boulevard...
...I remember our long talks, how worried he had become recently about the survival of Israel...
...After studying psychology at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, he had become the first psychologist hired by the State of New Jersey to work in one of its prisons...
...Though bleeding, Michael was still alert...
...The Juggler, one of the first books about Israel to emerge after its birth...
...I met Michael in 1973...
...When that happened, I knew I was in trouble...
...And there were many more whom he touched even deeper personally than professionally...
...Unlike many people who list their office numbers but hold their homes sacrosanct, Michael did the opposite...
...Fay Kanin, his close friend and President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, spoke first to the large crowd that spilled out of the back doors of the hall...
...theatrical plays...
...The funeral was a celebration of Michael...
...his adaptation of The Juggler that Stanley Kramer turned into the first Hollywood movie shot in the new State—a remarkable career as a writer, art collector and public man...
...We are still looking and seeing the younger ones who are themselves looking and seeing...
...In part, his passions were focused and directed by the radicalism that threaded through his life, etched in the art he chose, in the books he wrote and in his attitude towards Judaism...
...He worked with Kate Braverman chopping out overwritten sections of Lithium for Medea, her novel that Harper and Row then published...
...Coupled, paradoxically with a touch of old-world courtliness...
...He spent long hours with Lem Kitaj, the artist's son, who has now sold his first screenplay to Fox through an agent Michael introduced him to...
...He looked exhausted at the party, and when I went to talk to him, he shooed me away, telling me I should spend time with my other guests...
...He transformed Mrs...
...He went into surgery, then into a coma, never regained consciousness, and the world lost a treasure...
...They had ridiculously named Colonel Evans Carlson, who had been a batallion chief of the Marine Raiders in the South Pacific, a Communist, and claimed that his biographer, Blankfort, was one too...
...Twelve highly acclaimed novels...
...Of his 14 books, five wrestled with difficult Jewish themes, including the novel he finished just before his death, A Cry From a Red Field...
...His eye would fasten on you and you could almost feel the ruler rapping your knuckles...
...The Blankfort dinner table was one of his domains, and he ruled it with an iron hand...
...and, on only the most special occasions, to celebrate a sale, a wedding engagement, a stock market killing or the like, there was the elegant La Scala...
...Two years before he had forgotten my (first) 30th birthday party (the second was never held) and called the following morning...
...Michael was an Orthodox Jew by upbringing, a Conservative Jew by theology and a radical Jew by temperament...
...An elegant, dashing man, with a moustache and a full head of wavy gray hair, Michael was always ebullient and full of humor...
...Kramer, a little old lady who owned a tobacco shop near his office, into a young, beautiful woman with all his attention and the way he flirted with her...
...And while these writers were struggling, he always picked up the check...
...He discussed stories with David Brandes for his screenplays and work for Jim Henson's upcoming new show, The Fraggles...
...He was a man who had something to say, and he never succumbed to the temptation of simply repeating a success...
...He belonged to no synagogue, preferring to spend the High Holidays at UCLA Hillel where he could be surrounded by hundreds of young people who cared about their heritage...
...One conversation at a time, and everyone listening.' And God help you if you started a side conversation with the tablemate at your right...
...He had finished his novel on Saturday, the day before the party, and was rereading it...
...Afterwards, Michael told me that he had been set to direct the picture, but the McCarthy hunters had taken his passport and prevented him from leaving the country...
...The following day I met him at his office...
...Take the A Train (1978), about a young Jewish boy who becomes friends with a charismatic black con man from whom he learns honor...
...one biography...
...I walked into the hall upset and depressed, but the service was so charged with love, it lifted me with it...
...His row of pipes and classical tapes rested to the right of the paper-strewn desk...
...That was Michael...
...When he finally called, there were no wasted words...
...Michael, working passionately and desperately on A Cry From a Red Field, had been tired and worn for the past six months...
...he had not seen the movie in over twenty years...
...I remember, too, the dinner in 1979 when the Hebrew University awarded him the S.Y...
...But more important, Michael's humanity, which was inextricably woven with his Jewishness, pervaded all his writing...
...Neighbors across the street immediately called the paramedics, then ran to the house to get Dorothy...
...He had a breadth of spirit...
...The Strong Hand (1956), about the dead hand that holds back change in the name of tradition when an Orthodox rabbi falls in love with a woman whose husband has been killed over the Pacific but not declared legally dead...
...It bothered him...
...And perhaps most of all, he was a lover—of people, and especially of women...
...Yet he never denigrated his screen writing...
...To continue to write fiction, he later said, was his "test of integrity...
...You'd better come over...
...heater blazed orange...
...That trip (immediately after the War of Independence) led to his writing The Juggler, and it tapped a flow deep inside him...
...Unable to break the fall, his head crashed into the cement...
...His most urgent need was to reach out, to touch, to make human contact...
...And he reached out passionately...
...In Israel in 1948, he suddenly realized that Jewishness was as vital a component of his identity as being a father, lover, writer and man...
...here, as with everything in his life, he followed the biblical injunction, "Whatever you set out to do, do with all your might...
...Jewishness had always been a part of him, but secondary to his commitment to social reform...
...He held beliefs but no dogma...
...They were the last words I spoke to him...
...In addition to me, there was an entire stable of young writers he helped...

Vol. 8 • December 1982 • No. 1


 
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