On the Waterfront
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On the Waterfront
Budd Schulberg
with Stan Silverman
PLAYS FOR PERFORMANCE
A series designed for
contemporary production and study
Edited by
Nicholas Rudall and Bernard Sahlins
This play is dedicated
to the memory of
Father John Corridan, S.J.
“The Waterfront Priest”
and of Arthur Browne,
the irrepressible “Brownie”
who kept getting up to fight again
Contents
Introduction
Background
Characters
Act 1
Scene 1 A Riverfront Street
Scene 2 Backroom of the Friendly Bar
Scene 3 Doyle Parlor
Scene 4 On Stoop Outside Doyle Tenement
Scene 5 Doyle Parlor
Scene 6 An Active Pier
Scene 7 A Loft in the Pier
Scene 8 Father Barry’s Study and the Church Basement
Scene 9 A Riverfront Street
Scene 10 Edie’s Bedroom
Scene 11 Terry’s Rooftop
Act 2
Scene 1 Father Barry’s Study
Scene 2 The Hold of a Freighter
Scene 3 Terry’s Rooftop
Scene 4 Outside the Church
Scene 5 The Friendly Bar
Scene 6 An Abandoned Pier
Scene 7 Edie’s Bedroom
Scene 8 A Riverfront Street
Scene 9 A Friendly Bar
Scene 10 Hearing Rooms: Archdiocese and Crime Commission
Scene 11 Terry’s Rooftop
Scene 12 Active Pier
Scene 13 St. Timothy’s Church Sacristy
Scene 14 St. Timothy’s Church
A Biography of Budd Schulberg
INTRODUCTION
by Budd Schulberg
ON WEST 47TH STREET in New York I stand outside the Brooks Atkinson Theater, and there it is, on the marquee in big letters: “On the Waterfront.” The play. Not the movie that surprised the director Elia Kazan and me when it overcame rejection by all the major studios to win a record number of Oscars and become a landmark film. But now in a legitimate theater only a ten-minute walk from the piers I had been drawn to after Kazan and I joined forces some fifty years earlier.
Malcolm Johnson’s breakthrough exposé, “Crime on the Waterfront,” in the long-lost New York Sun pointed us to our subject matter. Following Johnson’s lead, I had gone down to St. Xavier’s Church on West 16th Street to meet one of the most unforgettable characters of my life, the Waterfront Priest, Father John (Pete) Corridan. Tough, canny, fast-talking, chain-smoking and sometimes profane, he had become the champion of the dockworkers who were treated like convict labor by the racket-ridden International Longshoremen’s Association, whose officers were literally recruited in Sing Sing and Dannemora.
I had walked into a brutal, inhuman world—just a few blocks from Sardi’s. Rebel longshoremen daring to meet in the basement of St. Xavier’s were set upon on their way out by rackateer union goons wielding baseball bats and steel pipes. But not a word appeared in any of the New York papers the next day.
Egged on by Father Corridan, I went to Turner Catledge, then the managing editor of the New York Times, and told him about the battle for control of the harbor that was going on from the Brooklyn docks to Hoboken. He invited me to write an article for the Sunday Magazine.
I came back with “Joe Docks, Forgotten Man of the Waterfront,” a profile of the average longshoreman. There were some forty thousand of them, shaping up at dawn every morning, forming a human horseshoe around the hiring boss who picked them to work a four-hour shift according to his whims or according to the amount they were willing to kick back for the job—$2, $3, even $4 of the $2.27 per hour they were getting for the most dangerous work in America. “Joe Docks” described them as “forgotten men performing rugged, thankless jobs in a jungle of vice and violence where law and conventional safeguards never existed.”
My three years of prowling the waterfront resulted in a screenplay that so excited Kazan he took it immediately to Darryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox, who promptly threw it back at us with, “Who’s going to give a damn about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?”
Longshoremen, or workingmen in general, were not “in” in 1953, and they’re still a rarity if not invisible in the movies of today. It was only with the intervention of a colorful, manipulative freebooter, the independent producer Sam Spiegel, that we managed to get the film made on a B budget and a thirty-five-day shooting schedule.
The Oscars, and the unexpected box-office success, were sweet revenge on the studios that had turned us down. But those years on the waterfront, including attendance at every one of the hearings held by the Waterfront Crime Commission, left me feeling that given the tight structure of a ninety-minute movie, we could tell only part of the story.
The film focused on Terry Malloy, a fringe hoodlum caught between obeisance to the mob and the gradual awakening of his own conscience, stirred by the innocence of Edie Doyle, the sister of the young rebel, whom Malloy had unwittingly helped to do in, and the prodding of the waterfront priest, now called Father Barry. What may strike many as a cliché—“If you do it to the least of Mine …”—becomes dangerous doctrine in Barry’s mouth. It was dangerous for him to stand up to the waterfront mobsters because behind them was a complex support system, involving the church, big business, and city politics.
In our film the priest—memorably portrayed by Karl Maiden—was a heroic figure. But there was no hint of the ordeal that his real-life counterpart had to endure in bucking the archdiocese.
The ideal film moves from sequence to sequence in a series of mounting climaxes. A novel has time to pause and wonder, time to put a Terry Malloy in proper perspective, to describe a social matrix of which Terry is totally unaware but one that is nonetheless driving him to put his life on the line. Choosing to do the novel through the eyes of “Father Pete Barry” gave me a vehicle for exploring his courageous challenge to church authority and describing his eventual banishment to an upstate, inland parish.
Despite what Sam Goldwyn was reputed to have said—“If you want to send a message, try Western Union”—I felt the message of my novel had been overwhelmed in the fame of the film and deserved to be heard more clearly.
Some fifteen years ago my lifelong friend and frequent collaborator, Stan Silverman, and I discussed still a third way of presenting the material: reinventing it as a play.
That the greatest natural harbor in the world was still held hostage by the mob exerted a nagging fascination on us. The cargo ships with their old-fashioned slings into the hold had given way to nine-hundred-foot container ships so high tech that two men could do the work of twenty. But credit the mob with resilience and resourcefulness. The Gambinos in Brooklyn and the Genoveses in Port Newark-Elizabeth weren’t going to go away—not as long as billions of dollars’ worth of cargo was moving in and out.
If the shape-up kickbacks were ancient history now, the high-level kickbacks from stevedores and shipping companies to crooked longshoremen union officials, and modern methods of corruption, were the old story in a new setting. No one on the inside, from the FBI to the United States attorneys to the district attorney to the computerized bi-state waterfront commissioners, doubts that despite their best efforts, the Five Families are still doing “very lovely” around the harbor.
It struck Stan Silverman and me that it was time to tell the rest of the story. And what better way than on the stage? The theater offers an opportunity to combine the drama of film with the subtext of a novel. But we had to find ways to dramatize the social and moral issues that there had been no time for in the movie and that were often expressed in interior monologues in the novel.
While the play includes scenes straight out of the movie and drawn directly from the novel, it also includes new ones that this third “Waterfront” demands.
The love story is still there, somewhat enlarged in fact, as we had more time to develop the relationship between Terry Malloy and Edie Doyle. While Terry’s story remains, he shares virtually equal time with Father Barry, for whom, in the movie, there was not as much space as in the play, where he must come to terms with his own difficult choices and those of his critical superiors.
While there were worker-priests in France in the 1950s, and there have been priests speaking out for the impoverished peasantry of Latin America from the 1970s through the 1990s, the issue of liberation theology and the conflicts within the church about its current social role are sharpening every day.
The activism celebrated in our play may be new for the “X” Generation, which has often been accused of moral aphasia. Concern for one’s fellowman or woman is considered old-fashioned and out of step in the era of get rich quick or starve on your own time and leave us Internet wunderkinds alone. Why should our overnight millions ease the pain of your unemployment or personal failure? some ask. Today’s anthem, all too often, seems to be, “If you do it to the least of Mine, it’s OK by me.”
In the play, Terry Malloy expresses his philosophy of survival on the docks: “Do it to him before he does it to me!” It prompts Edie Doyle’s question, “Isn’t everyone a part of everyone else?” The answer to what seems a simplistic question goes to the heart of our modern malaise.
In the course of our play, Terry Malloy, the seemingly soulless street survivor, is forced to face up to the unfamiliar and inexorable demands of conscience, and the question: Where do we draw the line between naked self-interest and responsibility to our fellow beings?
Although the time of our play is still the mid-fifties, when crimes in fifty-seven varieties were shrugged off as the facts of life—and death—on the waterfront, the moral quandary that Terry and the waterfront priest face is the same one that the film and novel posed almost fifty years ago. Only now, in hindsight and, we hope, with foresight, are we able in this theatrical version to cut a lot closer to the bone.
On my way to the Brooks Atkinson a few years ago, I stopped to buy the morning papers and scanned them over a coffee-shop breakfast. The Javits Center, I read (not exactly with surprise), was a hive of labor racketeering. The waterfront, moved inland.
A carpenter’s union official, who had been ousted for daring to speak up for union democracy, had been set on fire. The mayor was quoted as saying that if the Javits Center situation was not cleaned up, “It will go the way of the Port.” And we all know what happened when Mr. Giuliani declared his intention to break the stranglehold of organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market. “They” burned part of it down.
The look has changed, the technology has changed, but the modus operandi of the old waterfront days is doing “very lovely” in the new waterfront days. And what is the waterfront, after all, if not a microcosm of the good-old-bad-old USA?
BUDD SCHULBERG
Long Island, New York
March 2001
BACKGROUND
THE PLAY TAKES PLACE in the 1950s on and around the New York-New Jersey waterfront, which includes not only the piers but all the places around them—tenements and their rooftops, bars, riverfront streets, churches, cargo ships—where dockworkers and their families work, drink, worship, fight, live, and die.
CHARACTERS
WATERFRONT REPORTER*
TERRY MALLOY, a youthful ex-pug, cousin of Johnny Friendly
JOEY DOYLE, activist dockworker (doubles with BARTENDER)
MUTT, a drunken waterfront derelict
waterfront goons
BARNEY
TRUCK
LITTLE FRANKIE
CHARLEY (THE GENT) MALLOY, Terry’s older brother
veteran longshoremen
POP DOYLE
RUNTY NOLAN
MOOSE
LUKE
TOMMY
JIMMY CONROY, Terry’s teenage protégé
FATHER PETE BARRY, waterfront priest
JOHNNY FRIENDLY, “pistol local” union boss
BIG MAC, Johnny’s hiring boss
“J.P.” MORGAN, Johnny’s loan shark
SKINS, Johnny’s bag man (doubles with GLOVER)
EDIE DOYLE, Pop’s daughter
GLOVER, a Crime Commission investigator
FATHER VINCENT O’MARA, senior priest in Fr. Barry’s church
BARTENDER
LONGSHOREMEN
INTERROGATORS’ VOICES (2)
*This play has been staged in two distinctly different ways: with fully realistic sets on Broadway or with stylized realism at the Cleveland Playhouse, and with minimal sets (a series of ramps on a virtually bare stage) at the Renegade Theater in Hoboken, New Jersey, and at Manhattan’s Theater Row Theater. With the latter, to help set the scenes, a Waterfront Reporter was added as intermittent narrator. This role may be eliminated if sets are used, although the Theater Row version is preferred.
The Waterfront Reporter was suggested by director Kelly Patton, whose minimalist approach proved especially effective in the Hoboken and Theater Row productions, where actors were used for minimal scene changes and music was used for segue of scenes and cross-fading of lights.
Although the collaborators worked harmoniously in developing the play, they had a creative difference of opinion regarding the closing scenes. Mr. Silverman prefers to end the play at the end of Scene 12, adding only Father Barry’s monologue which now opens Scene 13. Mr. Schulberg prefers including Scenes 13 and 14, essentially an Epilogue, if it is carefully and feelingly orchestrated.
ACT 1
Scene 1
A Riverfront Street
REPORTER: Did you know that only a few blocks west of here, just a short walk from Theater Row, you cross the boundary into another country, the New York waterfront—the greatest natural harbor in the world—host to the Cunard Line and the French luxury liners—and the hunting grounds of the pistol local—Four-forty-seven, The Skelly Mob. A no-man’s land. The Wild East. Where hiring bosses are recruited in Sing Sing and Dannemora. Down there they tell you not to ask questions—if you want to stay healthy. But I’m a reporter. The docks are my beat. It’s my job to ask questions. So I keep going down there looking for answers. OK, let’s get to work. We’re outside a rundown tenement, down the street from Johnny Friendly’s Bar facing the piers. It’s nightfall, in the mid 1950s.
(The cast files in. Terry Malloy enters last.)
MUTT: (wanders through muttering a mournful song) Tippi-tippi-tin, tippi-tin. … Tippi-tippi-tan, tippi-tan. …
TERRY: (entering, calling up from street) Hey Joey!
MUTT: Tippi-tippi-tan, tippi-tan. … Tippi-tippi-tan, tippi-tan. …
TERRY: Hey Joey! Hey Joey!
JOEY: (calling down from rooftop) Hey Terry! What do you want?
MUTT: Tippi-tippi-tin, tippi-tin. … Tippi-tippi-tan, tippi-tan. …
TERRY: (reaching into windbreaker for live pigeon) Look—He’s one o’ yers. I c’d tell from the band.
JOEY: Yeah? Must be Danny Boy. I been lookin’ for ’im. Lost ’im in the last race.
TERRY: He followed my birds into my coop. I figured you’d want ’im back.
JOEY: I sure do. He’s one of my best.
TERRY: Yeah, he’s a nice bird. Wanna come down ’n’ get ’im?
JOEY: Well, I don’t know. I’m in a little hot water right now. Gotta watch myself with certain people—I guess you know who.
TERRY: Look, ya want yer bird back or don’t you?
JOEY: Sure, only I’m not comin’ down to get ’im. I’m stayin’ off the streets these days, know what I mean?
TERRY: OK, so why don’t I bring ’im up to yer coop?
JOEY: Yeah, I been checkin’ on the little buggers an’ there’s nobody around. Thanks, Terry. See ya up here!
MUTT: Tippi-tippi-tin, tippi-tin. … Tippi-tippi-tan, tippi-tan. …
TERRY: (running into Mutt) What the hell—
MUTT: Jus’ me, pal—jus’ old Mutt. Got a dime fer a one-armed member of the Four-forty-seven?
TERRY: Fuck off!
MUTT: A dime fer a cuppa coffee …?
TERRY: Don’t gimme that coffee, ya juice-head!