Lee J. Cobb Achieved Theatrical Immortality as Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman"

Lee J. Cobb, one of the premier character actors in American film for three decades in the post-World War II period, was born Leo Jacoby in New York City's Lower East Side on December 8, 1911. The son of a Jewish newspaper editor, the young Leo was a child prodigy in music, mastering the violin and the harmonica.

Any hopes of a career as a violin virtuoso were dashed by a broken wrist, but his talent on the harmonica may have brought him his first professional success. At the age of 16 or 17, he ran away from home to Hollywood to try to break into motion pictures as an actor. He reportedly made his film debut as a member of Borrah Minevitch's Harmonica Rascals (their first known movie appearance was in the 1929 two-reeler "Boyhood Days"), but that cannot be substantiated. However, it is known that after Leo was unable to find work, he returned to New York City, where he attended City College of New York at night to study accounting while acting in radio dramas during the day.

Lee J. Cobb tried his luck in California once more, making his debut as a professional stage actor with the Pasadena Playhouse in 1931. After again returning to his native New York, he made his Broadway debut as a saloonkeeper in a dramatization of Fedor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which closed after 15 performances. (Later in his career, Dostoyevsky would prove more of a charm, with his role of

Father Karamazov winning him his second Oscar nomination.)

The Group Theater

Lee J. Cobb joined the left-wing Group Theater in 1935 and made a name for himself in Clifford Odet's politically progressive dramas Waiting for Lefty and Til the Day I Die, appearing in both plays that year in casts that included the then-actor Elia Kazan. He also appeared in the 1937 Group Theater production of Odets' Golden Boy, a huge hit that featured Luther Adler in the title role of a sensitive musician forced into boxing by the exigencies of the Great Depression. Cobb played the role of Mr. Carp in a cast that also included Kazan, Julius Garfinkle (later to achieve fame as John Garfield), and Martin Ritt, all of whom would come under the scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee for their left-wing sympathies more than a decade later.

Luther Adler was not cast in the film version. Instead, Hollywood turned to the WASP William Holden to play Joe Bonaparte. Lee J. Cobb was cast as Mr. Bonaparte, the protagonist's father, in the 1939 film of Clifford Odets play, despite the fact that he was not yet 30 years old. The role of a patriarch suited him, and he'd play many more in his film career. (In the early 1960s, Elia Kazan publicly bemoaned the fact that Cobb never got to play King Lear on Broadway, though he eventually would before the decade was over.)

Death of a Salesman

It was as a different kind of patriarch that he scored his greatest success. Lee J. Cobb achieved immortality by giving life to the character of Willy Loman in the original 1949 Broadway production of

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which won the Pulitzer Prize His performance was a towering achievement that ranks with such performances as Edwin Booth as Richard III and John Barrymore as Hamlet in the annals of American theater. Cobb later won an Emmy nomination as Willy when he played the role in the 1966 teleplay of Salesman. (Miller originally said that he wrote the role with Cobb in mind, though in the 1980s, he would say he conceived Willy as a small man, when Dustin Hoffman was playing the part on Broadway.)

Before triumphing as Miller's Death of a Salesman, Cobb had appeared on Broadway only a handful of times in the 1940s, including Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column (1940), Odets' Clash by Night (1942) and the US Army Air Forces' stage pageant Winged Victory (1943-44). Later, he reprised the role of

Joe Bonaparte's father in the 1952 revival of Golden Boy opposite John Garfield as his son Joe, and appeared the following year in The Emperor's Clothes. However, he then stayed off the Broadway boards until his final appearance as King Lear in the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center's 1968 production of Shakespeare's eponymous play.

Becoming Willy

In his autobiography Timebends, Arthur Miller writes about producing Death of a Salesman on Broadway for the first time. He found the casting of Willy Loman to be "quite difficult."

"Willy had to be small, I thought, but we soon realized that Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body. The script had been sent to Lee Cobb.... Having flown himself across the country in his own two-engine airplane, he sat facing me in [producer Kermit] Bloomgarden's office and announced, 'This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man.'

"And he did indeed seem to be the man.... But while I trusted his and Kazan's experience, I lacked any conviction of my own about him until one evening in our Grace Court living room Lee looked down at my son, Bob, on the floor and I heard him laugh at something funny the child had said. The sorrow in his laughter flew out at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously reedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving.

"'You know - or do you? -,' Lee said to me one day in Bloomgarden's office a week or so before rehearsals were about to begin, 'that this play is a watershed. The American theatre will never be the same.' I could only gulp and nod in silence at his portentousness - which I feared might augur a stately performance - and hope that he would make Willy come alive anyway.

At the rehearsals of Death of a Salesman, Cobb was not doing well, having a hard time getting into the part. He was mumbling and seemed loss while the other actors, Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchell, were getting their parts up to performance speed.

"...Lee seemed to move about in a buffalo's stupefied trance, muttering his lines, plodding with deathly slowness from position to position, and behaving like a man who had been punched in the head.

"'He's just learning it,' Kazan shakily reassured me after three or four days.

"On about the twelfth day, in the afternoon ...he began to move frighteningly, with such ominous reality that my chest felt pressed down by an immense weight. After the scene had gone on for a few minutes, I glanced around to see if the others had my reaction. Jim Proctor had his head bent into his hands and was weeping, Eddie Kook was looking shocked, almost appalled, and tears were pouring over his cheeks, and Kazan behind me was grinning like a fiend, gripping his temples with both hands, and we knew we had it - there was an unmistakable wave of life moving across the air of the empty theatre, a wave of Willy's pain and protest.

"I began to weep myself at some point that was not particularly sad, but it was as much, I think, out of pride in our art, in Lee's magical capacity to imagine, to collect within himself every mote of life since Genesis and to let it pour forth. He stood up there like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position.

"At the end of the act, Del Hughes, our sweet but hardheaded, absolutely devoted, competent stage manager, came out from a wing and looked out at us. His stunned eyes started us all laughing. I ran up and kissed Lee, who pretended to be surprised. 'But what did you expect, Arthur?' he said, his eyes full of his playful vanity. My God, I thought - he really is Willy!

"On the subway going home to Brooklyn I felt once again the aching pain in my muscles that the performance had tensed up so tightly, just as in the writing time. And when I thought of it later, it seemed as though Lee's sniffing around the role for so long recapitulated what I had done in the months before daring to begin to write."

Death of a Salesman had its first public performance on the road, in Philadelphia. Eliza Kazan thought that Lee J. Cobb should take in an afternoon performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony by the Philadelphia Orchestra before that evening's opening. Miller supposed that Kazan wanted " to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended" and attended the performance with the two men.

"The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy's part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat at either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past."

At the end of the performance, the audience initially did not applaud.

"As sometimes happened later on during the run," Miller wrote, "there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it."

Brooks Atkinson, in his opening night review of Death of a Salesman in the New York Times, praised Lee J. Cobb's performance:

"Mr. Cobb's tragic portrait of the defeated salesman is acting of the first rank. Although it is familiar and folksy in the details, it has something of the grand manner in the big size and the deep tone."

Movie Career

Aside from his possible late '20's movie debut and his 1934 appearance in the western The Vanishing Shadow in 1934, Lee J. Cobb's film career proper began in 1937 with the westerns North of the Rio Grande (in which he was billed as "Lee Colt") and Rustler's Valley, and ended nearly 40 years later with his death. After a hiatus while he served in the Army Air Force during World War II, Cobb's movie career resumed in 1946, and he continued to play major supporting roles in prestigious A-list pictures.

His movie career reached its artistic peak in the 1950s, when he was twice nominated for Best Supporting Actor Academy Awards, for his role as Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront (1954) and as the father in The Brothers Karamazov (1958). Other memorable roles in that decade were his supporting turns as the sagacious Judge Bernstein in The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955), as the probing psychiatrist Doctor Luther in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), and as the volatile Juror #3 in Twelve Angry Men (1957).

HUAC

It was in the 1950s that Cobb achieved a sort of fame that most artists dreaded: he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee on charges that he was or had been a communist.

For a period around 1950, after his triumph in Death of a Salesman, Lee J. Cobb was briefly considered a contender for the title "Great American Actor," with the likes of Frederic March (a star on film and stage) and movie legend Paul Muni as his competition. Although Salesman ran for more than 700 performances, Cobb left the production after only three months, claiming that his voice was failing him. Arthur Miller later would jokingly say he left the play to go to Hollywood to play sheriffs in Westerns.

The fact is, Lee C. Cobb had been a member of the Communist Party, and he had held meetings of communists (so-called "study groups") in his California home in the 1940s. He initially denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) and resisted HUAC.

Cobb's membership in the Group Theater in the 1930s was the genesis of the charges. Other Group Theater "fellow travelers" already investigated by HUAC had named Clifford Odets and Elia Kazan as communists, and first Kazan and later Odets would provide "friendly" testimony before the committee, "naming names." (Neither named Cobb as a communist.)

Group Theater alumnus John Garfield also was tarred as a communist, though in fact he was not. Many blamed Garfield's fatal heart attack on HUAC: he died the day after Clifford Odets testified that Garfield had never been a member of the Communist Party. The blacklisted Garfield had been appearing with Cobb in the Broadway revival of Odets' Golden Boy that had closed on April 6th, 1952. (The Broadway theater did not honor the blacklist that effected film, television and radio.)

"Naming Names"

Lee J. Cobb's own persecution by the witch hunters had already caused a nervous breakdown in his wife. Initially, he tried to deny that he had been a CPUSA member. Roy Brewer, the anti-communist, red-baiting Hollywood union boss that also went into the business of "clearing" suspected communists and fellow-travelers for a fee so that they could be re-employed, claimed that Cobb was the only former communist who lied to him, claiming that he had never been a member of the Party.

After the breakdown of his wife, Cobb decided to appear as a friendly witness before HUAC in order to preserve her sanity and his career. He brought the inquisition directed at him to a halt by appearing before the Committee in 1953 and naming names. His film career was saved.

Ironically Cobb would win his first Oscar nomination in On the Waterfront, directed and written by fellow HUAC informers Kazan and Budd Schulberg. The film can be seen as a stalwart defense of informing, as epitomized by the character Terry Malloy's testimony before a governmental committee investigating racketeering on the waterfront.

When Victor Navasky published the first important book about the Hollywood witch hunt, Naming Names, in 1980, he included an interview with Lee J. Cobb. Cobb said of his ordeal:

"When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. The HUAC did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again."

Of the period of the HUAC witchunts, Arthur Miller wrote in his 1989 autobiography Timebends that "...Lee Cobb, my first Willy Loman, [was] more a pathetic victim than a villain, a big blundering actor who simply wanted to act, had never put in for heroism, and was one of the best proofs I knew of the Committee's pointless brutality toward artists. Lee, as political as my foot, was simply one more dust speck swept up in the thirties idealization of the Soviets, which the Depression's disillusionment had brought on all over the West."

Later Career

Major films in which Lee J. Cobb appeared after reaching his career plateau include Otto Preminger's adaptation of Leo Uris' ode to the birth of Israel, "Exodus" (1960), the Cinerama spectacle "How the West Was Won" (1962), the James Coburn spy spoofs Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967), Clint Eastwood's first detective film, Coogan's Bluff (1968), and legendary director William Wyler's last film, The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970). In addition to his frequent supporting roles in film, Cobb often appeared on television.

On TV, he played Judge Henry Garth on the series The Virginian from 1962-66 and also had a regular role as the attorney David Barrett on The Young Lawyers (1970-71). Cobb also appeared in made-for-TV movies and made frequent guest appearances on other TV shows. His last major Hollywood movie role was that of the police detective, Lt. Kinderman, in The Exorcist (1973).

Lee J. Cobb died of a heart attack in Woodland Hills, California on February 11, 1976, at the age of 65. He was buried in Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA. Though he will long be remembered for many of his successful supporting performances in the movies, it is as the stage's first Willy Loman in which he achieved immortality as an actor. Bearing in mind that the role was written for him, it is through Willy that he will continue to have an influence on American drama far into the future, for as long as Death of a Salesman is revived.

On Video

Lee J. Cobb's performance as Willy Loman was preserved in the 1966 television version on CBS, which co-starred Mildred Dunnock (recreating her role of Linda from the original Broadway production), George Segal as Biff, James Farentino as Happy (the best Happy I've seen), and Gene Wilder as Bernard. The program won three Emmy Awards, for Best Dramatic Program, Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Drama, and a special award for Arthur Miller.

Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock were nominated for Emmies also. (Dunnock also was nominated for an Oscar for her recreation of Linda in the 1951 film version of Salesman, which starred Frederic March, another victim of Cold War hysteria.)

The 1966 TV Death of a Salesman is avaiable on DVD from the Broadway Theatre Archive, which is put out by Kultur Films. The Salesman DVD can be purchased fromAmazon.com and directly from Kultur Films.

A review of this version of Death of a Salesman can be accessed at the Bright Lights Film Journal Web site.

Sources:

An earlier version of this biography originally appeared on the Internet Movie Database

Miller, Arthur. Timebends (New York: Grove Press, 1989)