by Allan M. Jalon
[This is the concluding section of Allan M. Jalon’s article on Paul Newman’s never-released film version of Anton Chekhov’s one-act play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco. If you’ve been reading Parts 1 and 2, you know what a remarkable tale this is. (If you haven’t read the beginning installments—posted respectively on 5 and 8 February—I strongly suggest going back and picking up the start of this endeavor.]
The play’s full title is “The Dybbuk, Between Two Worlds” [in which Michael Strong appeared in 1975 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum; see Part 2]. It presents the troubled divide between the religion-steeped past and secular assimilation, the same transition that members of the Natapoff family (and many families) had experienced in Russia, and then in America. The play’s history runs like a thread through Jewish progress from the Old World to the new. It was written in Russia — originally for Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre, though it never had a production there — and got staged in Yiddish in New York in the 1920s. Now it was playing at the main theater complex in L.A.
Still, when Strong was onstage in “The Dybbuk,” in costume as a Polish Jew, did he feel connected to his Jewish identity? Strong’s childhood home felt “more Russian than Jewish,” his son told me, adding that the Natapoff family had no custom of Jewish practice or even celebrating holidays. Garfein said he’d had Strong and Shalet to his apartment for a few Seders [the ceremonial meal for Passover].
I’ll let Ellen Strong have the next-to last word: “Acting was his religion.”
My final words on this question offer a reminder that these were decades of a specific evolution — the merging of Jewish and American identities. Mike Strong was an American Jewish actor, while other people of his generation, with widely varying interest in the specificities of Jewishness, were American Jewish poets, American Jewish teachers and American Jewish politicians. It seems so obvious a statement, until one considers the decades of change it had taken until immigrants and their children could feel less like strangers here.
Garfein had moved to L.A. in 1964, joining Newman to establish the Actors Studio-West, an outpost of the New York group. He also got together with Strong and Shalet, growing closer to Strong than they’d been in New York. Ellen Strong recalls his “very social” presence at parties of about 10 people, mostly actors, in the backyard of their house. “Everyone would be telling stories and laughing about scenes going wrong, actors getting injured while doing stunts,” she recalled.
Garfein and Strong went to star-studded Hollywood parties. “We didn’t go to stupid parties,” he said. “It was always Kazan or Strasberg’s parties.”
They spent frequent Sunday mornings together at Garfein’s apartment, in a high-rise along Sunset Boulevard, “talking mostly about what we were doing — theater, movies.”
Strong and Garfein were two Actors Studio friends whose relationship was rooted in Chekhov-like indirection, the fissures between what was and wasn’t stated, remembered and left behind. Garfein said he and Strong got as close “as brothers — I was the younger brother,” but the two never spoke about the deep shadows surrounding them.
Garfein told me he never spoke to Strong about his youth in the Slovakian town of Bardejov [then part of Czechoslovakia]. In 1942, the family moved from Slovakia — a brutal Nazi ally that had begun deportations by then — to the relative safety of the Hungarian town where the Garfeins lived for two years. The family was swept up and placed on trains to Auschwitz in the massive Hungarian deportations of 1944.
In Auschwitz, Garfein told me, he lost 19 members of his family, including his mother and sister, on a single day, May 23, 1944; he was 13. His name was then Jacob Garfein, and his hair was red, not today’s airy white. (Iraj Abde, our mutual friend at Barzini’s Market, told me he buys 19 yahrzeit candles for Holocaust Remembrance Day each year.) [Yahrzeit is Yiddish for ‘anniversary’; the candles are memorials that Jews light in memory of loved ones on the anniversaries of their deaths. They are also lit at Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah).]
It’s hard to reconcile his carefully modulated voice, his hints of infinite grief, with the man I’ve watched stroll buoyantly down Broadway. He details labor camps and death marches across Europe largely to lay German rail lines. He names nine camps across Poland and Central Europe where he stopped before English forces set him free at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. He was sent to a Swedish recovery center and from there, in 1946, to New York.
On his iPhone, he carries photographs from a Swedish newspaper, showing him as a flesh-and-bones teenager in Sweden.
Michael Strong, meanwhile, never spoke of being Cecil Natapoff, the son of an immigrant mail carrier in the Bronx who read Shakespeare in Yiddish. By hiding in a cemetery, Strong’s father had survived a pogrom in 1903 that killed hundreds of Jews in a Belorussian town called Gomel; I learned this from Susan Strong, the family historian. Strong never spoke of his brother. Gus Natapoff was seven years older than he, a prodigy who gained admission to Harvard for graduate work in advancing areas of science and engineering at a time when admission quotas limited the number of Jews.
He drowned in a swimming accident at a Harvard pool in 1938, just as Cecil Natapoff was starting his acting career, three years before he changed his name to Strong.
Alan Natapoff, a Strong cousin, is a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the impact of space travel on the human body. He grew up taking pleasure in Michael Strong’s work, and believes that Strong’s relationship with his elder brother —“the family never recovered from his death” — at least partly drove his acting ambitions.
“I didn’t know he had a brother. I never heard the name Natapoff,” Garfein said. “To me, he was Michael Strong. I knew he was Jewish, but we didn’t talk about the past.”
Grant, who wrote about her Jewish family (and how she endured the Hollywood blacklist) in a memoir called “I Said Yes to Everything” [2014], saw Strong and Shalet in L.A. She echoed Garfein, saying: “We didn’t talk about who we were like that. We were part of the tribe of actors. I never knew he was Cecil Natapoff. He never knew I was Lyova Rosenthal. Mike Strong. Lee Grant. How American can you get?”
[This is from Wikipedia: “The Hollywood blacklist (1946-1960s) was the colloquial term for what was in actuality a broader entertainment industry blacklist put in effect in the mid-20th century in the United States during the early years of the Cold War. The blacklist involved the practice of denying employment to entertainment industry professionals believed to be or to have been Communists or sympathizers. Not just actors, but screenwriters, directors, musicians, and other American entertainment professionals were barred from work by the studios. This was usually done on the basis of their membership in, alleged membership in, or even just sympathy with the Communist Party USA, or on the basis of their refusal to assist Congressional investigations into the party's activities. Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, from the late 1940s through to the late 1950s, the blacklist was rarely made explicit or easily verifiable, as it was the result of numerous individual decisions by the studios and was not the result of official legal action. Nevertheless, it quickly and directly damaged or ended the careers and income of scores of individuals working in the film industry.”]
But Garfein and Strong shared a delight in Yiddish theater stories. The Yiddish theater was in Strong’s blood. He sat in the 55-cent balcony seats of such theaters when he was a boy. Maybe when he stood on the stage of the Orpheum for Newman’s film, he was looking into a theater where he sat with his parents as a boy and felt the first stirrings of actor inspiration.
We know Strong worked on Broadway with Joseph Buloff [1899-1985], the Yiddish acting star who’d been brought from Europe by Maurice Schwartz [1890-1960], impresario-star of New York’s Yiddish Art Theater. It’s a good guess that Buloff gave him the following Schwartz story.
It seems Schwartz had a bad-great night playing Hamlet — in Yiddish, of course. He gave the gravedigger scene’s famous line — “Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. . .” — and blanked out. He looked to the prompter’s box, but it was empty, nature having called. Recovering his composure, Schwartz improvised: “Poor New Yorick, I know it. . . .”
His New York immigrant audience went crazy, it seems, as he went on: “Oh, poor New Yorick, I know it. It is our city, New Yorick, the city of our struggles, but it also holds promise for better times. . . .”
In 1968, Garfein directed Shalet and Strong in a short play about a honeymooning couple’s post-coital fight about the height of a great conductor. It was called “How Tall Is Toscanini?” [written by Calder Willingham, 1922-95; performed at UCLA’s Actors Studio West Workshop.] Strong and Garfein met, and Garfein showed him his “big directing book” filled with analytical notes for his actors.
Strong didn’t want to see it, saying he’d find his part on his own.
Garfein asked him, “Well, what do you do?’
“He said: ‘I put the character on the ceiling. Then, I lay on my bed and talk to the ceiling. That’s where the character lives. I ask questions: What job do you have? Introduce me to your mother and father. What are you doing right now? And the character talks back from the ceiling, and I listen to what he says. So, use your big book after you see what I get from the ceiling.’”
From 1969 to 1970, Strong enjoyed an unusually visible career moment. Working in “Patton,” he wove through the film as the title character’s ever-helpful chief of staff, Brig. Gen. Hobart Carver, and flinched in pain when his boss declared his willingness to work with ex-Nazis.
With the film on screens nationwide, Strong toured the country in a key role in Miller’s play “The Price” [1967], directed by Miller. He played the troubled middle-aged policeman Victor Franz, one of two brothers at war over an inheritance. Critics loved him. “Strong hovers between goodness and weakness” [“Arthur Miller Directs 'Price' at Hartford,” 4 Mar. 1970], wrote Dan Sullivan of the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s Richard Coe [1914-95] judged Strong to be “strangely more perceptive than Pat Hingle’s original” [“‘The Price,’” 28 Oct. 1969; Hingle, 1924-2009, played Victor Franz in the Broadway première, 7 Feb. 1968-15 Feb. 1969].
On February 17, 1970, Kazan wrote him a letter that shows how acutely Strong’s admirers felt his unachieved potential. After seeing Strong’s glowing reviews from the road, the director wrote, “See, if you keep working, and you can stand the waiting, you finally get what you deserve.”
In Chicago, where “The Price” was onstage at the gorgeous old Studebaker Theater while “Patton” played on local screens, a Chicago Daily News reporter saw a good story in Strong as a veteran actor in the limelight. He interviewed him for a rare feature focusing on just him. Midway through it, Strong pulled out his wallet, removing a “fading, well-creased” clipping of The New York Times’s tiny rave of “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.” He told the reporter that he wished this “teething ring” of Newman’s directorial skills “might be shown as part of a Paul Newman retrospective.”
It seems the star of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” [1969] never forgot his directing debut, either. Amram visited the actor in his dressing room one night a few years before his 2008 death. “All Paul wanted to talk about was that film with Michael Strong,” the composer told me. “He asked, ‘Do you have or do you know anybody who has a copy of our film, ‘On the Harmfulness of Tobacco’? I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ He said, ‘I want to see it again.’ And he looked melancholy.”
THE GRAVE
In Diane Shalet’s book, “Grief in a Sunny Climate,” Michael is already dying of stomach cancer. He’s still well enough to join the narrator-wife at a cemetery somewhere near L.A. to pick out his grave site. They find one and lie down on it, under a tree with a “cluster of dark green needles.” He tells her a Chekhov short story about a young actor who visits the grave of a dead stage star who has been forgotten.
Shalet’s fictional alter ego recalls how, referring to a once popular police series, her husband had once told her, “I wasn’t put on earth to do ‘Baretta’” [ABC, 1975-78]
And the narrator created by Shalet (who would die in 2006) explains: “Passionate about the theater, uncanny in his sense of truth; and chameleon, he could create the psychological and physical reality of another human being.” She recalls exercises that they’d used to enter a role: “Wrap yourself in the circumstances. . . .Talk and listen with the illusion of the first time. . . . Acting is life chosen.”
Then there were the trials of the barely famous: “When we walked down the street he had the finger-snapping recognition of the public: “Aren’t you. . .? Click, click. . . . ”Aren’t you. . . Glenn Ford [1916-2006]?’ Michael would mumble and ask me, ‘Are you disappointed I’m not as famous as Burt Lancaster [1913-94]?’”
Finishing that passage, I asked myself: Why, without the Newman film’s second life, would Michael Strong remain so buried by time? With all his talent and commitment, why didn’t he get another truly visible break in films? True, he was more of a character actor, but why didn’t he find the notice earned by others of that broad type, like Karl Malden, his closest actor friend, or Eli Wallach, with whom Strong’s daughter says he socialized?
Was he too versatile? Not sufficiently distinctive? Too much the good soldier, not assertive enough in some back-lot sense? And is it fair to raise a question about whether a fine actor might have won more success than the substantial degree he found? Isn’t the risk of going under-recognized in the big world’s eyes so rooted in the acting life that it’s misguided to second guess such a career?
The more often I watched “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco,” the more resonant the scene in which Chekhov’s character peers into that empty theater with baffled eyes became for me. I sensed the meaning it might have for many artists working in different fields who hold somewhere in their minds the question: “Will this work of mine be seen? Will it be heard?” The sight of Ivan Nyukhin — staring as his belief in his connection to others drains away — became a kind of symbolic moment that guided how I understood the film and the filmmakers. It’s only a reporter’s guess about the past, but I’ve become sure that both Strong and Newman constructed that scene of the unwatched actor on the Orpheum’s stage in 1959 to dramatize the possibility they lived with of making art and being answered with silence.
Still, while Paul Strong is convinced his father did what he did for mostly the sake of doing it, that he “cared more about art than stardom,” he wonders if he may have hidden frustration about his career. He asked me, “If Kazan admired him so much, why didn’t he give him a small part in ‘On the Waterfront’ [1954], or another of his classic films?”
He wanted to know if I’d found any answers to the mystery.
I told him my reporting had only deepened it.
In fact, if there’s one person I’d like to trouble from the grave for this story — besides Newman and Strong — it’s Kazan. I’ve realized how closely the lives its major figures wove through his career. He directed Newman in the [Sweet Bird of Youth (T. Williams), 1959-60]. Garfein considered him a mentor. Amram composed for him repeatedly [Splendor in the Grass (1961), The Arrangement (1969)]. He directed Strong [After The Fall (1964-65), Marco Millions (1964), The Changeling (1964), Incident at Vichy (1964-65); all stage] and worked with him at the Actors Studio.
None of those four men was blacklisted, but I can’t conjure Kazan’s memory without thinking of his having named names in the Hollywood blacklist era. His autobiography, “Elia Kazan: A Life” [1997], is one of the most complex books of self-narration I have read: a thick, confounding knot of history-making talent and betrayal. Still, his affection for actors ran deep, as the Strong papers show.
Michael Strong died of stomach cancer on September 17, 1980. He was 62. On October 3, without addressing it to Shalet or anyone, Kazan wrote what looked like a condolence note. He wasn’t at Strong’s funeral — Malden, who called Strong “my dear friend” in his memoir, was there — so it wasn’t a eulogy. He signed its typed sentences, an elegy for one actor and for a world of New York actors who called the theater home: “At one time in my life, for perhaps 15 years, I had a family in the theater, a small family of actors, because I trusted them to understand me and give me everything of which they were capable.
“Mike was one of this family. And he was capable of a great deal. But beyond and above his work there was a unique quality of sweetness, of goodness, so rare today. Of course he was competitive — that’s a necessity as the world spins today; one pays for excessive naiveté — but this career orientation never dimmed the sterling light of his realest self. There was never a day that I went to rehearsal and found Mike waiting that I didn’t feel better for the sight of him.”
THE HARMFULNESS OF AVOIDANCE
Garfein was in Paris when Strong died. Shalet called him from L.A. with the news. She also called him — possibly just before or right after he died — to tell him that Strong had asked her on his deathbed to bring Garfein the Newman film. He’d asked that she fly to France and hand it to him in person.
Ellen Strong, who cared for her father with Shalet till the end, recalls no deathbed request. But she says her father was “very proud” of the film, and that Shalet visited Europe after he died, so “it is very plausible that it happened just as Jack Garfein says.”
In fact, the film box bears a peeling strip of tape on which printed black letters say “For Jack Garfein.”
“Diane told me, ‘Mike wants you to have this movie,’” Garfein told me. “That’s what she said.”
And he fell silent, the Garfein energy giving way to a hard, inward look.
I asked, “What happened next?”
His hand gave the air a lost-looking swipe. Silent, he stared at the space of pale sofa beside him and repeated: “She came to Paris. She said that on his deathbed, Mike said: ‘Give it to Jack. He’ll know what to do with it.’ I’m the one he called after Newman gave it to him. He trusted me. He knew I respected his work immensely. He knew I understood it was the best he could do, his pinnacle as an actor. I put it away somewhere in some closet, and I never looked at it again.”
I asked him what could have stopped him from watching a film that a dying actor-friend had told his wife to carry across the Atlantic to give to him, with a clear sense that his friend dreamed it could finally be seen when he was gone?
“I knew Paul had taken his name off of it,” Garfein answered. “I was afraid that, if Paul found it a disappointment, I’d find it disappointing, too. I respected Paul’s opinion. I wanted to remember the way Mike did it at the Actors Studio. I was there the first time he did it in a class, in front of Strasberg. Strasberg thought it was astonishing. Everyone did. I didn’t want that memory to be wiped out by something mediocre.”
After Shalet handed Garfein the box with the film in it, he stashed it in a closet in his Paris apartment, where it stayed, untouched, for another 34 years.
LOST IS NOT ALWAYS LOST
In 2012, while still living in Paris, the 82-year-old Garfein visited New York and met an articulate 37-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant (“75% percent Jewish,” he said, with a teasing smile) named Natalia Repolovsky [b. 1976; m. Garfein, 2019]. Born in Sochi, the site of Russia’s recent Olympics [winter 2014], she grew up there and trained as a classical pianist in Moscow. She’s tall, with a willowy bearing, and states clear views in her Russian accent.
She met Garfein, far more diminutive, 45 years her senior, at a dinner party that also figures into a tangled tale they gleefully tell me, about a production they were supposed to see together earlier of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya”— a story that ends with them seeing it separately and hating it.
[The only New York staging of Uncle Vanya (first produced, 1899) around the time Jalon reports that Garfein and Repolovsky met was an Off-Broadway production of the Pearl Theatre. It was mounted at the company’s home on West 42nd Street (Theatre Row), east of 11th Avenue, known as the Peter Norton Space, in September and October 2014.
[Of the production, the New York Times’ Laura Collins-Hughes (“On a Russian Farm, Where Frustration Grows,” 24 Sept. 2014) said that “there’s a lopsidedness to the telling” because “performances by” some cast members “are funnier and more fully realized than those by” others. Collins-Hughes added that “with the strong imbalance in the principal roles, . . . poignancy goes missing”; “in place of the sadness that should be there, we feel only emptiness.”
[The translation, by Paul Schmidt, was apparently contemporary, as the Times reviewer, who liked it, characterized it as “vibrant” and “loose-limbed” and asserted, “There’s no groping through layers of musty language to find our connection to Chekhov’s” characters. Other notices (Time Out New York, Village Voice) were equally non-committal-to-negative.]
In 2014, Garfein returned to New York to move in with Repolovsky, and brought with him a certain tired-looking brown box with an old film in it.
“We were unpacking,” she recalled. “And I saw it. Just laying there amid his things. I asked, “What’s that?” And he said, ‘Oh, it’s an old film of a play by Chekhov.’ And I asked, ‘What play?’ And he told me, and I had never read this play. I had never seen it performed. I said, ‘We have to see it.’”
Garfein hesitated, but Repolovsky insisted.
“I said, ‘We have to see it. Anything Chekhov, I will go and look,’” she recounted. “Even if it is bad, it is bad Chekhov!”
They faced a problem of time and technology. The film was locked onto the roll that Newman had handed to Strong and Shalet to Garfein, an artifact of the long era when Americans went to a movie theater to see a movie. So, Garfein called Lori Styler [b. 1954], a friend and a connection to his past.
Her father, Herman Styler, was a freelance journalist who wrote about Garfein’s brief talk at a United Jewish Appeal dinner shortly after he arrived in New York in 1946, at the age of 16. One of the first and youngest Holocaust survivors to emigrate here, he’s now one of the last who lives.
He placed the old film box with the print in it into her hands; she took it to be digitized, and brought it back with the film on a DVD disc. That evening, he nervously watched Repolovsky slide the DVD into place, and they watched as some visual static crossed the print. Credits rolled past the spot where Newman’s name might have been.
And Michael Strong came wandering down the street, dressed as Nyukhin. He stopped at the theater door, corrected his name, and starred in his slow storm of words and silences.
When the film ended, Garfein and Repolovsky told me, they sat “in silence,” contemplating the decades that it had been left to the dark. “I knew that I was wrong,” Garfein said. “Paul was wrong to be disappointed, if that’s what happened.”
“It was a revelation to me that an American actor could perform Chekhov in a way so Russian,” Repolovsky told me after I’d returned to watch the film again, this time with both of them. “This combination of misery and humor that is so big a part of Chekhov was so natural for him. It was not an American performance of a Russian play. I’ve seen those, and I have been disappointed a number of times.
“There is such a big difference between the two cultures. American culture is a success culture, always about winning, while Russia has a culture of elegant failures, and that is what this film is about. I watched Michael Strong, thinking that he gets it. He understands, and it comes from a very deep place.”
Repolovsky didn’t know, when we watched the Newman film that evening, that Michael Strong was a Russian Jew, that he’d grown up hearing the language in which Chekhov wrote his play. When I’d done that piece of reporting, I told her. Her eyes wide, she looked at me like I’d handed her a key and she’d unlocked — well, a closet. “See,” she said. “It makes total sense.”
Without Repolovsky’s émigré antennae, Garfein says, the film might have stayed lost. He had no plan to look at it. “I brought it back to New York, thinking I’d donate it to some institution, maybe Lincoln Center, and then I could take a tax write-off,” he said candidly. At one point, I told Garfein I’d found a Chekhov quote to be in order: “One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake” [from The Personal Papers of Anton Chekhov, ed. 1948]. He smiled broadly, and asked me to email it to him.
Repolovsky is clear that this ungodly mistake should be corrected, saying the film “must be seen.” Garfein said he’s taken steps to make a film about the Newman film, one that will be “more than a documentary,” though he’s declined to elaborate.
But last April [2016], the director of “Something Wild” visited a studio at TCM and helped the popular Robert Osborne [1932-2017] host a screening of his best-known film. That visit resulted in early exchanges about a possible showing of the Newman film.
Osborne may end up introducing it in just the kind of Newman retrospective that Strong envisioned as a showcase for his Chekhov tour-de-force. “At this point, a Newman evening is what I have in mind,” TCM’s [senior v.p. of programming and production Charles] Tabesh said.
Still, I wonder: Who actually owns this orphanlike film? Such a film isn’t likely to bring a windfall, but who can profit from it? I asked this to Eric Schwartz, a leading attorney on film copyright issues. “Copyright law is often murky for unfinished or abandoned projects,” he told me.
Amram registered for copyright protection for his music; Newman didn’t take that step. Garfein — possession being nine-tenths of the law — owns the physical print, but copyright law governs intangibles, and that could thwart his right to profit from screenings of the imagery.
Amram said that he will “be a mensch, not a gangster kind of guy,” and isn’t looking for money because he wants only to “get this film seen.” Still, if the Newman family claims to own the copyright, it could create a problem, Schwartz said, especially if it has documents that place control in family hands. Tabesh said TCM lawyers have looked into the rights question deeply enough to feel “comfortable” with it, but he added, “We will check with the family.”
For members of the Strong family, watching TCM together is a tradition. They spoke in interviews about stars of the decades between 1930 and 1980 with whom Michael Strong performed, including Frederic March [1897-1975; An Enemy of the People (play), 1950-51], Lee J. Cobb [1911-76; The Emperor's Clothes (play), 1953; The Young Lawyers: The Victims (TV), 1971] and Ethel Merman [1908-84; Gypsy (play; understudy Herbie), 1959-61]. When they watch Cobb, they’re aware he was one of Strong’s two favorite actors. The other was Paul Muni [1895-1967], with whom Strong probably never acted but whose disciplined intensity he emulated, and for whom Paul Strong is named.
Three generations of the Strong family spent the past summer [2016] on the Maine coast, in a house on an inlet that reaches out to the Atlantic and has been in the family for decades. There, Paul and Susan Strong have shared old movies with their two grown children — who call Michael Strong “Grampa Mike” — and two grandchildren. Michael, 9, is named for the actor. He and his sister, Sophia, 11, spent part of the summer at a theater day camp. When I mentioned his name to them, they said they hadn’t heard of Paul Newman. But they knew a lot about Michael Strong, and they’d heard about “On the Harmfulness of Tobacco.”
I made a last call to the family to tell Paul Strong about TCM’s plan to show the film. In his deep, quiet voice, he said: “Robert Osborne once mentioned my father’s name. He was about to screen a film with him in it. Then he suddenly said his name, and I’ve remembered that ever since.
“They’ve shown him in ‘Detective Story,” and we’ve watched that,” he added. “But if you ask me what it means that they will show this film after all this time? There really are no words for it.”
[TCM had scheduled On the Harmfulness of Tobacco along with 1968’s Rachel, Rachel and 1972’s The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for “Newman Directs” on Sunday, 26 March 2017. In February, however, Garfein pulled out of the arrangement with the network on the argument that airing the movie for a nationwide audience would impede the success of an independent documentary about the Newman film the director planned to make.
[As a result, TCM aired only Rachel, Rachel and Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds that Sunday night at 8 and 10 p.m.; On the Harmfulness of Tobacco wasn’t shown as originally announced. Garfein died on 30 December 2019 and, as far as I could determine, never made the Newman documentary.
[The Film Society of Lincoln Center, however, scheduled the Chekhov movie along with Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds for Monday, 20 February 2017, the first time since 1962 that the film would be seen in public; that screening was still planned.]
Allan M. Jalon won two 2015 Simon Rockower Awards [given for “Excellence in Jewish Journalism” sponsored by the American Jewish Press Association] for his Forward feature stories, “My Opa’s Story of World War One’s Other Fight” [7 Sept. 2014; Opa is German for ‘Grandpa’] and “A New Jersey Tale of Two Alfred Doblins” [27 July 2014].
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