Tough Guy

One summer morning in the early '20s, a tough little boy hung by his fingers from a tenement cornice, five stories above a littered Bronx street. Leaning on their window sills, Jules Garfinkle's neighbors gawked and gasped. Jules pulled himself back up on the roof and proudly collected his dime bet. Except for fighting in the streets, he liked nothing better than making easy money by showing off.

Jules's mother died when he was seven; his father, a presser in a garment factory, never found time to curb his son's surly, defiant spirit. At last, street-brawling, hooky-playing Jules was sent to Bronx P.S. 45, where the principal, famed Child Rehabilitator Angelo Patri, was doing his able best to teach unruly kids.

"It Stinks." Jules responded to Patri's treatment. At 14 he won an oratorical contest. Saving his fists for juveriile boxing tournaments, he began studying dramatics. Within a few years, he was playing minor roles in the Group Theater's Broadway hits written by Clifford Odets --Waiting for Lefty, Golden Boy.

Hollywood noticed Jules in 1938, changed his name to John Garfield, and launched him on a type-cast screen career of playing himself--the narrow-eyed, rock-hard underdog. In his first movie, one of his lines came easily: "It stinks." He put a jarring realism into his tough-guy roles --in such movies as They Made Me a Criminal, He Ran All the Way, Tortilla Flat. The critics cheered him, and Hollywood's pinkos took him in tow. Soon, Garfield was lending his name to all sorts of Communist-front crusades.

Last year, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Garfield said: "I have always hated Communism ... I am not, never have been a [Party] member." The committee was not entirely convinced, but he was already a sick man who had suffered a heart attack and been warned to take it easy.

Like a Meteor. After starring in a Manhattan revival of Golden Boy (TIME, March 24), Garfield recently decided to come completely clean. He wrote out a statement of how Hollywood's Communists had fooled him. In a brooding mood, he quarreled with his wife, left her and his two children and moved into a hotel.

One day last week, three cops, summoned by a doctor who had already made his report, forced open the door of a Gramercy Park apartment. Inside stood a blonde exactress who sobbed that her dinner companion of the night before had complained of feeling "awful" and had come to her place to rest. Behind her in the bedroom lay the body of John Garfield. After 39 years, the tough guy's heart had given up.

For two days, the actor lay in state in a Manhattan funeral parlor. A crowd of fans estimated at 10,000, most of them women, waited in line to file past his oaken bier. Greying Playwright Odets, himself a repentant ex-Communist, came in, looked down, turned away to bury his face in his hands. Out in the street two men began slugging each other; one of them, someone reported, had called Garfield a Communist. But Jules Garfinkle was past caring. "He came like a meteor." said Rabbi Louis Newman at the Reformed Hebrew service, "and like a meteor he departed."

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