Zero Mostel

Performing in 1958

Part of Mostel's duty with the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was to give gallery talks at New York's museums. Leading groups of students through the many paintings, Mostel could not suppress his comedic nature, and his lectures were noted less for their artistic content than for his sense of humor. As his reputation grew, he was invited to entertain at parties and other social occasions, earning three to five dollars per performance. Labor union social clubs followed, where Mostel mixed his comic routine with social commentary. These performances played a large role in his eventual blacklisting in the next decade.

In 1941, the Café Society, a downtown Manhattan nightclub, approached Mostel with an offer to become a professional comedian and play a regular spot. Mostel accepted, and in the next few months he became the Café Society's main attraction. It was here that he adopted the stage name Zero (Zee to his friends), created by press agent Ivan Black at the behest of Barney Josephson, the proprietor, who felt that "Sam Mostel" was not appropriate for a comic.[10]

Thus, at the age of 27, Mostel dropped every other job and occupation to start his show business career.

Mostel's rise professionally was rapid. In 1942, his salary at the Café Society went up from $40 a week to $450; he appeared on radio shows, opened in two Broadway shows (Keep Them Laughing, Top-Notchers), played at the Paramount Theatre, appeared in an MGM movie (Du Barry Was a Lady), and booked into La Martinique at $4,000 a week. He also made cameo appearances at the Yiddish theatre, which influenced his performance style. In 1943 Life magazine described him as "just about the funniest American now living".[11]

In March 1943, Mostel was drafted by the US Army. Although Mostel gave varying accounts of his Army service, records show he was honorably discharged in August 1943 because of an unspecified physical disability. He subsequently entertained servicemen through the USO until 1945.[12]

Mostel married Kathryn (Kate) Cecilia Harkin, an actress and dancer, on July 2, 1944, after two years of courtship. The pair met at Radio City Music Hall where she was a Rockette.[13] The marriage caused problems in his relationship with his Orthodox Jewish parents as his new wife was a gentile. His mother never met Kate or her grandsons.[14]^:89 The marriage had problems at times, again mostly due to Mostel's spending most of his time in his art studio. Their relationship was described by friends of the family as complicated, with many fights but having mutual adoration. The couple stayed together until Mostel's death and had two children: film actor Josh Mostel in 1946 and Tobias in 1948.

After Mostel's discharge from the Army, his career resumed. He appeared in a series of plays, musicals, operas, and movies. In 1946 he even made an attempt at serious operatic acting in The Beggar's Opera, but received lukewarm reviews. Critics saw him as a versatile performer.

Mostel made notable appearances on New York City television in the late 1940s. He had his own show in 1948 called Off The Record on WABD with comedian partner Joey Faye. Simultaneously, Mostel had a live TV show on WPIX, Channel Zero. He also appeared in the May 11, 1949 Toast of the Town broadcast hosted by Ed Sullivan.

Since college, Mostel was a leftist, and his nightclub routine included political jabs at right-wingers. His MGM contract was terminated, and his role in Du Barry Was a Lady was truncated, because studio executives were upset that he participated in protests against another MGM film, Tennessee Johnson, which protesters believed had downplayed the racism of former US President Andrew Johnson.[15] According to biographer Arthur Sainer, "MGM blacklisted Zero Mostel way before the days of the blacklist".[14]^:186

During his Army service he was under investigation for alleged Communist Party membership. The Military Intelligence Division of the U.S. War Department said it was "reliably reported" that he was a Communist Party member.[16] The Post Intelligence Officer at the Army's Camp Croft, where Mostel served, believed that Mostel was "definitely a Communist." As a result of that, his application to be an entertainment director with the US Army Special Services unit was denied. Mostel had lobbied hard to transfer to Special Services, at one point traveling to Washington to request a transfer.[17]

It was not until 1950 that Mostel again acted in movies, for a role in the Oscar-winning film Panic in the Streets, at the request of its director, Elia Kazan. Kazan describes his attitude and feelings during that period, where

Each director has a favorite in his cast, . . . my favorite this time was Zero Mostel—but not to bully. I thought him an extraordinary artist and a delightful companion, one of the funniest and most original men I'd ever met. . . I constantly sought his company. . . He was one of the three people whom I rescued from the "industry's" blacklist. . . For a long time, Zero had not been able to get work in films, but I got him in my film."[18]

Mostel played supporting roles in five movies for Twentieth Century Fox in 1950, all in films released in 1951. Fox then abruptly cancelled his contract. Mostel learned this after he was loaned out to Columbia for a film role but not permitted on the set. The studio may have received word that he was about to be named as a Communist in Congressional testimony.[19]

On January 29, 1952, Martin Berkeley identified Mostel to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as having been a member of the Communist Party. After the testimony he was effectively blacklisted. He was subpoenaed to appear before HUAC on August 14, 1955. Mostel declined to name names and jousted with the members of Congress, invoked the Fifth Amendment, while standing up for his right to the privacy of his personal political beliefs.[20]

His testimony won him admiration in the blacklisted community, and in addition to not naming names he also confronted the committee on ideological matters, something that was rarely done. Among other things, he referred to Twentieth Century Fox as "18th Century Fox" (due to its collaboration with the committee), and manipulated the committee members to make them appear foolish.[21] Mostel later commented: "What did they think I was going to do – sell acting secrets to the Russians?"

The admiration he received for his testimony did nothing to take him out of the blacklist, however, and the family had to struggle throughout the 1950s with little income. Mostel used this time to work in his studio. Later he said that he cherished those years for the time it had afforded him to do what he loved most. Mostel's appearance before the HUAC (as well as others) was incorporated into Eric Bentley's 1972 play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been...? During this period he also appeared in many regional productions of shows like Peter Pan (as Captain Hook)and Kismet (as the Wazir), with his name seen prominently in the advertising.

In 1957, Toby Cole, a New York theatrical agent who strongly opposed the blacklist, contacted Mostel and asked to represent him. Mostel agreed, and the partnership led to the revival of Mostel's career and made him a household name. Mostel accepted the role of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown, a play based on the novel Ulysses, which he greatly admired in his youth. It was an Off-Off-Broadway play produced in a small Houston Street theater, but the reviews Mostel received were overwhelmingly favorable. Most notably, Newsweek's Jack Kroll compared him to Laurence Olivier, writing, "Something unbelievable happened. A fat comedian named Zero Mostel gave a performance that was even more astonishing than Olivier's." Mostel received the Obie award for best Off Broadway performance of the 1958–59 season.

After the success of Ulysses, Mostel received many offers to appear in classic roles, especially abroad; however, he declined the offers because of artistic differences with the directors and the low salaries associated with the roles. By this time the effects of the blacklist were lessening, and in 1959 he appeared twice on TV's The Play of the Week.

Mostel circa 1960

On January 13, 1960, while exiting a taxi on his way back from rehearsals for the play The Good Soup, Mostel was hit by a number 18 (now the M86) 86th Street crosstown bus, and his leg was crushed. The doctors wanted to amputate the leg, which would have effectively ended his stage career. Mostel refused, accepting the risk of gangrene, and remained hospitalized for four months. The injury took a huge toll; for the rest of his life, the massively-scarred leg gave him pain and required frequent rests and baths. He sought compensation for the injury by retaining the famous Harry Lipsig (the 5'3" self-described "King of Torts") as his attorney. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum. From this time forward, whenever he attended the Metropolitan Opera, Mostel carried a cane to go along with the cape that he also favored.

Later that year Mostel took on the role of Estragon in a TV adaptation of Waiting for Godot. In 1961, he played Jean in Rhinoceros to very favorable reviews. The New Republic's Robert Brustein said that he had "a great dancer's control of movement, a great actor's control of voice, a great mime's control of facial expressions." His transition onstage from man to rhinoceros became a thing of legend; he won his first Tony Award for Best Actor, even though he was not in the lead role.

In 1962 Mostel began work on the role of Pseudolus in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which was to be one of his best-remembered roles. The role of Pseudolus was originally offered to Phil Silvers, who declined it, saying he did not want to do this "old shtick". Mostel did not originally want to do the role either, which he thought below his capabilities, but was convinced by his wife and agent. The reviews were excellent, and, after a few slow weeks after which the play was partially rewritten with a new opening song, "Comedy Tonight", which became the play's most popular piece, the show became a great commercial success, running 964 performances and conferring star status on Mostel (he also won a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for this role). A film version was produced in 1966, also starring Mostel – and Silvers.

On September 22, 1964, Mostel opened as Tevye in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. Because of Mostel's respect for the works of Sholem Aleichem he insisted that more of the author's mood and style be incorporated into the musical, and he made major contributions to its shape. He also created the cantorial sounds made famous in the song "If I Were a Rich Man". The New York Times wrote "Zero Mostel's Tevye is so penetrating and heartwarming that you all but forget that it is a performance."[22] In later years, the actors who followed Mostel in the role of Tevye invariably followed his staging. The show received rave reviews and was a great commercial success, running 3,242 performances, a record at the time. Mostel received a Tony Award for it and was invited to a reception in the White House, officially ending his political pariah status.

In 1967, Mostel appeared as Potemkin in Great Catherine, and in 1968 he took the role of Max Bialystock in The Producers. Mostel refused to accept the role at first, but director Mel Brooks persuaded him to show the script to his wife, who then talked Mostel into doing it. His performance received mixed reviews, and was not a great success at first, but the film has since achieved classic status. Of it, the critic Roger Ebert wrote: "This is one of the funniest movies ever made".[23]

He lived in a large rented apartment in The Belnord on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and built a summer house on Monhegan Island in Maine.[24]

In the last four months of his life, Mostel took on a nutritionally unsound diet (later described by his friends as a starvation diet) that reduced his weight from 304 to 215 pounds. During rehearsals for Arnold Wesker's new play The Merchant (in which Mostel played a re-imagined version of Shakespeare's Shylock) in Philadelphia, he collapsed in his dressing room and was taken to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. He was diagnosed with a respiratory disorder and it was believed he was in no danger and would be released soon. However, on September 8, 1977, Mostel complained of dizziness and lost consciousness. The attending physicians were unable to revive him, and he was pronounced dead that evening. It is believed that he suffered an aortic aneurysm.[27]

Wesker wrote a book chronicling the out-of-town tribulations that beset the play and culminated in Zero's death called The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel.[28]

In accordance with his final requests, his family did not stage any funeral or other memorial service. Mostel was cremated following his death; the location of his ashes is not publicly known.[29]

• Zero Mostel Reads A Book Photographs by Robert Frank (New York Times, 1963)
• Zero Mostel's Book of Villains [with Israel Shenker, photographs by Alex Gotfryd] (Doubleday, 1976)

• Zero Mostel: a Biography (1989), Jared Brown, Atheneum, NY (ISBN 0-689-11955-0)
• Isenberg, Barbara (2014). Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World's Most Beloved Musical. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-59142-7.