The "tragedy' of a Polish actress

John Guare's new play, 3 Kinds of Exile, touches on the tragic downfall of the acclaimed Polish classical and film actress Elzbieta Czyżewska (1938-2010). As Carol Rocamora describes the story in BSR, Czyżewska's troubles began when she met, fell in love with and married the journalist David Halberstam, then the New York Times correspondent in Warsaw. When Halberstam was expelled in the mid-1960s for his sharp criticisms of Poland's Communist regime, Czyżewska loyally followed him to New York.

In the U.S., Carol writes, the language barrier and Elzbieta's strong foreign accent, not to mention her unwieldy name, doomed her acting career. (She couldn't even get a role in a film based on her own life.) Then her marriage fell apart. Ultimately this highly intelligent woman wound up "alone, unemployable and destitute on the streets of New York." (To read Carol's essay, click here).

Reflect on this narrative for a moment. In Communist Poland, Czyżewska was one of a relative handful of Eastern Europeans who enjoyed creative expression. She was also one of the relatively few Eastern Europeans to escape the heavy hand of Communism long before the Iron Curtain finally fell in 1989. Freedom, it seems was her undoing.

In Guare's play, Czyżewska attributes her problems to "legendary bad luck." But isn't it also possible that she owed her stage and film success in Poland to remarkably good luck? How many other creative voices were squelched in Eastern Europe while Elzbieta was at the peak of her career? Was this woman's glass half-empty or half-full?

Cary Grant's solution

I think here of Blanka and Jiri Zizka, a pair of repressed young theatrical innovators who escaped Czechoslovakia in the 1970s for the artistic freedom of the West. They arrived in Philadelphia with only a rudimentary grasp of English and barely more assets than the ideas in their heads. In 1979 they parlayed $600 into a production of Orwell's Animal Farm in an illegal loft; today their Wilma Theater is a $3 million-a-year company located on a prime piece of Broad Street real estate.

Good for the Zizkas, you say. But how could an established foreign actress like Elzbieta Czyżewska change course and revive her career in America?

Well, she could have changed her name, for one thing. Archibald Leach changed his to Cary Grant. Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund became Paul Muni. Frances Ethel Gumm became Judy Garland. Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta became Lady Gaga.

Or she could have kept her name, however awkward or unwieldy it may have sounded. Gina Lollobrigida kept hers when she arrived in Hollywood from Italy. Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal kept theirs. Grace Gonglewski kept hers. (So, come to think of it, did Dan Rottenberg, despite my father's fears that the family name would impede my writing career.)

Lee Miller's reinvention

At the age of 28, Elzbieta Czyżewska wasn't too old to learn a new language, as the Zizkas did in their 20s. Or, if she lacked linguistic proficiency, she could have evolved in new creative directions. When Gina Lollobrigida's status as a sex symbol faded after she turned 40, she launched a new career as a photographer. The model Lee Miller reinvented herself successively as a photographer, war correspondent and gourmet chef.

For better or worse, personal reinvention is what life in a free society is all about. The days when folks spent their lives working for the Post Office or the Pennsylvania Railroad or the Evening Bulletin are gone. Seemingly eternal corporate fixtures like Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Standard Oil have all morphed into something else. What you did for a living in the past no longer commits you to the future.

Economically that can be a scary prospect. But creative people ought to see change as an exciting prospect.

Instead of perceiving new opportunities in her new homeland, Elzbieta Czyżewska fixated on the risks. She's surely not the first performer whose later life was overshadowed by the glittering promise of her youth (Van Cliburn comes to mind).

Whom to blame?

Would Elzbieta have been better off if she'd never known extraordinary success at a young age? Or suppose she had known success but had remained in Poland? Would her life there ultimately have been more fulfilling than, say, that of the Zizkas in Philadelphia?

Or if Elzbieta's life was a tragedy, who is to blame? I suppose we could fault Poland's Communist government for failing to prepare Elzbieta for a life of freedom. But you don't hire Karl Marx to teach a course in entrepreneurship at Wharton. In a free society, at least, at some point individuals must accept the concept that change is difficult but also inevitable— and make their own choices accordingly.

Longstreth's choice

The late Philadelphia City Councilman and mayoral candidate Thacher Longstreth was once a hotshot ad salesman for one of America's leading publications, Life magazine. In 1954, when he was 33, Life's parent company, Time Inc., offered him a job as publisher of a new magazine then in its initial planning stages, Sports Illustrated.

Had Longstreth taken that job and made a success of it, he would have been on track to become chief executive of Time Inc. some day. But he instinctively recognized that ultimately he derived his greatest strength not from his work but from his community. So instead of moving to New York to climb Time Inc.'s corporate ladder, he quit Time Inc. and stayed in Philadelphia.

Each of us makes choices without an entirely clear fix on the future. Elzbieta Czyżewska made hers; Thacher Longstreth made his.

Incidentally, has anyone heard from Time Inc. lately?♦


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