Polonsky Never Lost His Sense of Humor or Zest for Life

When Abraham Polonsky came to dinner recently, he brought a bottle of Mumm’s--not for my wife or me, but for our 17-month-old son. “He’s old enough to start enjoying life,” Abe said on the drive over. “I bet champagne will agree with him.”

Abe died two days later on Oct. 26 of a heart attack, just a few weeks short of his 89th birthday. But he was never too old to enjoy life. If he liked you, he’d call you darling. When you irritated him, he’d call you an ignoramus--and much worse.

Having grown up on the rough ‘n’ tumble streets of New York, four-letter words were an integral part of his vocabulary, whether he was talking about Harry Cohn, Lew Wasserman, Robert Redford or simply regaling you with boyhood stories about seeing Shakespeare performed in Yiddish on the Lower East Side.

He was crusty and combative to the end; maybe orneriness is part of the genetic code for longevity. On the afternoon of his visit, he had gone to an academy screening of “The Fight Club.” He hated the movie so much that he stormed out after an hour, stopping as he walked up the aisle to grab the arms of people he knew, saying, “What the hell are you doing, watching this piece of [expletive]! You should get up and walk out too!”

After all, Abe was nominated for an Oscar 50-plus years ago for “Body and Soul,” a riveting John Garfield boxing film that had more soul and inspiration in its title alone than “The Fight Club” could muster in all 150 minutes. Best known as the writer-director of such films as “Force of Evil” and “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” Abe was blacklisted during the Hollywood Red Scare after he refused to testify in 1951 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Unable to work in Hollywood, he spent the next 17 years writing novels, working with Tyrone Guthrie and the Canadian Shakespeare Company and penning scripts, using Jeremy Daniel as his front, for the acclaimed CBS TV series “You Are There.”

Having Abe over for dinner, as we did every few months, was like spending time with a character out of a history book. When he was in college, he did the Lindy hop at the Cotton Club and heard T.S. Eliot read “The Wasteland” at New York’s 92nd Street Y. He worked with Orson Welles and John Houseman in the Mercury Theater. In World War II, he went behind enemy lines as a member of the OSS.

John Singleton Was a Favorite Student

When he came to Hollywood after the war, he remained active in the Communist Party. He was in Europe when a friend called to say the HUAC had been to his house, trying to serve him with a subpoena. His wife, Sylvia, thought they should stay overseas, but Polonsky considered himself too much of a patriot. “I was romantic about it. I said, ‘Nobody’s going to chase me out of my country.’ So I came back. I was so romantic that I brought a Jaguar back with me.”

Even though the blacklist ruined his career--he was nearly 60 by the time he could work in Hollywood again--he never betrayed any bitterness. He was a fixture at USC, teaching a class that was half film history, half hard-headed Polonsky monologues. One of his favorite students was John Singleton, who would drive Abe to class and once confided that he was unpopular with his classmates because Abe, after reading Singleton’s scripts, would tell the class, “At the rate all of you are going, this is the only guy who’s ever going to get a job making movies.”

When the motion picture academy gave Elia Kazan an Oscar for lifetime achievement this spring, Abe and fellow blacklistee Bernard Gordon led the opposition, waging a media campaign that sparked a heated debate in the weeks before the awards. Abe got the ball rolling by giving an interview in which he quipped with his usual fierce wit: “I’ll be watching, hoping someone shoots him. It would no doubt be a thrill in an otherwise dull evening.”

It was because of Kazan that Abe and I first met. In 1995 I was working on a piece for The Times Sunday magazine about why Hollywood, after 45 years, still hadn’t forgiven the fabled director for testifying against his friends. Abe seemed a good place to start--he’d been calling Kazan a rat for years. Abe lived in a penthouse apartment down the street from Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. He was a regular at the department store’s lunchroom, where he’d flirt with the waitresses, who would all kiss him on the cheek when he arrived.

Afterward, as we walked out of the store, Abe pointed to a rack of men’s suits. “You have to admit, this is quite a place,” he said. “Where else can you get a good $100 suit for $1,000?”

Little Patience for Excesses of the ‘90s

Abe’s politics never changed. He had long ago broken with the Communist Party, but he had an instinctive scorn for the easy-money excess of modern-day Wall Street. “I don’t think my politics have changed that much over the years,” he said one night. “I’m really a Darwinian, with a slight bias toward Karl Marx.” For Abe, it hardly mattered that socialism had failed so often. “I have no regrets,” he said. “Fighting for lost causes is a perfectly proper activity for a human being. It’s one reason why I’ve had such a helluva good life.”

In many ways, Abe outlived his time. He had little patience for the casual vulgarity and excesses of the ‘90s. One night, when I drove him home from dinner, he insisted that I see the gaudy new crystal chandelier and gold wool carpet his landlord had installed in the lobby of his apartment. “Why the hell did he buy a wool carpet?” he fumed. “The first time a dog [urinates] on it, they’ll have to throw the whole thing out.” As for the “pretentious” chandelier: “My wife would never let me go to Las Vegas because she hated the place. But now look--Las Vegas has come to me!”

Sylvia had died before I met Abe, but he regularly invoked her memory. They met when Abe was 16, were married nearly 60 years and it was obvious from the way he’d linger at the photos of her in his bedroom that he missed her dearly. At that last dinner he told us that, when they were courting, Sylvia taught him the tango.

“Why should I learn the tango?” he asked her. “That’s easy, Abe,” she told him. “It’s the best way to cop a feel.”

Abe knew his time would come. He had pneumonia last winter, but he bounced right back. His exercise regime, after Neiman closed its lunchroom, included a daily walk through Beverly Hills to the Bagel Nosh. At dinner he joked that he’d just gotten his flu shot, “so my USC students won’t kill me this year.”

Abe kept sentiment to a minimum in his life as well as in his writing. But one night, after an evening of debate and laughter, he recalled a conversation he had with Sylvia when she was dying of cancer. “I asked her if she had any advice for me,” he said. “And she said, ‘Yes, never try to balance your own checkbook.’ ”

“But will I ever see you again?” he asked. Sylvia replied, “I’m going to be star-dust and eventually you will be too.” Abe thought that over. When they were teenagers, it was Sylvia who had sought him out. “Well,” he said, “you might be very far away. How will I find you?” And Sylvia answered, “Have I ever had any trouble finding you before?”