Gil Rodin sent his nephew to the Reinhardt Workshop, a performing-arts school run by the towering Austrian émigré director Max Reinhardt, who had settled in L.A.. Reinhardt had made a bewitching adaptation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which featured the film début of Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney’s breakthrough role as Puck, but his subsequent projects had sputtered out, and the workshop was struggling to stay afloat. Still, Rodin prospered under the genial tutelage of Reinhardt and his wife, Helene Thimig. When, in 1941, Rodin performed in an evening of Shakespeare scenes, the émigré newspaper Aufbau raved that his Puck outdid Rooney’s. After Reinhardt’s death, in New York, in 1943, a memorial event was held for him in L.A. The speakers included Mann, de Havilland, Edward G. Robinson, Marlene Dietrich, and the thirteen-year-old Rodin, who recited a poem in honor of his teacher.
Rodin began winning roles in Hollywood movies. He played a traumatized Dutch refugee boy in the 1942 film “Pied Piper,” which, as it happens, received a positive review in Mann’s diary (“gut”). Rodin also appeared in “The Song of Bernadette,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” and such anti-Nazi vehicles as “The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler” and “The Master Race.” One of his most memorable outings was in Mervyn LeRoy’s short film “The House I Live In,” a plea for tolerance that was released in 1945 and won an honorary Oscar. It stars Frank Sinatra as himself. After recording “If You Are But a Dream” in a studio, Sinatra goes outside to grab a smoke and discovers a gang of boys beating up a Jewish kid. Rodin plays one of the bullies. The following dialogue ensues:
SINATRA: You must be a bunch of those Nazi werewolves I’ve been reading about.
KID: Mister, are you screwy?
SINATRA: Not me, I’m an American!
RODIN: Well, whaddya think we are?
SINATRA: Nazis!
Sinatra sets the kids straight and serenades them with the title number, by the leftist firebrands Abel Meeropol and Earl Robinson: “The children in the playground / The faces that I see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.” Sinatra sings it well, but Paul Robeson sang it better.
Rodin gave up acting in his late teens, preferring to bury himself in books and music. An aunt who lived across the street from the Sontags, in the Valley, had identified Susan as a suitably bright friend for him. The two had in common not only a fixation on everything modern—they regularly attended the Evenings on the Roof series, where Stravinsky was a regular—but also same-sex attraction. Together, they explored L.A.’s gay scene, lurking at the Flamingo Club, in West Hollywood, and the Tropical Village, in Santa Monica. In the Sontag archive can be found a charming five-page dictionary of gay slang, with definitions for “bi,” “drag,” “butch,” “daisy chain,” “rim,” and “69.” Once, Sontag, Rodin, and Marum, who was straight but adventurous, attempted what they deemed an “orgy,” with embarrassing and unerotic results. This happened around the same time as the visit to Mann. That Mann himself had written stories on gay themes added to the piquancy of the encounter. Sontag’s first story about the visit states, in a charming euphemism, “We were lovers of Thomas Mann, not of each other.”
Rodin and Sontag drifted apart in the early fifties, when they were both students at the University of Chicago. (Sontag had graduated high school at the age of fifteen, and she and Rodin had visited Mann while home from college for the holidays.) One source of strain was Sontag’s abrupt marriage, in 1951, to Philip Rieff, one of her instructors at the University of Chicago. “We were both pretty closeted,” Rodin told me, “and that added to the friction.” The decade was, of course, a nightmarish time to be gay. Rodin himself got married in 1961, to the psychologist Jill Schwab, and raised four children. He went into academia, teaching philosophy and literature at various institutions; he also ran an art-movie house in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Later, he moved back to Southern California and became the dean of the Weekend College at Mount St. Mary’s University. For his eightieth birthday, his daughter and sons rented the Silent Movie Theatre, in L.A., and staged a Merrill Rodin festival.
