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If you happened to visit New York in the winter of 1908 (or
even if you lived here), you could scarcely avoid seeing
"The Devil," a play by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc
Molnar. Probably for the first time in the history of the
New York theatre, four companies were simultaneously
performing one play. Two of the productions were in English,
one was in German, and one was in Yiddish. In one of the
English versions, produced by Henry W. Savage at the Garden,
the fascinating Devil was played by Edwin Stevens; in the
other, produced by Harrison Grey Fiske at the Belasco, the
part was played by George Arliss. Judge came out with
a cover that showed Mephisto, perched on a rock, leering
down on a New York street solidly made up of theatres, all
of which were playing "The Devil." A caption recorded
Pluto's satisfaction with what Molnar had done for him: "I
seem to be quite popular." The Devil was so popular, not
only in New York but throughout the United States, that
producers complained it was impossible to get leading men
anywhere; they were all away somewhere or other playing Dr.
Miller, which was the pseudonym affected in the play by the
distinguished visitor from below. There was also a grievous
shortage in opera capes and silk hats, for Dr. Miller was a
formal dresser.
In the thirty-seven years that have passed since these
multitudinous productions of "The Devil," seventeen other
Molnar plays have been produced in New York, a record few
American playwrights can claim. In 1914, David Belasco put
on "The Phantom Rival," with Leo Ditrichstein, and it was
extremely successful. In 1921, the Theatre Guild, then just
getting started, took a leap into the unknown and produced
his most famous play, "Liliom." A quarter of a century
later, the Guild is presenting it again—expatriated to
Massachusetts—as "Carousel," with music by Richard Rodgers
and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. "The Guardsman," a later
Molnar play, was the first production of the Theatre Guild
that made real money. In it the Lunts acted together for the
first time and had their first major success, and they chose
it for their first and only film. During the next several
years, Gilbert Miller put on three Molnar works—"The Play's
the Thing," with Holbrook Blinn; "The Swan," with Eva Le
Gallienne; and "The Good Fairy," with Helen Hayes and Walter
Connolly—and all three were very successful. At the moment,
three theatres in Budapest are playing Molnar—"The Swan,"
"The Play's the Thing," and a bill of one-acters. "Liliom"
and "The Play's the Thing" are also current in Vienna. Of
contemporary playwrights, only Shaw, Maugham, and O'Neill,
it would appear, have shown a comparable durability.
Molnar, who has been living at the Plaza ever since he
arrived in this country in January, 1940, was born in
Budapest on January 12, 1878, of a Jewish family named
Neumann. His change of name was not an assimilationist
caprice, nor was it akin to the naive aspiration which in
Boston animates the Kabatznicks to assume the dubious
protective coloration of Cabot. The shift from Neumann to
Molnar was a gesture of patriotic assertion rather than of
escape. Until late in the eighteenth century, Jews in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire were not permitted to dignify
themselves with surnames. Then Emperor Josef II, in a burst
of tolerance, made the pronouncement that they could wear
swords and have surnames, provided that these were German
and were approved by the officials. Hungary struggled
against the process of Germanization until well into the
nineteenth century, and even before 1867, when a decree
making German the official language was revoked, a
revolution took place in the nomenclature of the Hungarian
Jews, whose abruptly acquired family names were often the
coarse inventions of grossly comical German officials. In
some cases the imposed names were scatological, in others
merely ribald. Molnar's family had escaped the elephantine
vagaries of official German humor, but he himself felt that
he could not write under any German name whatever; he felt
it would be unfair to Hungarian literature. Almost every
Jewish doctor, lawyer, and businessman had somewhat the same
feeling. "Molnar" is Hungarian for "Miller;" this was the
profession of his favorite uncle, and he took the name over.
It was a fling at nationalism.
In a preface to one edition of his collected plays, Molnar
wrote a capsule biography of himself up to 1925:
1878, I was born in Budapest; 1896, I became a law
student at Geneva; 1896, I became a journalist in
Budapest; 1897, I wrote a short story; 1900, 1 wrote a
novel; 1902, I became a playwright at home; 1908, I
became a playwright abroad; 1914, 1 became a war
correspondent; 1916, I became a playwright once more;
1918, my hair turned snow-white; 1925, I should like to
be a law student at Geneva once more.
Molnar's father was a fairly successful physician, and the
son's earliest memories are of people sitting in the
Doctor's darkish waiting room. The whole household
atmosphere was gloomy, and the boy, to liven things up,
often played practical jokes on the patients. There is the
legend that one of these jokes was so vivid that it quite
literally scared his grandmother to death. (Probably this is
the malicious invention of someone who suffered from his
practical jokes in after years. According to Molnar, his
grandmother merely broke a leg.) Except for whatever
excitement of this sort he was able to whip up, the first
five years of his life seem to have been, as he puts it, a
"hiatus." In quick succession, for the next thirteen years,
he attended a number of schools in Budapest, ending his
local scholastic career at the Royal Hungarian University of
Sciences, where, he recalls, he got into the habit of going
to the Central Café, a local Mermaid Tavern, to do his
homework. There he laid the foundation for that capacity to
concentrate in cafés which later made it possible for him to
toss off "Liliom" at a marble-topped
table in one of the town's most populous restaurants, to the
music of a military band. At the Royal University he studied
law, concentrating on its criminal branches, and wrote a
disquisition on criminal law and criminal statistics that
appeared in Pesti Hirlap, a Hungarian political
paper. He leavened these solemn activities by composing
stories and light verse for a humorous paper.
In 1896, when he was eighteen, Molnar decided to devote more
of his time to journalism. He presented himself at the
editorial offices of Pesti Hirlap, where he was told
that the managing editor was away hunting. On subsequent
visits, he got the same story. This hunting trip lasted
fourteen years; Molnar didn't meet the editor until 1910.
When he did, however, he got a job. In the meantime, piqued
by the prolonged absence of the tireless huntsman, he
decided to tackle plays. His first major dramatic effort,
"The Blue Cave," had been successfully produced when he was
fourteen—on a stage he constructed himself at a cost of
eight florins—in the basement of a friend's home. There was
a lot in this play about alchemy, and the props were mostly
blue bottles filched from his father's office. The play must
have been controversial, for the performance ended in a
riot. Molnar had to wait ten years for his next production.
This was a farce called, not too surprisingly, "The Lawyer."
It was produced at the Gaiety Theatre, in Budapest, in 1902.
Only the other day, forty-four years later, Molnar sold the
film rights of "The Lawyer" to R.K.O. An incident of this
sort brings to mind Shaw's advice to young dramatists.
"Don't go in for Hollywood or radio or anything else," he
adjures them. "The money you earn by these sidelines will
vanish. The earnings from your old plays will support you in
your old age." At the moment, Molnar is drawing six hundred
dollars a week from "Carousel" alone, and occasional film
sales of old works keep the wolf still farther away from the
lobby of the Plaza.
Molnar never practiced law, though he went to Geneva, after
he had finished with the Royal University, to continue his
legal studies. In Geneva, he tried his hand at feuilletons
and correspondence for the Budapest papers, and his material
caught on so well that he definitely decided to give up the
law. To the intense unhappiness of his family, he abandoned
his studies, returned to Budapest, and set himself up as a
full-time journalist. It was as a journalist, not as a
dramatist, that Molnar won his first distinction; he was the
leading newspaperman of Hungary from the beginning of the
century to the end of the first World War. His plays were a
byproduct of his newspaper work. For a time, in Pesti
Hirlap, he wrote a column—its name can be loosely
translated as "Miscellaneous Chronicles"—which thoroughly
delighted the town. It did not deal in celebrities, as most
of our columns do now; it dwelt upon the caprices and
currents of life, as fiction does. Many of the columns were
overheard, or imagined, dialogues. One of these dialogues
was a conversation between two servant girls about their
men. Molnar used this dialogue again in writing the story of
Julie and Marie in "Liliom." In fact, it was the nucleus of
the play. "Jozsi," an earlier play, was also a dramatization
of one of his newspaper sketches.
Molnar was very handsome in those days, and very witty. It
has been said of him, as it has been said of Oscar Wilde,
that his real genius is revealed in his conversation. A
serious-minded friend of this period regrets that Molnar was
so lavish in social extemporization. "Had he written it down
instead of talking it away in all-night carousals," the man
recently said, "we should have had volumes of brilliant
humor." Molnar speaks French, German, and Italian fluently,
as well as his native tongue, but when he arrived here in
1940 he knew little English. One night soon afterward he
went to a dinner party in New York at which most of the
guests, Broadway people, spoke only English. He felt
painfully out of things. On the way home, he said to a
compatriot, "You know, I used to dominate occasions like
this one. It is terrible to have no English. True, I have
learned to say quite well 'Where is my hat? ,' but it does
not seem to excite people." He now speaks a cultivated and
easy English, and, surrounded by dictionaries in his room at
the Plaza, is experiencing the
adventure of writing a play in his most recently adopted
language.
In 1896, when Molnar celebrated his eighteenth birthday, his
native city celebrated its thousandth. It had a culture all
its own. In those days, everybody in Budapest wrote,
painted, or composed music. Entering a café one day, Molnar
observed a gentleman at a table who was deep in a book.
"There sits the greatest reader in Hungary," Molnar said.
"In fact, I am not sure he is not the only reader in
Hungary." In spite of its antiquity, its glitter, its winy
gaiety, Budapest was a provincial capital. None of the
city's enormous output of literature was exported. The true
Austro-Hungarian capital was Vienna, a five-hour journey
from Budapest. The German-language writers and playwrights
of Vienna were well known in Budapest, but none of the
authors of Budapest had broken into the charmed circle of
Franz Josef's city. Not one Hungarian play had been seen by
the theatregoers of Rome, Paris, or New York. Molnar changed
all that. In 1907, he wrote "The Devil," and it was such a
success in Budapest that it was soon translated into every
major language and played the world over. Thereafter,
Hungarian plays were in. Molnar's plays became Hungary's
principal export, and a large demand developed for the work
of his colleagues. (It is said that when, during the last
war, the Russians bombed Budapest, they destroyed two
playwriting factories.) The stir in Budapest when first it
was realized that Molnar was an international success was
enormous.
Nevertheless, Molnar stuck to his newspaper work. He had by
that time written novels, sketches, and short stories, but
it did not occur to him to give up his profession. Molnar's
fame as a playwright later outdid his reputation as a
novelist, but, like Maugham, he has practiced both crafts
all his life. In between "The Hungry City," a bitterly
satiric novel on Budapest corruption, published in 1901, and
his most recent work, "Farewell, My Heart," written in New
York and published by Simon & Schuster in 1945, Molnar wrote
many novels. Of them all, "The Paul Street Boys," a story of
juvenile gang warfare, is considered by most Central
Europeans his masterpiece. His own choice is "The Green
Hussar," the tragic love story of a chorus girl.
There does not appear to have existed, in the Budapest of
that time, any line of demarcation between journalism and
what is nowadays loosely called "creative work." All the
novelists, playwrights, poets, and short-story writers were
working for newspapers or magazines; journalism was their
mainstay, and they did not feel that what they did for their
employers was on a lower plane than their other work. Molnar
even now calls himself a journalist. While he was still a
practicing newspaperman, he once set down the following view
of his calling:
Reporters in America and elsewhere go out and get the
news, whereas we more often than not stay in the office
or in our garrets and make the "news." By that I mean
that we report the news of the mind and soul of our
characters as much as we do the actions and happenings
of daily life, which are, after all, the material
accidents of existence rather than the significant
realities of life. But some of it, I insist, is
literature. True literature is life translated into
letters.
By this definition, of course, "Swann's Way" and "The
Brothers Karamazov" make pretty good journalism.
Not long after "The Devil" became a success, Molnar found
himself the head of an informal organization known as
Molnar's Gang. On one of the boulevards of Budapest, the New
York Life Insurance Company had built a grandiose five-story
Wolkenkratzer, or skyscraper. Not long afterward a
restaurateur leased the ground floor and basement and called
his place the New York Café. The opening of this café was
something of an occasion. Molnar was given the key to the
front door by the owner and, escorted by his Gang, he
proceeded to the Danube and ceremonially threw it in
the river, as a fairly intricate way of saying that the café
would never shut its door. In the memories of its patrons,
the New York Café was a fabulous establishment. It had
marble columns, terraces, and bars. It had lunch rooms where
the poor could sip a glass of beer and munch a roll, and
dining rooms for those who wanted luxury. It had rooms with
dance orchestras and rooms without dance orchestras. Because
Molnar's Gang made its headquarters there, the group was
known alternatively as the New York Crowd. For a newcomer
with artistic ambitions to be invited to sit at Molnar's
table in the New York Café was an accolade, a kind of
decoration. Molnar's disapproval of a play or book or piece
of music could have a serious effect on its career; his
saying that a young man was talented got the young man
a
hearing. The New York Crowd was made up of a dozen or so of
the city's most celebrated men—composers, painters, and
sculptors, as well as novelists and playwrights. There was
only one requisite for membership in the Crowd —talent.
Molnar himself plays several instruments well, and in his
youth he wrote, along with everything else, some songs and
lyrics. Among his musical protégés were Viktor Jacobi, the
composer, and Dr. Albert Sirmay, now the musical editor of
Chappell & Company. The group travelled everywhere together.
They went to dress rehearsals and first nights in a body and
then repaired to the New York Café for the post-mortems.
One member of Molnar's Gang, now distinguished in musical
circles in New York, was astonished when he discovered that
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II have an office. In
Budapest you worked at home, and when you had business to
transact you went to one of the cafés. Each theatre had a
café that was considered its own, across the street or
around the corner, and when you wanted to see the manager or
the director, you could be certain—unless, regrettably, he
had died during the night—that he'd be in that café every
afternoon. The café took care of everything: you could plan
a production there, do your casting, and even, as Molnar
sometimes did, write your play there; if you needed money,
you could get an advance against royalties from the café
manager or, if he was evasive, borrow from the headwaiter.
The café headwaiters were important and apparently lavish
personages. The most famous and the most lucrative was Uncle
John, of the New York Café. His loans over the years to the
less lucky customers took on the aspect of an annuity,
appropriate to the actuarial setting. After Molnar became
prosperous, Uncle John would say to him delicately, before
delivering the change from a large note, "Anything on
account?" Molnar would tell him how much, and the headwaiter
would presumably allocate the amount to the liquidation of
forgotten debts. This went on for several years. Finally,
Molnar decided it was time to stop. "You've been collecting
from me for several years," he said when Uncle John made his
usual request. "Surely I didn't borrow as much as that from
you!" Uncle John grew purple in the face; he began to shout
at Molnar. "And what about all those who can't pay?"
he demanded.
To many of the survivors of the era of the New York Crowd, a
considerable number of whom are now in this country,
Budapest still seems a little paradise. There are dissidents
who say that the town was all right for those who could
escape into the literary and theatrical Bohemia but that it
had another side. There is an actress who, although not
Jewish herself, was upset, when she was
a
girl, by the lurid anti-Semitic posters she saw on her way
to school. She also remembers going on a picnic in the
lovely countryside along the Danube and being shown a wood
where, her companion told her, with a great longing for the
return of the good old days, a considerable group of Jews
had once been taken out and shot in inexact reprisal for the
Communist uprising, headed by the Jewish revolutionist Bela
Kun, just after the first World War. Some members of the
Molnar Gang, including its leader, were conscious of these
undercurrents. Threaded through many of Molnar's plays is a
light, Heinesque awareness of this lurking enmity. He
himself was, however, immune from persecution, and so were
his friends. Immersion
in the arts washed them with a shimmer of inviolability,
even of honor. In 1908, official Hungary gave Molnar
recognition by making him a member of the Petofi Society, a
kind of national academy of arts and letters. The head of
the Hungarian Democratic Party was Molnar's closest friend,
and if Molnar had had serious political aspirations, he
probably could have done very well. He was, in fact,
actually elected a Democratic member of the City Council of
Budapest, but although he attended a number of sessions, he
never made a speech. "He is not a fighter," a more militant
contemporary has said of him.
Those who remember the Budapest of the golden days remember
not only the city but their youth as well, and this may
easily heighten the town's glamour in retrospect. Just the
same, life there was once beguiling, and it afforded one
amenity of undeniable worth that unfortunately has never
taken root elsewhere. This was the system of the Red Caps.
The Budapest Red Caps did not carry baggage; they were
uniformed messengers who did miscellaneous errands. They had
beats and favorite corners all over the city. If you found
yourself unable to pay your bill at a café and your credit
with the headwaiter was overextended, you simply called the
Red Cap on the corner and had him take your watch to a pawn
shop. If you wanted to borrow money without security, you
sent him with a note to whomever you wanted to touch. Lazy
borrowers devised a time-saving system: they wrote one
letter and addressed envelopes to five or six prospects. The
Red Cap was instructed to deliver the letter first to the
most likely. If it met with a rejection, he was to recover
the letter, put it in the envelope addressed to the
second-best bet, and go there, and so on until the loan was
forthcoming or the list was exhausted. The Red Caps made it
possible to converse in cafés with continuity even if you
were insolvent.
The Red Caps were used for a hundred things. They were hired
to wake up people who had slept through an appointment or to
wake oneself up. There is a story of a theatre manager who
sent theatrical-page items every day by a Red Cap to a
newspaper editor who hated him. The editor would invariably
take the material from the Red Cap and, ostentatiously throw
it into the wastebasket. After a while, the Red Cap would
just bring in the dispatches, bow to the editor, and throw
them into the wastebasket himself. Once Molnar, dissatisfied
with some goulash in a little restaurant he frequented, sent
a Red Cap to a rival restaurant for a goulash and ate it
before the stricken gaze of the proprietor. The oldest and
most cherished, if not the sturdiest, Red Cap was naturally
stationed near the New York Café. He was ancient,
white-bearded, arthritic, and given to procrastination.
Nevertheless, he bore gallantly on the visor of his cap the
legend "EXPRESS!" One of these messengers was Molnar's
prototype for Wolf Beifeld, whom the servant girl Marie
falls in love with in "Liliom," mistaking him for a soldier
because of his uniform.
Molnar wrote "Liliom" in Siberia. Siberia was a name given
to one of the terraces in the New York Café because it was
patronized by Hungarian dancers who came home broke after
touring Russia. It was a custom of Budapest managers to send
companies of dancers to Russia. Some of the dancing girls
were successful, stayed in Russia, and married noblemen. The
Czar's government was strict with the less accomplished
ones. If they failed as dancers, they were not allowed to
remain and improvise. The unfortunates who returned made at
once for Siberia. Molnar, himself an inveterate fancier of
far-off places and with an inborn hatred of the minutiae of
actual travel, came to love Siberia. He arrived there one
evening at his usual time, settled himself at his usual
table, and ordered an expansive dinner, after which, with
the café's military band going full swing in the background,
he began "Liliom."He wrote till dawn. After three weeks of
exile, the play was finished. It opened in Budapest, on
September 5, 1909, and failed. Molnar was by now married to
his first wife. She had furnished for him an ideal writing
room, with a polished mahogany desk, silver inkwells, and
comfortable armchairs. Somehow, Molnar found himself not
using this room to work in. It was too lonesome and it had
no military band. When "Liliom" failed, Mrs. Molnar was
angry but triumphant. "This is what comes of not working at
home," she said. Then she reproached him for having written
such trash and extracted from him a promise that he would
never compound the offense. Years later, after the Theatre
Guild success with "Liliom" and a general reversal of
opinion about the play, Molnar recalled this vow. "It is
about the only promise I ever made to a woman that I fully
kept," he said.
Molnar's first wife was the daughter of Jozsef Veszi, a
local newspaper publisher. This man was a great figure in
the town, cultivated and gay, who kept open house and seems
to have attracted and stimulated everybody who had anything
to do with him. Molnar, like everyone else, loved going to
his house, and he had an adoring affection for his future
father-in-law. There were wonderful dinners and literary and
musical parties. The man had four daughters, so Molnar
married one. Possibly owing to her insistent critical
faculty, the marriage did not last. There is a point, with a
writer, at which candor may be excessive. They had one
daughter, Molnar's only child, who is now a widow and lives
with her two sons and a daughter in Budapest.
Probably because of his lighter plays, there is an
atmosphere about Molnar which conveys the impression that he
has had a multiplicity of wives, but he has had only three,
and he is still married to the third, the actress Lili
Darvas. Molnar's second wife was Sari Fedak. She was the
greatest stage star of Hungary, equally brilliant in
straight parts and in operetta. She was so famous at home
that when Erno Rapee, the Hungarian conductor, came to
America, he at first called himself Fedak, under the
impression that this resplendent name would guarantee an
easy success in New York. Mr. Rapee was grieved to find that
the path to recognition here was somewhat more devious.
After a highly publicized courtship of seven years, Molnar
and Fedak, in 1922, married. This marriage celebrated the
end rather than the beginning of their relationship; it has
been described by a contemporary as a "farewell marriage."
This seems to have been a peculiarly Budapestian form of
leave-taking. It was on the occasion of this wedding that
Molnar made one of his most frequently quoted remarks. When
his friends came to escort him to the ceremony, they were
shocked to find him wearing a gray business suit. When they
upbraided him, he answered, "I dress only for premières."
By the time Molnar married Fedak, he was deeply involved
emotionally elsewhere. There had appeared in
Budapest a new young actress who, though only seventeen, had
made a big hit in an inconsequential play. Her name was Lili
Darvas. Everybody ran to Molnar to ask him to go to see her.
He refused. He seemed to regard the new star as an intruder.
Without seeing her, he predicted that her success would be
only temporary, but instead it grew with each new play she
appeared in. Molnar's friends assured him that Darvas was
just the sort of actress he was writing for. Molnar's
resentment grew. For a long time he refused to meet her.
(Later, long after his hostility had ebbed, he explained to
her. "It was your youth," he said. The emergence of a new
star so young had made him aware that his own generation was
growing old, that the next generation was pushing up.) The
question of casting a part in a new Molnar play arose.
Molnar had chosen for it an actress with whose husband, a
jealous man, he had recently fought a token duel. Fedak
refused to allow her to play the part and insisted that
Darvas have it. Eventually, Molnar yielded. Within three
years, Darvas and Molnar were married. This seems to have
had the effect, for a time, of somewhat diluting their
relationship. But it has survived the years and many plays
and war and exile, and though Molnar and Darvas are living
in separate establishments in New York, there is still a
deep friendship between them. She is playing the Queen in
the Maurice Evans "Hamlet," now on the road, and during its
recent run here, when, on matinee days, there was too little
time between performances to go to her own flat uptown,
where she was living with her mother, she had dinner with
Molnar in his favorite delicatessen, near the Plaza.
Molnar's parsimony is as legendary as his wit. His
prodigality seems to be confined largely to conversation.
When he was divorced from Fedak, he paid her thirty thousand
dollars. Before he married her, they had given many
elaborate parties, on which she spent a great deal of money.
Molnar had a flat of his own, but the parties were given at
Fedak's flat, an arrangement which suited Molnar admirably.
The thirty thousand dollars was like the payment of a
long-overdue bill at a restaurant. The parties at Fedak's
are still remembered by those lucky enough to have been
invited. One of the regular guests was the Mayor of
Budapest, who played the piano far better than Jimmy Walker
and who often accompanied the famous tenor Richard Tauber.
There were other parties, too. One evening, in the home of a
well-known politician and his wife, Tauber was singing and
the Mayor was playing the piano. Molnar, carried away by the
Stimmung of the moment, found himself absentmindedly
embracing his hostess. In his free hand he held a lighted
cigar. Her husband walked over to Molnar and spoke to him.
His manner was severe and his tone unfriendly. "Mr. Molnar,"
he said, "may I see you alone?" Molnar followed him into
another room. He felt
miserable, for he is a man who hates all conflict that is
not verbal. "This," he thought in Hungarian, "is it!" The
husband closed the doors behind them, then faced him. "I
must request you, Mr. Molnar," he said, "not to smoke while
Herr Tauber is singing. It is bad for his throat." It was a
music-loving atmosphere.
Not the least of the diversions at the Fedak parties were
the occasional quarrels between Molnar and Fedak. Molnar
gave her a large but uncelebrated painting, and
occasionally, to counteract the calumny that he never gave
anyone anything, he would proudly point it out to the
guests. One night, after a sharp difference of opinion
between him and Fedak, he had the picture taken down and
removed to his own flat. Later it reappeared in Fedak's
flat. During the course of the next few years, this painting
made many trips back and forth. When people started
gossiping about Molnar and Darvas before their marriage, the
opinion was frequently expressed that this time it must be
real love because, it was reported with stupefaction, "he
spends money on Darvas!"
Molnar himself capitalizes anecdotally on the widespread
legend of his stinginess. In 1927, on his return to Budapest
after his first visit to America, where Darvas was by then
playing in Max Reinhardt's repertory company at the
Cosmopolitan Theatre, he was given a welcome-home dinner
party. A former friend who had become an enemy managed to be
invited. Molnar was in good form and told a number of
stories about New York. One of them concerned the night
Darvas had come home to their hotel weeping. Her purse,
which had more than a hundred dollars in it, had been stolen
out of her dressing room. To calm her, Molnar recounted, he
had said, "Don't cry. I will give you the hundred dollars."
Then, surveying the table through the monocle he has always
worn, he caught the look of utter incredulity in the eyes of
his estranged friend. "Don't be so startled," said Molnar.
"I only promised it." Recently, in New York, someone asked
him whether he was able to send anything to his daughter in
Budapest. "Yes," he said. "In the beginning, I sent her
money through Rumania, then through an American soldier who
was going to Budapest, then through the Red Cross, but now I
hear that all you have to do is go to the bank and just
send. In fact," he added, his voice broken with factitious
sobbing, "it's getting easier and easier and easier!" Molnar
says that he finds a reputation for stinginess costly. When
a man has a reputation for generosity, he believes, people
are apt to say, "Well, he's so nice and kind and gives so
much that I can't approach him." On the other hand, of a
stingy man, they think, "He's so tight it will be a pleasure
to nick him."
Hungary’s one reader must have been hard put to it to keep
up just with Molnar's output. For some twenty years before
the first World War, Molnar led an industrious life in his
native city. The literary program to which he determinedly
adhered was: a feuilleton or a short dialogue for the papers
every day, a short story every week, and a play and a novel
every year. His
fame grew, but in those years travel, which was forced upon
him later by the Nazis, was very unattractive to him; he
would not stir out of his beloved capital. No one could
budge him from it, though many tried. One day, a friend just
returned from America met Molnar in a café and talked
persuasively of the delights of New. York. Molnar sighed and
said it sounded wonderful.
"If it seems so wonderful to you, why on earth don't you
go?" the friend asked. Molnar t made a gesture to convey the
fantastic improbability of such a journey.
"Is it that you dislike boats?" inquired the friend.
"No. Although I have never been on one, I rather like the
idea of boats," Molnar said.
Emboldened, the travel agent pursued his advantage. "Is it
that you are afraid of the Atlantic, like Grieg?" he asked.
No, Molnar had no special prejudice against the Atlantic.
"Are you afraid of seasickness?"
Mildly, perhaps, but Molnar might take a chance.
"Is it the rail journey to Le Havre or Villefranche that
puts you off?"
Tiresome, perhaps, but with a hamper of books and brandy it
might be managed.
"Why, then," his companion shouted triumphantly, "don't you
just pack up and go to New York?"
Molnar ordered a brandy and came to grips with the
situation. "All the stages of this journey I think I might
accomplish," he said, "except the most hazardous of all—the
one you have not mentioned."
"What is that?" asked his friend.
"Getting from this terrace where I am sitting," said Molnar,
"to the railway station in Budapest. That I cannot do. That,
I feel, is beyond me."
Budapest had much of the intimacy of a small town. Molnar
remembers having a political argument with a friend in his
rooms on the second floor of an apartment house. The
argument undoubtedly became noisy, because a passerby in the
street who disagreed with one opinion came upstairs and
joined in the argument. Another time, Molnar was going past
Viktor Jacobi's house in a cab. He heard Jacobi playing the
piano. Molnar asked the driver to stop the cab and listened
carefully to the tune. Jacobi was working out a new melody.
While playing cards with Jacobi in a café a few days later,
Molnar started casually humming it. Jacobi went pale. "Where
did you hear that tune?" he asked. "In Paris," said Molnar
offhandedly. "It's quite a hit there." "Strange," Jacobi
said. "I wrote it and thought it was original. I must have
stolen it unconsciously."
Molnar's working habits were celebrated. He would not emerge
from his rooms until early evening. Then he would stroll or
ride to the New York Café, where he would dine and afterward
sit till dawn, writing, conversing, drinking, and listening
to the music. His courtship of Darvas made only a slight
change in this routine. He would meet her after the play and
take her to what would be her supper and his lunch. He would
then escort her home and return to his Gang. In one of the
public gardens along the Danube was a statue of Lajos
Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot. It was considered improper
in the New York Crowd to go home before the tiny bronze
lettering at the foot of the statue was legible. There came
a day when Molnar's rigorously nocturnal existence was
interrupted; he was summoned to be a witness at a trial. It
was borne in upon him that he had to appear in court at ten
in the morning. Red Caps were mobilized to see that he got
up in time, his friends bivouacked in his rooms as a further
precaution, and, at nine-thirty on that grim morning, the
still incredulous and foggy Molnar found himself in a
carriage being driven through the streets of Budapest,
unfamiliar in the unaccustomed light, to the courthouse.
Molnar looked around. The streets, he discovered, were full
of people bustling about at this insane hour. He was
appalled, "Can it be," he asked, "that all these people are
witnesses?"
During the first World War, Molnar was a war correspondent
for the Budapest papers. Three volumes of his war
correspondence were published, and as a result of his
experiences the plays he wrote immediately afterward
contained a good deal of tragedy. In the postwar period, the
Molnar Gang began to dwindle and a rival gang began to form.
The new one included a number of what one of Molnar's
adherents described as "character enemies." It is a
requirement of Molnar's nature that he constantly have on
hand a pet enemy on whom to focus his lethal epigrams, and
by systematically attacking people in rotation, he has been
able, through the years, to build up a considerable body of
opposition. Of a mediocre painter who
was an inveterate and brilliantly successful gambler, Molnar
said, "Yes, he's awfully good at the roulette table, but
everything he makes at night he paints away in the daytime."
The authorized translator of Bernard Shaw in Germany was
Siegfried Trebitsch. "What have Bernard Shaw and Siegfried
Trebitsch in common?" someone asked in a literary symposium.
"Neither understands German," Molnar answered. To a magazine
publisher who had accidentally dropped Molnar from his free
list, Molnar wrote, "Let us get my relation with your
magazine clearly established. If I am not on your free list,
I see it too seldom, and if I am, I see it too often."
There was a diverting group in Budapest known as the
"revolver journalists." These gentlemen had mastered an
unusual variety of blackmail. They all published little
papers, some of them no more than throwaways. Their method
had a refreshing modesty. They attempted to hold up not the
bosses of big business firms but their subordinates. The
procedure was simple; one of them would print an effusive
article about the chief clerk or the vice-president of an
organization. The tenor of the article would be that the
head of the firm was a mere figurehead, that the real brains
of the organization was the subordinate. The journalist
would call upon the selected victim and show him the
article, then ask him to subscribe for so many copies. The
man would be horrified, especially if the praise was
justified. "You can't print this," he would say. "It will
cost me my job!" He would have to pay heavily to suppress
the rave notice. A gentleman named Schweiger, one of the
best-known practitioners of this art of extraction by loud
praise, encountered Molnar when he was taking the cure in
Karlsbad. Evidently Schweiger had run out of superlatives,
for he asked Molnar for a loan. Without saying anything,
Molnar threw him twenty pengos, which was less than five
dollars. Schweiger was hurt. "From a Molnar, twenty pengos?"
he said. "No," Molnar said. "To a Schweiger, twenty pengos!"
One of Molnar's intimates was once asked whether Molnar was
not his enemy. "No," the man replied. "Just now Molnar has
Feleki, but he's got an option on me for October." Of this
Feleki, a well-known, startlingly thin journalist, Molnar
one day remarked pleasantly that when he was born, the nurse
threw the child away but kept the umbilical cord. Feleki
resented this description, and the feud between them
was prolonged and bitter. A reconciliation was finally
arranged; Feleki was to be brought by mediators to the New
York Café for supper with Molnar. Molnar was sitting at his
table, surrounded by his court. The great moment came;
Feleki appeared, and the enemies shook hands; they were
friends. But there was an assurance about Feleki's manner
that annoyed Molnar, and he suddenly had the feeling that
the reconciliation was premature. With a cordial wave of his
hand, he motioned his old friend to a seat at the next
table, then calmly began to eat his meal, stopping now and
then to fix his chagrined and glowering enemy with his
monocle.
After the first World War, Molnar began to pay the penalty
for his long and undisputed dominance in his native city.
The papers did not receive his plays with the unanimous
fervor to which he was accustomed. They actually ventured
criticism. As a result, he began to make excursions from
Budapest. He went first to Vienna, where he was able to
enjoy a new flood of adulation. His plays were produced in
the Burgtheater, which was a national honor reserved
principally for playwrights who were dead. His third wife,
who accompanied him, also had a great success in Vienna.
Thereafter, Molnar spent more and more of his time away from
Budapest, and this defection was resented at home. Molnar's
chief crime, however, was his commercial success in other
countries. In the higher literary circles of Budapest, there
was one sin which was beyond forgiveness. That was to be
prosperous. In his memoirs, Stefan Zweig said that the same
thing was true of Vienna; to make money out of literary work
was considered vulgar. In either town, to make money out of
America was the ultimate solecism, which confined you to a
limbo from which no good works could possibly rescue you.
Molnar committed this ultimate solecism repeatedly. His
enemies said he no longer wrote for Hungary, he wrote for
America. It was like a Harvard halfback making a touchdown
for Yale. In the cafés, they called him Checkspeare. Between
1920 and 1930, Molnar's gross earnings from his plays were,
in fact, enormous—amounting to well over a million
dollars—but the net was much less, averaging about
twenty-five thousand dollars a year, which was still an
imposing sum in Hungary. His fiscal relations with agents
and translators were very complicated and their fees were
exorbitant. From "Liliom," not counting the substantial
income he receives from "Carousel," he has made, in
thirty-seven years, about fifty thousand dollars net. He
sold the film rights for five hundred dollars. For a while,
Molnar had a prix fixe of twenty-three thousand
dollars for the foreign and film rights of all his plays.
How he arrived at this figure he does not know; it just
appealed to him. Three thousand dollars of the price was an
advance against the stage rights and twenty was an outright
payment for the film rights.
Molnar's absences from his native city kept getting longer.
For the two decades following the end of the first World
War, while his books and plays were current all over the
world, he maintained what he called his "five-room
apartment"—a room in the Hotel Hungaria in Budapest, another
in the Imperial in Vienna, a third in the Pupp at Karlsbad,
and one each at the Danieli in Venice and the Negresco in
Nice. The five staffs necessary to keep up this apartment,
he used to say without vanity, were numerically and in skill
on a scale few men could afford in their private
establishments. He felt that even the very rich might well
envy him his unicellular luxury. Molnar believed in the
dispersal not only of his apartment but also of his bank
balance. The sensational failure, in 1931, of the
Creditanstalt, Austria's leading financial institution, was
a disaster for many people. It was possible for Molnar to be
philosophical about it because he had acted (or so, at
least, he claims) on a pet investment theory all his own.
"In case of bank failures," he says, "the small depositor is
always paid off first. Therefore, if you have a hundred
thousand dollars, all you have to do is keep two dollars in
fifty thousand banks. Under this system of dispersed
deposit, a great many banks will have to fall simultaneously
to do you any real harm."
Molnar's political instinct is extremely keen, and for a
long time before the second World War he felt that a debacle
was coming. Sitting on a café terrace with Gilbert Miller in
1936, he waved a hand toward the Danube, flowing peacefully
below, and said, "This won't last, you know." All through
the thirties he allowed the money his plays earned in
America to remain in this country. He was deeply impressed
by a lighthearted remark he once overheard in a Budapest
café and has often quoted it during the years of his exile:
"A Jew should never own more property than he can jump
quickly over a fence with." He has also remembered another:
"A Jew should never keep his money in the country where he
is. He should send it to some other country.
But he should always be in the country where his money is."
In September, 1937, Molnar left Budapest for what may have
been the last time. He spent the next year in the Venetian
room of his apartment, and in 1939, when the war broke out,
he was in Geneva, Switzerland, a country that had always
courted visitors but was now nervous about them. It was
afraid of food shortages, and there were even demonstrations
against foreigners. Visitors were urged to go home, advice
which it was peculiarly impossible for Molnar to act on,
because the Nazis had already infiltrated into Hungary.
A companion of Molnar's Budapest days who visited him in
Venice in 1938 noticed a great change in his outlook. The
friend made a joke about the Jews and Hitler. Molnar said
sharply, "It is bad taste to joke about things like that."
This was a surprise; in the old days, the two men had joked
about everything. The friend, on the defensive, said that
before he left Budapest he had given five thousand pengos to
help the historic boatload of Jews marooned in the middle of
the Danube, on a ship that was unable to exercise one of the
traditional functions of a ship; namely, to land somewhere.
This gift, he argued, gave him the right to joke. But the
easy mechanics of levity, which would have served in the old
days; served no more; the scope for comedy was shrunken
indeed. Molnar was grim. The friends parted, and the pengo
giver came to America. In 1939, he and a number of other
exiles, including Molnar's wife, who had been here for a
year and a half, sent him cables urging him to follow. The
expressions on the faces of the Geneva hotelkeepers became
more and more forbidding and finally Molnar sailed for New
York. Gilbert Miller reserved a room for him at the Plaza.
He arrived on an Italian ship on the evening of January 12,
1940, his sixty-second birthday. Darvas and four Hungarian
cronies of old met him at the pier and escorted him to the
hotel. They all had dinner in Molnar's room. There was a
tense and agonized interval at the end, when the waiter came
in with the check. For a moment time stood still. Molnar
signed the check.
(This is the first of three articles on Mr. Molnar.) |
