My book report: The career that might have been

 John Stangeland, Aline MacMahon:  Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting, University of Kentucky Press, 2022

I read Martin Filler's enthusiastic review of this book in the New York Review of Books and knew I had to read it.  A fan of early 1930s movies, I could only remember seeing Aline MacMahon in two Warner Brothers classics, Five Star Final (her film debut as Edward G. Robinson's cynical secretary) and Golddiggers of 1933 where she plays Trixie Lorraine, out-of-work comedienne.  But she was far from just another WB contract player, as this book makes clear.  Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, of largely Russian-Jewish ancestry, she was a Barnard graduate and an early student of the Stanislavski method under the tutelage of Richard Boleslavsky, with a considerable New York stage presence before Hollywood ever heard of her.  Given halfway-decent material, her acting always drew praise from critics but she never became a movie star.  Partly it was her un-glamorous looks, partly a lack of commitment to the movies. 

MacMahon's contract with Warner Brothers stipulated that she would spend half of every year at home in New York, to work in the theater but perhaps more importantly to be with her husband Clarence Stein, architect, city planner and (though the author barely mentions it) a brother of Gertrude Stein.  Stangeland's book draws heavily on the letters they exchanged every day, beginning in the era when the trip from Los Angeles to New York took several days by train.  The movie money was generous enough to support their comfortable life through the worst of the Depression (when MacMahon insisted on payment in gold, anticipating the collapse of all banking) and the periods when stage work was scarce.  She was fond of Guy Kibbee but bored with the minor comedies they appeared in and longed for the stimulation of serious drama.  It didn't help that the publicity department had no clue about how to put her over, with her serious ideas and unconventional beauty (she was photographed by Cecil Beaton and sculpted by Isamu Noguchi).

Then there was her political stance somewhere to the left of liberal.  She never joined the Communist Party but associated with many organizations which turned out to be fronts.  Like many Americans in the interwar years she naively believed in the ideals of the Soviet Union, which led to subsequent blacklisting during the heyday of HUAC.  To make matters worse, Clarence Stein suffered recurring bouts of bipolarism, in and out of institutions and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy.  He died in 1975, by which time he also suffered from Alzheimer's.  The Steins had no children.  Aline MacMahon used her estate to establish the Clarence Stein Institute for Architecture with Cornell University.

There was fulfilling work at the end of her life, such as playing the Nurse to Judith Anderson's Medea in Jose Quintero's production, repeated for television in 1959.  She finally played the classics with the first Lincoln Center repertory company.  She was offered a recurring role on All in the Family, as Archie Bunker's foil, but it didn't interest her and seems to have been reworked for Beatrice Arthur.  

This is probably the only biography of Aline MacMahon we will have, and I wish it were better.  The writing, described by the reviewer as "graceful," could better be described as "serviceable."  Evidently nobody proofreads manuscripts anymore, even at university presses on books that sell for forty dollars.  People share a yoke, not a yolk.  Coriolanus's mother is Volumnia, not Volumina.  As for the punctuation, well, it's a disappearing art.  I see Mr. Stangeland has also written a life of Warren William.  Maybe I'll borrow it from the library.