The
Freedman Follies
David Freedman wrote for Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and
Florenz Ziegfield. Now, 68 years after his death, his son, UCSD professor
David Noel Freedman, wants to restore his father’s reputation.
By Patricia Morris Buckley
One night 68 years ago, a 14-year-old Noel Freedman went to
bed almost literally on the top of the world. His father, David Freedman,
was one of the top comedy writers in America, penning material for the
likes of Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice and Florenz Ziegfield. David had three
shows running on the Great White Way simultaneously, including the longest
running Broadway show at the time.
Famous folk like the Gershwin brothers and Vincent Minelli
visited the family’s three-story penthouse overlooking New York
City’s Central Park.
After falling asleep to the sound of his father receiving
calls from Brice and Samuel Goldwyn (who hired David as his chief screenwriter
that night), the young Noel woke up to the sound of crying. “My
mother was screeching, but the doctor said there was nothing we could
do, my father was dead,” recalls Noel, now 82 yet still emotional
when speaking about the event that changed his family’s fortunes
forever. “The rest of the day was a nightmare.”
The nightmare had actually started the day before, when David
took the witness stand to testify against his former boss, Eddie Cantor.
Freedman and Cantor were locked in a bitter dispute over money Cantor
owed the writer who had penned countless sketches, an autobiography and
a film for him. David. 38, had a massive heart attack, bringing the trial
to an abrupt halt. Even though there was great concern for David’s
health (especially since David’s own father had died at 55 from
heart problems), he still came home after seeing a doctor. But he would
never leave his home again.
The heart-broken Noel watched three weeks later as every stick
of furniture his family owned was auctioned off and they returned to the
poverty from whence it came. Yet nothing has broken Noel’s heart
more than to see his father’s name forgotten. Once David Freedman
had been the king of the comedy writers. Today, hardly anyone knows his
name and his plays are virtually forgotten.
Yet that all may change this year with a reading of “Mendel,
Inc.,” David’s greatest hit, as part of the Lipinsky Family
San Diego Jewish Performing Arts Festival. The reading will be directed
by Todd Salovey, associate artistic director at the San Diego Repertory
Theatre (and driving force behind the festival), and will include North
Coast Repertory Theatre Artistic Director David Ellenstein in the cast.
Today, Noel is frail and walks slowly. His face is creased
by wrinkles his father never got to wear. Yet he has never given up the
fight to restore his father’s name. As the designated family historian
(he has two brothers and a sister), he’s kept his father’s
books in print and tried many times to get his father’s plays produced.
“I have a funny thing about family and the need to preserve our
heritage,” says Noel, the endowed chair of Judaic Studies at UCSD,
a position he’s held for 19 years. He has also edited 330 scholarly
books (some of which he wrote) and has been an editor at Doubleday for
48 years. “There’s a quote from Shakespeare I love, ‘The
only permanent thing is black ink on white paper.’ That’s
the only way to outlive our bodily weakness and achieve immortality.”
When Noel attended the Jewish Performing Arts Festival last year, he came
one step closer to seeing his father’s name remembered by the theater
community. There he met Salovey through a mutual acquaintance and Noel
gave the director a script for “Mendel Inc.” Salovey, egged
on by his 10-year-old daughter Leah (who discovered the play had a role
for her), read the script about a Jewish immigrant family living on the
lower east side of Manhattan. The father is a bumbling inventor who has
created an all-purpose cleaning machine that, after many failures that
have bankrupted the family, finally works.
“It’s set in 1929, which is a real transition
point,” notes Salovey, who immediately added the play to the festival
roster this year after reading it. “It’s when the stock market
was starting to go down and immigrants wondered if the roads of America
would still be paved with gold. At the same time, they were dealing with
their children growing up as Americans. So it has many interesting issues
in a funny play.”
For Salovey, this play is not only funny, but it’s also a
critical history lesson about theater of that time. “It’s
textbook, classic vaudeville,” says Salovey. “It has shtick
that we would later see on ‘I Love Lucy’ and ‘The Honeymooners.’
When I read it, I felt like I was at the source of vaudeville.”
Born in Botosani, Romania, David immigrated to the United States as an
infant. in 1898. He first became a short story writer. Yet, after marrying
and starting a family in his early 20s, he discovered the flaw in this
career choice. “Writing these short stories took a year and then
he was only paid $200,” notes Noel. “My father was an ambitious
man. His father was active in the Jewish community and knew everyone.
So he got my father a job writing for Cantor and the ‘Chase &
Sanborn Hour.’”
Cantor would promise payment but not always come through.
So David, who had a staff and gambling habit to support, expanded his
client list, writing Baby Snooks sketches for Fanny Brice and six different
radio shows. He wrote the Ziegfield Follies of 1936 the year he died.
Noel attended opening night. “It was a special treat because the
star of the show was Gypsy Rose Lee,” he remembers.
“After the show, my father took us three boys backstage to meet
her and we were so excited. But she was completely clothed. You couldn’t
even see her toes.”
Noel laughs as he tells the story. It’s one of his fondest
memories of his father, whom he did not see often. “He was always
busy,” he says of David, who liked to spend money as fast as he
made it. “He worked at night and slept all day. We rarely saw him.”
After his father’s death, it was their tenacious mother
who kept the family together. The older son, Benedict, had been an apprentice
in his father’s “Laugh Factory,” alongside future novelist
Herman Wouk. Three years later, Benedick received an offer to write radioplays
for Al Jolson. By then, the 16-year-old Noel was already studying history
at the City College of New York. The whole family followed Benedict to
California, where Noel finished earning a European history degree at UCLA
and graduated at age 17. After college he traveled and he and his older
brother finished their father’s last play, “The People’s
Choice,” a play about a woman president that has never been produced.
Then comes the strangest chapter in Noel’s history. With World War
II ominously on the horizon, his mother came up with strategies for keeping
her sons out of the fighting.
“After losing my father, she didn’t want to lose
any more family,” he explains. “She knew that I was most at
risk as Benedict had poor sight and was married. And she knew I wasn’t
connected to our religion. She read that clergy people and theological
students were exempt from the draft. So I attended Princeton Seminary.”
Upon graduation he became an ordained minister and a practicing
Christian, even teaching at Presbyterian Theological Seminary for 23 years.
He also adopted his father’s name to become David Noel Freedman
(his eldest son is named David as well). Combining his Jewish heritage
and his Christian faith in the scholarly genre of Judaic studies has been
a lifelong process.
“I want to show everyone that you can be a Christian
and Jew at the same time,” he says. “No one wants to believe
that, but you can. This is a deeply felt thing for me and the underlying
theme of my life.”
Today, Freedman lives near the university and still teaches
two graduate level classes on the Hebrew Bible. He and his wife Cornelia
have been married almost 60 years. They have four children, seven grandchildren
and three great-grandchildren. Retirement is something he rarely thinks
about except to say that he’ll use that time to write his memoirs.
When a New York theater company revived the Ziegfield Follies of 1936,
he represented the family at the show. And he’s hopeful that this
staged reading will turn into a full production. Salovey sees that as
a solid possibility, depending on the response to the reading.
That, indeed, is Noel’s greatest dream – one he
has kept alive since that horrible night 68 years ago when his world turned
upside down. “I felt that I missed something with my father,”
he says, now tired from a long and emotionally draining conversation.
“I was just getting to the age where we could be close when he died.
He was just beginning to flourish as a writer.
They say if they can get enough of an audience for this show,
they may put it on. It would mean a lot to me. Quite a lot.”
MENDEL, INC.
When: Wednesday, June 2, 7 p.m.
Where: North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987D Lomas Santa
Fe Drive, Solana Beach
Tickets $12. For more information, call (858) 481-1055.
For feedback, contact editor@sdjewishjournal.com.