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Since January 12, 1940, Ferenc Molnar, the Hungarian author
of more than fifty volumes of plays, novels, short stories,
essays, war correspondence, and children's stories, has
spent most of his time in one long, narrow room at the
Plaza, with an incomplete collection of his own works. On
the bookshelves beside his one window, which looks out on
the fountain in the Plaza, are a mere twenty of the fifty
volumes in the Hungarian set of "Molnar Ferenc Müvei." He
managed to find room for these twenty in his luggage when, a
few short jumps ahead of the Nazis, he fled Budapest; the
rest he had to leave behind. On his shelves he also has some
French, Italian, German, Finnish, and Serbian translations
of his novels. Molnar is apologetic when he shows you his
bookshelves; he is aware that their contents are somewhat
monotonous. The library in his abandoned apartment in
Budapest contained five thousand volumes, some of them by
other authors. All but a few of the books were eventually
confiscated by the Nazis. On the walls of the room at the
Plaza are Gauguin prints. Behind a massive and polished desk
is an armchair with a deflated balloon cushion. Molnar has
long since given up the attempt to keep it pumped up and has
allowed it to relax permanently in flat discouragement. On
the floor beside the desk, like a faithful mastiff, is his
unabridged Webster, given to him last Christmas by his
compatriot Sir Alexander Korda.
Leading off this room is what Molnar calls his "combination
library-kitchen;" this contains a small electric stove and a
set of shelves intended for kitchenware but bulging with
manila envelopes stuffed with manuscripts and piled
compactly to the ceiling. The detritus of a long and
international career trickles out of the manilaed walls:
caricatures of Molnar clipped from German, English,
Hungarian, and Italian magazines, commentaries on his work
by Central European critics, notes on the backs of Berlin
and Vienna hotel menus, clippings of interviews with him in
several languages, and playbills of countless Molnar
productions. Of these last, one has a particularly sad aura.
The late Joseph Goebbels, before his intolerance hardened,
permitted the Jews of Berlin a ghetto theatre in which they
could put on plays, provided all the participants, including
the author and the audience, were Jewish. One looks at this
playbill and sees the actors in a performance of Molnar's
"Delilah." There they are, in the cheap newsprint, being
seductive and winning, flirtatious and amatory. Pinned to
this playbill is a long and serious review of the play,
clipped from a ghetto newspaper. It is written as though the
critic were unaware that he, as well as the actors he
admonished, would soon be swept away.
Molnar's theory of hotel life is simple: get the cheapest
room in the best hotel and eat in the best cheap restaurant
in the neighborhood, preferably in a "grocery," his name for
a delicatessen. His favorite locally, a small but excellent
delicatessen with booths in the back, is at Fifty-eighth
Street and Sixth Avenue. There he lunches almost every day
and dines several times a week, often with his devoted
Hungarian secretary, Miss Wanda Bartha, who, he says, is his
best literary adviser and best friend. Molnar is well
satisfied with the Plaza. It provides him, he figures, with
a staff of twenty-six well-trained servants. For Molnar, who
is an exceptionally frugal playwright, there is an added
advantage to hotel life. He suffers from insomnia and has
been an addict of sleeping powders for thirty years. He
usually goes to bed with a book rather early, takes his
powders, and waits for sleep to overcome him. Often he falls
asleep without turning out the light. This negligence, he
says, would be very expensive if he lived in a flat of his
own. There is, however, one flaw in his Plaza existence.
Telephone calls from this hotel cost eleven rather than ten
cents, and he is irritated by the sociability of some of his
Hungarian visitors, who are very casual about using his
telephone.
Molnar has always hated walking, but his American doctor has
prescribed this form of exercise and he does his stint by
walking around and around the block on which the Plaza is
situated. A methodical man, he notes down in a book at the
end of each walk the number of times he has circumnavigated
the block and how long he has been outdoors. Whether afoot
or in a car, he rarely gets more than a few blocks from the
Plaza. Sometimes he will go out of his orbit to dine in one
of the fashionable restaurants his friends patronize, but it
is a wrench for him to forego his regular booth in the
Fifty-eighth Street delicatessen. In whatever restaurant or
private house he finds himself, he does not rely on the
cutlery set at his place; he carries a sharp penknife, which
he uses to cut his meat.
On the way to his delicatessen, Molnar usually passes
Bergdorf Goodman, and he usually stops to gaze at the
mannequins in its windows. They have perhaps a special
interest for him because one of his plays, "Riviera," was
laid in a fashionable shop; its plot revolved about the
weary and underpaid shopgirls and clerks at the moment when
they were putting Riviera costumes on their mannequins. By
watching the Bergdorf Goodman windows, Molnar follows the
changes of season and fashions. He prefers this to the more
direct method of attending dinner parties, because an
engagement to attend a dinner party, even if it is several
weeks off, destroys for him the entire interim period. He
knows that no matter what happens, he will still have to
squeeze through the funnel of that dinner party. A few years
ago, Molnar found out, by way of Bergdorf Goodman's windows,
that Christmas was coming; an elegant mannequin, unharassed
by the turmoil of Christmas shopping or any other pressures,
held his attention until she disappeared to change for New
Year's Eve. Molnar wrote a children's story about this
mannequin and called it "The Blue-Eyed Lady." It was
published by the Viking Press. "Just think what he could do
if he ever got as far as Radio City," a Hungarian friend of
his remarked afterward.
In further obedience to his doctor's instructions, Molnar,
who is sixty-eight, has lately given up smoking, drinking,
and rich food. This asceticism, he says, is a tribute less
to will power than to a fear of dissolution. The mortuary
customs in America, which smear death with the obscenities
of makeup, revolt him, and he wishes to delay the event as
long as possible. Like many men who live in their
imaginations, Molnar is, as he admits himself, cowardly. In
1944, after one of Hitler's most threatening secret-weapon
speeches, Molnar became convinced that the bombing of New
York was imminent. When a less cautious friend suggested
that he might at least wait for more tangible evidence,
Molnar said, "Tomorrow one million people will he leaving
the city. The stations will be crowded. I must leave
tonight." With his secretary and two impressionable friends,
he departed that night for Lake Placid. The quartet sat the
blitz out there.
Owing to his timidity, Molnar is a nervous motorist. When he
had a car and chauffeur in Budapest, he tried the experiment
of installing a horn in the hack, so that he could blow it
in tight situations. The division of command did not work
out; it resulted one day in the chauffeur's getting rattled
end running into another car. Molnar was only mildly shaken
up, but he lost confidence in his chauffeur and eventually
switched over to cabs. During the odd and dangerous episode
of the revolution of Bela Kun, following the first World
War, the streets of Budapest were not safe. Molnar had a
little seat built on the running hoard of the cab he
regularly used, and rode around sitting on that and talking
to nonexistent passengers inside to give thugs an impression
of numbers. During that period, Molnar rarely went out,
however; he used to telephone desperately to his friends to
come to see him. One night a newcomer was brought along—a
man of enormous stature. At the end of the evening, Molnar
went up to the giant and shook his head with a worried
expression. "You're so tremendous. You're so strong," he
said. "Aren't you afraid to go home alone? Aren't you afraid
you'll attack somebody?"
Molnar tells a story about the Bela Kun days that is a
tribute to the tenacity of playwrights. A Communist author
of that time was trying to peddle a play around Budapest. He
went to producer after producer, but no one would put it on.
When the Bela Kun regime was established, this playwright
became a member of the cabinet. The play went into
rehearsal. But the regime didn't last long enough for it to
open. Time, as they say, passed. In 1945, the Communists
came back to Budapest as conquerors. The play is on.
Though scattered in Paris, London, Hollywood, and New York,
the Hungarian émigré colony is a closely knit community. At
its center is Molnar. For all the Hungarian exiles, Molnar,
whom they call Feri, is the wise man and elder statesman.
Most of the Hungarians who shuttle busily between London and
Hollywood visit him when they arrive here and go to say
goodbye to him when they leave. There are not only
theatrical and film people but also novelists and
journalists. His leadership of the Budapest group known as
the New York Crowd—its headquarters was the New York
Café—has survived the transposition to New York itself.
In Molnar's revolving circle are Sir Alexander Korda, who
put the British film industry on the map when he produced
"Henry VIII," and was knighted for it; Michael Curtiz, the
Hollywood director; Dr. Albert Sirmay, now music editor of
Chappell & Company, who was in charge of the music for a
cabaret Molnar ran in his youth; Gabriel Pascal, the conduit
between Bernard Shaw and the movies; Emmerich Kalman, the
composer; Alexander Ince, the producer and publisher ; Erno
Vajda, the author of "Fata Morgana;" Geza Herczeg, the
author of "The Wonder Bar;" and a great many others,
including several Austrians and Germans, such as Kurt Weill,
Ludwig Bemelmans, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, and Alfred
Polgar (the Viennese critic who supervised the translation
of most of Molnar's plays into German), who have been taken
into the group as honorary Hungarians. Today the circle
includes a great many people who didn't know Molnar in his
younger days, and a newcomer still considers an invitation
to sit down at Molnar's table an accolade, even though the
table is not in the New York Café but in the Fifty-eighth
Street delicatessen. Molnar's routine is so definite that
his friends can reach him at any hour. They know when to go
to the Plaza and when to go to the delicatessen. Some one of
them is always asking him for advice. A few weeks ago, the
Hungarian director of a play written by another Hungarian
came to him and complained that he was unable to cast the
leading role properly. "What type do you want?" asked
Molnar. "I need an actor who looks like Oscar Karlweis," the
director said. "I need someone with Karlweis's comic
intonation, with Karlweis's charm, with his walk, with his
timing, with his gestures." "Why, then, don't you get
Karlweis?" inquired Molnar, not unexpectedly. The director
recoiled. "For this part, Karlweis!" he said. That is the
kind of thing Molnar has to handle all the time.
The Hungarian émigrés are bound together, it would appear,
by a kind of invidious camaraderie. They coöperate in the
face of a common calamity, but they relish telling stories
about one another's duplicities. A Hungarian will recount to
you, as though describing a skillful piece of legerdemain,
how a Budapest husband, separated from his wife and ordered
by the courts to pay her fifty dollars a month, faithfully
paid her every time and then called on her, enjoyed an
excellent dinner at her house, and won the fifty dollars
back from her at pinochle. "This was Budapest!" the
Hungarian will say ecstatically. Or there will be the story
of the composer whose long and unsatisfactory pursuit of an
ambassador's wife was interrupted when her husband was
suddenly transferred to Berlin. The composer packed his bags
and prepared to follow, but his impresario, anxiously
awaiting delivery of a score, counselled restraint. "What
will you gain?" he argued. "Supposing you succeed? What
then? After all, you will admit, the chief benefit you will
derive will be from telling about it in the café. Well, tell
it anyway and save the trip!" The composer found the
argument irrefutable and rushed to a café.
In their new environment, with its naïve standards, the more
exuberant Hungarian refugees seem to have acquired a zestful
perspective on their national traits. "If you have a
Hungarian for a friend," an objective Hungarian will say,
"you don't need an enemy." Another will tell you that a
recipe in a Hungarian cookbook starts with the brisk
injunction "Steal two eggs . . ." Another will say,
"Hungarians are enemy aliens even in peacetime." They will
go as far as to quote the German saying "A Hungarian will
sell his country out, but he won't deliver it." When a
friend of Molnar's was asked whether it was true that Molnar
was writing his memoirs, the friend replied, "He'll never do
that, because he can't attack himself." Another Hungarian,
contemptuous of the otiose existence led by his luckier
compatriots in Hollywood, says that a movie producer finally
had to put up a sign in the writers' building saying "You
must work here. It is not enough just to be Hungarian." This
man also tells a story about Emmerich Kalman, who, a while
back, arrived in Hollywood to write the score for an M-G-M
musical and was received with a maximum of graciousness by
Louis B. Mayer. The studio, Kalman was informed, was
prepared to do its utmost to make his stay on the lot happy.
He was offered, among a great many other things, a
choice of librettists from his native Hungary. "If you
like," said Mayer, "you may have Melchior Lengyel." Kalman
was transported. It didn't seem possible; to come to
Hollywood and to work with Lengyel, for whom he had had,
since his childhood, an admiration amounting to worship—it
was too much to expect. "Or would you prefer Erno Vajda? "
Mayer asked. It appeared that to work with Vajda had been
the secret ambition of Kalman's life. Was it to be achieved
at last? Beaming, Mayer kicked open still another door in
the fabulous Metro stables. "How would you like Bus-Fekete?"
Kalman was overcome. His admiration for Bus-Fekete was
inexpressible. "Of course, Mr. Kalman," Mayer went on, "if
you wanted to, you could have an American Hollywood writer."
"Good," said Kalman quickly. "I'll take the Hollywood
writer."
All the backbiting and self-criticism among the expatriate
Hungarians seem to fall into a design of mutual aid. When a
Hungarian actor is after a part in a play, other Hungarian
actors do everything they can to see that he gets it, and
the journalists, playwrights, and producers are helpful in
the same way. When an important Hungarian scientist was
mentioned in the papers in connection with the development
of the atomic bomb, there were ripples of satisfaction all
through the colony. Perhaps it is because each success by a
compatriot serves as a hopeful augury. Another cause of
their closeness is that they all speak the language of
exile. And they all look hack on Budapest as the happy
hunting ground where naughtiness was conventional and a
keystone of manners, and, shuddering a bit in the more
astringent atmosphere in which they now find themselves,
laughingly adapt themselves to the quaint regime.
Even Hungarians who could not tolerate one another at home
stick together remarkably well in exile. There is the
Hungarian editor of a scandal magazine who for fifteen years
bedevilled Molnar, Korda, and other well-known Hungarians.
Molnar says that this editor was almost as effective as the
oncoming Nazis in driving him out of Budapest. Molnar alone
supplied the mephitic publication with enough copy to keep
it going for years; his marriages and his romances were the
editor's lifeline. Whenever the magazine languished, Molnar
gave it nourishment. This editor spared nobody; in one issue
he attacked Gundel, the thoroughly respectable proprietor of
the most famous restaurant in Budapest. The restaurateur,
distressed, came to Molnar and said, "I must answer this
man: I must write a letter of denial to the papers. I must
do something!" "I advise you to ignore this scorpion,"
Molnar said "But if you must reply to him, print your
statement on the back of your own menus. They have a far
larger circulation than his paper." When, a couple of years
ago, the editor came to New York, lost without his vehicle
of vilification, bereft of his sheaf of poisoned arrows,
Molnar, Korda, and a few other distinguished Hungarian
exiles invited him to dinner. They don't know why; they just
did. At this dinner, says Molnar, the unemployed executioner
experienced such an expansion of the soul that he forgave
them all.
Molnar's émigré disciples have to derive what comfort they
can from the edged benevolence of his humor. Unsuccessful
young compatriots come to him with their hopes, successful
ones with their accomplishments; he is openly skeptical
about both. Young or old, they also come to him with their
disputes. Then he quotes one of his favorite lines, which is
from Saint Augustine: "If two friends ask you to be judge in
a dispute, don't accept, because you will lose one friend;
on the other hand, if two strangers come with the same
request, accept, because you will gain one friend." It was
so worldly of a saint, Molnar remarks appreciatively, to
notice this. He is pessimistic about the state of the world
and about the individual destinies of his countrymen. "We
are all dead, we refugees," he says. "We walk around,
shadows among shadows, ghosts of what we were, in a world
that does not know us and that we only faintly comprehend."
But most of the refugees feel far from dead; the successful
ones swim lustily in the stream of artistic activity, the
unsuccessful ones exert themselves mightily to get into the
stream. Molnar's own moribundity is highly active; since his
arrival here he has written half a dozen plays, two novels,
and one juvenile, and has found the time, besides, to be
extremely helpful in converting "Liliom" into the immensely
successful "Carousel." This success affords Molnar only a
mitigated pleasure. The fact is that Puccini wanted to use "Liliom"
for an opera libretto. Molnar refused, on the ground that "Liliom"
would disappear as a Molnar and survive as a Puccini, the
same fate that befell Murger's "Vie de Bohème." Later the
Theatre Guild tried to persuade him to allow George Gershwin
to do an operetta version, and again he refused. Would it
have been better to let Puccini have it? Was it a mistake to
turn down Gershwin? Will "Liliom" survive "Carousel"? From
the contemplation of such questions, Molnar suffers a
certain erosion.
Inevitably, Mulnar's thoughts now hover about the past. He
sits in the Fifty-eighth Street delicatessen, surrounded by
his Hungarian friends, and one reminiscence leads to
another. Soon they are all back in Budapest, in the great
days of the New York Café and of the Gaiety Theatre, where
Molnar opening nights were major events. Old dramatic
criticisms are recalled, bygone performances are analyzed,
Gundel's wonderful menus are recited, old quarrels are
refought, and forgotten mots scintillate again. Many of
Molnar's fondest reminiscences of Budapest have New York
associations. He tells about the time Eva Le Gallienne went
to Budapest after playing Julie in the original New York
production of "Liliom." Molnar took her to see the amusement
park around which he had written the play. When she saw the
merry-go-round, with its barker high-pressuring
customers—when she beheld the actuality behind the
illusion—she wept. Another American star, Bertha Kalich, who
also visited Budapest, was even more tenderhearted. In his
overoptimistic youth, Molnar had fallen wildly in love with
a well-known actress. Without being unduly encouraged, he
confidently set about finding a rendezvous, so that, when
the moment came, he would he prepared. He went to Buda
(Budapest's "old town") and there, on a dark alley, he found
what appeared to be the ideal place. It was a noisy, dingy
two-room flat, but since it was on the dark alley, one could
get in or out of it without being noticed. Molnar engaged
this flat at once. The rendezvous never materialized, but he
lived in the flat for twenty-two years. When Miss Kalich
came to Budapest, she expressed a wish to see the place he
lived in and Molnar took her to his flat. She tried, while
she was there, not to show her horror, but after she
returned to America, Molnar was touched to hear that she was
attempting, overcome by pity for his manifest poverty, to
arrange a benefit for him.
When Margaret Perry, a daughter of Antoinette Perry, the
theatrical director, visited Budapest, she took with her a
letter of introduction from her mother to Molnar. Molnar
responded by inviting her to dinner and at the appropriate
time he called for her accompanied by a dark and younger
man, who, he explained, was a gigolo who danced much better
than he could. The three of them had a happy evening in an
open-air restaurant. The gigolo would give Miss Perry a
whirl, then bring her back to the table, and Molnar would
pick up the conversation where he had left off.
Molnar likes to recall his first visit to this country, in
the winter of 1927. He came over principally to be with his
third wife, Lili Darvas, who was playing in Reinhardt's
repertory company here. Molnar remembers an audience
with Calvin Coolidge. Gilbert Miller escorted him to
Washington and, to fortify him for the White House call,
took him to breakfast with a friend who had an excellent
library and the kind of cellar specialists collected during
prohibition. Miller's friend handed Molnar simultaneously an
excellent brandy and a copy of a Molnar play to autograph.
Molnar drank half a dozen brandies and signed half a dozen
of his plays. When the man's collection of Molnar plays was
exhausted, there was a lull in the hospitality, and Molnar,
glancing at the shelves, saw a beautiful volume of
Shakespeare. "I have the knack of imitating Shakespeare's
autograph," he told his host. He quickly found himself
inscribing "Hamlet." By the time he and Miller, who had been
joined by the Hungarian Minister, Count Szechenyi, arrived
at the White House, they were relaxed. Coolidge was not
talkative. Molnar remembers a prolonged silence after the
introductions. Finally, behind his hand, the President
inquired of Miller, "What does this man do?" (Molnar spoke
no English, but Coolidge didn't know it until Miller told
him.) Miller described Molnar's activities. "Yes," said
Coolidge, "but how does he earn his living?" When this was
made clear, the President inquired of Molnar, "What is the
political and economic situation of Hungary at the moment?"
Count Szechenyi translated the query to Molnar. Molnar said
to the Count, "As you know, my knowledge of these matters is
limited. But I will keep talking to you for a few minutes as
if I were explaining the political and economic situation of
Hungary to you exhaustively and with authority. You can tell
him anything you like as coming from me." Molnar then
recounted to Szechenyi a few choice items of Budapest gossip
and the Count presently transmuted them, for the President,
into a discourse on politics and economics. By the time
Molnar left, Mr. Coolidge was impressed by the fact that a
man whose livelihood depended on activities so marginal
should have so acute an insight into graver matters.
Molnar was in this country six weeks on that visit, during
which he celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He remembers his
stay mainly as a blur of parties and theatregoing. The only
tranquil occasions were when he went to Reuben's at three
o'clock every morning to meet Max Reinhardt. They would sit
there talking until dawn. "It is very healthy to get a few
hours' sleep before breakfast," Molnar once remarked, and
after these nightly sessions with Reinhardt he was always
careful to get them. The graph of the relationship between
Molnar and Reinhardt was extremely angular. Reinhardt was
the first person Molnar had told about his idea fur "Liliom,"
years before. Reinhardt was very enthusiastic and implored
Molnar to write the play. Reinhardt, says Molnar, had
immense charm and was a wonderful listener, but he never
actually heard what you said. He had a remarkably mobile
face, which registered keen attention; his absorption was
complete, but it was in what he was thinking rather than in
what you were saying. As Molnar outlined the story of "Liliom,"
the dancing light in Reinhardt's eyes and the mobility of
his expression doubtless followed the parade of some private
drama of his own. At any rate, a year or so later, after
Molnar had written "Liliom," he sent it to Reinhardt, who
was then the leading producer of Europe. For a period of two
years he got no answer. Finally, Molnar sent him a telegram
which said, "It is a great honor to be produced by you, but
not to he produced by you is no honor at all." Molnar turned
the play over to a more responsive producer, and Reinhardt
and he did not speak to each other for thirteen years. Then,
after they were on good terms again, there was the matter of
Lili Darvas's contract to play the Nun in "The Miracle,"
when Reinhardt's company was first coming to this country,
in 1923. Darvas, then a radiant young actress who had made a
great success in Budapest, seemed to Reinhardt the ideal
Nun. He offered her a handsome salary to go to America with
him and offered, besides, to pay for English lessons, to
help her establish herself as an actress here. The contract
was signed, the departure date set. But Molnar was very much
in love with her, and he persuaded her into thinking she was
ill. A confirmed hypochondriac, he was able to create a
valetudinary atmosphere at will. Darvas went to a hospital.
Molnar, having deprived Reinhardt of his star, was not to be
mollified; he broke off with Reinhardt again, this time for
three years. That was not difficult; Molnar, on occasion,
has found it possible to break even with a friend he has not
inconvenienced. The Hungarian playwright Heltai was a close
friend and the distinguished author of serious plays in
verse. One night Molnar had a horrid nightmare; he
dreamed that he was being publicly executed. Just as the
hangman was about to slip the noose around his neck, he
looked down at the crowd milling around the foot of the
scaffold. Right in front, looking up at him with an
expression of uncontrollable glee, was Heltai. When Molnar
woke, the memory of this look of joy on Heltai's face
remained with him. Molnar, churning with anger, did not
speak to Heltai for five years.
There are only two periods of his life that Molnar remembers
as completely blissful. One of these lasted two weeks and
the other six. The first was spent in custodia honesta,
the second in a hospital. This custodia honesta
was a form of punishment that only Budapest could have
devised. It was not common imprisonment; it was more like
being a house guest. For certain minor infractions of the
law, a man was put into a room in a municipal building and
told to stay there for a specific period. The door was left
unlocked; he was on his honor. When Molnar was a young man,
he fought a duel, with pistols. He and his antagonist
emerged without the least injury. Swords were not
customarily used in Budapest duels, because with swords you
might get hurt, whereas with pistols you could make an
impressive noise and all you had to do was miss. Duelling of
any sort was against the law, however, and Molnar was
sentenced by the chief magistrate of the city, who was a
companion of his and a great admirer of his plays, to spend
two weeks in custodia honest, the regulation
penalty. Molnar kept putting off serving his sentence, but
finally a pained and peremptory message came from his judge.
"This time, my dear Molnar, you really have to go," it said.
Once incarcerated, Molnar was dismayed because the sentence
was so brief. His room overlooked the Danube and a rose
garden. From the sentries walking up and down outside, he
got an unparalleled sense of security. There were no
telephones. No one could get at him, and he was free of all
obligation to do anything himself. It is a jewelled
fortnight in his memory. Once Molnar was out, the
tribulations of love beset him again and he took an overdose
of veronal. It was the fashion then in Budapest to commit
mild suicide, and Molnar succumbed to it. He had been
drinking heavily and he rather overdid it. He was rushed to
a hospital and his arrival caused a romantic flurry among
the nurses. "This is the boy who tried to kill himself for
love," the nurses whispered, and for six exquisite weeks
they pampered him. "It was the only failure that I ever
enjoyed to the hilt," Molnar once said.
Like many other wits, Molnar remembers his own mots word for
word. He frequently recalls his reply when he was asked how
he happened to become a playwright. He said, "In the same
way that a woman might become a prostitute. First I did it
just to please myself, then I did it to please other people,
and now I do it just for money." He has written over forty
plays, and he continues to turn them out by a kind of
automatism. He has just finished a new one—based on an old
notion—that is in his earlier comedic, ironic vein. It is
about a nonexistent character, like Harvey, and is full of
minute comic invention. One of his favorite plays is one
that he has never got around to writing but to which he
keeps adding amusing scenes in his head. It is concerned
with Napoleon, about whom Molnar has accumulated a vast
lore. It supposes that in his youth, in Corsica, Napoleon
fell madly in love with a girl whose father put up a great
resistance to the match. Napoleon, to show that he can
overcome opposition, marries her. He settles down and
becomes a successful cloth manufacturer, eventually engaging
in a fierce textile war with England. His wife deceives him
and, in a rage, he denounces her. "I am only a provincial
businessman," he shouts, "but had I followed the impulse I
had before I married you, to enter the world arena—had I
become a great soldier or a great figure in Europe—you would
not serve me so!"
Molnar even likes to recall other people's mots. He
generously points out that many famous remarks made by
others have been attributed to him, attracted by the
centripetal force of his reputation as a wit. There was a
Berlin banker named Fürstenberg, whom Molnar never met but
whom he knew well because of three celebrated mots, which
were all the man possessed that was not confiscated by the
Nazis. Fürstenberg telephoned another Berlin banker, whom he
did not like but had to see on a business matter. The man
said he would have to look through his engagement book
before he could make an appointment. Fürstenberg heard the
surf of the pages being ruffled in the man's book. No free
time in January, February, or March. The third of April was
his first free afternoon. "On April third," said Fürstenberg,
"I have a funeral." On the overnight express from Berlin to
Vienna, the understanding was that you could, if you wished,
have a first-class sleeping compartment to yourself; the
upper was simply not made up. One night when the train was
crowded, the conductor implored Fürstenberg to surrender his
upper to an elderly baron, who otherwise would not be able
to get on the train. "Give me the night," Fürstenberg
countered, "to think it over." On one of his birthdays,
Fürstenberg received a present of a huge, silver-framed
group photograph of his family, including all his cousins
and in-laws. He found the ideal use for it. He gave it to
the porter of his apartment building. "Study this photograph
well," he said, "and whenever any of these people show up, I
am out."
There was, Molnar also enjoys recalling, a dreadful man in
Vienna named Haas, an inveterate first-nighter and a
fountain of malice. At one opening, just before the curtain
rose, somebody asked him a question, involving some esoteric
family relationship, which he couldn't answer. The moment
the first curtain came down, he rushed to his questioner.
"Your question cost me a sleepless first act," he said. The
remark killed the play.
Opening nights in Budapest and Vienna were festive; the
boxes would glitter with uniforms and tiaras. A Frau
Baroness von Pollack was always present on these occasions.
One time, after the curtain fell on a dingy play about poor
people, the Baroness, according to Molnar, felt let down.
"It's no play for a première," she said.
Molnar adapted an enormous number of French plays into
Hungarian. Once he was given a comedy by de Flers and de
Caillavet to work on, and was asked to hurry; he started on
it late in the afternoon, worked all night, and had the
adaptation finished by morning. Of the many plays he
adapted, he remembers only one distinctly, and that one only
because of a line in it which, he says, illustrates
perfectly his notion that the theatre should exist for
entertainment. The line came in the course of a courtroom
scene; a young Frenchman from the provinces was up before a
Paris judge for examination. He gave all the standard
data—birth, date of marriage, and so on—and the judge asked
him if he had any children. "Nine," said the defendant. The
French birth rate was then rapidly falling, and the judge
showed considerable astonishment at this statement. "Nine!"
he exclaimed. "Did you say nine?" "Yes, Your Honor," the
husband explained glibly. "You see, there was no theatre in
our town."
Among the contents of Molnar's combination library-kitchen
is a copy of the London Graphic for August 22, 1931,
which has a full page of caricatures by Autori, a popular
artist of the period, gently lampooning the celebrities
attending that summer's Salzburg Festival. There are
Reinhardt, A. P. Herbert, Anita Loos, Moissi, C. B. Cochran,
Bruno Walter, and Molnar, who looks very elegant leaning
against a pillar and staring impersonally at his
surroundings through his monocle. Somehow or other, the
world it calls up seems remoter than Spy's; the near past
has been so irremediably splintered by events that it is
farther away than the more distant one. Molnar, already
white-haired when Autori sketched him, was plump, cool,
assured, foppish; now he is much thinner, and though he
still wears the monocle, his expression is mellowed and
kindly, and his sharp brown eyes, still young and vivacious,
are lit with a tragic impishness. His skin is clear and his
face almost unlined. Today, Molnar is a grandfather. His
daughter, his only child, who lives in Budapest with her two
sons and a daughter, is a widow; her husband was put into a
concentration camp by the Nazis and died there. Her children
were taken in and protected by a family of peasants. Molnar
is very much moved by this. The nobility and the peasants,
he says, did not join in the persecution of the Jews in
Hungary; it was largely the work of the middle class.
Molnar's first wife, and the mother of his daughter, is
Margit Veszi, who is now in Hollywood and a successful film
writer. His second wife, Sari Fedak, who was a great stage
star when Molnar married her, became a violent Nazi and is
now a prisoner of the government in Budapest. His third
wife, Lili Darvas, from whom he is amicably separated, is on
the road in this country, playing the Queen in the Maurice
Evans production of "Hamlet."
When summer comes now, it brings Molnar no suggestion of
Salzburg Festivals; he simply leaves the Plaza for Montauk
Point, where he spends the season in modest lodgings. His
wife and his friends visit him there. Except for these
trips, he has left New York only a few times since coming to
live here. He went to New Haven for the opening of
"Carousel," and once he ventured to Mount Kisco for a
weekend at Billy Rose's. Packing is for him a long and
elaborate ritual. He has a special medicine case for his
pills and sleeping powders. When he went to Rose's, he
declined a dinner invitation for the preceding Thursday
night because he had already started packing. Every spring
used to find him in Venice, in a small corner room in
the Danieli Hotel, looking out toward the Campanile. His
favorite people in the world are the Italians and his
favorite city in the world is Venice. His niche in the
Danieli was one of the rooms of what he called his
"five-room apartment," which he maintained in hotels in
Budapest, Vienna, Karlsbad, Venice, and Nice. Venice was a
dead city, a mercifully silent city, and every night he
would come back to his room, look out over the motionless
canal, then get into bed and wait for the midnight bell. It
would come, twelve liquid strokes, the last a pianissimo, a
lullaby. In Venice, he recalls, he gave excellent advice to
Gilbert Miller, who visited him there almost every spring.
The plague of Venice, as of all Italy, was the beggars.
Mussolini abolished that plague, but he automatically
created another. All the beggars became peddlers. They
legitimatized themselves by selling something. When you sat
in St. Mark's Square with your apéritif, they bedevilled you
to buy corn to feed the pigeons, dark glasses to shield you
from the sun, and maps of the city. Molnar advised Miller to
supply himself with these commodities before he arrived at
the café. This worked magnificently; they sat in peace, a
map of the city unrolled on the table, a bag of corn at
their feet, and dark glasses handy. When, this spring, it
was suggested to Molnar that now, with the war at an end, he
could return to his beloved Venice, he dismissed the idea.
The time for that is past, he thinks. He feels that he can
no longer afford to spend his strength in travel.
Molnar regards this country as a fascinating experiment, and
he is glad to be permitted to watch its operation. He has
taken out his citizenship papers. He adored Roosevelt. Last
summer, while he was at Montauk, he satisfied the masochism
that is one side of his complicated nature by reading the
tabloid columnists. "Every day," he remarked, "they disinter
him so that they may once more spit upon him." His friends
mildly reproach him for reading the newspapers so much; his
preoccupation with political news, they say, interferes with
his work. Asked one day whether he was quite happy here,
Molnar said, "Yes, I am happy, but quite happy, that I am
not." He has the poise of a man who, in spite of wars,
persecutions, and imperious personal drives, among them the
almost searing dualism of the impulse to suffer and the
impulse to impose suffering, has yet managed to make his
life, on the whole, pretty much what he has wanted it. He
manages still. The five-room apartment is now reduced to
one, but its window looks out on the lovely back of a
graceful girl. On moonlit nights the Plaza fountain murmurs
in silver and the spring evenings filter in, soft,
beguiling, and without memory.
(This is the last of three articles on Mr. Molnar.) |
