Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,393

This is the grave of John Garfield.

Born in 1913 in New York, Jacob Garfinkle grew up on the Lower East Side. His parents were Jewish immigrants and the family was very poor. His father was quite devout, a cantor in the synagogue. He worked as a clothes presser and like almost everyone else in the Jewish apparel industry of this time, he didn’t make much money. His mother never recovered from a later childbirth and died when Jacob was seven. His father farmed the boys out to various family members around New York. So it wasn’t a super great childhood. He spent a lot of time on the streets, joined gangs, and was a tough kid. He got scarlet fever that weakened his heart, especially because no one knew that’s what he had until he was an adult and had the money for real medical care. This would come back to haunt him,

A few things helped Garfinkle turn his life around and become John Garfield. One, he developed an ability for mimicry really early in life. This mostly made his fellow gang members laugh, but he was really good at it and people noticed. Second, he started hanging around a boxing gym and channeling all that street anger into boxing has been a path for many poor gang members over the years. Third, while being in a school for toughs (his father and the extended family trying to take care of him had no idea what to do with this kid), the principal helped get him speech therapy for his studder. Then the speech therapist encouraged him to get into acting. So this was a series of lucky breaks that didn’t happen for a lot of kids. It was far more likely that Garfinkle ended up being a gangster or in prison than becoming John Garfield. Luckily for him and for us, it worked out.

Garfinkle started acting in Yiddish theater productions. He received a lot of encouragement. He then became one of the first students of Richard Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya, the people who brought Stanislavski’s acting system to the United States, the descendant of which would be The Method. He did well. Now, he still had some serious wild oats in his blood. He spent some time hoboing around the nation, working in the Pacific Northwest in the timber and picking camps. In fact, Preston Sturges later created the idea of Sullivan’s Travels after hearing Garfield tell stories from his days on the trains, although Sully had nothing in common personally with Garfield; after all, the point of that film is to lampoon the rich liberal Hollywood idiot who thinks that poverty is romantic. Garfield knew it was not romantic, though I am sure the stories were good.

But by 1932, Garfinkle as he was now known as in the theater, appeared on Broadway. It was a play that didn’t do much, but he had broken into the professional theatre. Moreover, for his next play, he won a co-starring role with Paul Muni in Counsellor-at-Law, which was a good hit. This got Hollywood interested, but Garfield turned down a screen test from Warner Brothers. Now, Garfield had developed radical politics as he moved from being a tough kid to a respected actor. He knew poverty. He knew it was horrible. And he knew a radical rejection of capitalism was required to fix it. So he got close with a lot of the leftists of the theater, including Clifford Odets, who would be a major mentor. After Waiting for Lefty went so big, Odets could pretty much call his own shots and one of those was insisting that Garfield receive a major role in his next play Awake and Sing, the powerful drama about poverty in New York. Garfield didn’t have to learn much to play that role! He received tons of accolades for his work in the play.

However, when Odets gave the lead in his next play to Luther Adler instead of Garfield, the latter decided maybe he would give Hollywood a chance after all. His group of lefty theater people thought he betrayed them by going to crass ol’ Hollywood. Well, whatever. He got over it. He did force Jack Warner to put a clause in his contract to give him time off when he wanted to do theater. In exchange, Warner noted that no guy with an obviously Jewish name was going to star in Hollywood, so he changed it to Garfield. In his first film, Four Daughters, for Michael Curtiz, Garfield was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. Realizing what they had here, Warner redid his contract and gave him a lot more money and a lot of star vehicles, starting with They Made Me a Criminal.

Garfield was just a sensation. Although his career in the end was far too short, he was just a great actor. Nothing felt forced. He could play such dark characters with such power and emotion. Really, one of the true greats and if anything, significantly underrated today. Part of the problem was that Warner Brothers and Garfield fought constantly. Warner wanted Garfield in their ridiculous comedies and musicals; Garfield wanted real dramatic parts. Since this was the days of the studio system, they could suspend Garfield and did several times. If Garfield had come to Hollywood in 1967, he’d have been Al Pacino or Robert DeNiro, doing the very best dramatic roles. Both later actors are clearly influenced by Garfield. So, sadly, there just aren’t that many films in the late 30s and early 40s.

In fact, Garfield was so angry at Warner by 1942 that he tried to enlist in the military to fight in the war. But his bad heart meant that wasn’t happening. So he and Bette Davis led Hollywood’s effort to provide services to servicemen passing through LA in the Hollywood Canteen. He also played the lead in a lot of Hollywood war productions, which temporarily stopped the battles between him and Warner. That included Air Force, from 1943; Destination Tokyo, also from 43; and Pride of the Marines, from 1945.

After the war is when Garfield did his best film work, especially in The Postman Always Rings Twice, in 1946, and then in Gentlemen’s Agreement, from 1947. In the latter, he subsumed his rather sizable ego into a small part so he could participate in a film attacking American anti-Semitism. He then received his second Academy Award nomination for 1947’s Body and Soul, which I have sadly never seen. I need to fix that.

In 1946, Garfield’s contract with Warner Brothers ended and he wouldn’t sign another. He was going independent. That first meant back to Broadway, including a reunion with Clifford Odets. However, there came HUAC. Garfield was quite vulnerable to the anti-communist hysteria overtaking Hollywood. At this point, he wasn’t really a communist, more a non-sectarian socialist. But of course he was friends with communists and his wife was a member of the party. Moreover, there was no way in hell a bunch of dumb politicians were going to make John Garfield name names. He just was never going to do that. This was still a tough guy from the New York streets after all. So he didn’t. And he was blacklisted. There were a couple of later films that got out before the blacklist, notably the pretty good The Breaking Point, again directed by Michael Curtiz and the also pretty good He Ran All the Way, from 1951 and directed by John Berry. But who knows when he would have been able to make a film again.

Of course, Garfield had the bad heart from his lack of medical care as a child. Whether his heart was ready to give out anyway or whether the stress from HUAC put too much strain on his heart can never be known, but he had a heart attack in 1952 and died. He was 39 years old. Interestingly, at the very end, he was ready to denounce communism as an ideology without naming names for a Look article he was writing. But then the FBI came around, showed him the dossier on his wife, and said the agency would clear his name if he signed an affidavit denouncing her. He quite literally told them to fuck off and walked out the door. He never wasn’t that tough kid from New York who wasn’t putting up with your bullshit.

John Garfield is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Sorry for the extra horrible picture, but there were other people at the grave too and the last thing I wanted to do was to talk to them so I just walked by real fast and snapped the quickest picture I could.

Let’s watch some John Garfield.

If you would like this series to visit other actors nominated for Academy Awards in 1947, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Ronald Colman, who won the award that year for A Double Life, is in Santa Barbara, California and Gregory Peck, nominated for Gentlemen’s Agreement, is in Los Angeles. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.