John Garfield

Jacob Garfinkle (Yiddish: יעקבֿ גאַרפֿינקל) was born in a small apartment on Rivington Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side, to David and Hannah Garfinkle, Russian Jewish immigrants, and grew up in the heart of the Yiddish Theater District. In infancy, a middle name—Julius—was added, and for the rest of his life those who knew him well called him Julie. His father, a clothes presser and part-time cantor, struggled to make a living and to provide even marginal comfort for his small family. When Garfield was five, his brother Max was born. Their mother never fully recovered from what was described as a "difficult" pregnancy and birth. She died two years later, and the young boys were sent to live with various relatives, all poor, scattered across the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx. Several of the relatives lived in tenements in a section of East Brooklyn called Brownsville, and there Garfield lived in one house and slept in another. At school, he was judged a poor reader and speller, deficits that were aggravated by irregular attendance. He would later say of his time on the streets, that he learned "all the meanness, all the toughness it's possible for kids to acquire."

His father remarried and moved to the West Bronx, where Garfield joined a series of gangs. Much later, he would recall: "Every street had its own gang. That's the way it was in poor sections... the old safety in numbers." He soon became a gang leader. At this time, people started to notice his ability to mimic well-known performers, both physically and facially. He also began to hang out and eventually spar at a boxing gym on Jerome Avenue. At some point, he contracted scarlet fever (it was diagnosed later in adulthood), causing permanent damage to his heart and causing him to miss a lot of school. After he was expelled three times and expressed a wish to quit school altogether, his father and stepmother sent him to P.S. 45, a school for difficult children. It was under the guidance of the school's principal—the educator Angelo Patri—that he was introduced to acting. Noticing Garfield's tendency to stammer, Patri assigned him to a speech therapy class taught by a charismatic teacher named Margaret O'Ryan. She gave him acting exercises and made him memorize and deliver speeches in front of the class and, as he progressed, in front of school assemblies. O'Ryan thought he had a natural talent and cast him in school plays. She encouraged him to sign up for a citywide debating competition sponsored by The New York Times. To his own surprise, he took second prize.

With Patri and O'Ryan's encouragement, he took acting lessons at a drama school that was part of The Heckscher Foundation and began to appear in their productions. At one of the latter, he received back-stage congratulations and an offer of support from the Yiddish actor Jacob Ben-Ami, who recommended him to the American Laboratory Theatre. Funded by the Theatre Guild, "the Lab" had contracted with Richard Boleslavski to stage its experimental productions and with Russian actress and expatriate Maria Ouspenskaya to supervise classes in acting. Former members of the Moscow Art Theatre, they were the first proponents of Konstantin Stanislavski's 'system' in the United States, which soon developed into what came to be known as "the Method". Garfield took morning classes and began volunteering time at the Lab after hours, auditing rehearsals, building and painting scenery, and doing crew work. He would later view this time as beginning his apprenticeship in the theater. Among the people becoming disenchanted with the Guild and turning to the Lab for a more radical, challenging environment were Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, Franchot Tone, Cheryl Crawford and Harold Clurman. In varying degrees, all would become influential in Garfield's later career.

After a stint with Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theater and a short period of vagrancy, involving hitchhiking, freight hopping, picking fruit, and logging in the U.S. Northwest, (Preston Sturges conceived the film Sullivan's Travels after hearing Garfield tell of his hobo adventures), Garfield made his Broadway debut in 1932 in a play called Lost Boy. It ran for only two weeks but gave Garfield something critically important for an actor struggling to break into the theater: a credit.

There is a claim that he was a patron of Polly Adler's bordello or brothel in New York.

Garfield married Roberta Seidman in February 1935. She had been a member of the Communist Party. They had three children: Katherine Garfield (1938 – March 18, 1945) who died of an allergic reaction, David Patton Garfield who became an actor and later a film editor, and Julie Garfield (born 1946) who became an actress.

In 1954, his widow Roberta married motion picture and labor lawyer Sidney Cohn, who died in 1991; Roberta died in a Los Angeles nursing home in 2004. At the time of Roberta's death, Julie Garfield told the Los Angeles Times that her mother was embittered over Garfield's treatment by studio executives, who she believed, "had used Garfield as a scapegoat to take attention from others in Hollywood because he had 'formed his own production company and they felt threatened by him.'"

Long involved in liberal politics, Garfield supported the Committee for the First Amendment, which opposed governmental investigation of communist activity in Hollywood. When called to testify in 1951 before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Garfield declined to name Communist Party members or followers, testifying that he knew none in the film industry. Garfield claimed to reject communism and, just prior to his death in an effort to redeem himself, wrote that he had been duped by communist ideology in an unpublished article titled "I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook", a reference to Garfield's boxing films. However, his forced testimony before the committee had severely damaged his reputation. He was listed in Red Channels and allegedly barred from future employment by Hollywood studio bosses for the remainder of his career.

With film work scarce, Garfield returned to Broadway and starred in a 1952 revival of Golden Boy, finally cast in the lead role that had been denied to him years before.

Near the end of his life, in an effort to clear his name, Garfield drafted an article for Look magazine in which he would denounce communism without providing names. His lawyer advised him to concede he had been duped into contributing time and money to communist front groups. Garfield met with the FBI to press his case, but at the meeting, the FBI showed him a dossier on his wife Roberta (known as "Robbe"), which included her old Communist Party membership card and canceled checks to events sponsored by the party. The FBI offered to clear him if he would sign a statement asserting that his wife was a communist. Garfield responded with an angry expletive and left the meeting. Writer-director Abraham Polonsky, who worked with Garfield on two films, stated that Garfield "defended his street boy's honor and they killed him for it."