THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2015 by James Grissom

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint “Youth” from New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001 by Czesław Miłosz, copyright © 1988, 1995, 2001 by Czesław Miłosz Royalties, Inc. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grissom, James.

Follies of God : Tennessee Williams and the Women of the Fog / James Grissom. — First edition.

pages     cm

ISBN 978-0-307-26569-2 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-1-101-87465-3 (eBook)

1. Williams, Tennessee, 1911–1983—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Characters and characteristics in literature. 3. Women in literature.

I. Title.

PS3545.I5365Z666  2015       812′.54—dc23       2014021046

Jacket photograph courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby’s

Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Illustrations

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Acknowledgments

Four women made the writing of this book possible:

Winnie Hubbard Grissom

Marian Seldes

Dr. Dale V. Atkins

Rose Byrnes

And one made it publishable:

Victoria Wilson

I have been very lucky. I am a multi-souled man, because I have offered my soul to so many women, and they have filled it, repaired it, sent it back to me for use.

—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

Illustrations

1.1  Tennessee Williams in Jackson Square, 1977 (Christopher R. Harris)

2.1  Marlon Brando and Maureen Stapleton on the set of The Fugitive Kind, 1959 (Photofest)

2.2  Tennessee Williams and Maureen Stapleton, 1975 (Photofest)

2.3  The garden behind St. Louis Cathedral

3.1  Eva Le Gallienne, c. 1920 (Photofest)

4.1  Clarence Brown, 1940s (Photofest)

5.1  Miriam Hopkins, 1930s (Photofest)

5.2  Lillian Gish on Cielo Drive, 1940s (Photofest)

6.1  Lillian Gish, mid-1930s (Photofest)

6.2  Lillian and Dorothy Gish, 1960s (Diane Arbus)

6.3  John Gielgud, 1970s (John Hedegcoe)

7.1  Jessica Tandy, 1947 (Carl Van Vechten)

7.2  Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Lillian Gish, John Gielgud, 1966 (Corbis)

7.3  Irene Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, unidentified man, 1947 (Ruth Orkin)

8.1  Lois Smith, 1955 (Photofest)

8.2  Laurette Taylor, 1940s (Photofest)

8.3  Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie in The Hard Way; Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette, 1943 (Photofest)

9.1  Marian Seldes, 1960 (Getty Images)

9.2  Hermione Baddeley and Mildred Dunnock in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, 1963 (Photofest)

9.3  Tallulah Bankhead, 1930s (Photofest)

10.1  Frances Sternhagen, 1970s (Photofest)

10.2  Julie Harris in The Member of the Wedding, 1950 (Photofest)

10.3  Isak Dinesen and Carson McCullers, 1959 (Corbis)

10.4  José Quintero, 1950s (Photofest)

10.5  Kim Hunter, early 1950s (Corbis)

11.1  William Inge, 1950s (Photofest)

11.2  Elia Kazan and William Inge, 1961 (Photofest)

12.1  Barbara Baxley, 1960 (Photofest)

13.1  Geraldine Page, 1961 (Photofest)

13.2  Geraldine Page, 1962 (Photofest)

13.3  Luchino Visconti, 1936 (Horst P. Horst)

15.1  Mildred Natwick, mid-1940s (Photofest)

15.2  Jo Van Fleet, 1957 (Photofest)

16.1  Kim Stanley, 1960s

16.2  Katharine Cornell, 1940s (Photofest)

16.3  Lee Strasberg, 1950s (Photofest)

16.4  Kim Stanley and Paul Massie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, 1958 (BEI Images/Rex USA)

17.1  Truman Capote, c. late 1940s (Photofest)

17.2  Ellis Rabb, 1970s

17.3  Rosemary Harris, 1950s

17.4  Eva Le Gallienne and Rosemary Harris, 1975 (Photofest)

18.1  Katharine Hepburn, 1955 (Photofest)

18.2  Katharine Hepburn’s letter to author, 1990

18.3  Katharine Hepburn, 1959 (Photofest)

18.4  Stella Adler, 1943 (Photofest)

18.5  Irene Worth, 1950s (Photofest)

18.6  Tennessee Williams, early 1940s (Photofest)

One

“PERHAPS YOU can be of some help to me.”

These were the first words Tennessee Williams spoke to me in that initial phone call to my parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was September of 1982, a fact I noted in a small blue book. The book was new and had been purchased for an upcoming test in World History that I would not be taking because Tennessee invited me to lunch in New Orleans, and I accepted.

I know that pleasantries were exchanged, and he laughed a lot—a deep, guttural, silly theatrical laugh—but the first quotation attributable to Tennessee Williams to me was the one I wrote in my small blue book.

Perhaps you can be of some help to me.

How could I be of help to Tennessee Williams? How, when in fact I had written to him, several months before, seeking his help? From a battered paperback copy of Who’s Who in the American Theatre, I had found the address of his agent (Audrey Wood, c/o International Famous Agency, 1301 Avenue of the Americas), and had written a letter—lengthy and containing a photograph, and, I’m thankful, lost to us forever—asking for his advice on a writing career. I wrote that his work had meant the most to me; that I was considering a career in the theater. I also enclosed two short stories, both written for a class taken at Louisiana State University. It was a time I recall as happy: I was writing, and exploiting the reserves of the school’s library and its liberal sharing policy with other schools. I was poring over books and papers that related to Tennessee and other writers I admired.

Tennessee (he told me, by the end of that first phone call, to call him Tenn) was in a horrible “knot of time.” He asked me to imagine a knot of time, but time for me at that point was something from which I was seeking favors, something I was approaching. I did not feel a part of time yet, which can be somewhat attributable to growing up and living in Baton Rouge, a city detached from time, thought, or curiosity. Tenn acknowledged with a laugh that Baton Rouge was a city encased in gelatin.

Tenn, however, could see and feel a literal knot of time and people and places encircling him, choking him, pursuing him. While he told me that he could no longer dream, due to age, a lack of flexibility both glandular and creative, and the “monumental accretion of toxins self-administered,” he was, comically, fully equipped to endure nightmares. His most frequent nightmare, one he had endured the night before he chose to call me, consisted of his slow, painful death by means of a massive knot, bearing the image of an enormous boa constrictor as well as an “artistic representation of a penis,” encircling him and squeezing him into darkness and death. The scales of this boa were faces of people and covers of books and posters of plays (both his and others’), travel brochures of trips planned, taken, aborted. The faces of the people and the blurbs on the books and the posters all posed the same question: Where have you been?

This time knot was for Tenn a threat, an indictment, and a motivator, and he took it as a primarily positive occurrence. “This thing, this horror,” he told me, “may very well allow me to write at my previous level of power, and it appears to be telling me to plunge into my memories, to plunder them. And those that are most vivid to me are in Louisiana.”

Tenn believed that writers, all artists, had several homes. There was the biological place of birth; the home in which one grew up, bore witness, fell apart. There was also the place where the “epiphanies” began—a school, a church, perhaps a bed. Rockets were launched and an identity began to be set. There was the physical location where a writer sat each day and scribbled and hunted and pecked and dreamed and drank and cursed his way into a story or a play or a novel. Most importantly, however, there was the emotional, invisible, self-invented place where work began—what Tenn called his “mental theater,” a cerebral proscenium stage upon which his characters walked and stumbled and remained locked forever in his memory, ready, he felt, to be called into action and help him again.

“I’ve got to get home.”

When Tennessee Williams was young, when he could dream and felt that time was a destination awaiting his arrival, he would repair to this mental theater, a safe place that operated under his management, where he could close his eyes and open the stage curtains and be not only home, but working.

If you’re a writer, you write. If you don’t, you’re dead. You have no home, no reason to be offered a seat at any table, and no reason to live.

No play written by Tennessee Williams, however, got its bearings until a fog rolled across the boards, from which a female form emerged.

“I do not know why this is,” Tenn confessed to me, “but there is a premonitory moment before a woman, an important, powerful woman, enters my subconscious, and this moment is announced by the arrival of fog. Perhaps it is some detritus of my brain belching forth both waste and a woman. I do not know, but it comes with a smell, and it is the crisp, pungent smell of radiators hissing and clanking and rattling in rooms in New Orleans and St. Louis and New York. Rooms in which I wrote and dreamed and starved and fucked and cried and read and prayed, and perhaps all that action and all that steam creates both this fog and this woman.

“I have not seen the fog in years.”

Tenn’s primary activity, he told me, was “faking the fog.” When he closed his eyes and summoned his mental theater, he could see the scuffed boards of the stage, the frayed, slow-moving curtains, smell the dust, and feel the excitement of drama forthcoming.

“When I was young,” Tenn told me, “I never sought out a woman, a character. She came to me. She had a story to tell, urgently, violently, fervently. I listened and I identified, and I became her most ardent supporter and witness. I cannot get a witness for me and I cannot be a witness for anyone! I cannot find a woman who will speak to me on my stage.”

So Tenn sought the women elsewhere, searched for fog in movie theaters, on television screens, and in the pages of magazines, in stacks of photographs. He failed to find fog in literature, because, he explained, “I am a very visual person. I need to have the shape and movement and intent of a woman before me.”

In his homes, in hotel rooms, in lodges and athletic clubs and as a guest of others, Tenn would pull out his typewriter or his pad of paper (which he called the “pale judgment” awaiting his ministrations), move close to a television set, and wait for a woman to speak to him. With friends like Maria St. Just and Jane Smith, whose love for and patience with him were boundless, he would sit in movie theaters for up to three consecutive showings, because a “wisp” of fog was emanating from the screen.

“I have not seen the fog in years,” Tenn repeated. “But your letter made me believe it still existed.”

Writing early in the morning or deep into the night, Tenn kept his television set on, the volume set to low, a radio or a phonograph playing the music of people who had led him to fog-enshrouded stages in the past. An image would come across the screen and catch his eye, the volume would be raised, and a voice would speak to him. Tenn had notes and diagrams and plot outlines scrawled on envelopes, napkins, hotel stationery, menus from restaurants and diners and airport lounges. Once, he delicately constructed a plot outline on a paper tablecloth, which the waiter neatly folded and presented to him along with the check.

He consulted psychics, tarot-card readers, tea-leaf diviners. He placed himself in tubs of warm water and tried to experience rebirth, so that he could emerge from his liquid prison young and alert and full of creative and glandular flexibility, free forever of the impending time knot.

Time and the ever-present pale judgment haunted him, jeered at him, reproached him. In the home of a friend, a fellow writer, he once walked over to a desk holding a ream of white paper and violently pushed it to the floor, then shoved it from view behind a desk. “I will have none of that from you!” he admonished the pile of paper, and went on with his visit.

Where have you been? the scales of the time knot asked him.

“Well, where the hell have you been?” Tenn once yelled out. “I was very loyal to my women, to my plays, to the construct of words. Where are they? Oh, they’re all on tour, baby, and I’m here with silence and clean air and a condemned theater. My heart and eyes are failing, but those gals are doing fine.” In Tennessee’s mind, Amanda and Blanche and Alma and Serafina and the Princess were errant daughters, each of whom who had been carefully listened to and coddled and husbanded by him, their “queer Lear,” and were now on stages telling their stories—the stories that had come to him in the fog—and he was off on his heath, yelling and whining and drinking and fighting off the time knot.

“Sometimes,” he told me during that first phone call, “I think the fog has been replaced by something else. I feel that there is a wind tunnel inside of my head, and inside my head, within my very brain, there are leaves flying about, and each leaf is an idea.”

When I finally met Tenn, he placed two fingers on his forehead, as if pushing against the pressure within, and he told me that the nights were spent scurrying after these leaves, trying to catch and collect them and find some meaning and comfort in them. He had also come to believe that the specks in his eyes, darting and floating, were reflections of these leaves moving across his brain, and if he could only marshal them, calm them down, and make the many dots one whole entity, he would have a character, a play, a woman, an idea.

“I am incapable of containing it,” he told me, “this mulch, this confetti, until I can find some form in which to place it. A shadow box of the cerebellum; a case of curiosities plucked from my subconscious; a brilliantly white page framed in gold that I can approach and admire for its order and cleanness and say to it, in front of it, ‘Yes, I have something to add.’ ”

Because he believed that the spots in his eyes, the floaters in his vitreous humor, were actually reflections of his cerebral leaf storm, Tenn took to staring into white tablecloths, looking upon blank white walls, and facing the sky, blinking and rolling his eyes, hoping to focus and find a connection.

“I’ve heard of connecting the dots,” he laughed, “but this is ridiculous.

“I try to approach the whiteness of the page, the pale judgment, as if I were a neophyte priest, and the paper is the host,” Tenn confessed to me. “I approach it gingerly and ask it to be patient. I see upon it the darting leaves in my brain, and I pray they will alight on the page and have some meaning. Or I touch it gently, a frightened queer faced with his first female breast, a nipple that seeks attention and ministration. ‘Forgive me,’ I say to it, ‘I don’t know my way around these parts.’

“I start with anything—one lone sentence—and I ask the leaves, I ask the page, for the next line, the next phrase.”

Sentence after sentence would follow, and Tenn would write them down, fervently, eagerly. Later, once we had met, once he had decided to trust me, I would write them down for him, and the bits of papers, the pages yanked from journals, and the old bills and envelopes—all littered with words—would pile up.

“I think we can help each other,” Tenn told me in that first phone call.

Tenn admitted that he was repairing to bars, where jukeboxes sat in dusty corners (“I judge a place by the particular pattern of its dust,” he told me: “dust often tells me I can be comfortable … or not”), and play, incessantly, songs that gave him something, that took him somewhere, that might ignite the clanking and rattling of radiators and produce a fog. Fumbling for coins in the sparse afternoons of dark, dusty bars, he listened to “If I Didn’t Care,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” “Haunted Heart,” “Our Finest Hour,” “The Long and Winding Road.”

“One should discard immediately from one’s life anyone who does not cry at the sound of these songs,” Tenn told me. “These songs hurt the heart.”

Once, he told me, he was driven to write on a series of napkins a letter to his mother, after hearing the Andrews Sisters sing “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time.”

I think of organza and linen. My nose pressed into her bosom, the slightly singed smell of where the iron pressed into the fabric. My face rubbed raw by the fabric.

Comfort/discomfort.

I am not moving.

Tell me something. Tell me anything.

When did you realize that to survive, you would need to stumble in the dark rooms of reality until you found a door, to a closet perhaps, that, once opened, held a dream, or a memory, and suddenly, Mama, you could face grocery lists and altar-society meetings, and congregation with my father and … me?

Tell me, Mama. What did you give to me, and where is it now?

Tenn believed that if he could get back to the intersection of Royal and Conti streets, or Dumaine and Bourbon, he could connect all those floaters in his brain, all those leaves, which he came to believe were memories unacknowledged, unrecognized.

Another night, sleepless, anxious, afraid of a visitation of the time knot, Tenn saw an actress on television and had an idea. He would later relay it to me, and I would write it on the menu of a praline shop.

A young man circles a small Southern town. Everyone has seen him. The older woman, living alone, nurses her memories of the young man she once loved, who died, taking with him her unrequited love, her desire for the surcease provided by the flesh, and a dark secret. Is this man walking about a ghost? He appears to the young man who sits in the public park at night, because he has heard there are assignations among the magnolias, buttocks pressed against the cool bases of the Confederate statues. This young man speaks to the phantom, who never responds, and who never submits to his longing. Is he real? Is he the desire most wanted and never found? The town becomes afraid of the young man. Is he responsible for the vandalisms, the small robberies, the sound of shattering glass in the still night?

Tenn would stare into tablecloths, bare walls, the noonday sky, and remember: “This is the white of the pale judgment which faces me every day. I think of piles of cocaine, beautifully white and pure, like sand on the beaches where I was beautiful and the days were long and fat with purpose. I can look into the cocaine, as I look into a white tablecloth, and I can see the spots that dance in my eyes, and they are like the leaves that whirl in my brain. If I can only connect them. If I can only find a means to use them.

“I pray to the emptiness that is the page,” Tenn said, “and I pray to the emptiness that is my mind, and I ask that I be filled.”

Tenn paused, then continued.

“Now, I can recall a summer in Italy, in a small pensione, simple and rustic, with the most luxurious towels. No grand hotel of Europe ever had such plush towels, as white as this tablecloth, fresh-smelling, nubby. I remember that the shower had a loud, slow drain, and as you began to rub your body down with the towel, you would stand ankle-deep in warm, soapy water. The air was full of the smell of castile soap—those bars that are as large and as heavy as Baptist hymnals—and the sweet smell of onions and peppers slowly cooking in olive oil. When I would begin to dry my face, I would press the towel against my eyes and I would feel—and be—totally blind. There was blackness as stark as this cloth is white, and I was ankle-deep in the water, and I was casting off the poisons of the previous night, so I was not strong or sure on my feet, and the smells were there, and I would suddenly hear a woman’s voice, hear her words, and she was reciting her Rosary, in Italian, a language that was still new to me, so I could only decipher a few words of her prayers, but I could hear, I could feel, her intent, her desire, and I could begin to write. That voice ultimately became the voice of Serafina [the primary character in The Rose Tattoo], and I just followed that voice from prayer to prayer, from room to room, and that woman and I completed that play, on a different evening, in a different setting, on a night that was balmy and smelled of lemons.”

The memory of balmy evenings forced Tenn to reopen, then reclose his eyes, and remember a New Orleans summer, in a room where the shuttered windows were open to the humidity and the noise of the city, burning peanuts, hot chicory, and a blank page in front of him, but fog incoming. “I was poor and I was parched,” Tenn laughed, “and there’s a prayer everyone has memorized, and I took my last coin and I went to a Rexall’s and I bought a lemonade, extra ice, and I drank it fast and hard, and it hurt and it healed, and I could only think Rapture! And Blanche DuBois had entered the picture, danced her way into the blank whiteness, and begun to live.

“Tell me,” Tenn had wondered, “is it that I can’t find the words? Is it that I have nothing more to share or to care deeply about? Or am I husbanding my niggardly treasures because I would rather have them surprise and comfort me in the deep of the night, scribbled on some scrap of paper, rather than fill the vast whiteness?

“I need you to understand three things,” he told me. “Find the memories. Build words from those memories. Trust me, they will come. Finally, recognizing the worth of the words, separate the wheat from the chaff. That is all.”

“That is all?” I asked.

“That is more than enough, baby! That is enough for a lifetime of fog and time knots.”

Plans were made. I was to meet Tenn in Jackson Square, in front of St. Louis Cathedral (“Louie’s Place,” he called it), and we would have lunch, we would talk about writing, I would help him connect the dots that were flying about.

“I need to know that I mattered,” Tenn told me, “and your letter led me to feel that I did. Surely, there must be others who can tell me that I mattered, that I was of some value.” Tenn paused to cite, apparently from memory, two vituperative quotes from theater critics who had come to their separate conclusions that Tennessee Williams had never mattered; his work had been overrated; it was time to reevaluate him or discard him forever.

“One man felt it charitable,” he continued, “to assume that the real Tennessee Williams had died, and all of my later plays, my work of two decades, had been perpetuated by a clever epigone, a paid hack carrying on the industrial entity known as Tennessee Williams!” He laughed and hacked a bit, recovered, and muttered, using a term I hadn’t heard since childhood Sundays in revivals, “Good Lord, can I get a witness?”

“Do you need a witness?” I asked.

“Yes,” Tenn quickly responded, “and I’ll be yours. I’ve read your work and I’ll champion it, and I’ll be your witness.”

He was full of energy now.

“Here is the importance of bearing witness. We do not grow alone, talents do not prosper in a hothouse of ambition and neglect and hungry anger; love does not arrive by horseback or prayer or good intentions. We need the eyes, the arms, and the witness of others to grow, to know that we have existed, that we have mattered, that we have made our mark. And each of us has a distinct mark that colors our surroundings, that flavors the recipe of ‘experience’ in which we find ourselves; but we remain blind, without identity, until someone witnesses us.

“How does the pretty girl know she is pretty? Her witnesses testify to the fact that she is unique, that her peers lack something in pigment or stature. How can we know that we have talent until our words or the manner in which we speak them moves someone? Makes them think outside the puny lines into which they’ve colored themselves? We can’t know that we have the power to break these lines apart with thought until we have our first witness, that person who tells us what we have done.

“So we grow from being watched and felt and we grow from watching others, and we have to fight our way out of the blind alleys that we create by believing that a witness can be snorted from a mirror or can reside on the tip of a syringe or come tumbling from the mouth of a paid witness.

“No,” he uttered, seemingly defeated, “I’m afraid that we can’t continue to run from each other; I’m afraid that only in the company of these people, all of our witnesses, many of whom frighten us, can we learn who we are and what we’ve done.

“Jim, be my witness.”

The following morning I got into a 1977 Chevy Malibu and drove the eighty miles to New Orleans from Baton Rouge with the memory of something Tennessee Williams had said to me.

“Perhaps you can be of some help to me.”

HERE IS what I took with me on that trip from Baton Rouge to New Orleans: three small blue exam booklets. Soft-blue covers and lined pages. I took Berol pens. I did not take a tape recorder, because I was not a journalist and this was not a “story” or an “interview.”

I wrote everything down. I am a dutiful student and there have been complaints that I rarely look up and into the face of my subject. I wrote when I was with Tennessee, and I wrote when I was away from him. I researched everything he mentioned or told me to study.

The blue books multiplied, and ultimately more than twenty were filled with notes. The books have long since deteriorated, their staples fallen away, their pages thinned and yellowed. The words from those books were transferred to pages typed on an IBM Selectric, then to pages created through an IBM word processor and on to Compaq and Dell computers. Some of the pages were given to those about whom Tenn spoke.

That day in September was slightly muggy, so I used the air conditioner in my car, and people throughout the Quarter were in shorts and light cotton shirts. There was a lingering feel of summer in the air. Nonetheless, Tenn was wearing an enormous coat of indeterminate fur, a large straw hat, and sunglasses: he seemed ready at any moment to endure a winter storm, imitate Rudy Vallee, or face the firing squad of a Latin American judicial system.

Tennessee Williams in Jackson Square, in the late 1970s, reciting poetry to the pigeons (illustration credit 1.1)

Before I could approach him, he turned, saw me, and smiled. “You must be Jim,” he crooned. “You look utterly confused.”

Tenn had been engaged in conversation with several people huddled in the Square, only a few feet from the bird-infested statue of Andrew Jackson, but he pulled from them quickly, put his arm around my shoulders and began walking toward the Quarter.

“I am most at home in the Quarter,” he spoke to my right ear, but the conversation seemed decidedly one-sided, a monologue for his own edification. “Wonderful things have happened for me on Royal, of course. Nothing of any positive significance ever happens on Rampart. Have you felt that way?”

I explained that I was actually from Baton Rouge, the club-footed cousin to New Orleans, and my time in the Quarter had been solely as a tourist. I could not speak to any deep experience on Rampart Street, or any other street in the city.

“Let’s try to change that while we’re here!” he exulted. “But let’s now eat something. Do you like the Court of Two Sisters?”

I admitted that I had never eaten there before.

“You’ll love it. Wonderful food, courtly service, lovely people, food served in bowls the size of a dog’s head, all the time in the world.”

I was not able to get a look at Tenn’s face until we stood in the dark, brick-lined passageway to the restaurant; a tiny shaft of sunlight streamed from the courtyard, and it fell across his face as if directed by an aging film star. Shadow obscured his prominent chin and neck, and his face held a high pinkness that made me think of Easter hams fresh from the oven. His mustache and beard were both trimmed short but looked askew, as if he had recently been resting flat on his face; there were hairs posing in quizzical fashion, curious as to their whereabouts. His lips were dry and flecked with white, and his tongue darted quickly and constantly across them, but never long enough to provide any moisture or comfort. Tenn’s eyeglasses rested unevenly across the bridge of his nose, which was red, weltlike, as if the glasses had rested too heavily and abraded him. The lenses were coated with fingerprints. His eyes were bright and were confusing in that they could appear blue or green or a combination of the two; the lids were heavy, and he blinked at an alarming slowness. Nonetheless, they were not the eyes of an old or tired man—they appeared to be fighting against the flesh that held them.

The host and several waiters flocked around Tenn like bridesmaids cooing over a giddy bride; they were flush with compliments, praise, greetings. They all knew and loved Tenn, so they all loved me. I was embraced and led, a few steps behind Tenn, to a table in a dark corner, away from the bulk of the diners but still within view, our gustatory real estate of value to us and to the restaurant.

Tenn snapped his fingers, then pointed to a pitcher of water. A tall, elegant waiter brought to our table the pitcher and two large goblets and filled them. Tenn quickly and voraciously drank them. “Good God,” he stated, spraying the table with fluid, “I was dying and didn’t even know it.” There was then a long, dramatic pause. “As is my wont.”

I know that the waiter read us the specials and left us with menus. I don’t remember any of what he said, and I know that we failed to order for some time. It was more important for Tenn to drink, and he signaled that he wanted a bottle of liquor left at the table, along with a bucket of ice. I chose iced tea, the house wine of the South.

Every eye and ear in the restaurant was trained on us.

“I would like to talk about prayer,” Tenn said.

Prayer was introduced to me—and to Tenn—as a device to achieve what earthly vendors could not provide. Prayer opened up supernal supermarkets, opportunities; energies were shifted, and people we needed or wanted appeared.

I prayed to be accepted into the kingdom of heaven and I prayed whenever I plugged an appliance into an electrical socket, because I had been shocked at a young age doing so. I prayed to be left alone by school bullies, and I prayed to die young, because I believed that one remained forever at the age at which one died, and I didn’t want to get to heaven and be too old to enjoy myself or to be able to move around with ease. More than anything else, I prayed to get out of Baton Rouge.

Tenn prayed for this same liberation, but his prayers came with a particular consecration: Tenn was raised in the cradle of the Episcopalian Church, his family serving the institution (on retainer to Christ, as he saw it), and his mother finding great strength in having and maintaining a high standing within its social confines. Deluded into thinking that his prayers would hold a higher power because of his connections, Tenn was bitter that they failed to remove him from his unfortunate place of residence.

“I awoke every morning,” he told me, “enraged that I was not in Maine (I fancied Damariscotta, because I thought it might be like the Taj Mahal on the water, with silver maples in the background) or Paris or Los Angeles. I expressed grave disappointment as my mother’s face hovered over me in the bed each morning. It should have been Gloria Swanson or Judith of Bethulia or any number of imaginary women I had conjured in the night. I came to see that my reality was St. Louis and oilcloth on the table and watery eggs and perpetual abuse by my father and other boys, so I found a new means of prayer and a new means of liberation.”

Tenn explained to me that he had and loved a large radio throughout his childhood. The radio reminded him of a photograph he had once seen of a cathedral, and it became for him a holy relic, an object of great adoration, as esteemed as the church that gave him nothing on barren Sunday mornings. Tenn could not recall if the radio was made of cherry, walnut, or oak, but it was the first fine gift he had ever been given, and his first memories of reverence were of polishing this radio with lemon or verbena oil.

Deep in the night of his sleep, Tenn would hold the radio as he might have held a puppy or a stuffed animal, and he would listen to radio dramas, or parties over which band music wafted, and he could imagine other lives, other snatches of dialogue that could remove him from the reality of the life he endured.

“When I was young,” Tenn told me, “and if I was particularly inappropriate, my father would punish me by sending me to bed early, demanding that I sit in my room with no illumination and reflect upon my maledictions. Having no access to my books or drawings, I would turn on the radio that sat by my bed and listen to the dramas that played there. I would hug the radio close to my body, the better to hide what I was doing from ears of enmity that lived around me, and also to better feel the vibrations of the action that was emanating from the radio—to feel the action of the airwaves enter my body. I became engaged to my imagination, and I loved the organ stings, the glissandos, the tiny dramas that used so much, so quickly.

“As I listened to these programs, I also husbanded a deep hatred for my father and for the God who had decided, in an attack of cruel capriciousness, to cast him as my father in our own tiny drama, which deprived me of so much, so quickly.

“I prayed a new prayer as I listened to these dramatic programs. I asked to be released from the prison that was my home, from the meanness that surrounded me. I utter this prayer every day, to this day. You’ll learn,” he explained to me, “that prayers are directed at us, at our souls, our gifts; and I was being released, I was being directed to a new reality.

“When my father was especially angry and fulsome in his rage, when I was especially effeminate or dreamy for his tastes, he would remove my radio from my room, and I was left with nothing but my imagination, my rage, and my pitiful prayer, thrown up to a God who directed, mercifully, my attention to the sounds outside my window—the scattered conversations of my neighbors, the sound of music and dramatic programs emanating from dozens of radios around the neighborhood, cast on spring or summer breezes, or encased in closed-for-winter homes. Faint or forceful, I would listen, and I would imagine the circumstances surrounding the shards of dialogue or music I could hear.

“I believe this was when I came to believe I could write. I believe this was the time when I could imagine that there might be a God.

“As the years have progressed, and as my maledictions have become pronounced and occasionally profitable, I still find myself in the dark, in the silence, listening and waiting, hoping and praying, beseeching that ever-capricious God to show me something, share something with me, cast upon the movie screen that hangs over my bed, or within the radio tubes that reside in my head, a narrative, a woman that I can follow and believe in and dream for and write about to pull me from that St. Louis bed of anger and fear and sadness. God, give me something, anything!”

A pause, a lick of the lips.

“Oil, as you may know, is most often found in our own backyards; euphoria deep within. Aren’t we told that the kingdom of heaven is within us? I’m still looking, and my guides, my fearless and supernal Sherpas, are attempting to keep me on the right paths.

“As I stare into the darkness of my many nights and bad intentions, waiting for my mental proscenium to be lit, or for my above-bed screen to flicker with images, I think instead on those women—and a few men—who have been a constant source of inspiration and illumination; examples and extremes. I can’t always recall the circumstances through which they came to dominate my thoughts and my earliest attempts to communicate, but I can remember their names, and I have created acts of idolatry for them all, an amended Stations of the Cross in which I recall their acts of alchemy, of kindness, of spiritual and imaginative valor. I hold the memory of these people as close to me as I held that radio, lost to me forever.”

Tenn paused and looked into the courtyard, not for human contact, but for a distant spot into which he could stare and think. His eyes were lightly misted, but he brushed away any emotion, and returned his attentions to me.

“A few years ago,” he continued, “a friend in publishing told me of a typeface bearing a most marvelous name: Friz Quadrata. Very bold, very stylish. I was given some samples of this typeface, and they were on a sheet of paper upon which you could press and they would stick to whatever you had devised for a communicative purpose. Pressure letters, they’re called. What a lovely title that is: ‘Pressure Letters.’

“I can waste a good day applying these pressure letters to surfaces of pale judgment that cry out for a story or a woman speaking to us, and I can fool myself that I am writing, that I am praying to that same fucking God again to allow me to hear the distant voices, the distant music, to bring forth words.

“I now imagine the names of my great influences, and I see them in this great and bold typeface, and I focus and I pray and I am not bitter. I am grateful that they have been in my life and continue to be in my life, and I hope to be of use to them again. To matter.

“If there is a God, I think that he realized upon creating the world, upon making the mud and man—the rudiments, the utilities of the world—he needed color and beauty and analysis of what he had made, and he made woman, not from dust of the earth or spit or rain or sweat, but from the bone of a man. Now there’s a title, too: ‘The Bone of a Man.’ ”

Another pause, a slight laugh.

“So God presented us with the follies of God, the great and immortal truth of his humor and comfort and care and taste. And at night, in the dark, without my radio, without my rosary, without a word to place on the pale judgment, I see, without effort, and with great peace, the names of these women in Friz Quadrata type on the screen above my bed or on the lids of my tired eyes. And I can dream, and I can sometimes write, but I can always, always believe again.

“And so, baby, that is proof enough for me that there are higher powers and better stations awaiting us—awaiting you—and a woman will lead us to them.”

Tenn then picked up his menu and handed it to me. He pointed to it and said only one word: “Write.”

Over the next twenty minutes or so, Tenn dictated to me the names of the people he wanted both of us to pray to, dream of, write for.

He called them the follies of God, and I wrote down the names.

The menu was soon covered with names, primarily women, and then Tenn offered me an assignment.

“I would like for you to ask these people if I ever mattered,” he confessed. “I ask you to go to them because these people have mattered to me, and they keep me going—to the pale judgment, to face another day, to care again.”

The tone of the lunch changed abruptly. I was no longer the rube from Baton Rouge seeking advice and counsel; I was his partner in a venture that would bolster us both. I would go to New York and I would go to these people with a message from Tenn, after which the topic of Tenn mattering would be broached. I would then call or write Tenn and let him know what had been said.

“I am keeping the disease of bitterness firmly at bay,” he said. “I’ve been to the bottom of that barrel, and I’m not going there again. I am no longer angry, baby. A little aggrieved, perhaps, but anger is a voracious cancer on the soul and the talent: it cripples the instincts, leaves you open to all manner of bad things.”

Bitterness was kept at bay by a pronounced concentration on those people who had mattered to him, would matter again, and who might be of some value in pouring some fog on his mental proscenium and allowing some women to come forth and begin talking. He had taken an old rosary—given to him more than a decade earlier, when he had converted to Roman Catholicism—and he had renamed the mysteries and each bead along its length. There were no longer mysteries reserved for the crucifixion or the giving of water as the burdensome cross was carried. Instead there were beads bearing the memory and imagined visages of Jessica Tandy, Kim Stanley, Maureen Stapleton, Maria Tucci, Irene Worth, Marian Seldes, William Inge, Elia Kazan, John Guare—far too many names, so the beads had to be rotated, understudies taking over for leads, Beatrice Straight sometimes being called forward to take over the bead reserved for Geraldine Page, her memory caressed, recalled, blessed.

My assignment would be to knock on the doors of these people and relate to them what Tenn felt about them, then tarry and see if the thought was reciprocated, if they believed that Tenn mattered.

“There is very little that I can do well,” he confessed. “I cannot have or care for a child. I cannot prepare a meal satisfactorily—the dishes never emerge at the appropriate times. I cannot even eat a meal when I would like to. Things are falling apart; I lack mental and glandular flexibility. My brain doesn’t produce the creative fog, or words or sentences that share anything but the dusty refuse that resides in my skull. I cannot even be a friend for any sustained period of time, because my boundaries, always gently traced in sand—sands of madness—have been blown away and I can’t retrace them. I cannot, you see, really do anything, can’t relate to anything, but goddammit, I thought once, and I think still, that I can write. Can’t I get a single witness to whom I once delivered pages and deliverance to say that I once mattered?”

I accepted the assignment. I took out my first blue book and began to take the notes, to receive the directions to find my way to the people who had mattered to Tenn.

“One more thing,” Tenn interjected, as I began to write. “I would like to call you Dixie. It seems appropriate.”

I nodded and returned to my blue book and the description of the first folly of God. I wrote her name: Maureen Stapleton.

Two

HER THEATRICAL LIFE began in circumstances similar to Tenn’s: in the darkness, with a radio attached to her body and a deep desire to be transported.

“I’m a dumb broad,” she would admit to me, “and I don’t always know what I mean, and I don’t always say what I should say, but I so understood what it meant to be transported. I wanted out! The radio was my first taste of an ‘out there’ that I had to get to, that I believed was a salvation of sorts; and later, I lived in the movies, looking for the same thing—that crazy belief that I could get there and away from … this.”

Early on she was allowed access to the radio that resided in the living room, and she would continue to listen deep into the night. Later she was given her own radio, and while Maureen did not recall her model being as grand as Tenn’s—there was no resemblance to cathedrals that she could recall—she did keep it near her, on the bedside table, and when she tried to imagine that a male actor in a radio serial was speaking directly to her, she would place it in the bed, right next to her face. “I believed,” she told me, “I had to believe, that dreaming and praying and hoping would change things.”

Maureen and Tenn would remain bonded—through many years and many circumstances—by their insistent belief that to dream was to change things; that to cast an ideal image into the mental theater (Maureen’s was a huge Art Deco movie palace; Tenn’s a stately theater meant for great plays) was to begin to change lives and paths. These were two friends who could meet at any time, under any circumstances, and begin to talk out their methods of escape.

Maureen and Tenn also shared what they laughingly called joint custody of a dreaming spine that would neither bend nor break. “It wasn’t so much that Tennessee and I were committed to what we dreamed—we were—but we were also incapable, unable, unwilling to do anything else. I mean, what could we do? Attached to radios and mothers and dreams—what else was there for us to be? Had we failed … Well, we dreamers don’t think about that. We push that away with another dream, another drink. I never gave up, because there was nothing else I could do or wanted to do, not because I have some incredible will of steel. I just didn’t know what else I could possibly do. And maybe the misfits like me do better because we can’t marry for money and be a sweet wife at the door at the end of the day; we can’t become a terrific secretary; we can’t sell anything but our dream of being an actress—we can’t write or edit or search the world for those who can. We can’t do a damn thing but wait for someone to write a part that speaks to us. And Tennessee could only write. It was all he really did well; it was all he could do where he felt comfort and power. It’s not so much refusing to give up as just sidling along and repeatedly trying, repeatedly failing, until you get a break. And maybe I kept at it because I really wanted to piss off all those people who told me I wouldn’t make it. And maybe I kept at it because I wanted to honor the kid who dreamed all this up. I don’t know, but I kept at it. However you can manage it, keep at it. And Tennessee and I both kept at it, through a lot of thin, wet times, but we stuck it out. Tennessee and I had our movies and our mothers.”

Maureen felt comfortable sharing her dreams with her mother and her aunts, single women who raised her in Troy, New York, when her father abandoned them. These women were angry, funny, fueled with an almost diabolical melancholy, and movies and weekly Mass were their methods of emotional release and comfort.

“I wanted my movies big and dumb and shiny,” Maureen admitted. “Serious stuff was too much like life, too much like the drama that was my daily bread. I wanted shiny floors and dancing; singing; silly people who had lots of beautiful clothes and food and people who left to do wonderful things and came back and told stories. People only walked out to get better things to bring into your life; they didn’t abandon the life—the cards—they’d been dealt. They coped and looked good. They didn’t work at notions counters and drink too much beer and bitch into the night about injustice and Irish men. They had good lighting and futures, and that’s what I wanted.”

Maureen and Tenn never abandoned their nightly reveries: they both thrived in the darkness—it erased the unsatisfactory surroundings into which they had born, and in which they repeatedly found themselves. “We always got to the bad points,” Maureen said, “so that we could get to the dreaming part, the getting-in-the-bed-and-sorting-things-out part, the understanding that we could do nothing else. And we always found each other, no matter how bad the times or how far apart we had become. And I still do this, and I still look for points of escape and entry.”

Maureen paused and thought for a minute.

“I don’t know how I thought I would do it,” she confessed, “but I really thought that this fat little girl from Troy was going to be able to enter ballrooms or dining rooms or whatever setting I liked that night and introduce myself. I didn’t grow up thinking I was especially adorable or likable, but I somehow thought that I would be understood by anybody on the ‘other side,’ the folks who had gotten there. I imagined that they had grown up hearing their mother cry herself to sleep; that they had been abandoned and rendered worthless by their fathers; that they didn’t understand the rhythms and regulations of daily life, as I didn’t. I thought they would embrace me and tell me I was home. And I still think this way, and so did Tenn—until the very end.”

While Tenn loved his mother, he was frequently frustrated by her, irritated by her intrusions on his life and what he called his ambulatory dreaming, but what he most resented was that she never offered help. “My mother wanted very badly to help,” Tenn told me. “Her desire was to help. She frequently told me and my sister that if she could only help, she would. She craved the ability to help and to love, but she didn’t know how to do it. My mother gave me the dreams, and she infused me with so much passion and drama, not to mention an eye for a story, an eye for characters and details, but she couldn’t hold me or love me in a way that made me feel safe for very long. This Maureen could do for me. Maureen always helped. Always. Not merely in the way that she could—that horrible, niggardly offer so many people make: ‘I am doing what I can; I am doing what I think I should.’ Maureen gave fully and immediately and consistently. Maureen broke her own bank to see to it that I was safe.”

Maureen loved her mother, even if she failed to understand her, even if she resented her stubborn sadness. “Of course, I have become my mother,” Maureen confessed. “We all do, I suppose, but I’m the same way. I can harbor a grudge or cry over an injustice my whole life, just sit and piss away my life on utter bullshit, and that’s what she did, and I thought I knew better and would never do anything but head out for the shiny life. And whatever shiny life Tennessee and I dreamed for ourselves, we set a place, put aside a chair, for our mothers.”

“The care and feeding and placement of mothers,” Tenn told me, “has been one of my life’s greatest obsessions.”

Maureen fantasized that she would take her mother with her to the better places. They made a great pair, laughing at the same things, loving the same things, creating a commotion. “Until I had my kids,” Maureen told me, “nothing gave me greater pleasure than sharing with my mother. My heart would swell until it hurt, and I would be dizzy with gratitude. I wanted her out of the same place I’d come from, but she didn’t have the same drive to get out that I did. I think she found a level of comfort in her sad little corner.”

And Tenn?

“Tenn kept writing plays,” Maureen said, “and throwing pretty things at his mother, all in the hope that she would tell him he was a man, a grown-up, that he had done well. And on those soggy nights in the dark, I never heard from him that this had happened. I think that Edwina withheld praise until her last breath.”

“Perhaps I stopped trying so hard to reach my mother, to have my mother love me,” Tenn told me, “because Maureen came into my life. There were other women as well, but Maureen was the greatest, safest place to fall. By finding these women in my life, I no longer felt the great need to connect with and know my mother. I began to look outside of my mother’s heart and my own biography for answers to things.”

Maureen Stapleton was born on a cruelly hot day in June of 1925, a day so hot that her mother was momentarily comforted by the water that broke and cascaded down her legs, announcing the arrival of her daughter. Maureen loved to tell and retell the story of her mother, in her simple cotton shift, now spattered with water, and her legs shiny with expectant motherhood, rushing to give birth to her “perfect, pudgy” baby.

“I have always been known for my entrances,” Maureen remarked drily.

She was equally known for her departures, for her long, frequently miserable absences from friends and family and work, but the primary damage seems always to have been self-inflicted. “No one creates more pernicious scenarios for herself than Mo,” Tenn told me, using the favored nickname for the actress. “She is forever on the precipice of some horrendous disaster, and inevitably, she is the only person aware of it. And then,” he remarked with wonder, “it just blows over, and becomes another of her rich anecdotes.”

“Do not,” Maureen told me once, after another so-called disaster in her life, “ever worry about me insofar as drama and food are concerned. I always get my share.”

This ravenous need for drama, for attention, and—she was ashamed to admit—her desire to be rescued, and loved anew after her salvation, began at an early age.

“Tennessee and I truly loved each other,” she said, “and we were bound by our love of the theater and movies and movie stars and comedy. And we were bound to each other particularly by our mothers: the way they raised us; the things they said, the things they never could say; the things they gave us. The dreaming nature, most of all.”

“I have been very fortunate,” Tenn told me. “I have been recognized and I have made a considerable amount of money being so recognized. But I cannot escape the persistent curiosity to know about what else exists in the world, and what things might have been like if the wheels of fate had shifted just a little bit on a given day. Whatever happens to me, I need to know that I can commiserate with a friend—particularly Maureen—and lie in the dark and wonder and marvel and cackle at how it happened and how it might have been better or worse or something entirely different. I know that this act of getting into a dark place with Maureen makes her my great friend, but I also think that the act of doing this, of being with her in these dreams, keeps me an artist. Maureen keeps me dreaming.”

“Tennessee keeps me moving,” Maureen told me. “He likes to dream, and so do I, but my dream is always to keep things moving. I can’t bear stillness.” Maureen could remember with clarity the fear she felt at the repetitiveness of her life, of the routines in her household, at her school, among her schoolmates; often feeling the need to scream, if only to break the monotony. “I sometimes felt,” she said, “that if I didn’t break up the routine of things, I would literally freeze, just turn into a pillar of salt or shit and be stuck in that same position for the rest of my life in a schoolroom or on a front porch in Troy, New York, and I would just create a racket to break things up, move me an inch or so farther from paralysis.”

The fuel for her “rackets” was provided by the scenarios in films and on the radio, and Maureen began to spend more time alone in her room. “I needed to be alone with the stories,” she told me, “so I could dream and find the little sliver of time and opportunity I could slip into.” Maureen shared with Tenn a childhood and adolescence peppered with family concern for their solitude, their moodiness, their long stretches of silence and dreaming. “Why,” Tenn asked me once, “is it so bad to dream? Why is the honor solely in submitting to reality? To what is present and ready? I never understood why I was odd for wanting to be detached.” “I’ve got to tell you,” Maureen marveled, “I would be hard-pressed to think of a happier time. The dreaming, I’m telling you, is the best. Screaming against paralysis is the greatest—it’s all downhill from there.”

Years later, as Tenn and Maureen, whom he came to call “the old shoe”—because he could always fit right into her rhythms, her schedule, her neuroses, and find understanding and comfort—began to realize that they had achieved, by happy accident, one of their goals: They had found an order to things, a means by which they could place what Tenn called a “black border of clarity” around events and emotions. They would find each other and submit to the ritual of holding each other in the dark, and analyze who they were and how they had gotten there. “I have never felt terribly comfortable with people,” Tenn told me, “but I feel comfortable with Mo.”

In our conversations Tenn would speak of words by great writers collecting like bricks or gems or stones, rising ultimately in a play or a novel or a story that could make him believe in writing and living. Tenn spoke of prayers that relied on beads or a specific number of steps or rituals, and he came to believe that they could lead him to peace or industry. However, the steps leading to Maureen’s West Seventieth Street bedroom were also a ritual, a rite of “clearance and comfort,” and Tenn felt better with each step toward that unmade but welcoming bed. “Let me tell you,” Tenn told me, “Maureen did not keep an especially fit home, and the bed had seen its share of adventures, but in I went.”

“We got into the bed,” Maureen remembered, “and we got a radio, a transistor radio that I cadged from one of my kids, and we looked and looked for a drama, for music that might remind us of our childhood, and there was nothing! Just rock and roll and weather and religious nuts. I said, ‘Honey, this ain’t happening.’ ”

But Tenn had an idea: It was irrelevant what was on the radio. What mattered was what they did with what came on the radio. “After all,” he reasoned, “we never knew what would pop up on the radios of our youth. Why know now?”

Tenn and Maureen lay in the bed for hours, speaking aloud when they saw or imagined another setting, another room, another reality. They would re-create this scenario, in various locales, with various radios, over the years.

“We didn’t drink an ounce on those nights,” she would say, “not an ounce. We might have gone to the bed drunk, but we had nothing once we got there and started dreaming. Jesus Christ, were those the only times we were comfortable or felt safe?”

“I tell you now,” Tenn told me, “that at an advanced age, knowing many things, I can live and go on and try and fall and try again because there is a woman named Maureen Stapleton in this world.”

Tennessee had an idea for a play, created expressly for Maureen.

He came to believe that he could complete a play—a play that mattered—if he could dictate it to me.

“The ideas are here,” he would announce, pointing to his leaf-strewn cranium, ideas swirling out of control. “You and your young eyes, your eagerness, can help me get them there.” He would point to the blue books or a menu or a tablecloth, and I would take dictation.

She lies in bed, fully dressed. Resplendently dressed, ready to receive. The room is plush, everything in its place, but the bed is a rumpled paradise of linens, undergarments, paperback novels, candy wrappers, handkerchiefs, pads of paper and pens, a multitude of pillows that will be used to prop her up when she is excited or to place over her head when she can’t bear another moment of stimulation or boredom or what we call life.

She could be in Mississippi or Morocco; Nebraska or Nepal; Baltimore or Bangladesh.

It does not matter. She has the capacity to be wherever she needs to be.

Or did.

Her powers are beginning to fail her.

By her bedside are a phone and a large radio, very modern, with an enormous dial. If she turns it—and she does, with great skill and swiftness—she can tune into programs across the globe and across time. All of experience and extremity are within this radio.

The radio sometimes fails her.

She reaches for the phone on those occasions and calls several men from a list she has compiled over the years of the great fabulists, writers, and performers around the world.

“Talk to me,” she’ll say into the phone, and their voices will fill the room, the lights will dim, and through the scrim of the wall behind her bed we will see whatever scene they create together.

She lives in fear of satellite failures, program interruptions, inclement weather.

Radios fail, phone lines are inoperable.

She cannot bring herself to recall the hurricanes of the past, when all communication was lost and she was forced to dive deeply into her own reservoir of memory and painfully dredge up her entertainment, her arousal.

One evening, after an unsatisfactory encounter with a young novelist, whose stories have grown increasingly pale, she takes a break for dinner and to make notes for future phone mates.

There is a rumble of thunder.

She looks out the window and sees ominous clouds.

She quickly places calls to three of her best phone mates and asks them to be ready soon. A storm is approaching, and she has not gained surcease for the night.

She begins writing notes and becomes increasingly giddy at the prospect of the upcoming call. Which of the three should she call? Which one of the men would best handle the scenarios she was considering?

The room is plunged into darkness. The lights are out. The phones are dead.

She rushes to the window and we see her silhouette, outlined with lightning.

She rushes back to the phone, angrily jiggling the receiver.

“Hello? Hello?”

End of act 1.

“I think we can do something with this,” Tenn told me. I kept the outline in my blue book, and we continued to talk.

I did not make contact with Maureen until the fall of 1991. I sent several letters to the West Seventieth Street address: one was returned and others were never answered. Ultimately, an editor told me that Maureen no longer lived at that address—she had moved to Lenox, Massachusetts—and he recommended I write to her through the auspices of Chen Sam, the press agent she shared with Elizabeth Taylor. I took the name and address and sent the letter.

However, my editor friend had butchered the name of the press agent, so that it read like the name of a Szechuan restaurant: the letter was sent in the care of Hang Cham, and this created such hysteria on the part of the press agent, and for Maureen, that my letter got a brisk reply.

“I laughed until I peed,” Maureen told me, “so you can see that I’m easily amused. But you got my attention.”

She was deeply disappointed to learn that mine was an honest gaffe, and not some bold and iconoclastic statement. Maureen had hoped to meet a twisted customer; instead she met a writer who wanted to talk about Tennessee.

“Oh well,” she sighed, “you’re in the door; do your stuff.”

In that fall of 1991, the country—and, more explicitly, Maureen—was totally enmeshed in the Clarence Thomas hearings, and any phone conversations I wished to have with her had to be carefully arranged around this television coverage, her allotted drinks for the day, and the ministrations of a friend who had been drafted to care for her after a serious back injury.

“Hey,” she blurted on the phone one day, “this guy wants out. I’ve had him here too long. You wanna come up and see after me?”

I had not yet met Maureen and did not feel sufficiently trained to care for her, with or without a back injury. I somehow knew that caring for Maureen required a very specific set of skills and strengths unknown to me. I could not imagine traveling to Lenox and serving as her masseur and provider of Blue Nun.

Maureen grumbled into the phone and told me that she was growing increasingly disappointed in me. I did not seem the bold person Tenn had loved and spent time with, much less had sent into the world to meet the people who had mattered to him. And yet she stuck with me, because, as she always said, “any friend of Tenn’s is a friend of mine.”

Maureen was tough and occasionally brutal in her assessments of herself and her peers. Like so many artists—and many considered her one, even if she did not—she had come to feel that she had wasted her life and her talents, and if she could look back on her career and find some good work, she immediately attributed it to Tennessee’s writing or Harold Clurman’s direction or a fluke or a newspaper strike or a diet she had been on or the fact that all of the other “cunts” (the term she insisted on using for her fellow actresses) had temporarily lost their senses and ceded the center of the stage to her.

Maureen might have been a dreamer, and she might have admitted that her addiction to fantasy was greater than her addiction to alcohol, but she demanded the truth from her friends and those with whom she worked. “I hate a soft sell,” she told me. “Do not protect my feelings if I ask your opinion: I’m asking because I’m unsure; I’m asking because I know something’s wrong. Tell me the truth. Be brutal. Help me.”

Tenn had sent a copy of his play—dictated to me in a mad rush—and she had chastised him for it, calling it furtive and sentimental, a childish plea for affirmation. I learned on that day in 1991, when I traveled to Lenox, that Maureen had been called late at night after I had met Tenn in New Orleans, and in the confusing, raucous conversation, she had assumed that my arrival at her doorstop was imminent. “I thought you were coming to see me—and soon,” she told me. “It wasn’t unlike Tenn to tell me someone was coming, and it wasn’t unlike me to agree to whatever he suggested. So I put away the Blue Nun and took a bath. What took you so long? I’d like to know. I took a fucking bath for you in 1982!”

Maureen had read the play and hadn’t liked it, so Tenn read it to her, interrupting himself to explain the casting, the effect, the intention. Maureen hated the play—the “treatment,” she called it, “jagged ideas”—and told him he was gasping for air, reaching, hoping, failing. “You have a great desire to write,” she told him, “and nothing to write about yet. Strip it down.”

“The play?” Tenn asked.

“The desire,” she replied. “The play you can burn.”

“I hated to hurt him,” Maureen said, “but I knew that as a friend, as someone he trusted and needed, as someone who dreamed and hoped with him, I needed to tell the truth. I also knew that I was dumping on a man who was already in deep trouble, scared, desperate. I tried to give him some positive criticism, some examples.”

Maureen reminded Tenn of a conversation with Harold Clurman during rehearsals, in 1957, for Orpheus Descending. The play, Clurman had told Tenn, should be like your own hand. Clurman had held up his own firm, elegant, expansive hand, fingers flexed, the palm pink and healthy. Each finger, he recounted, was a memory, a snatch of time so real to you and utterly dear, whether sweet or evil, accidental or committed with intensive purpose. The fingers—the events—lead to the palm, which is the play, and those fingers have to—must—close over the palm. Clurman then curled his fingers over his palm into a tight fist. The events are tightly contained in the play; the play should be as tight as this fist, as powerful, as capable of restriction or damage. And at its conclusion, Clurman continued, the fingers unfurl, the angry redness recedes, the hand is open, a symbol of supplication. The effect has been achieved, and now there is release.

“And your play—this play,” Clurman continued, “is like this.” At which point he stood and danced a manic jig, both hands spastically splayed, fingers wiggling, frequently clapping together.

“Let me tell you,” Maureen told me, “the point was made, and we sat there fucking slack-jawed. I told Tenn that story; he remembered it. He laughed and said he was going to work on his fists and his fogs. I hoped that I helped.”

In our time together, Tenn would often raise his fist—clenched, as if extolling Black Power—and announce loudly, “En avant!”

It was impossible to engage Maureen on the topic of acting: it bored her senseless. While she had attended sessions at the Actors Studio for many years, she had, like so many others, turned mutinous toward its artistic director, Lee Strasberg, and had largely abandoned much of what she had once held true about its controversial Method.

“I don’t think we need to know why we do things onstage,” she said, “I really don’t. I think we need to be trained to be ready for whatever comes up, and I fault the Studio for failing to adequately train us for a career of any variety or depth. We never worked on our voices or our bodies at the Studio, so when you get to be of a certain age, as certain assholes put it, you no longer have the muscles or the memory in your throat to get a sound for a period piece. I was never trained to move properly, to use my body as that ‘vessel’ so many speak of. So I think we spent too much time at the Studio delving into our brains and serving ourselves and not plays or audiences. And now,” she announced, “I don’t want to talk about the fucking Studio anymore. I spent way too much time there. We all did. We learned a lot and we grew, but it’s also true that we wasted our time, but we felt glorious, positively glorious, about ourselves.”

Maureen was quick to admit that she had little patience with what she called “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” analysis, of either one’s art or one’s psyche. “Granted, I’m a mess,” she said, “and the messes are probably less likely to want to go into the crevices of the brain and see what’s wiggling around in there, but I just think it’s bullshit. I think I drink because I’m scared and bored most of the time, and booze livens things up for me. I don’t think I have the courage to do the things I should do—like face responsibility, or become a full-fledged, grown-up woman—so I delay the taking of that responsibility with a drink or with a pill or with an act of amazingly stupid carnal courage. Is it important why I do it?”

Admitting that it was perhaps a form of folly, Maureen believed that her times alone, dreaming, or with Tennessee, dreaming in “tipsy tandem,” were her only consistent and effective forms of self-improvement. “I may be a mess,” she said, “and I may be crazy, but I had a great friend—Tennessee—and he had a great friend in me. For a long, long time. And that means something. Or it should.”

In the summer of 1990, I had a series of telephone conversations with Marlon Brando. In those days before caller ID, when I simply picked up a ringing phone and took my chances, I heard the voice of Marlon Brando on the other end of the receiver.

“I want to talk about Tennessee,” he told me.

I had several calls from Marlon over a period of several weeks. Brando was in what he called a catastrophic state at that time: his son was facing trial for the murder of his sister’s boyfriend, and he was also taking on the process of writing his autobiography, and he wanted to talk about people and events that had been important to him. “Or should have been,” he stressed repeatedly. “Or should have been.” Brando called to talk about Tennessee Williams—and he did—but he also could not stop talking about Maureen Stapleton.

Maureen Stapleton and Marlon Brando, on the set of Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1959), based on Tennessee’s Orpheus Descending. “I think we were trying to stay sane during the shoot,” Maureen said upon seeing this image. (illustration credit 2.1)

Marlon adored Maureen and compared her to a large box of Cracker Jacks: sweet, sticky, messy, simple, and, in its way, perfect. Both Tenn and Maureen remembered happy times with the mercurial and beautiful Brando, cluttered and loud and joyous, at the apartment he and Wally Cox shared on West Fifty-second Street. If Tenn and Maureen needed to regularly repair to a bed with a radio and some imaginative memory work, they could also find what Maureen called “a kind of joy and understanding” in Brando’s apartment.

“We were young and alive and stupid and generous,” Brando told me, “and we believed that anything could happen: Opportunities and new friends were all around us. There was no fear—for our talents or for our persons—and we were, all of us, committed to something big.” Brando’s apartment was always open, there was food, some wine, perpetual music (both from a phonograph and from the many clubs along the street, from which jazz wafted up to the skies), and everyone spoke of their music or their art or the scene on which they were working—or the passionate life they were seeking. The apartment had a unique open-admissions policy: all were allowed entrance a first time, but a return visit depended on your commitment to life in general and the life of the party within the apartment. “It was rampant,” Tenn remembered. “And wonderful.” “It was insane,” Maureen remembered. “And glorious.”

Tenn had known success by the time the parties were attended in the Brando apartment, but he wanted to be with the people he called “the strivers,” and he marveled at their energy, their sense of community, their sense of freedom. “I wanted to remain a striver,” Tenn told me. “I wanted to be creatively young, even if my flesh would not accommodate me. That apartment and those people helped me to keep dreaming the ‘what if’ and ‘what else’ scenarios I needed. I was so afraid and so timid for so long, and these people seemed to have no fears: they were loose and comfortable with their ideas and their minds and their food and their affection.” Brando and his friends fascinated Tenn, but they also intimidated him. “They were all beautiful and young and unafraid to touch, to go for what they wanted,” Tenn told me, “and I’ve never been able to accept that, to flow with that. I felt safe with Maureen—safe enough to look at the young strivers and follow their dreams, which were as fervent as mine, but which were not so much in the darkness; not so much the fragile dreams of a queer kid locked in his room, safe from enemies. These were active dreamers, fervent, angry—but joyously angry. They believed that they would make good work, make a difference, matter. Watching these people, I realized that God makes an artist. Face this now and hold the fact dear. There is nothing else to do about the equipment you had installed celestially, and there is absolutely not one single thing you can do about the equipment that your family, your place of birth and culturation, your surroundings, your history implant in you. You can tweak and lie and warp and weave, but you’ve got what you’ve got. But the art can come from the tweaking and the weaving. You can’t change yourself, but you can change what you produce. He [Brando] was the most exquisite man I think I’ve ever seen. He smelled of activity and musk and wheat fields. His body was perfectly and powerfully developed, a specimen not often seen in those postwar years. He was built like a stevedore, but he had the most beautiful and fragile of faces—smooth, flawless skin; a full and sensuous mouth; luxuriant eyelashes; a sweet smile. I thought of murky fairy tales my mother had read to me as a child, in which unwary people wandered into forests and discovered magical creatures who combined human traits with animal, with flora, with elements.”

“Tenn and I both needed those people, that education,” Maureen said. “And I needed him by my side. Tenn made me feel safe. We needed each other.”

“Maureen talks of being this shy, fat girl from Troy,” Tenn remembered, “but I remember her as joyous, open, brave. She could talk to or seduce anyone; she tackled any role that was given to her—onstage or in a class—and soon she would be my Serafina, a part that was inspired to a great extent by my time in Italy and from my exposure to the fears of Maureen, as well as the warmth with which she covered and healed them.”

“I think it was Tenn speaking to me, explaining Serafina to me, that made me feel so safe,” Maureen said. “Safer than I ever felt—onstage or in life. It was like being on that bed. What the hell is going on? I always ask. And Tenn calmed me. Tenn had that ability. He could just look at you and say ‘There is this woman, she lives in the Keys, and she takes in sewing on occasion. She doesn’t always get her work done on time, but she is exquisite in her detail. Any Parisian house would be honored to have her on its staff. She is a mess, however. Her hair, her posture, her diction—all loose and out of control. She only has control with pins and scissors and material. She only has a sense of control when she surrenders hers to the Madonna, who resides on a shelf in her little house full of mannequins and material and melancholy and the scent and memory of a man almost always gone.’ I was a mess,” she admitted. “I wasn’t doing very well. I didn’t understand the play or the woman or why a mick from Troy, New York, was playing this virago.”

What is a virago? Clurman asked her. Before she could answer, he told her to forget what she thought it was and just play the woman. Maureen did not respond well to such direction, so she sought out Tenn and asked for his help.

Stapleton and Tennessee (1975), happy and tipsy, and looking for an escape, where they could talk. “Even then,” Maureen said, “we felt we were just getting things right, learning how to cope.” (illustration credit 2.2)

“Tenn was a seducer,” Maureen remembered. “He seduced with words, and he seduced by loving you so goddamned much. He just looked right through me and told me I could do it, but then he told me who and what I was playing and what I should be doing. He told me to stop thinking and to look into being. I was outside of myself, looking at Maureen playing this woman, rather than being this woman, and in that play—probably only in that play—I was fully alive and real and myself.”

It wasn’t only on the stage that Maureen gave of herself fully, however. She was a very present friend, and confessed that that period of time that became known as “the Tattoo years” were her happiest and fullest—as an actress, a friend, a woman. “Maureen always appears at the ideal time, so she is the angel we dream of, pray for, pine for, wait to see,” Brando said. “People laugh at her and her ability—extraordinary ability—to find and secrete food on her person and that of her friends. Everyone knows that food is not safe around Maureen—it finds its way to her home. What no one seems to add to the stories, to the jokes, is that she shares her bounty, and the food often found its way to my home, to the homes of my friends. On the street once—we were walking and talking and arguing and laughing—a child was crying, and Maureen pulled a piece of cake, wrapped in foil, from her purse. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. ‘Jed Harris had an opening last night.’ And that was that. Jed Harris opened a play, had an abundance of cake, and a crying child was calmed on the street by Maureen’s gift. On that day, in that time, she was his angel.” In the Tattoo years, there were many examples of this kindness, and Tenn admitted to me that Maureen often fed him or found him food, even though he was what he called “a so-called successful adult.” “It wasn’t the food,” he told me. “It was Maureen. I wanted to see her and spend time with her. My hunger could get her to respond.”

Brando was aware of the closeness that existed between Tenn and Maureen, and he was both perplexed by it and envious of it. “You tell me that Tennessee used to lie on a bed with her and talk things out. I can see that. It might be one of the wisest things Tennessee ever did—to have and to keep a friendship with Maureen. I never got on a bed with her to talk things out, but I have watched the sun rise many a morning as we were still trying to figure out life and work and our own battered hearts. Tennessee says he can believe in the world because there is a woman named Maureen Stapleton, and I can’t be completely defeated in a world in which she lives.”

Both Brando and Tenn asked Maureen—repeatedly, she claims—why she was so sweet, so giving.

Maureen waved away the question.

Tenn believed that it was her attempt to create for herself the narrative that biology and geography had denied her. “We are all fantasists creating the journal of the life we want to live, to read about, to leave behind. Life is a long revision, and Maureen and I share a similar—and odd—version of revision.”

Brando saw it differently, however, and believed that things appear most vividly and consistently to those who most want them, and Maureen, more than anything else, wanted everyone to be happy. “She grew up with abandoned women and sad hopes, but her job was to cheer everyone up, goad them into going to the movies, urge them to bake a cake and have a party. Atlas with an apron, you could call her: holding up the world with some confiscated food, a huge heart, and a shoulder on which so many people have leaned and wept.”

When I told Maureen what Marlon Brando had said of her, she was silent and still for a time. “Well,” she quipped, “we must believe what Marlon tells us.”

We sat in her kitchen for several more hours, talking and drinking Blue Nun. Every half hour or so she would ask me to reread what Marlon had told me on the telephone on a summer night in 1990. And I did. Over and over.

I was determined to talk to Maureen about acting, if only because Tenn had told me she was one of our greatest talents—big in gifts and in their sharing. This enraged Maureen, and it was the only occasion on which I saw her angry. “I know that you—and probably Tenn—want me to talk about Strasberg,” Maureen said, “and I was betrayed by Strasberg; hurt by him. I don’t want to live it, pick it apart, dissect it again. I did all that. I’ve been through all that. I’d like to forget it. All that you need to know about that time and that place has been given to you—by Tenn.”

I had given her several books of notes I had made in my time with Tenn, and she had been up several nights reading them. She found the proper notes and shoved them across a table toward me. “That’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It” was the Actors Studio, which Maureen had needed and trusted, to which she had opened her heart and what she called her “wobbly talent,” and she had believed in Lee Strasberg. “I not only bought and read the Bible that was Lee Strasberg, but I copied and bound the damned thing,” she said. “And then everything collapsed. Or my eyes were opened. I don’t know which.”

The notes she pinpointed dealt with Marilyn Monroe.

Maureen looked me in the face and very flatly said: “I did not like what I saw there.”

Here is what Tenn said about Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio:

“Marilyn was an example of the weak children who seek a guru. Having no balance in her life, having no family, having no understanding of the give-and-take that is daily life, she was drawn toward Mary Baker Eddy, Buddha, Jung, Freud, and finally, the gnomish Lee Strasberg, who specialized in adopting sexually confused, physically abused women and becoming the seemingly gentle father figure they desired. Strasberg lied to her and told her she was the new Duse; he told her she should play Nina; he told her to investigate O’Neill and Shakespeare. This was all folly, because Marilyn had no talent and no understanding, and it was folly because Strasberg only wanted access to and withdrawal privileges from fame.

“Only Strasberg got what he wanted.

“In that awful church in the West Forties, Marilyn sat, face upturned, checkbook open, heart confused, and believed that she might become the great actress Strasberg told her she could and should be. It was an evil, extended con game, and there were many witnesses. You will, no doubt, speak to some of them. It was during Marilyn’s tenure at the Studio, and particularly after her death, that the exodus of the talented began from the Studio. The emperor had always been naked, but some of his adherents had finally invested in some spectacles and could see his puny endowments and the intentions he had for them.

“I wanted to love Marilyn: I fall for myths, too. She was fragile and she was beautiful and she was silly. She was the lost kitten in the rain, or the kittens who were born on Carson McCullers’s bed in Nantucket—you wonder who will take care of them, because you know that she cannot, and you cry like the child you were who saw the dog run over and the town move on, uncaring and serious about getting their needs attended.

“Marilyn was also annoying and cloying and demanding. She knew her power and she abused it, but in the demonstration of it she degraded herself and she knew this, so the spiral of destruction deepened and intensified. Do not think for a moment that I do not see this in my own behavior and that of others: I am only offering a sobering lesson.

“When we can’t imagine understanding or loving a God or some other myth of support, we attach ourselves to artistic symbols: the lost soul; the waif; the abused artist. This is all utter nonsense. Get to work. Work hard and well. Your troubles are no one’s business but your own. Don’t be a Pharisee extolling yourself on the street—take it inside; use it; share it; overcome it.

“I spoke to Arthur [Miller] only once about Marilyn, and it was during his exhumation of her [After the Fall, 1964]. I wondered if he was satisfied; I wondered if he had exorcised himself of her spirit and her toxins, and I wondered if he had expiated his own sins. He told me he thought he could help her, yes, but he wanted to buck the odds and be the homely, skinny, cerebral Jew who got the beauty queen; he wanted to be the bookish, pedantic, shy boy who introduced the beautiful and simple girl to books and plays and ideas and the act of thinking things out beyond the crotch and the nipples and the people with the cameras. Arthur wanted to be her savior, but he also wanted to be envied; he wanted attention; he wanted to be noticed; he wanted to expand his audience.

“I think Arthur Miller got what he wanted.

“It’s fine to cry for Marilyn Monroe. I did, and I still do. She was tragic, but she was also lucky. There are beautiful, sad, dumb girls all over the world who endure worse than she did, but they never get to live on the screen or bathe in perfume or populate the dreams of people who love beauty or who love pain or who wonder what it must be like to possess such sexual power.

“Let her go. Look at the beauty, but move on. There is nothing else there. A pretty visage with a sad story.”

Maureen was deeply affected by these words from Tenn, and she wanted to comment on them. “I love acting, and I needed it; but acting … no art on earth is a cure or a replacement. You have to have a life. You have to love and be betrayed and heal and move on and start all over again, and there is no church or book or slogan or some single person who can give you something that will make it all work for you. No one. But we all stupidly believed that we had found a secret, a way, a shortcut, to life or happiness or understanding.

“Marilyn Monroe,” Maureen continued, “was a sweet girl. I know she was a woman, but I think of her as a girl. She had talent, but she was not the second coming. Lee and others at the Studio made her the second coming because they needed her to be this; they needed her to stay there and bring in the money and the attention. It was easy to be intimidated by Marilyn, and I was. She was so goddamned beautiful. Luscious. Sweet. But the intimidation disappeared fast, because she was so committed and so ready to get better. She listened like no one else, and she worked to the point of a migraine, and I would tell her to lighten up, go easy on yourself, but she couldn’t: she wanted to be taken seriously; she wanted to get it right. I bitch about my upbringing, and my sad mother and sad aunts and no men around and nothing but dead ends all around, but I had love and food and the space and the silence to dream. Marilyn didn’t have that. She told me once that she just wanted her own bedroom, her own bed, and a door she could close. And grass. Grass to run in. Trees to hug and flowers to pick. This was a girl who had nothing but the great gem that she was, and everyone got to hold and fondle that gem, and then put it back when they were done with it. She was happiest—for a time—when she married Arthur, and there was a country house and trees and fruit and flowers—and silence and doors.” Maureen paused, her voice thick and low. “I just wish,” she told me, “that we had spent more time helping her find the grass to run and the room with the door she could close. I wish more time had been spent helping her instead of pushing her. It can’t always be about the art or the play or the dream in the dark: sometimes it’s about the person who needs to be cared for. I felt that way about Marilyn, and I felt that way about Tennessee.

“That’s how I feel about it all now,” Maureen told me. “The emperor has no clothes. Let it go. There is nothing else there. Maybe we all dreamed too much for too long.”

By the time I met Tenn in 1982, he felt that the roles had been reversed for him and for Maureen: he now felt lost and confused and bereft while she was soaring—or so he thought. Maureen had won an Oscar in the spring for her performance in the Warren Beatty film Reds. One year earlier she had been much ogled during the theatrical and show-business extravaganza that was the revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Maureen was being offered many film and television roles. Tenn felt that she was now in a position to offer him aid and advice.

“I could never explain to him that I was still the same mess I’d always been,” Maureen said, somewhat exasperated. “I was just getting paid a bit more; that’s it. The work wasn’t really any better. I certainly wasn’t functioning any better. But Tenn believed that I was now connected, and he wanted me to make calls for him, to help him get his plays produced. He even wanted me to call Warren and get him some film work.”

Maureen made none of the calls, but she did stay on the phone with her friend and tried to calm him, reassure him, and get him back to the pale judgment.

“His writing had become an ordeal,” Maureen remembered. “Writing for him was like walking into gunfire—he knew he was going to be injured or killed, and he couldn’t face it. He wanted someone to walk him through it. That’s why he liked you.”

Maureen was the first person to explain to me why Tenn had found my presence reassuring or necessary.

“I mean, you’re great,” she confessed, “and I like you, but you were gonna help him get the words on the page. Or so he thought.” Maureen was exasperated by her friend, by his creation of so many steps and rituals and activities he needed to try to write, to believe he could write, to get in the mood. Journals were bought, begun, discarded. Prayers were written or learned, then forgotten. Everything was done but the writing. “He drove me crazy,” Maureen told me. “What do you say to a friend who’s afraid? I couldn’t tell him he was driving me insane. I couldn’t hurt him. I wanted him to know he was a great writer; that he could do it. But he … had to do it! He kept aiming for the writing, but he wasn’t writing. He wasn’t—God forgive me—writing well.” Maureen would talk to Tenn deep into the night, in the measured and soothing tones he had reserved for her when he told her who Serafina was, where she lived, how she lived. Maureen offered to Tenn the hand she had offered that led him to Marlon Brando’s apartment, full of young artists, fervent and fearless.

“I would say to him: ‘Tenn, you are a playwright, an American playwright, born to us on March 26, 1911. Your words are magical, because they came to you as an escape from a world you couldn’t handle, and while they are poetic and shot through with fantasy gold, they came to you through windows and across the fences of neighbors and overheard in offices of priests and around the kitchen tables of frustrated wives and mothers. The words in your plays are promises, and your plays are promises. We need you and we love you. Your writing is glorious and—fuck you—it mattered.’ ”

TENN AND I GOT UP from our table at the Court of Two Sisters. Lunch was over, and Tenn wanted me to join him at the Cathedral of St. Louis, which faces Jackson Square, the church in which Tennessee “received Christ.”

The moment Tenn entered St. Louis Cathedral, he took a sharp left and slipped into its tiny, cluttered gift shop. “We are in the market for rosaries,” Tenn announced, and the wan acolyte in charge pointed us toward a shelf on which rested a series of bags and boxes, as well as stainless-steel implements upon which were draped a variety of rosaries, cast of wood, ivory, onyx, and plastic, all in various sizes, from a laughably tiny version meant, perhaps, for a very young child, to one so large it could have been a wall hanging. Tenn was drawn to a moderate-sized black model that hung on a Styrofoam bust. “I like this one,” he told the clerk, who then directed him to a lower shelf stacked with plastic bags. Tenn chose the first one that read “Holy Rosary/Black/Large,” and pulled it open. The rosary fell into his welcoming palm, and we realized that its cross bore no Christ.

“This is a good sign,” Tenn whispered. “A rosary with no Christ indicates that He is already on the job. This is very portentous.” Tenn purchased the rosary—against the shocked, strong objections of the clerk, who called it damaged and ineffective—gave it to me, and we walked into the cathedral proper. When Tenn entered, he dramatically genuflected and made the Sign of the Cross. He remained in the position for some time, and I began to wonder if he was able to lift himself. I was not a Catholic, and I did not know the time allowed or required for such a gesture, but I also did not want to interrupt what might have been a sacred or obligatory rite. As I was considering which action to take, he lifted himself and grabbed my arm. He walked with purpose toward an array of red votive candles and looked for one that “reminded” him of Maureen. He chose one high and in the center, was unable to reach it, and asked me to light it.

Tenn surveyed the pews, looking for the perfect one, the absolute right one, for our purposes. “We must move quickly,” he told me in a whisper. “We must do this before the candle has been extinguished.”

We finally found a pew, fifth from the main altar, in the center of the cathedral, and we sat, or rather I sat and Tenn fell to his knees. He lowered his head to begin his prayer, but paused, turned to me, and said, “Write this down. I want you to take this to Maureen.”

I pulled out my blue book and pen and waited.

In a few seconds, Tenn began to pray aloud.

“I found my voice, which is to say my salvation, in the dark, with a radio, or the voices of neighbors, and a pure hatred in my heart, and a prayer that I would be transported. I pray that you and others who dream, in a literal and a spiritual darkness, are transported, and I pray, and I know, that they will, on the other side of a stage or a backyard fence or on the farthest reaches of understanding, find a listener, some recognition, some feeling of usefulness.

The garden behind St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, with its statue of Christ throwing a shadow upon the building where Tennessee claimed he found Christ, sobriety, and the courage to continue (illustration credit 2.3)

“We wait here, Jesus, in a confluence of crises for voices to rise up. I pray that the fears that cripple the young eventually force them to walk when they can find no other progress; when their only movement is purely emotional, I pray that their artistic limbs will take them to people hungry for what they’ve observed, on the sidelines, silent and seeing.

“I pray that the world will always want a story to be told, and I pray that they will always be able to trust themselves and others strongly enough to hear and accept what others have experienced, lived through, and strained to turn into art that can be subsumed by the willing.

“I pray that we will care to be big—of heart, of soul, of pocket, of industry, of daring—to magnify who and what we are through whatever means we have—in art, in living, in being. This is a great undertaking; it has value; it has saved so many; it is dying, but it is always in the process of dying, and is always rescued by those who recognize its frailty, its grandeur, and its necessity. Our greatness often lies in saving something that will be of use to souls unknown to us.

“I pray that this boy finds these women, these struggling, wonderful agents of change and creation, and learns not only to dream but to love and to apply and to give and to matter.

“I pray that I have mattered to some, and that I will matter again. I offer this candle to Maureen in the belief that its light will serve primarily to remind her that she, more than so many, has loved, applied, given, and mattered.

“I am, God help us all, a writer, and I have nothing else but my voice, for which I offer up, to my enduringly patient God, my heartfelt thanks.

“Amen.”

Tenn sat upright, leaned into me, and sighed. We looked at the altar, bathed in lovely amber light, and focused on the inscription ECCE PANIS ANGELORUM: Behold the bread of angels.

No more words were spoken. People came and prayed and left.

Tenn patted my hand, we got up, and I delivered him to his hotel. I drove back to Baton Rouge, with one blue book full, a menu covered with scribbles, and an assignment.

Three

A LONG ENTRY.

“A writer must admit to everyone—but primarily to himself—when he is unable to write, when he is unable to communicate, which is to say when he is unable to care. I have suffered no known incidents or accidents of the brain. I am unaware of any neurological maladies that might have pressed negatively upon my nerves or arteries, creating any blockage of feeling or movement. And yet I face the task of writing—not to mention the task of living—with a profound sense of apathy and anger, and they often alternate their entrances. A day may begin with my rage at the fog not coming over my mental boards, or it may begin lethargically, with my feeling that it might be best if the fogs remain offshore. But I write. I face the task every day. Pen to paper or keys to paper. Word upon word.

“I told you that I do not consider myself a religious man. I do not understand or try to understand the mysteries of Scripture or dogma or superstition or holy tradition. I use them. I try to understand them. I believe that if I count, as so many Catholics do, the injuries seared into the flesh of Jesus, count them, see them, feel them, adding them up, imagining their depth, they might be transformed into words.

“I imagine that words can become like the beads on the rosary, and I can count them, hold them in my hand and hold them in my mind, and hold them in my heart, and they can become images too. Images can become words, and words can become stones or steps that can lead me to a play.

“A woman appears only when images she deserves appear. My goal is to get to the images, to make my mind and my heart care enough to imagine a woman in a situation from which she must escape, and I can then hold out a means to do so for her.

“Which I can’t do, because the essential act of caring has left me.

“This gives me no comfort.

“When I think of words as stones or steps, I’m reminded of another woman. Not a woman who ever inspired the fog, not a woman who ever altered the idea of theater for me, but a woman who altered my sense of what a writer could be.

“She was a stone against which I could rub my talent and feel that it became sharper, and I can now imagine, from a distance, armed only with memory and imagination, that she can do this for me again.

“Tough and sad and funny and angry and lonely. Lovely and ugly and elegant and rustic. A born pilgrim who built—stone by stone, word by word, step by step—an artist.”

This was Tenn’s description to me of Eva Le Gallienne.

I NEVER MET Eva Le Gallienne in person, and only spoke to her on the telephone twice, calls that were arranged by Kim Hunter during my first year in New York.

Le G, as she asked me to call her, had no interest in seeing anything Tenn had said about her, and she let out a derisive snort when I offered to show her notes on other actresses Tenn had mentioned to me.

“No time for all that,” was what she told me. Le Gallienne could not be bothered to consider or “imagine” anything; she was, however, ready to be of assistance. “If I can help you,” she told me, “I’ll do it. I’ll do what I can, but I don’t want to talk about things that I can’t understand or that I have no interest in trying to understand. I can talk about Tennessee, and I can talk about me. So.”

Le Gallienne had a habit—at least with me—of ending sentences with that one word, and it sounded as if it were both a firm conclusion—closing a subject—and also, with its slight lilt, a cue to move on to the next question or comment. While Tenn had warned me that she was formidable and often curt, my impression was of a curious, alert woman eager to analyze and argue.

Eva Le Gallienne, circa 1920, perpetually working—on herself, on designs—for her Civic Repertory Theatre, which the young Tennessee followed with great interest (illustration credit 3.1)

“If I may,” she said to me early in our first phone call, “might I suggest that you never easily accept the conclusions of others when it comes to your work. I’m sure that Tennessee meant very well by telling you about his experiences and his impressions, but those should not be impressed upon you to such a degree that you begin to feel that his was the only way, or that his are the only opinions that are truthful.

“He was a great writer,” she continued, “but he was a flawed man. Emulate the writer, not the man.”

This laconic introduction was one that I had been prepared to expect from Le Gallienne, because it mirrored the odd but important relationship Tenn shared with her. “She never bored me,” Tenn had said to me, “even when I expected her to do so. Even when I expected the worst from her—judgments and self-aggrandizing attitudes and bitterness over spent gifts. But it never happened that way. She had a mind that was like a tough, tall broom that swept everything before it away, and what was left was a clean, bare floor, a screen, and you could then project onto it whatever you needed to rethink something, to begin again.”

The first meeting between Tenn and Le Gallienne—or at least the one that Tenn could recall—had not gone well. Tennessee Williams was already a successful playwright—both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire had been produced and published—and Le Gallienne admired his work, had studied it, and had, she admitted, taken notes.

“I felt that his talent was great enough to bear repetition of experience,” Le Gallienne told me. “I cannot think of a greater thing that could be said to a writer, but I don’t think he understood my statement. He looked bemused, even a little bored, but I wanted to tell him that those plays had altered me, had—now how can I say this?—uncomfortably forced me to accept some things about myself and about others that I might not have. This was great praise as I saw it, but I got the impression that it angered him, that he believed me to be a critic who wanted to show him where he needed improvement.”

Tenn admitted that the meeting was tense and “decidedly odd.” Tenn looked upon Le Gallienne, who was perhaps fifty years old when the meeting took place, as “ancient, of a different time,” although he had great admiration for her work with the Civic Repertory Theatre, her championing of writers, and her own writing skill, which he knew from her autobiography, At 33. Tenn also held in great esteem what he called her “blunt-force sleekness” in handling her lesbianism, which she carried not as a burden or a dysfunction, but as another attribute she chose not to deny and which contributed to her work, just as much as her talent, her beauty, and her intelligence.

“I was not terribly educated about lesbians,” Tenn admitted to me. “I had only a tertiary understanding of their trials through Radclyffe Hall and Mrs. Danvers [Judith Anderson’s Sapphic servant in the Hitchcock film of Rebecca], and I had a not much better understanding of what we called the male homosexual. I was still in a bit of a maze in that regard, and Miss Le Gallienne appeared neither deranged nor incomplete.”

Le Gallienne was, however, intimidating to Tenn: She was intelligent, a fact she chose not to hide, and she was opinionated, unafraid, in Tenn’s eyes, to speak her mind to anyone. After she had made her remarks about studying Tenn’s plays and making notes in their margins, Le Gallienne asked the young writer what he thought of Ibsen. This was of no small concern to Le Gallienne: she adored Ibsen, translated his works, studied him intently.

Recalling the encounter years later, Tenn could not help laughing. “I am a terrible reprobate, I’m afraid,” he said. “I could not help myself, for I felt that a stern, spinsterish Shaker woman had taken it upon herself to emend my plays. I told her I had, indeed, read the plays of Mr. Ibsen, had seen them in numerous productions, and found them to be quite like the act of eating a box of soap flakes, when they were not like two months of Sundays in church.”

Tenn cackled at the memory of his comment, but he also recalled that Le Gallienne did not dismiss or scorn him. Instead, they continued their discussion, and when they met again, years later, they picked up their friendship, such as it was, and kept talking.

“He was a child,” Le Gallienne remembered, “and a nervous one. I knew he was performing for me, trying to be smart. I also felt he wanted an argument, a defense, from me. I refused to offer one. I wanted to talk about his work, about work in general.

“If you want to know about me,” she told me, “you’ll need to know that I want to work, and work is what motivates everything I do.

“So.”

Tenn believed that Eva Le Gallienne’s autobiography, At 33, began with the following paragraph:

“At seven in the morning of January eleventh, 1899, a lusty and hideous baby was brought into the world to artistic parents. Bow bells sounded for the cockney baby, because, as is well-known, no baby born to bow bells can be anything but cockney. Thus began my first year.”

That is not the first paragraph of At 33, but Le Gallienne liked it. “In some ways,” she laughed, “it’s better, it’s tighter.”

Tenn and Le Gallienne shared a love of dramatic entrances—and alliteration.

“My God,” she once said, after I had recounted something he had said, “he really gets caught in the circle, doesn’t he? I do it, too, searching for a rhythm.”

Le Gallienne sympathized with Tenn’s desperation for order, for a plan, a metaphor—anything onto which he could depend to get to the act of writing. However, she had never been able to display any patience—or to hold her barbed opinions—when Tenn began talking about rivers and streams and steps and stones.

“He had the talent,” she all but shouted. “He had the gift. This was demonstrable; that could not be disproved. What he lacked, and what I believe he always lacked, was the foundation of discipline and respect that everyone needs to remain balanced and to function. When he was young and strong, he could fly on lots of dreams and little maintenance, but when I last saw him [a meeting Le Gallienne believed occurred in 1980], he was adrift, sad, diminished.” Tenn had told her during that last meeting that he felt distracted. “He was the distraction,” Le Gallienne quipped. “Tennessee Williams was the only thing that could destroy Tennessee Williams. And he did.”

Could anything destroy Eva Le Gallienne? I was prompted to ask this question because Tenn had told me that she and her Civic Repertory Theatre had been launched with great fanfare and hope, only to fail. Le Gallienne’s face and hands had been severely damaged in a fire at her home in Connecticut, and she had constructed ways to conceal both the scars and the nerve damage that had resulted. A film career that she had pursued, primarily for funds to continue working in the theater, had not prospered. After each of these setbacks—heavily chronicled and intently watched by Tenn—Le Gallienne had returned to her home in the country, regrouped, pondered, thought about things. “I am amazed at her resilience,” Tenn told me. “I wish I had it.”

“To live is to be destroyed,” Le G told me. “There is no other way to get through life. We have to have hopes and we have to witness them being shattered; we have to love and we have to lose; we have to fail; we have to find ourselves depleted of faith. I have been destroyed repeatedly, but I have been able to recuperate; I have been able to mend myself; to love and to be loved; to find some other way of working.

“And this was absent in Tennessee Williams,” she continued, “who believed in writing, and who once could write, but when that gift had been altered by his self-destruction, he could not recuperate, because he had never learned how to survive on his own. He used sex and liquor and drugs and amusements where he ought to have applied love and faith and work.

“I haven’t worked—fully—as an actress in years, but this has not prevented me from finding other ways of being of some use and of some purpose.” When she offered this summation of her life as an actress, Le Gallienne was ninety years old, and she felt that her ability to act “fully and freely” had disappeared some thirty years before our call took place, at some point in the early 1960s, when she launched another version of her repertory theater and tried yet again to take challenging works to people all across the country.

I was amazed that Le Gallienne had used that phrase “being of some use and of some purpose,” and I told her that Tennessee had used it frequently, to the point where other actresses in whom he confided used it as well.

“It was first uttered by my father,” Le Gallienne told me, referring to Richard Le Gallienne, a poet who worried that the bounties of nature and affection would pull him from his writing table. “He instilled in me the love of languages, the love of work, the love of nature,” Le Gallienne said, “and he taught me that we needed to know our histories, to know everyone’s histories. We are all perpetual students, and we are all perpetually ignorant—of something.”

When we ended our first phone call, Le Gallienne told me that our conversation, as well as Tennessee’s words I’d read to her from my notes, had reminded her of a little poem her father had written, and which was among the first she had memorized.

At last I got a letter from the dead,

And out of it there fell a little flower,—

The violet of an unforgotten hour.

“This is what you’ve given me,” Le Gallienne told me, “a violet from a fabled time; a gift from a great writer.”

It was Eva Le Gallienne who instilled in Tenn a love for the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in their earliest visits, Tenn could talk about Emerson and draw a line toward his interest—capricious at best—in Christian Science, Religious Science, and “a damnable tendency toward Christian positivism,” as Le Gallienne remembered.

“His mother had given him a book once,” Le Gallienne recalled, “and it was called It Shall Be Done Unto You, and with all that he should have been remembering and doing, snatches of that book stayed within his mind.”

It took me many years and many searches of used bookstores to find a copy of It Shall Be Done Unto You, which, as Le Gallienne’s memory has it, was given to Tenn not long after the success of The Glass Menagerie. “To keep him centered,” Le Gallienne remembered. “On the straight and narrow.”

The book is subtitled “A Technique of Thinking” and was written by Lucius Humphrey and published in 1936 by Duell, Sloan and Pearce. (It has since been reprinted as a paperback and “gift idea.”) Tenn never mentioned the book to me by name, but Le Gallienne’s vivid recollection of what it entailed—not to mention her scorn—led me to believe that much of what he remembered as his mother’s “survival tips” derived from this book, and what he took from multiple readings he shared with many of the actresses I would ultimately meet.

For all of his dependence on psychoanalysis and its attendant prescriptions, all of the illegal substances ingested, the liquor, and the “happy subsuming” into the Roman Catholic Church in the late 1960s, many of Tenn’s core beliefs concerning his mental rejuvenation stemmed from this book’s teachings on creativity.

Tenn’s obsession with work, and his fear that he might never again work well, was calmed by remembering what he called “the Creative Principle.” In chapter 4, entitled “Be Ye Doers,” there is a description of the division of the mind of man into three component parts, or phases. Each of these phases has distinct qualities peculiar to itself; each complements the activities of the others; and each is an extension of, and one with, the Creative Principle.

The first and foremost phase is Creative Principle—God. It is the embodiment of all the known laws of creation, and not only expresses itself in the other two phases but also constitutes the highest phase of intelligence, our Super Mind, symbolized as the Father.

The second phase, the “Christ Mind,” manifests its distinct and peculiar quality in that it is at once conscious both of our God phase and also of the human phase. It is the conscious link between the two, and is symbolized as the Son.

The third phase, our human mind, or the Habitual Mind, is distinct and peculiar in that it can, with understanding, use all three phases for the purpose of fulfilling its desires, or it can, by its ignorance, deprive itself of the privileges of the higher phases. Nearly all of us are motivated exclusively by the restricted ideas which arise from the limited understanding of Habitual Mind. This Habitual Mind is the individual’s accumulated consciousness—the aggregate of experiences arising from the reactions of inherited tendencies to environment and education. By relying solely upon habitual thinking we deprive ourselves of experiences we might otherwise have. In fact, most of us are running our lives today on one cylinder. I can of mine own self do nothing.

Tenn spoke often of the Habitual Mind, whose description he found in Humphrey’s book, and of the Mortal Mind, which is a term attributed both to Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and Phineas Quimby, the healer from whom, it is suggested, Eddy found her inspiration. Several times Tenn told me that the human race is governed by its imagination, a quote of Napoleon’s that appears in the Humphrey book, preceding the following paragraph, one frequently quoted by Tenn to me and others: “By means of our thoughts and feelings we can unite ourselves with, and direct, Creative Energy. Therefore we should understand the vital necessity of forming the habit of thinking upon our thoughts and controlling them. Nothing in the world is more important than considered thinking. It is the practical means of consciously producing whatsoever we desire.”

Eva Le Gallienne epitomized for Tenn the art of considered thinking. So too did Stella Adler, Edith Evans, Ruth Gordon, and a series of other actresses who served as a unique section of his redesigned Rosary, because the memory of them, the “habit of thinking upon their thoughts and actions,” kept Tenn sane and balanced deep in the real and imagined night of his confusion: Julie Harris, Kim Hunter, Elizabeth Wilson, Frances Sternhagen, and Marian Seldes.

Le Gallienne held a high place among those actresses because she was tough and outspoken, and because she shared with Tenn the additional bonus of creating, of tapping into Creative Energy, while also carrying the secret and, as he imagined it, the shame of being “inverted.” (I had never heard that term applied to a homosexual, and Tenn explained to me that it was the term his mother preferred. “She felt it was more sympathetic to their plight,” Tenn said, “and it stated their sexual preference as if it were brown eyes or a cleft chin—or a cleft palate. An accident, a trick, of nature.”)

Le Gallienne and I did not discuss her sexuality at great length, but she did not feel that it was a burden to be carried, nor did she feel that she had brought it forth often as a matter of pride or embarrassment. But Irene Worth told me that during their work together, Le Gallienne had told her, in confidence and with great tenderness, that she was a lesbian. “She thought I should know about it,” Irene remembered, “as if it were narcolepsy or memory lapses—something that would impact our working relationship, our time together on the stage. It didn’t matter to me at all,” she continued, “but I did feel that she needed to tell people, some people.”

Tenn believed that Le Gallienne escaped the many problems he had experienced with his homosexuality—or rather his homosexual relationships—because of her strict ordering of her life and her emotions. He spoke of her many journals filled with her tiny, elegant, spidery script, noting her thoughts, her readings, her activities, her plans. Le Gallienne did not let the “accumulated consciousness,” the “garbage that clutters our minds and drags us down,” as he saw it, to alter the Creative Principle. Their shared homosexuality could be categorized, via Humphrey, as “the reactions of inherited tendencies,” and Tenn believed that Le Gallienne had trumped them, or had at least compartmentalized them, by virtue of her dogged discipline, her noting of every thought or action.

“What is religion?” Le Gallienne asked me. “A series of acts and intentions meant to honor, most of the time, one man: Jesus Christ. He is to be our example. What should Tennessee’s religion have been? Writing. And what is writing comprised of? Words. He should have been in the habit of worshipping, collecting, studying words all the time.”

When Tenn would meet with Le Gallienne, and in their phone calls in the last few years of his life, they would discuss writers and their works. The subject of Ibsen would be brought up. “I would quote Ibsen in his native tongue,” Le Gallienne recalled, “and I would then translate it, noting the intention of the words, their placement, their meaning. There are no accidents in Ibsen, and if you divine his intentions, you can begin to see how a great writer thinks.”

Tenn would follow this line of thinking for a time, and would even entertain Le Gallienne’s request that he take apart his own works in this way. “He could then explain, with great clarity,” Le Gallienne remembered, “what Blanche was doing and thinking, what her intentions were, and how the brutal swirl of circumstances delivered her to her safest, desired place.”

But Tenn’s mind would wander; he would grow tired of searching for the foundations and scaffolding of great works. His Habitual Mind would take over, and he would be hungry for gossip, for ideas, for affirmation.

“I would be fascinated in the beginning,” Tenn told me, “of Le Gallienne telling me to begin each play with the title page, the name of the author, the date of publication.” Stella Adler discussed plays in this manner as well, but she was far more passionate, far more sympathetic to the artistic temperament than Le Gallienne, who had about her, Tenn said, “the pure rigidity of a devoted teacher.” Tenn liked, however, what the deconstruction of plays revealed. “Line upon line, word upon word, you see the bones,” he marveled. “You see the intention, and it must be what musicians feel when they take notations—chords and notes on a page—and transform it into a piece of music, and it’s a piece that makes you think of your mother, or a lover, or the sun on your young arms.”

Recalling a conversation with Le Gallienne, and how she implored him to think of the words he wrote—that anyone wrote—as strings that were literally attached to people or ideas, Tenn became animated and emotional.

“I am seduced by the strings—in songs as well as in plays. The strings we attach to the people we love, the people who are in our works. The strings are feelings and memories—our memories. But they must be heard musically; they have to sound like orchestral strings to have their effect. The sound is what I imagine in moments of extreme intensity and vulnerability. I pray to have the ability to evoke through words what wonderful orchestral music can accomplish—or even tawdry jukebox ditties that pull out a string to move a person. I can recall times in my life when I would be walking down a street—a street in El Paso or Provincetown, Hollywood or New Orleans, Dallas or New York—and from a bar or an open window I might hear the sound of strings and with it a voice that competed with its cry, its teasing wail. It’s a sound that stops me cold, literally. I stand there and I’m transported to another time in my life when I had a similar feeling, when my heart hurt so much, from longing or hunger or rage. I can remember being in that bed, in the dark, in St. Louis, sent to bed hungry by my father, my radio removed from my night table and hidden, and through the open windows all around our house, I could hear Jack Benny and The Shadow and Lux Presents Hollywood and strings! And those strings were saying to me that life was rotten, small, and worthless, but life, this life, could be escaped. Follow the strings.

“A friend lost his mother a few years ago,” Tenn remembered. “She died in a nursing home that reeked of death and disinfectant, and my friend felt haunting in the halls, spirits discarded. When my friend’s mother had been young, she had worn Mitsouko and Bellodgia, and her clothes, her handkerchiefs, the air that swirled around her, always carried these scents. My friend hated to see his mother in this condition, smelling of shit and unguents and pine oil. When my friend’s mother died, he went to the nursing home to spend a few moments with her body, to bury her and any ill will he had harbored, to spend himself of some tears and some resentments. She was tiny and withered and fully dead, but the air hummed with energy and Mitsouko, and I wondered, my friend wondered, if the smell returned as she returned to her desired self, or if he felt compelled to remember her, even in an olfactory manner, as he knew her in happier times, and as he knew she would prefer to be. That is writing; those are strings. The strings tug at our hearts musically, and they also pull us, tightly and closely, to those things we’ve loved, those things we’ve lost, those things we pray will return—those things that are, God help us, who we are. That is what I hope the Creative Principle can be.”

When I read those words to Le Gallienne, she cried, and she announced that I had been in the presence of a writer. “He still could do it,” she said, “if he had wanted to. Tell me, where did those gorgeous images go?”

I had no idea if he eventually wrote them down, or if he ever took them to a pad of paper or a typewriter. He never mentioned those images to me again in our short time together—but they effortlessly came forth when he took thoughts he had, analyzed the feelings they generated, and expressed them in words that meant something to him.

“You see,” Le Gallienne said, “if he had just gotten himself to a piece of paper, if he had just begun the act of capturing his feelings, he would have been able to write a play we would now be producing and loving and discussing. But what did he do instead?”

There was drinking and praying and talking and circular walks in the Quarter, and on every corner a search for the writer he had once been.

“He didn’t believe in the pragmatic habit,” Le Gallienne continued. “He was like that other Tom—the Tom in The Glass Menagerie, who wanted magic, who got lost in dreams. We all know what happens to people who descend into magic, don’t we?”

No, I said.

“They disappear,” she said.

Four

“MEMORY, OF COURSE, is unreliable, often evil, but it is the source of our identity.”

That is the note I was given as Tenn and I began to walk around New Orleans one morning.

Tenn and I spent part of our second day together on foot and in my car, and because of the amount of time I spent behind the wheel, my notes were sporadic, composed at rest stops and when I returned home that evening. Tenn wanted to talk, exhume memories, and he needed someone to tell them to. He asked me to be that person.

I drove Tenn to the corner of Coliseum and Constantinople streets and parked in front of an ornate house, a whirl of pastel meringue. In this house he had been young and handsome and much appreciated. Promise was, he recalled, “written” all over him, and he was loved by the married man who lived here with his wife. Tenn was also liked by proper people who did not mind that this young and awkward writer often needed money and encouragement to keep heading to his writing table, which held a typewriter that was often pawned, and so intermittent handwritten pages would accumulate, and the secretary to this man—he was a professional man, very successful—would type up these notes and they were pristine, crisp.

Tenn learned to write during this fall he was remembering, during the war, but before he left for Hollywood, at the urging of his agent, Audrey Wood, to make enough money so that he would not need the love, prodding, and secrets of this married man.

“It wasn’t a long-lived memory,” Tenn recalled. “We met at an art gallery in the French Quarter, long gone, on Royal Street. It was an odd assemblage of people—the people who wanted the arts, enjoyed the arts, wanted to be artists, visual and verbal. He was handsome, softly handsome, which means that his looks weren’t immediately present—they became evident through his kindness, his ability to be gentle. That’s rare in a man—married or not—the ability to be gentle, the courage to move slowly and softly across the contours of a young queer.”

Tenn’s memories of this man included gifts of a Royal typewriter on which he had written portions of Battle of Angels, The Glass Menagerie, and Streetcar. Tenn tapped his wrist and recalled another gift: his first good watch, shiny and large and not his style, and pawned in Los Angeles, when he needed extra money to woo and impress a young Italian he met on the set of a Lana Turner film he remembered with laughter.

“Shiny toys for shiny boys.” Tenn laughed. “I am at my most extravagant in pursuit of love and affection, and at my most niggardly in accepting either. And that,” he said, pointing to my blue book, “is a point worth noting: a memory of value, if not comfort.”

Los Angeles in 1943 was Tenn’s next mental destination. On the corner of Coliseum and Constantinople, Tenn found himself instead mentally on Fountain Avenue, in front of the El Palacio Apartments, an explosion of broad strokes and architectural overstatements, enormous trees and hedges, overgrown and overheated. He was drawn there by its gaudy glamour and was dismayed that its cost was beyond his reach, even as it was close to so many men he had met and for whom he had fallen. (“Everybody,” he told me, “has had a lover on Fountain Avenue.”) Tenn would close his eyes and remember being driven around Hollywood or driving in a borrowed car up Fairfax until it passed Hollywood Boulevard and then crept up the hills, blooming into a series of zigzagging streets, and it was there that he knew a wealthy young man, an inheritor of money, who had come to what he always called “the Dream Factory” and whose house bulged with beautiful men, premium alcohol, and drugs. There did not seem to be a war raging anywhere, no shortages of any kind. The fabrics of the house were rich and clean, the food was abundant, and it was there that Tenn first tasted cocaine, which the host bought from a dealer out on Crenshaw, when he didn’t buy it out of a slab of limestone on Argyle, or had to make a call—a long-distance call, the ultimate extravagance—to someone in the art department at Columbia who had connections, and who also, deep in the night, utilized the sets of the Three Stooges’ soundstage to make high-end pornographic films with hopeful starlets and beautiful men, mostly black and Latin, “supremely sculpted” and frequently available to those, like the generous host, who wanted his guests happy in every way. High in those hills (“in every sense, I assure you!”) you could stand in a curve, on the soft shoulder of that street, with its fragrant, rich name, and look out over all of downtown Los Angeles, and you could see it twinkle, and the lights were bright but they carried no sound, and everything seemed bathed in a lovely blue shade of night.

“No sound from the city,” he remembered, “but so much from behind me, where the house hummed and trilled.” Records were turned and dropped, and each cut would propel an emotion, a memory from one of the guests. “Little Brown Jug” was played over and over, and the guests danced.

Each time a record fell, Tenn could feel that a word dropped into his mind, then fell upon his mental stage, waiting to be accepted or rejected by whatever woman waited in the wings. Each time an ice cube dropped into his glass, an idea was stored away for future use, a sound or a smell catalogued for future reference. In his pants pocket were coins, and he rubbed them like worry stones, the ridges of quarters and dimes calming him, helping him in conversations with men, all so burnished and poised, all of them unaware of time and resources slipping, fading.

“You drop the word,” Tenn said, “and it happens. You follow, word by word, brick by brick, bead by bead.”

Tenn was happier at the parties of other struggling writers, hopeful actors. They had “pads” on Olive and Cherokee and Ivar, and the booze wasn’t premium, but the talk was pitched at a higher level, and Tenn might wake up the next morning with someone who had a mind and an opinion of Clifford Odets or Ferenc Molnár or what might be coming up in a production that did not feature Lana Turner.

Tenn’s favorite apartments were on Havenhurst, right off Sunset, which he urged me not to confuse with the Havenhurst Apartments, which were grand in the 1930s, but which by 1944 were already beginning to fade and to draw into their environs a number of retired, unwanted, or cash-strapped contract players, and a couple of sad bachelors who had also come to play in the Dream Factory, but had stayed too long for too little and now invited the young Tennessee Williams to their rooms to talk about past glories and to gently kiss him and hold him in their beds until he could sneak out and walk along Hollywood Boulevard, wondering when things would happen for him.

“The search for the ‘click’ might have begun then,” Tenn said. “I spent my time in that city searching.”

One of his worst experiences in the Havenhurst was the night he went to be with an older gentleman who had worked with Alla Nazimova and who agreed to introduce Tenn to Ruth Chatterton, who was then living in New York. He did not want to go, but ambition superseded desire that evening, a clear, pink night, as he recalled. His shoes clicked on the terrazzo floors; a fan hummed in the corner of the lobby; the garden was full of chattering ladies. Tenn had a sandwich in a brown paper bag, and he carried it with him into the man’s apartment.

At work, at MGM, Tenn had found himself seated next to director Clarence Brown, who had eschewed the menu of the commissary and instead drew out from a leather satchel a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Tenn watched the director—who had been Garbo’s favorite—and was amazed to find that his lunch was that supreme Southern offering, pimiento cheese. Tenn struck up a conversation with Brown. Tenn’s mother prided herself on her pimiento-cheese “spread,” and the two men, one from Kentucky, the other deeply marinated in the ways of Mississippi and Louisiana, laughed over shared tastes. Ultimately, the director offered Tenn one half of his sandwich. Brown’s wife or maid or cook spiked his spread with a dash of vinegar, giving it a kick that Tenn’s remembered recipe lacked. Tenn praised the sandwich, and the men discussed films, actresses, and the theater.

The following day, Brown found Tenn again in the commissary and pulled from the satchel a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “For later,” he said, “when you’re writing.”

This was the sandwich Tenn took to the Havenhurst.

After a grim session of wrestling and groping, ending in apologies and regrets, Tenn sat across from the man and, surrounded by an airless room full of musty books, a candelabra from a touring production, and a kitchenette that smelled of a moldy sponge and tuna fish, the man spied the bag and asked about it.

Trapped, Tenn offered the man half of the sandwich, and they sat together, each eating, drinking lukewarm ginger ale, and discussing Chekhov.

“It was one of the worst nights of my life,” Tenn remembered. “The glorious gesture of Clarence Brown coming into contact with my resentful gesture toward that man, whose use to me was Ruth Chatterton’s address.”

Tenn remembered something of that night that had remained with him. “When I am most uncomfortable,” he remembered, “when I find myself caught in a situation entirely absent of desire or interest, when I feel deprived of air, and the room grows small and silent and the walls seem to move toward me, the person who is threatening or boring to me appears closer than they should, and I resort to rubbing coins, or the legs of my pants, or, in that particular case, the waxed paper of Clarence Brown, which I turned into a warm, worn prayer cloth, patting, turning, until it was creased and worthless, but I saved it, and I took it with me—a reminder of what not to do, of what not to remember.”

The memory of that night sent Ruth Chatterton into retirement, at least from Tenn’s mental repertory. Tenn began to search for another actress to crowd his mind, inhabit his dreams, drop words.

A happier memory for Tenn was his time with the young Italian he met at MGM, a carpenter or electrician (“in some technical capacity”), early twenties, handsome, terribly sweet. “I am never so weak,” he recalled, “than when I am in the presence of kind eyes. He had kind eyes.” They talked of movies, of literature, and Tenn learned that the young man dreamed of directing. Tenn shared memories of conversations with Clarence Brown, which included directorial advice that had been shared with him by William Wyler and George Stevens. Tenn explained to him that Wyler had consulted with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, over maneuvers that would draw the viewers’—the camera’s—attention from the teeth and eyes of Patricia Collinge and the thespian limitations of Bette Davis in The Little Foxes. Collinge seemed to animate her teeth and eyes more fervently each day, and the oracular and dental exertions were driving Wyler to distraction. The solution was to consider Collinge primarily in two positions: when pathetic, she was to be shot from above, allowing her to look small and humble, defeated; when in reflection, thinking of past beauty and worth, she was to be shot in profile, as if dreaming, half a person, diminished.

Clarence Brown, one of the most acclaimed and stylish directors at MGM, who encouraged Tennessee—with words and sandwiches—during his brief tenure at the studio (illustration credit 4.1)

George Stevens told Brown that the surest, simplest way to indicate that a character, especially a woman, was in doubt, in trouble, in need of an audience’s sympathy, was to take the camera as high as it could go, and to slowly bring the lens to her level. The world was against her, but the audience had sought her out, found her, felt protective of her. Tenn remembered the visual of a woman as seen from above, and the young man also wrote it down, as he wrote down everything Tenn told him about his time on the set, his reading, his life. “Every woman I have ever met or known or loved,” Tenn told me, “and every woman I have ever created, I have seen from above, sought out, found, coddled, loved, protected.”

The young man, whose name Tenn could not recall, although he could recall the contours of his physique and the décor of his apartment, lived off Hollywood Boulevard, in a multi-dwelling house on Vista. Tenn decided, in the retelling, to call the man Mangia, because he was a wonderful and generous cook, and because his memories of their times together revolved around discussion of movies, sex, and food. “A trinity I would willfully worship today,” Tenn quipped.

The apartment on Vista was one of four, and the home in which they sat had a wholesome, Andy Hardy look about it. The directions were simple—Vista, between Hollywood and Hawthorn—and Mangia had friends on surrounding streets with names like Sierra Bonita and Poinsettia Place. Another friend, who had access to marijuana, lived on Yucca. Luckier friends had advanced to dwellings on De Longpre and Harper; another was having an affair with a famous cinematographer who lived in a glorious wedding cake of a building on Fountain and Sweetzer.

The memory of these places became a Rosary for Tenn. Sierra Bonita. Poinsettia. Yucca. De Longpre. Harper. Sweetzer.

There was a Rosary of names for the streets, and the prayer Tenn had in his mind was to find and locate and coddle Miriam Hopkins, who had moved into the prominent position once held by Ruth Chatterton. “I was loved and I was loving in that time,” Tenn said, “but my primary passion was to find Miriam Hopkins, an actress my mother and I loved, and for whom I felt I had dreamed a character.”

I asked which character, but Tenn held up a hand and silenced me.

Tenn did not feel comfortable staying in Mangia’s apartment when he left for work in the morning, making a call that was earlier than Tenn’s. Tenn would stay in bed while Mangia prepared breakfast, only arising when it was completed. With morning slipping away, there was kissing and laughter and no time for a leisurely breakfast. Mangia had prepared sweet rolls, and they were still warm. The aroma of coffee filled the apartment. Two sweet rolls were placed in a brown paper bag and coffee was poured into a mug. “I’ll bring it back after work,” Tenn promised. Mangia left, and Tenn, without a car, and a couple of hours early for work, walked along Hollywood Boulevard, stopping at St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church, where he ate the sweet rolls and sipped the coffee while looking at the altar and sharing the space with a handful of other early risers. Tenn said a prayer: bring me, please, to Miriam Hopkins.

Days later, on another walk, he discovered Camino Real, and the thought of walking that particular camino, in that particular time, gave him ideas. Walking that camino, he created a lady, a great lady, and her contours were growing more and more into those of Miriam Hopkins.

“Did Miriam Hopkins always exist?” Tenn asked. “Or did I dream her into being? Certainly no one needed her more.”

Tenn had an epiphany: he had found Amanda Wingfield on the soft shoulder of that high street overlooking downtown Hollywood, blue lights and music and beautiful men and relaxed nerves and dreams of succeeding all around him, threatening and arousing him. “The album and the ice dropped,” he said, “and the words and the idea dropped. Amanda stands in her environment, and in the distance she sees expansion and hope and light, and behind her she hears youth and merriment and the hope of flesh and folly. And she’s right in the center, unable to move, unable to know where she’s headed. She lives in both of the worlds, both of the visions: her glorious past, which was what that house high in the Hollywood hills must have seemed to me, shiny and clean and full of things I wanted but was afraid to seek, and ahead was the glory that was unattainable. For me, it would have required understanding how the movies worked, knowing how to move in those circles. For Amanda it required moving Tom and Laura toward jobs or mates who could provide for her a safe, clean room, full of air, with walls that didn’t crowd, and space for her to remember.”

Tenn fingered coins in his pocket, rubbed the waxed paper of Clarence Brown’s sandwich, and held the warm mug in that church on Hollywood Boulevard.

Drop a memory. Drop a word. Words collect.

You go to Hollywood for some distinct reason. Even those born there are descendants of desire—the desire to be rich in money or movies or experience. Proximity to success is as powerful an incentive to be there as success itself, and the ambition and the craving give the city a buzz, the intensity of a hive, swirling with passion and avarice and occasional artistry. It was, Tenn remembered, a city glazed like a beautiful and perfectly unnecessary dessert.

Amanda Wingfield was Tenn’s mother, and also the young Tennessee, standing on that high hill, dreaming. The love and comfort Tenn felt in Mangia’s house, so different from the confusion he felt on the soundstages, where his work felt flat and forced, brought forth another version of himself, his mother, and an actress who had become an obsession. “Lady Torrance [in Battle of Angels and its later reworking as Orpheus Descending] was born in the intersections of my confusion,” Tenn told me. “She had had desire, and she remembered it. She wanted desire again, but didn’t know where to find it. She walked and she wandered and she prayed. She was in strange lands. There was silk but there was also the sun that could damage it, shrink it, destroy it. I had these thoughts and these desires, but I was searching for the female form onto which I could impress them all. And I found them. On a hill. On the Camino. In a prayer.”

Tenn paused. “I could write then,” he said. “I could connect things.”

He paused again.

“I believe I can write again,” he told me. “Thank you for indulging me.”

I then drove to the Marigny, where one of the city’s loveliest balconies beckoned to Tenn. “I believe that I can connect my memories, and reconstruct my life, my writing life,” he confessed, “through the balconies of New Orleans. Much as [John] Cheever reconstructed a man’s life through the connected swimming pools that held memories, that had access to the people and events that shaped his life.”

Tenn turned to me as we continued to wait. “I’m thinking like a writer. Drop a memory, drop a word. Drop a memory, drop a word.” He repeated the words like a mantra all through our drive to the Marigny.

Five

AT THE CORNER of Elysian Fields and Royal, Tenn asked me to slow down as we looked up at a forbidding grey building festooned with yards of wrought iron—a wraparound balcony that seemed, to Tenn, to call out for an embrace, and on which he had been many times, many years ago.

There had been parties, celebrations, parades, kisses, followed with walks back home made slow and fuzzy by liquor, to apartments on Royal and Dumaine, squatter pads on Governor Nicholls and Touro.

“To be drunk and young,” Tenn told me, “your lips slightly chafed from the attentions of someone you like or love, and to walk home, where, waiting like a loved and lonely pet, is a piece of paper in the typewriter, slightly curled, half-completed, waiting for your next move. And”—he flexed his fingers and made a fist—“the move comes. You complete the sentence, drop a memory, spread the remembrance across time and words, and make a gift of it to someone else.

“Take me down Royal,” he said.

We moved well below ten miles per hour, but the day was lazy, there was no one on the sidewalks, only a few people on porches or crossing the streets that we navigated as if lost and confused; and while Tenn’s eyes were frequently closed, his mind was alive as he ticked off names and dates and times and places.

Royal Street is populated by a series of houses amber or peach, cinnamon brown, slate grey, cerulean and turquoise, squat and stately—Necco wafers often shaded by trees that had burst through the mottled and cracked concrete of the sloped sidewalks. During several months in the forties, Tenn had walked this street, lived on this street, and his mind had been full of images of Miriam Hopkins.

“Whatever I have learned of any value,” Tenn said, “has come to me from women and from photographs, and I consider films to be a form of photography. I need images of women to understand things.” Tenn shared movies and their actresses with his mother and sister: it was a form of communication that always worked in his childhood—no codes or hidden messages were needed. “I was freest,” Tenn said, “when I could live my life, understand my life, reorder my life, through the movies, and then through drama. And my mother was the same; my sister served us both.” It was not an exaggeration, he told me, to think of those three—in their various locations—as a repertory company, working themes out, seeking clarity. “Life only made sense to my mother through dreaming,” Tenn told me, “and I was the same, but I wanted to move on and out; I needed to see if the dreams had any value or traction: I needed to find some realization of a few dreams, and my motivation for some time was Miss Hopkins.”

Miriam Hopkins was an idol to both Tennessee and his mother: a refined, intelligent, and talented Southern woman who was honest and comfortable with what Tennesse called “the finer things: she was surrounded by all the things I wanted.” (illustration credit 5.1)

Tenn found a play—and a woman—in his mind. It would become Battle of Angels, and later it would turn into Orpheus Descending, but it began as a series of mental introductions he imagined between his mother and Hopkins. “I not only admired Hopkins for her work in films,” Tenn said, “and for what I had heard of her stage work: I admired and sought her because she represented so many things that my mother admired.” Hopkins had been born into comfortable circumstances in Georgia; her pedigree, Edwina often asserted, as she looked up from movie magazines she had cadged from the beauty parlor, was one of pristine Southern heritage. Hopkins was beautiful and funny and smart, and she filled her days with painting and cooking and golf and flying lessons and sewing and maintaining famous husbands and lovely homes. “This was the catechism I heard on Miss Hopkins,” Tenn told me, “and I bought it, and I loved her, and I wanted to stay close to my mother and to my sister, even as my dreams pulled me farther and farther away.”

Near the houses on Royal that meant so much to Tenn there had been coffee shops and restaurants and candy counters—confectionaries, they were called, social centers for those with short attentions and sweet teeth. Tenn imagined Miriam Hopkins bumped from her pedestal of privilege and waiting on the motley band of hungry and lonely people who sat on pink stools and sipped pastel drinks. A character was born.

“I adored Miriam Hopkins,” Tenn told me, “for no other reason than that she answered my letters: she responded. She met with me and she talked to me and she encouraged me.” Once at a Hollywood party, during Tenn’s Mangia days and walks on the Los Angeles Camino Real and morning prayers in Episcopal churches, he had seen Hopkins—in the flesh, not through letters or phone calls—and he recalled that she had “that rapid and gooey Southern charm—which meant that she kissed me and welcomed me as a relative or automatic friend. We had things in common, she said. She simply could tell. I promised her my friendship and I promised her my play; she returned the offer of friendship. I cannot stress enough how important her vow would be.”

Tenn held the image of Miriam Hopkins in his mind both during his writing hours and his “living, walking, surviving” hours. “She was an instrument of usefulness,” Tenn told me. “There were no wasted hours, no unused gifts. I wanted to be that sort of person. And I learned then, during that process, that I am incapable of writing without the supervision—real or supernatural; intended or accidental—of a woman. Women give me the characters and the ideas and the language, and it is women who have brought me the food and the drink and the bits of cash to keep me going. I am entirely possible—by physical and artistic birth—because of women.” Like so many of the women who influenced Tenn, Hopkins knew that it was her responsibility to expand her life and her options within it. Hopkins used her own talent and her own will—as well as her beauty and her charm—to reshape and conquer reality. Hopkins did not have Christian Science or an adherence to scholarship and tough professionalism to keep her moving and mattering, but she had all those hours in all those days, and she frequently told Tenn that life was his to shape.

Not long after their meeting at that Hollywood party, Tenn was back in New York, poor and desperate to complete his work, a task made difficult by the fact that he had, once again, pawned his typewriter. “The Royal typewriter had fallen on hard times,” Tenn said. He had read in the newspapers that Miss Hopkins was in town, and he requested that they meet. Miss Hopkins cheerfully agreed, suggesting a chic restaurant. “There is no greater fear,” Tenn said, “than accepting an invitation that is beyond your means—financially, emotionally, socially. But I was desperate, and I went. There was a hole in one of my shoes and another in my heart. If I possessed two dollars at that time, I was flush. I saw Miss Hopkins on the sidewalk—lovely, smooth, perfectly attired. Miss Edwina’s eyes had trained me to look at a woman and to judge her character by her accessories, her deportment, her equipage, so to speak. I will never know if this was accidental or providential or what, but as I approached Miss Hopkins, as she turned and gave me her dazzling smile, I tripped and felt myself aiming for her feet. She caught me; there was a flurry of activity, patted shoulders, mother-hen cooings, and as I was being lifted up, I came face-to-face with Miss Hopkins and blurted out, ‘Could I possibly borrow five hundred dollars?’ I was shocked at my outburst, but she merely smiled, took my arm, and treated me to a feast of a lunch. Later in the day, she delivered to my sad apartment an envelope containing five hundred dollars, an amount that bought me several months of freedom, and released the Royal. Miriam Hopkins refused to call it a loan: it was, she said, a gift—for my gifts.” Tenn’s eyes misted at the memory, of seeking a woman who pleased his mother and who believed in him and who brought to life one of his women. “Is it a gift that I was lucky enough to bring into my life such women? If so, I accept it, and place it high in my estimation. Let no bad things be said about Miriam Hopkins.”

AT ROYAL AND FRENCHMEN, Tenn asked that I stop and park, so that we could walk through Washington Square, a lush block that was blissfully empty, and there were faint wafts of music from the Quarter, snatches of radio and television transmission from the houses surrounding it. Frenchmen and Touro Streets held memories for Tenn of rent parties during the war years and beyond, happy neighbors eating and dancing and gratefully accepting crisp bills in return for a plate of food or a po’ boy. The revelers were straight and gay, young and old, and Tenn could not remember being afraid; he felt open to express happiness and desire on a sunny street that smelled of crab boil and patchouli.

At Royal and Kerlerec, one can see the city downtown, one is closer to the Quarter and can hear it. At Royal and Esplanade stands a house much loved by Tenn, pristine and, as he put it, “glistening like a just-licked glans.”

We walked Royal for a bit, looking at balconies beautiful and blighted, but we ultimately came to Royal and Marigny and its simple but elegant balcony, swirling around a faded, pea-green house that had once been home to people who had invited Tenn up to that elevated porch, where he sat and caught what breeze there might be, and talked, and dreamed.

In the time when he was on that balcony at Royal and Marigny, Tenn was happy. He had, as he put it, “ideas and a record player and a little money.” Over and over, in the cooler months, he threw open the windows, and the air caught the linen curtains and they danced about—the animated arms, as he imagined, of the woman who was dominating his thoughts and his work. Tenn could smell coffee and night-blooming jasmine, and his record player repeatedly played “You Won’t Be Satisfied (Until You Break My Heart)” by Doris Day and “Do I Worry?” by Tommy Dorsey, which asked in its lyrics

When evening shadows creep,

Do I lose any sleep?

To the record, crackling and popping from overuse, Tenn would yell, “Hell, no!” and continue typing, on the Royal typewriter on Royal Street. All seemed well. The work was good. Miriam Hopkins was still much loved, and she had served Tenn well in the creation of one role, Lady Torrance, with whom he was already growing impatient. “My mental repertory rotates swiftly,” Tenn said, “and when I could dream and write, things moved quickly.” Tenn now had another actress—and another character—in his sights, and he had written to her, telling her he was interested in luring her talents into his world. “I had a world,” he told me, “that I had dreamed, and then I had made it happen, in the mental theater, on the pale judgment, and it was now alive and real and felt right. Ready for the unveiling.”

The actress was Lillian Gish, and from several calls to his agent, Tenn ascertained that she could be found on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, high above Benedict Canyon, in a French country house with a wishing well. To that address—10050 Cielo Drive—Tenn sent a play called, at that time, as he remembered, The Moon and the Royal Balconies.

My introduction to Lillian Gish was made in 1989, by a portrait painter, then nearing eighty, named Dorothy Hart Drew. Drew lived in a penthouse triplex within the Beaux-Arts Building at West Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, directly across from the worst perimeter of Bryant Park, where assault and crack cocaine were both on ample display.

Dorothy Hart Drew was the woman with whom I first lived when I moved to New York City to finally meet the people Tenn had told me I should. The arrangement had been made by a friend, a Baton Rouge native who had once lived in New York, made a name and a small fortune as a model and TV personality (she was the Pirate Girl opposite Jan Murray on the game show Treasure Hunt), then, after divorcing her husband, had returned to her hometown and settled into comfort and the persistent study of Christian Science. Her practitioner was also the practitioner for Drew (mental mind and its maladies knowing nothing of distance or time, one can be healed by a healer anytime, anywhere), and she told my friend’s practitioner that an aged friend needed a companion who would live with her—rent-free—and help with shopping and cooking.

Lillian Gish at her home on Cielo Drive, above Benedict Canyon, in the 1940s, at the time Tennessee imagined her as Blanche DuBois, and mailed her a copy of the young, unformed play that would be A Streetcar Named Desire (illustration credit 5.2)

I wanted to get to New York, had a small amount of money to do so, and felt I could not turn down the opportunity.

For two months I stayed in the apartment, a wonder of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass and bathrooms rimmed with gold-plated abalone shells, during which time I learned that my host had been a well-regarded sculptor and painter, had been close friends with the sculptors Anna Hyatt Huntington and Paul Manship, the latter having family in my hometown. Drew took news of this relationship, such as it was, as a good sign, and invited me to move in. All of this was done by phone—me in Baton Rouge; Drew in New York.

Once in this apartment, I learned a few other things: Drew and her sister, Lorna, had been great friends with Lillian and Dorothy Gish; Drew possessed only seven teeth in her head, necessitating a number of changes in the recipes I had brought along in my capacity as house chef; and she was a rabid anticommunist and virulent conservative, whose life, once her artwork had subsided, was consumed by ferreting out those people she was convinced were red or subversive, or who had grown successful through nefarious political means.

In my first few days in the apartment in the Beaux-Arts, I cleaned and began reworking recipes to make them softer, and in the evenings I read to Drew from Science and Health or from books like T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings’s Mona Lisa’s Mustache, which eviscerated the modern-art movement, along with all of the attendant mystical and political insanity he believed was threatening the world’s health and the survival of “good” art. I frequently had to stop what I was reading because his observations were so loony, and the book’s margins were littered with notes from Drew.

I had the master bedroom in the apartment, a large suite that included a dressing room and the gold-plated bathroom. The second floor of the apartment was the split-level studio in which Drew now slept on a small bed wedged behind a grand piano, and which featured an enormous skylight through which one could look up Sixth Avenue all the way to Central Park; the first level consisted of three small rooms: an anteroom holding a small bed covered with a purple velvet coverlet and several large cardboard boxes, a tiny kitchen and bathroom with a slop sink in which Drew took her daily cleaning, and a large dining room with an enormous and burnished table on which were stacked hundreds of books, magazines, and boxes. It was at this table that Drew sat for up to twelve hours a day, listening to talk radio, smoking (an activity that prevented her from seeking membership in the mother church), and talking to her sister, Lorna, who had died at least a decade before. Drew occasionally interrupted her schedule to call radio programs and yell at the liberals.

On the wall by the bed in which she slept, Drew had written, boldly and neatly, the names and numbers of those she might need to reach quickly: her practitioner, her relatives, her Christian Science nurse, and the AM radio stations that carried her favorite programs. Above all of this information was written—also boldly and neatly—the following:

Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.

Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.

Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.

Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane.

Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.

Surrealism aims to destroy by denial of reason.

When I asked Drew about the lines written above her bed (they formed a sort of halo above her head when she slept), she told me that they were taken from a statement made in 1949 by her good friend Congressman George Dondero, before the House of Representatives. Drew had helped him write it. “We both knew that art was a weapon, the strongest weapon, used by Communists to undermine America. He, along with Joseph McCarthy, was my greatest friend and hero.”

That night in my journal, I wrote “May you live in interesting times and interesting apartments.”

Drew led me to the many dusty boxes in the anteroom and invited me to look through them. Inside I found many copies of Red Channels, the booklet that informed advertisers and network officials of those suspected of being under Communist influence or enjoying its support. There were many other magazines and books, but there were also hundreds of letters, all of them pertaining to the diligent removal from the “shores of this great country” of reds and pinks in the artistic community. Drew’s letters were primarily a dance, a suggestive tango, between her and Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, who had first been elected to the House in 1932, and who admitted in one letter that the advent of Roosevelt and his New Deal had plunged him deeply into his “patriotic mission.”

One of the letters, marked COPY, was dated 1956, and had been sent to Drew to illustrate Dondero’s consistent commitment to stamping out modern art. The letter deals with the Republican’s distaste for Eisenhower’s weakness toward this menace, epitomized by his visit to the Museum of Modern Art on its twenty-fifth anniversary, at which he had “given them a slap on the back” and told them they should paint anything they felt like. Dondero wrote: “Frankly, I do not understand some of the statements made by the President regarding the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art is a term that is nauseating to me. We are in complete accord in our thinking regarding this subject and its connection with communism. No one is attempting to stifle self-expression, but we are attempting to protect and preserve legitimate art as we have always known it in the United States.”

Dondero’s statement before Congress, parts of which Drew had memorized, read in part:

Mr. Speaker, quite a few individuals in art, who are sincere in purpose, honest in intent, but with only a superficial knowledge of the complicated influences that surge in the art world of today, have written me—or otherwise expressed their opinions—that so-called modern or contemporary art cannot be Communist because art in Russia today is realistic and objective.

Drew stopped me as I read this aloud to her to tell me that she was one of the “friends” referenced by Dondero, and she would later share with me the piles of correspondence in which she revealed suspicious and unacceptable artistic Americans.

“This glib disavowal,” Dondero’s address continued,

of any relationship between Communism and so-called modern art is so pat and so spontaneous a reply by advocates of the “isms” in art, from deep, Red Stalinist to pale-pink publicist, as to identify it readily to the observant as the same old party-line practice. It is the party line of the left-wingers, who are now in the big money, and who want above all to remain in the big money, voiced to confuse the legitimate artist, to disarm the arousing academician, and to fool the public.

As I have previously stated, art is considered a weapon of Communism, and the Communist doctrinaire names the artist as a soldier of the revolution. It is a weapon in the hands of a soldier in the revolution against our form of government, and against any government or system other than Communism.

Drew interrupted to tell me that she had worked—and hoped to continue to work—to enlist soldiers of her own revolution, right-leaning “true” Americans who could cleanse and enhance “authentic” art in all media.

One of the most ardent soldiers of this revolution was Lillian Gish.

“Lillian,” Drew told me, “is one of the greatest soldiers in the good revolution.”

I asked Drew if Lillian Gish believed as she did about the influence of communism in the arts. “Well,” she demurred, “I’m often disappointed in Lillian. She’s very naïve, as you are. She can’t believe that anyone who can produce art she likes could be someone she ought to hate, could be someone she ought to destroy.” Nonetheless, Gish donated money and verbal support to both Dondero and Drew in their pursuits.

Drew was upset, however, that Gish respected Pablo Picasso, “a demented and diseased Communist and murderer and thief.” Drew quoted again from Dondero:

The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Picasso, who is also a dadaist, an abstractionist, or a surrealist, as unstable fancy dictates, is the hero of all the crackpots in so-called modern art.

Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.

The gist of Dondero’s and Drew’s mission, the “pearl of great price,” as Drew described it, was in the following paragraph:

It makes little difference where one studies the record, whether of surrealism, dadaism, abstractionism, cubism, expressionism, or futurism. The evidence of evil design is everywhere, only the roll call of the art contortionists is different. The question is, what have we, the plain American people, done to deserve this sore affliction that has been visited upon us so direly; who has brought down this curse upon us; who has let into our homeland this horde of germ-carrying art vermin?

Drew was moist-eyed as she claimed that she was one of the purest of the plain American people, as was Gish, as had been Dondero, and the mission continued. “I want you to talk to Lillian,” she told me, “but not about the degenerate writer you knew, and who probably spoiled your brain about art and the world. I want you to talk to her about purity and the truth, about the way America was meant to be.”

And that is how it was arranged that I should meet Lillian Gish.

DREW’S APARTMENT in the Beaux-Arts Building was grand but filthy, and at night, when the commercial tenants had left for the day, mice rushed up to the penthouse and executed a St. Vitus’s dance across the wood floors, their claws clattering. In the morning there would be hundreds of droppings, and the pantry shelves would be askew.

Drew did not want Lillian Gish to see what had become of the apartment on West Fortieth Street—or its primary tenant, whose refusal to frequent the offices of doctors had led to the loss of her teeth and most of her hair. Drew would tie old blouses over her head, creating striking turbans, but she could not fashion new teeth, and she could not stop smoking, so she refused Lillian’s suggestion of a visit to Fortieth Street, and sent me, alone, to East Fifty-seventh Street to meet the actress.

The apartment of Lillian Gish was as orderly as Drew’s was chaotic—beautiful and quiet and controlled. Nothing was out of place in any of the rooms, on any of the shelves, on any of the tables, or, for that matter, in the mind of Miss Gish. She had planned for our visit by rereading my letters to her and the comments Tenn had made about her, about our trips up and down Royal Street, and about the original version of A Streetcar Named Desire, called The Moon and the Royal Balconies, in which she was to have played the lead character, a woman who eventually became Blanche DuBois.

“Oh, listen,” Gish told me, “I don’t believe in guilt or regret. I believe that they exist, that people are almost always struggling through one or the other, or both, but I don’t see any value in honoring those emotions. However,” she laughed, “I think Tennessee felt guilty that I didn’t play that part, and I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I often wonder about my life—my professional life—if I had had the opportunity to be Blanche. Could I have done it? Could I have done it well? What or who would I be today if I had taken on that challenge?”

Gish was frail and tiny, and she showed difficulty in using her hands. She did not move from the chair in which she sat except to let me into the apartment and to see me off. Our first visit lasted about an hour, and my understanding is that it had been scheduled by Drew with James Frasher, Gish’s manager, who was normally present for all of Gish’s interviews, but who on this day had been called away. I sensed that Gish missed his presence, and that she might have been stronger had he been there. When Gish and I later had several phone conversations, she seemed more secure and comfortable—and opinionated—and I wonder if it might have been because Frasher was nearby, or because she didn’t have to present herself in the composed and attractive manner she did when she met people face-to-face, with full makeup, Fortuny gown, and rigid focus.

“I hope,” Gish told me, “that you don’t think I am entirely in league with Dorothy on her views on art and politics. I am conservative by nature, but I think Dorothy became a bit unsettled early in her life. There was promise, but there was not the attention she felt she deserved. It was easier to imagine a conspiracy, a plan for which she was not suited or invited, than to face the fact that the work and the acclaim she felt she deserved had passed her by. This is very common in the arts; I’ve seen it often. Bitterness is horrible, and we can never know why things happen as they do. Faith is an enormous challenge, but it’s all we have to keep going, and my faith is in God and the art I know and believe He has sanctioned for us, and in the role that art has in our life. I think art improves us, I think that it … Oh, what am I trying to say? It enlarges us and can act as a mirror, and that is valuable, and no one is a better example than Tennessee.”

Gish admitted that she found Tenn odd when she first met him: he giggled to himself nervously and his clothes were worn and ill-fitting. She considered him handsome, but he had a nervous and persistent habit of placing his hands over his mouth or his forehead when he spoke; he frequently ran his fingers through his hair. Gish felt an immediate desire to comfort him, but she was shocked, then amused, by Tenn’s defensive need to push away such affection with odd statements, declarations made only to disarm.

“He liked freaks,” Gish told me, “and odd situations. Tragic situations. He was obsessed with homes in which murders had occurred. He never forgot that I had lived in the house where Charles Manson had those poor people killed.” (This was the house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, where Tenn had mailed his play to Gish.) “He asked me if anything odd or scary had happened when I lived there; if the house was haunted. I told him I was perfectly happy there. The air was clear and sweet. The view was gorgeous. I rested and read and took care of myself. ‘Yeah,’ Tenn would say, ‘but were there ever any apparitions or portents?’ ”

Tenn asked Gish once if she would like to accompany him to the freak shows on West Forty-second Street. On another occasion he invited her down to West Fourth Street, to rustle through a succession of what she called “junk shops” that the artist Joseph Cornell had told him about. Gish declined the first invitation but accepted the second.

“He was such a sweet boy, really,” she remembered. “He loved pulling things out of boxes and bins, finding lost items, beautiful and sweet things that had once meant so much to someone. ‘Look,’ he said once, ‘look at these pieces of jewelry.’ They were nice pieces of costume jewelry, nothing extravagant, but one brooch was inscribed ‘To my mother, who made me and loves me.’ He cried when he found that, and he bought it. We had lunch later and he would take his purchases—jewelry, beads, a bag of marbles, old magazines, frayed playbills, books with sweet inscriptions—and spread them across the restaurant table. ‘Who are these people? Where are they now?’ He wanted to re-create their lives, to imagine what had happened on the day before and the day after these gifts had been given. He showed me a brooch with a lovely woman’s face on it, and he said that was how he saw me, and it was how he saw me in his play: golden, creamy, wearing a tiara. We couldn’t tell if it was meant to be a religious token or not, because it did vaguely resemble the Blessed Mother.”

(On one of our days together, Tenn and I visited several antique shops on Magazine Street, and he bought some old rosary beads that had been made in Jerusalem, some votives, many old magazines—some of which featured the women I was being sent to meet—and tiny pieces of jewelry and religious items, which he gave me, along with instructions as to who should receive what and what I should say when I presented them. For Mildred Natwick he bought a poem of Mary Baker Eddy’s that had been decoupaged on a block of wood; and for Gish, he purchased a hand fan, from a New Orleans funeral home, on which was an image of the Blessed Mother, her arms outstretched, surrounded by gentle animals, all of them at rapt attention. Her face, creamy and beautiful, featured a mouth that strongly resembled Gish’s. When I presented it to her, not long after she described the brooch he had found on their jaunt, she wept and asked that our meeting end. She apologized later, but admitted that seeing it had “made my heart hurt. I was pierced. I couldn’t handle it. I felt loss I had forgotten I had known.”)

Tenn had pored over the items he found, amazed at the worn report cards he found, with their comments and the signatures of parents, some of them grateful. “We so appreciate all that you’ve done with Billy,” one might read. The teachers’ rejoinder might have read, “Billy is coming along nicely. I would like him to try harder and calm down.” “Where is Billy now?” Tenn wanted to know. Was he a simple boy who fidgeted and couldn’t quite understand the letters that swam before his eyes or the numbers that never added up correctly? Another student, on another discarded item from some abandoned box of memories, had given his teacher a cheap, trick-shop tiara, and on a piece of cardboard paper he had written, “You Are My Queen.” The cardboard paper also held the teacher’s neat, adult handwriting. “I loved your tiara. It was so sweet of you.” Why had the teacher given the carefully inscribed piece of paper back to the boy who had created it? Had the boy been hurt? What had happened to the tiara? Might it have been saved by the teacher, who was, perhaps, lonely, and now old, and who could take it out and remember that she had been loved and that someone had gone out and with his tiny allowance purchased this gift?

“He was obsessed with all of these dusty things,” Gish told me. “I didn’t understand it, but now I do. He was always searching for evidence of people who felt as he did. I guess we all do eventually, but I didn’t feel safe doing it until I was older. You risk so much. You find things—not always in boxes of old things, but in memories or questions answered—that make you realize things about yourself. I think—no, I know—that I hid things from myself for a long time. I thought reflection was a waste of time. It required too much; it took you backward. Progress was something I was told to pursue and revere, and all I was supposed to reflect were qualities: love and mercy and forgiveness and charity. What I felt or what I wanted weren’t worthy of my thoughts. But being with Tennessee and seeing what he did with every day I spent with him—with everyone, I suppose—opened my eyes. You subsume all that you see and all that you’ve experienced. That is what he told me. I didn’t know what ‘subsume’ meant, but he told me to look at everything, to think about everything. Everything we needed was all around us. All the stories we’d ever need. More than we could ever handle in terms of time and space and in emotional terms.

“Every day,” she continued, “life has so much to show us: death and injury; birth and happiness; joy and the depths of grief; color and music and food and sensation. If we’re open to it, if we let ourselves see and feel as much of it as we can, we have a fullness that is extraordinary. Tennessee Williams gave me that. Tennessee changed my life.”

Tenn described to Gish a nightly event that took place in the apartment on Royal Street he had while writing the play he hoped she would inhabit. Wild cats roamed the Quarter at night, toppling garbage cans and fighting as they sought food. Some of the neighbors shot at them with guns or threw things or set traps, but most only wanted to stop the nightly disruptions. Tenn, working late into the night, with his records dropping and turned to a low volume, smoking and drinking Coca-Cola with ice he bought by the block and shattered with a knife or dropped to the floor, would hear the cats approaching and would go to his window and throw down pieces of chicken or fish to them, waiting below with upturned faces and rigid tails, eyes wide and glowing. Often Tenn would have a visitor, and the two of them would giggle at the cats, their ferocious hunger, the after-meal cleaning, their calmness, the way some of them, bellies full, plopped in the center of the street and stretched. Tenn and his friend would drop another record—usually Bach at this late hour—and slip into bed. If the night was cool, the windows would be open and the curtains, light and airy and now emblems of the arms of Lillian Gish, would billow and set, expand and retreat, the scent of jasmine and orange rinds and burnt-sugar residue from the street vendors and the water sloshed over the streets would rise up to the room and mingle with the scent of the friend who rested against Tenn, his neck against his lips and their legs rubbing both the cool sheets and each other, the hairs moving back and forth, a comfort and an arousal. Trains and boats could be heard in the air, and lights would play across the ceiling, and Tenn would think, This is a glorious time and these are glorious feelings and images and sensations. I want to take them deep within me, drop them as far into myself as I can, so that they can never be taken from me, never leave me, be a part of my identity forever. The records would drop and play, and Tenn would think: Remember the cats and the laughter. Drop it down low. Tenn would kiss and caress his friend and think, at every comfortable rub, Drop this memory of the comfort and the pleasure. From all the pleasure came a responsibility, and another happy event: to drop the memory on the page—the pale judgment—and not only share it, but further make it permanent.

“Tennessee taught me to commemorate not only every day,” Gish told me, “but every emotion. We worked together and walked around together a lot, and whatever happened—a conversation about films; an argument about religion; a beautiful sunset; seeing paintings or hearing music that moved us—he would find a way to make it last, to make it a permanent part of us. A subsuming.”

Gish was a student of Emanuel Swedenborg, and she and Tenn often discussed his writings, comparing them to the teachings passed to Tenn by his mother’s book and constant urgings. Gish thought of one of his statements when she and Tenn were discussing memories and the act of subsuming them and sharing them and keeping them. In Divine Providence, Swedenborg writes: “It is also known that everything a person meditates in his reason arises from the love of bringing it into effect by means of his thought.… It is the very delight of reason to see from love the effect in thought, not the effect in its attainment.”

“Tennessee had a theater in his head,” Gish told me, “and he could have populated it with anyone or anything he wished. He was monumental, but he seemed never to believe that, or he forgot it, or he just stopped looking for people and their feelings and their lives and just subsumed himself, instead of all that was going on around him. I think he got lost, but not in the flurry of events that he loved when I knew him, but in desperate attempts to merely stay alive, to get up and try again.”

Gish sent Tenn another statement from Swedenborg, this one from Secrets of Heaven: “Unless a person is prepared, that is, furnished with truths and goods, he can by no means be regenerated, still less undergo temptations. For the evil spirits who are with him at such a time excite his falsities and evils; and if truths and goods are not present, to which they may be bent by the Lord, and by which they may be dispersed, he succumbs.”

Tenn claimed that the letter from Gish bearing this statement arrived when he was in Italy, visiting the film director Luchino Visconti. Tenn was despondent, utterly in agreement that he lacked the necessary truths and goods. Visconti, knowing of Tenn’s descriptions from the past of good times and happy memories, both subsumed and set aside, commanded him to speak of some sensations and take them within. “Begin,” he said, “with a description of the ceiling above the bed where you felt safe and happy, and circle the room. Drop every detail before you drop the memory.”

Our discussions included more than the balconies of Royal Street and Lillian Gish, but when the early afternoon arrived, after a lunch that had included a large amount of wine, it was this actress, this “titanic sprite,” as he called her, who was most on his mind. Tenn asked for the rosary he had given me, and I handed it over to him. He held it in his fist and closed his eyes, saying a silent prayer. When he opened his eyes, he began fingering the beads, editing the owners of each one. “This one,” he told me, pointing to the fourth bead of the first decade, “belongs to Lillian Gish.” Tenn began moving his fingers across the beads, but it was no known prayer he was speaking: he was naming names and attributes, truths and goods.

Six

TENN BEGAN the following morning with a confession.

“I want to explain something to you about Lillian Gish,” he told me. “About all the women you are going to meet and, God willing, learn from. There are lessons in them all. They are golden apples, all of them. Some with poisonous seeds, but none of them are wholly poisonous, or they would not have been influential to you or inspiring to me. I promise not to send you to any entirely awful people. Well—” He stopped himself. “None of these people were entirely awful when I knew them and worked with them. But times—and people—change.”

What I needed to understand was that everyone operates on many levels. It is entirely impossible to face the world “bare of face or bare of soul,” as Tenn explained. All of us are coated in a series of myths and nostrums and superstitions, all of which create a particular person. “It won’t be easy to understand people, ever,” Tenn told me, “but our lives require us to keep trying.”

What Tenn wanted me to know about Lillian Gish, whom he had presented to me as virginal and vital and supportive, was that she was “packed with a multitude of sins and superstitions” that might make me think he had misled me into seeking her.

“Lillian Gish frightened and annoyed me as often as she inspired me,” Tenn confessed that morning, “but I remain grateful to her for what she taught me. What she taught me was the importance of fear—or, to be more precise, the importance of not allowing fear to rule your decisions.”

Bursting with health and gently beautiful, the biggest star in the life of Tennessee’s mother, Lillian Gish (here in the mid-1930s) walked through the city with the writer, shopping and talking, and becoming the inspiration for Portrait of a Madonna. (illustration credit 6.1)

Gish feared many things in her time with Tenn.

“She was terrified of being ignored,” Tenn told me. “There is an extraordinary photograph Andy Warhol showed me. Lillian Gish is sitting with some of the glamorous, well-oiled people—Liza or Bianca or Jackie O. Or it could be Grace Jones or Monique Van Vooren or Lee Radziwill. It doesn’t matter. These types of people are supremely interchangeable on the social circuit and represent a particular mood or circle or ambience. In the context of a club or a party, they are not real people. They are far more artificial than characters in a play, costumed and smeared with makeup and awaiting a cue and a follow light. But one goes. One must be seen. One must announce to the world that they are still dancing or writing or acting or staying sober or walking without assistance. A part is being played. A result is being sought. In this particular picture, Lillian sits, folding in upon herself, like a disused ventriloquist’s dummy, eyes vacant. She is being ignored. She, in her sensible shoes and dowager’s clothes, looks like the ladies’ room attendant, and everyone else—Martha and Rudi and Paloma—are waiting for a warm towel or supplication, and there sits this small, frightened Episcopalian lady. Ignored.

“One ignores Lillian Gish at great risk,” Tenn told me.

“You see,” he explained, “her life—her role in life—has been ordained—demanded!—by God.”

Lillian Gish had been born into a family of refinement and respectability, but her father was a wanderer, and he left his wife and two daughters, each of whom then descended upon a life on the stage. The Gish sisters often performed together, but they were also often separated, and Gish, “a frightened victim of abandonment,” as she told me, was grief stricken whenever she was apart from Dorothy. Their reunions were lachrymose and operatic, and Lillian recalled being slapped once by her mother for carrying on so fulsomely.

During her early years, Gish was surrounded by actors, vaudevillians, jugglers, and gypsies. Her performing life began before she could read, and she loved to describe the ceremony, as she called it, of her mother reciting the required lines of dialogue to Lillian and her sister as they were bathed, as they ate dinner, as they prepared for sleep. The routine was repeated the following morning, through the making of beds, breakfast, and later, that night, the performance.

Gish cleaned up the chronology and the order of her life considerably for her autobiography and for later interviews, but in the time she spent with Tenn, she made the recitation of her life scabrous and scintillating, justifying the rogue nature of her mother (who was not above skimming tips off of restaurant tables or leaving hotel rooms deep in the night due to a lack of funds) by the understanding that she—and, to a lesser extent, Dorothy—was being prepared for delivery to D. W. Griffith and the greatest art form ever invented.

Lillian and Dorothy Gish. They were partners—professionally and personally—from childhood; they spent virtually every day together. (illustration credit 6.2)

Gish had implanted in her mind the belief that the cinema was a creation that had been prophesied in the Bible, the means by which the multitude of tongues—that horrible Tower of Babel that was nothing to Gish but the collective human inventory—could come to understand each other, to live in harmony, to learn from and love each other.

Tenn loved Gish and he did not regret a moment of the time they spent together; but, as he told me, he found her to be utterly divorced from time or space or reality. “The Earth as we know it,” Tenn explained, “bears no relation to Miss Gish. Or I should say: she respects it only as a prop, something Mr. Griffith commissioned for her to act upon. It is not a spinning planet in the cosmos; it does not provide a home to other people making their way or finding a purpose. The Earth and all of its inhabitants and all of its resources are placed in a particular order so that the destiny of Lillian Gish can be realized.”

Order was her primary obsession, as Tenn saw it. Things had to be done in a particular way and at a particular time; but more importantly, her order, her placement, her billing needed always to be seen to, secured, given special treatment.

While Tenn conceded that her narcissism was colossal, he was quick to point out that her kindness and her concern—at least for him—always appeared to be genuine. Gish worried that he did not eat properly; she abhorred his clothes. She fussed over him, and the care she displayed pleased Tenn, and pleased his mother even more. “That I had a ‘great lady,’ which my mother believed Lillian Gish to be, taking care of me, gave her years of bragging rights.”

However, even Gish’s acts of kindness had their place. If she gave a donation to a charity, or provided tickets to the theater to a friend unable to afford them, or helped her “poor, addled, soggy sister” yet again, it was because of a plan crafted by God to put Lillian Gish in a position to be of use, to fulfill some destiny.

Dorothy Gish was not simply a depressive alcoholic who might require treatment or patience or love: she was a reminder, from God, that Lillian should refrain from drink, should eat the proper foods, should carve out time each day for slant boards and Delsarte exercises and blackstrap molasses and wheat germ. A sign had been sent and must be acknowledged and obeyed.

“Violently uneducated,” as Tenn put it, Gish learned everything from the people with whom she worked, from sawdust carny workers to Griffith to David O. Selznick. Gish attempted to learn from John Gielgud, who took an interest in her as a stage actress. “She was very sweet,” Gielgud told me, “but extraordinarily naïve. Quite spongelike, which is good, but she absorbed all the bad along with all the good, and her mind, which was sharp and retentive, remembered clichés, wives’ tales, and myths equally as sharply as poetry, history, or sound advice. She was hungry to learn, but she was also hungry to be the center of attention, and I could never tell if her desire to learn was motivated by her need for knowledge or her need to be noticed.”

Gielgud recalls working on Hamlet as a happy time, because Gish was, even in her mid-forties, ideal as Ophelia. “She was tiny and alabaster white, with those enormous, lovely, empty eyes,” he remembered, “and it was easy to direct her, because one only had to push an emotion, as if it were a slide into a projector, across her mind. ‘Be manic, darling.’ And there she was twirling about the stage, limbs flying. ‘Be contrite, darling,’ and she would have made the devil himself weep. ‘Be sweet and flirtatious, angel,’ and you could hear the cooing from the gallery. She was an actress trained in adverbs and adjectives. She could not—did not—understand emotional motivation, subtext, layers. But if you threw her something—sad, horny, angry, confused—her entire body was transformed and every inch of her, every pore of her body, exuded the adjective you had provided.”

A later stage experience with Gielgud, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, directed by the formidable Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky, was not one he remembered as sweetly. “Komisarjevsky was a brilliant man,” Gielgud recalled, “and very precise with some of the details of the play, which was good but misshapen. I think he respected the person who was Lillian Gish, but had very little use for the actress who was Lillian Gish. He clearly knew who she was and what she had done and what she meant, but he could not ascertain what she could do or what she could become for this production.”

Understanding that Gish was an actress who needed to be fed words or direct actions she could emulate, Gielgud would meet with her and describe the scene with which she might be struggling. “Lillian was the sort of actress,” Gielgud continued, “who wanted to be told something like ‘We are in the wintry home of the old teacher. He is tired and near death and feels unloved. Sitting with him is his beloved and devoted daughter. She would do anything for him. She dotes and she worries and she prays. She knows he will die soon, but she does everything to hide this fact from him, and from herself.’ That is not a scene from Crime and Punishment, I must add, but it illustrates how I spoke to her.”

In her mid-fifties during the run of Crime and Punishment, Gish amazed her fellow players with her energy and her enthusiasm. She also wanted to be beautiful, and Komisarjevsky’s directions for severity were meant to move her from the coquettish performance she was giving. He wanted her hair covered; he wanted her less flirtatious. “What is with the cute?” he would ask Gielgud, who laughed at the fact that the Russian despised the concept of cute, which he labeled as solely American. “The cute I do not want.”

John Gielgud, one of Tennessee’s favorite people in theater, and a man patient and intelligent enough to help explain plays and actresses to him (illustration credit 6.3)

Almost every day during the sharing of notes with the cast, Gish would raise her hand like a penitent student and ask if there were any for her: Komisarjevsky always left her out of the discussion periods. One day, spent and impatient, Komisarjevsky looked at her for a long time. “How can I improve my performance?” she asked, in the long silence.

“More rouge,” he told her, and the discussion was over.

Lillian learned many things from D. W. Griffith that she rarely discussed in her writings or interviews, including virtually all of her political and cultural beliefs, primarily a Republicanism that embraced “the purity of the Nation,” as Tenn recalled, and he was never sure if she was referring to the United States of America or Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation.

Tenn was surprised to learn that Gish had been devastated when Gielgud was arrested, in 1953, on a morals charge. “Accosted in a men’s room!” Gish had said. “I wasn’t sure I could ever face him again.” They remained friends, but she prayed for his “sickness” to be healed. Tenn had asked her if she hadn’t known that her friend was homosexual. “Of course not!” she replied. “Such a good actor, and so successful. It never entered my mind.”

Gish’s surprise was not that Gielgud had been discovered in his perfidy in a public toilet (that was, after all, where those types did what they did), but that a man who had succeeded, who had earned her trust, could be that way. Tenn was amused and amazed to learn what Gish believed about homosexuals. “Mr. Griffith told me about the homosexuals we worked with,” she explained. “I knew they existed. I knew they were there. We weren’t to expose them or abuse them, but we were to avoid them. You see, Mr. Griffith told me that homosexuals—and drug addicts and alcoholics—had drifted away from the light, from the light of God, and they walked in pools of darkness, clouded from goodness, and they could hold you in the dark if you let them. I don’t fear them or dislike them, but I pity them, and I pray for them.”

Gish also believed that because of the darkness in which they lived and moved, they could never be seen—or photographed or understood—properly, so success and happiness could not come to them. Any male artist who floundered in his career or who drank or who had difficulties with his monthly expenses was probably that way, and the sins accruing to his condition were simply calling on him. When Tenn confessed to Gish that he, too, was homosexual, she hugged him and told him that it was fine to have the condition of homosexuality, but one could not indulge in the commission of homosexuality. “That is when the darkness begins,” she told Tenn. “God gives us our weaknesses, but he also gives us the freedom of our choices. I can tell you haven’t succumbed to the temptations because there is light around you.”

“As long as I was a success,” Tenn told me, “as long as John Gielgud or Alec Guinness or Cecil Beaton or Cole Porter or Noel Coward were doing well and earning knighthoods and large royalties and full houses, it was assumed by Miss Gish that we were chaste; we were good boys. When I succumbed to failure, when my plays were demoted to church basements and off-Broadway hallways, when my mind and my narratives were no longer clear, when phone calls were not returned, it was clear that I had fallen into the darkness and was fully that way.”

And yet every time Tenn saw Gish at a party, at the theater, on the street, she embraced him and told him she was praying for him. “I want the light back on you,” she would say. When I spoke to Gish about those hugs and those prayers, she remembered them sadly. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “it’s terrible to live so long and to see so many people lost to the darkness! We have our hungers and we succumb to them and we only incur greater hungers, stronger appetites. Once we feel we’re owed the flesh, then we may feel we’re owed the wine, then we may feel we’re owed the protection and the aid of the government. ‘Protect and husband me, for I’m special,’ they seem to say, and soon you can’t see them at all. They’re just utterly lost. My sister was lost. Mr. Griffith was lost. They couldn’t believe in their destinies any longer, and they sought comfort elsewhere. They sought it in alcohol, and it only served to douse the fire of their talent.

“Listen,” she said to me, “the trees are loaded with fruit. Don’t be tempted by it. Look above the trees, look heavenward. All hungers are filled from above.”

Miss Gish, Tenn explained, walked the earth as if it were an enormous back lot, and high above the trees of which she spoke was cinematographer Billy Bitzer, shooting it beautifully, capturing every move she made, and next to him was Mr. Griffith, dry and full of light, making sure her every step was safe and sure.

“Do you know where the theater was born?” Lillian Gish asked me on the phone one day. “Do you know where the art of storytelling came from? Do you know where art came from?”

I admitted that I didn’t know the answers to these questions.

In honoring God, she told me, in the preparation of the Eucharist, all art forms were born. “There, in the earliest days of worship,” Gish continued, “the worshippers prepared the table, brought the water, brought the wine, carefully put down the finest cloth, made their prayers. Something more needed to be done, a sound made, a commemoration was required, and so people made a noise. They invented singing; they invented prayer. If someone was especially ecstatic, he might paint an image, draw an emblem. Man needed some way to express his love and gratitude and fear of God, and so he found a multitude of ways to do so.

“Each time you sit in a church and you watch the priests come forth and set the table and ring the bells and pray and consecrate, you’re witnessing not only the Eucharist, but the commemoration of the invention of art, and every time we commit to our work in the arts, we have to honor Him, or it will fail to serve any of us.”

Tenn knew of Gish’s beliefs on the origins of art, and he indulged her, which is not to say that he believed similarly. “You know,” he told me, “I’m afraid of many things, but my fear of God has never factored into my writing. My fear of the things that make us believe we need a God drive me to the pale judgment daily.”

Tenn found a need for—and an inspiration in—Lillian Gish. He came to understand her, and came to see how she could be of use to him as a writer. “I did believe,” he said, “that she could, in her way, drive me to be a better writer. Even if by forcing me to not live as she lived.”

On their earlier trips to the stalls and the junk shops downtown, Tenn had purchased the items, then shared them with Gish; as he regaled her with the discarded finery and sentimental objects, she smiled and endured his questions as to their provenance. But Tenn decided to invite her to choose the items on their next foray.

The change was extraordinary.

“When Miss Gish found an object,” Tenn told me, “no matter how tiny or dirty or damaged, it held the importance of one of Mr. Howard Carter’s excavations.” (Carter was the archaeologist who unearthed the tomb of King Tut, a discovery that fascinated Tenn.) “She would cry over the torn fan that some woman had once used to remain cool, perhaps while waiting for a lover to return. She would exclaim over the poem that had been inscribed in a tattered copy of Miss Browning’s poems, imagining the couple that this book had belonged to, and all that had passed between them. The difference between my discoveries and Miss Gish’s, you see, is that God had ordained her acquisitions, God had led her to the very items she would need for whatever purpose He would later proclaim.”

Watching her with her wares, her face suffused with the happiness she knew from divine providence, ageless, capable of lightning-quick biographies of the previous owners of the items she now held, Tenn began to think of a way he could understand this woman before him. Girlish, lovely, pregnant with fantasy, visited perpetually by the beliefs instilled in her by Griffith, Delsarte, Swedenborg, and God Himself, Tenn saw a lovely woman untouched by time.

“To be happy is to be forever out of time’s grasp.”

Tenn was certain that Thornton Wilder had said that, was sure that it was a quote given to him once by Lillian Gish. When? In 1982 he could not remember exactly; but he did remember that on that day, on the Lower East Side, some time in the 1940s—was it 1944, the year they had seen Since You Went Away?—he had looked at Lillian Gish, free from the constant rush of time and worry, and thought of a woman, felt some fog rising, and a play came to him.

He would call it Portrait of a Madonna.

The one-act Portrait was a rewritten version of a play Tenn had completed in 1941. “The war year,” he would recall, “and the play was not sufficient to its purposes.” Constantly revised and discarded, carrying various titles, he picked it up again after making the acquaintance of Lillian Gish.

“The primary character grew softer due to Lillian’s influence,” Tenn recalled. “I originally envisioned a rather desiccated spinster playing with her gewgaws of the past, recalling past lovers, a drugstore Miss Havisham, but Lillian presented another visage: a woman preserved in fantasy, pickled by delusion, ageless, untouched by time or care or reality. Glowing a bit, suffused with an inner itinerary that bore no relation to her surroundings. This is a woman I know well. It is my mother, of course, and …”

Tenn paused and collected himself. His mother, Edwina, had died only two years before our meeting, and the event had still not become one he could manage or direct or label in a way that made handling it comfortable for him.

“My mother could not fill out the lineaments of this woman on her own,” Tenn continued. “Lillian came along and at a café table, not far from the Brevoort, one of my favorite destinations in New York City, Lillian sat surrounded by her day’s findings in the stores and the stalls, and a woman came to me.”

Lucretia Collins, the title character of Portrait of a Madonna, is, as Tenn admitted, a recurring, obsessive archetype from which he was unable to escape. As he put it, this woman, a dramatic template, is a “neurotic fabulist with delusions of grandeur; a woman divorced from reality, and in perpetual pursuit of a dreamed-for, hoped-for world of her own creation; a lost soul, floundering on the shores of the real world, an honest-to-God fish out of water; a tough performer who decides, while floundering, while awaiting her own destruction, to, at the very least, put on a good show, scales shining, tail flapping, gasping forcefully until the end.”

In the brisk one act that is Portrait, Lucretia Collins calls down to the manager of her shabby-genteel “moderately priced city apartment” to complain that “Richard,” her persistent, imaginary tormentor, is back and taking advantage of her, “indulging his senses.” Two men, a porter and an elevator operator, come to the room and look over her belongings, consigning some to a future Dumpster, but finding others potentially valuable or useful. As one oils Lucretia’s aged turntable (“Freud incoming!” Tenn cracked to me about this device), the younger man thinks of taking the records for his own uses, since his girl has let him know that “it’s better with music.” Most of the items in the apartment are old magazines and newspapers, all covered with dust as thick as verdigris. From the magazines Lucretia clips pictures of elegance or innocence, emblems of a lost or dreamed time. At one point she clipped hundreds of images of the Campbell’s Soup twins, their oversized, cherubic, and glistening faces totems of purity and gravity at its strongest, and placed them in a scrapbook, which she delivered to the Children’s Hospital on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday. (“I felt,” Tenn explained, “that on these Christian holidays, we are trying to remember or become our ideal selves—at least in Christian theology, which is to say myth. We take this belief system—typically our first one—and we paste it upon all our intercourses with others and with life. Naturally, the sick and dying children would like to be as pneumatic and bright as the Campbell’s Soup twins, and Lucretia gives them their symbol, their cartoonish icons, as an inspiration. We do what we can.”) For her own needs and her own indulgences, Lucretia probably clips out images of elegant movie stars, princesses, models bathing in milk or mink—images she had hoped to fulfill, but which were denied her because she had pushed away the man with whom she would have liked to have around for the indulgence of her senses.

Tenn had explained to Gish that this was one of his greatest fears, and one of his most often-repeated offenses. “I fear,” he told me, “never experiencing love or appreciation or affection. On one level—on one day—I will believe myself unworthy of them, so my fears appear justified. On another day, I will very grandly believe I have been unjustifiably denied these things, deserve them in spades, and aggressively pursue them. The aggression I display at these times initially excites me, but afterwards—after the manic, muscular display—I am horrified. Like the regret and rubbish that surround a binge of drinking or drugs or repetitive rutting, I awake to guilt and apologies and a deeper retreat from everyone.”

Tenn tried to explain to Gish that Lucretia had lived in a time when women were expected to wait passively—and often fruitlessly—for their desired men to express themselves, show up, and to care for them. Surely, he asked, she could understand this lost, lonely woman in this regard.

“I have never known this of a man,” was Gish’s reply. But, Tenn countered, you must have known frustration, even desperation, when your needs were not met. “At some point,” Tenn told me he asked her, “you must have felt the need to be daring, even foolish, in reaching out to see that a need of yours, a desire of yours, was met?”

Gish replied that she didn’t have needs, and desires were “guilt markers,” a sign that you had neglected something or someone, and your conscience—“God’s nudge to your ribs”—was exercising this emotion, unpleasant and aching like a hunger, until you attended to your duties. “Whenever you want something,” she told me, “you really are wanting in some specific way. You’re short in some department, and the lack is painful. You fill the lack with work, with service. You don’t fill it with dreams or food or love or things.”

Gish then described for me the reactions or emotions she had felt when, on the set of a film, a light, high above the soundstage, had flickered out, and a cool, small spot appeared on her face, unnoticed by the director, the other actors, the visitors to the set. Only Gish knew what had happened; she could feel it. She waited, however, to alert anyone to the failure until an ideal time appeared. “You don’t disturb anything or anyone to get what you need,” she told me. “There’s no excuse for that.” At other times, on stage or screen, a scene may have been altered so that lines or business were denied Gish, leaving her an observer to others. “My ego may have arisen,” she said, “but what I needed to rise toward, what I needed to know as my message, was to give everything to the other actors, to fulfill what was needed of me, not for me. Happiness comes from such things, never from looking around for what will fulfill you or make you happy or make you noticed.

“I have,” she insisted, “no needs, and I never feel the discomfort of desire, because I always do what I should and I always have what I need.”

Tenn asked Gish how she felt at the conclusion of Portrait, when, after being calmed or “looked after” by the two black men, underlings sent to deal with the crazy woman repeatedly raped by her phantom lover, she is led away, by a distracted doctor and a curt nurse, to the state hospital. Delivered, Tenn stressed, to a horrible end.

Gish disagreed strongly. Lucretia Collins is not being delivered to anything, she insisted. Lucretia Collins gave herself over to this punishment.

Tenn was frustrated by what he saw as Gish’s selective sympathies. Lucretia Collins, the seedling from which burst forth Blanche DuBois, was a victim only of her own sins and improper actions and desires. Both women, Tenn would later realize, had ample opportunities, in Gish’s view, to right their ways and find happiness, to be comfortable, free of desire, respectable.

“She could not, or would not, conceive of people destroyed by circumstances beyond their control,” Tenn told me, in amazement. “It reminded me of the perpetual argument—the rampant animosity—that existed between Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, two demonically talented and aberrantly distorted women who shared a region but violently different views of what transpired there.” McCullers saw the world as one of chance and circumstances beyond our control, wandering evil looking for characters to take to a stage it had designed and controlled. One’s goal, one’s hope, was to not be cast in one of the roles needed for this pitiless passion play, always packed with an audience, and performing every hour of every day. In O’Connor’s view, evil only visited the deserving: some flaw, some significant neglect, had opened the door, perhaps several doors, to whatever horror now prevailed. Almost always it was a lack of God, an improper or puny penance that had led to the calamity, from which the “deserving, the observant” could learn their lesson.

Tenn saw a similar mind-set in Gish, particularly when charity was requested of her. The theater community was a close one—they looked out for their own. When actors and actresses, directors or designers, fell on hard times and weren’t eating properly or being cared for or falling behind on their rent, the community would rally and ask for donations. Tenn, then in his thirties, had known poverty, but the poverty of youth, when resilience was a fairly strong defense against want, when there was hope, when windfalls were always forthcoming. In his time with Gish, Tenn first became aware of the sadness and want that had come to visit so many of the talents he had once admired so much. In their own “moderately priced city apartments” or hotels where plaster rained down like dandruff—an “architectural psoriasis”—he saw men and women who had worked for Belasco and McClintic and Ziegfeld cramped into tiny rooms with hot plates and molding playbills. Gish was always prompt and generous with checks and cash (as well as invitations to dinners and events) for those she felt deserved her help, but she could not help anyone whose desperate times they had brought on themselves. Alcoholics, drug addicts, “people of any intemperance” should not be helped, outside of prayer and distant concern. As she explained to Tenn: “You do not feed the shrew who will later devour the garden.”

Gish would share, however, her wealth—of money, of time, of good cheer—with anyone who had been decreased by age or infirmity or changing times and values. The latter affected her most dramatically, given that so many of the people to whom she gave so much had worked with her in the silent-film industry, and their acting styles, their salability, and their beliefs, according to Gish, had been cast aside, disrespected.

As she told me, “Those were the people who built the temple in which we now work, and they were just rotting away, molding. Theaters and streets should have been named for them, but they were unable even to afford a closet with a hot plate.”

One surprising person in whom Lillian Gish rarely—if ever—invested time or money was D. W. Griffith, living in tatty seclusion in the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood, cast aside, Tenn said, like some botched model of taxidermy, drunk and bitter and raging at past associates by phone, when the service had not been disrupted for nonpayment.

Griffith, the man who had given both Lillian and Dorothy Gish their lives in film, who had, in the opinion of many, transformed cinema, who was, in Tenn’s opinion, a “demented, savage, but brilliant master of narrative,” and who had been, for a time, Lillian’s lover, educator, and, as she told me, her “lodestar,” was not deserving of her time, but quite deserving of his misery, because he had succumbed to liquor, to envy, to rage, and to desires and wants.

“He sat there,” Gish told me, “in that awful room and took no pride in what he had done. He waited for a reward for his work, when the work was the reward. He asked of the world and himself ‘What now?’ after he had invented and shared the modern cinema with the world. He was one of the world’s greatest storytellers, but he kept insisting on a bad ending—an unconvincing, undeserving end—for his own story. I owed him everything, but I couldn’t give him my time, and I couldn’t give him hope. But life, Hollywood, fate didn’t destroy him. He destroyed himself. Openly, willfully.”

As Tenn told me, “He transformed the world, and what he really wanted was a gold watch.” His gold watch came in the form of an honorary Oscar, guilt money to a vanquished artist, but it did nothing to assuage Griffith. He wanted work, and on his terms. “Terms!” Gish snorted to me on the phone. “Terms and desires and needs. These are the bricks in the road to hell.”

Tenn and Gish went one weekend to a festival of silent films, and the experience was annotated with comments from Gish on the ultimate fate of so many of the beautiful images that flickered on the huge screen. Bankruptcy, broken heart, drug addiction, homosexuality, botched abortion, car accident, pornography, suicide. At one point, Gish gasped and grabbed her chest. Tenn, expecting the worst—even after the long list of horrors—asked what had happened to the young and beautiful man on the screen.

“He,” Gish sputtered, “he … went into real estate!”

Portrait of a Madonna is “respectfully dedicated to the talent and charm of Miss Lillian Gish,” and Tenn fully felt she earned it.

When Tenn first presented Portrait of a Madonna to Gish, he hoped that one of the adjectives she might use to describe Lucretia Collins would be “heroic.”

It was not.

As she told me in 1989, “Oh, she was so tragic! So lost. So utterly in the darkness, and what she wanted was to be loved and respected, but she had made mistakes that cast her deeply into darkness. She couldn’t even stand the light of the sun, unable to see it as beautiful or nourishing or illuminating. To her it was a judgment, a revelation of who and what she really was: the spotlight of God shining down on her, exposing her, and offering a way out. But she ran from the truth, and she ran from the salvation. And then, with that elevator door crashing with the sound of a cage being snapped shut, she is placed into deep, perhaps eternal, darkness. It was a lovely and terrifying play.”

“Lillian’s influence upon the play,” Tenn told me, “was to soften it. Lucretia, as filtered through Lillian, was more frantic, more flirtatious, frail, a moth not only flittering about the flame, but frequently flying right into it, emerging singed and tattered but determined to keep flying.”

Tenn could see, however, that Lillian could never fully understand Lucretia, and she didn’t play the role until 1957, more than a decade after Tenn presented it to her.

How was she in the role?

“She was brilliant as Lillian Gish passing judgment on this poor, unfortunate soul who gave herself over to the wrong people and the wrong desires,” Tenn said.

Immediately upon completing and dedicating Portrait, Tenn began thinking of another play—and another role—that could be filled by Lillian Gish.

“Why, I’m sure you want to ask, did I want to continue to write for Lillian?” Tenn asked me. “Well, she fascinated me, and I wanted her approval. My own needs and desires got the better of me. I was determined to have her approve of me.”

Tenn was also enamored of her beauty, that translucent skin, that long golden hair. “She was like something I had either dreamed or had remembered from some large, ornate book my mother had read to me as a child—a book of fairy tales or a biblical primer for children. In either she was virtuous and beautiful and perpetually in danger, too good for this earth, alien to ordinary people.” Gish walked about the city with Tenn in ornate hats or with an umbrella, protecting her skin and her large, light eyes. “Talent, time, and skin,” Tenn mused. “She protected them all fiercely, and they have all lasted well.”

Tenn recalled that Gish had a “nice” but not terribly abundant sense of humor. Her propriety, and her determination to be sunny and productive, often placed her in situations that were funny. To sit with her in a theater near someone with an especially unpleasant body odor was something Tenn felt should have been captured on film. She denied the offense, because it could not interfere with the play or the film she needed to see. Around her, however, people laughed and writhed or moved. Lillian was oblivious. Gish was also often challenged by regal and ornate dining arrangements, foreign foods, but she plunged ahead, utterly serious even if utterly wrong. She adored stories of dining mishaps, and loved the story of Marion Davies’s facial strap—a device placed beneath a wig to pull up sagging skin—coming undone and landing in her soup. The bowl was Lalique or Villeroy & Boch or bought from the estate of a Hapsburg, but it now served a soiled facial strap. Davies soldiered on. At another party, during the making of The Night of the Hunter, the pendulous and free bosom of Shelley Winters kept grazing the top of her soup, her main course, her frothy dessert: her blouse, at least beneath the breasts, was a testament to both her eating habits and her posture.

Tenn imagined a funny, scattered woman of a certain age, once refined and destined for a good and respected and examined life, pretty and smart, capable of humor and sexuality, living in a lovely apartment on Royal Street, with one of its best balconies, and every inch covered with dust and trinkets she had collected through her living and through her pursuit of her fantasy life. Bibelots, trinkets, poems. Her desire for the respectable was as strong as her desire for the “indulgence of the senses,” and she could admit that the reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning was well and good, but sometimes a woman needed to be loved, appreciated, ogled.

Gish was not comfortable discussing sex or even things that could be labeled sensual. The fact that people loved and sought and were addicted to sex was a fact she skipped past mentally with the same quickness she displayed when she walked past the strip clubs and porno theaters in New York City. She would look, giggle, and shake her head, and move on. What fools these mortals be! What strange things ordinary people give themselves over to so often and to no good end!

Lillian Gish helped to get the new play, then called The Moon and the Royal Balconies, started, but Edwina Williams began to work her way in.

“My mother,” Tenn told me, “was very much of her time, and she was very much aware of the role the ‘fine’ and ‘refined’ Southern woman must play in the strata. Nonetheless, my mother would often tell me, in bald terms, what women really wanted; and what women really wanted, above a secure station in life or church or the neighborhood, above a line of credit in the best stores and a lovely home, was the admiration, seemly or not, of men. You were loyal to one, but you could entice and entrance multitudes, and a lack of physical attractiveness and charm were deformities toward which she displayed no charity or patience. Many times I saw her speak to photographs in newspapers and magazines, or to images on the television, that displayed a less-than-comely woman, and she was outraged. ‘An ugly woman,’ she always maintained, ‘has no reason whatsoever to be out and about. She should be ashamed of herself.’ Ugly women were created by God—or had managed to escape the grace of God—to become religious women; librarians; restorers of works of art, hidden behind the scenes with toxic chemicals, bleaching and refining paintings and sculpture. Some of them might write books or poems in the attic, but would manage, with great tact, to die before their faces could be exposed to a public that might not be able to reconcile their work with their lineaments. These women might also become cooks and maids, who would be grateful for the respite from judgmental eyes, and would pour all of the love they could not force or slaver over a man into pies and soups and casseroles and perfectly tended flower beds and shining bathrooms. ‘I always prefer an ugly maid,’ Edwina would say, ‘because all of her pregnant and fulsome attention will be transferred to me.’ ”

Beauty was a gift from God. Charm was a gift that arose from a woman, like a scent, from the beauty of her character and the refinement of her mind. You were given the beauty, but you earned the charm. Charmless people baffled and enraged Edwina, and Tenn admitted that he found them curious as well, freaks of nature who, rather than possessing a third arm or a pinhead or hundreds of extra pounds of fat, simply shot through the world selfish and blunt and humorless, sating every immediate hunger. Every villain written by him, Tenn told me, could be said to possess as a primary sin the absence of charm. They were not gifted.

Edwina was also unafraid to share with her son the glories of sexual and sensual pleasure, although they were always given in the mode of a confession—secretive and giggly and flushed with delight.

“My mother told me that there were three occasions upon which a man should and could consign his women to their beds,” Tenn said. “One occasion was upon the tragedies of war or illness or some other calumny visited upon his person. Another was his self-inflicted destruction—his unfaithfulness with his appendage or his finances or his time, a sort of spiritual and sensual suicide. The third was when a man took his woman to bed and, as Mother put it, ‘stretched her out from here to Tupelo.’ Then you stayed in bed, tired but happy, with a hot-water bottle, a movie magazine, and the ministrations of your devoted and ugly maid, who seethed with jealousy because she wasn’t going to be stretched from here to anywhere, but she had to hand-wash the dainties and restock the basins where proof of her mistress’s pleasure could be discerned.”

As Edwina aged, she displaced her uses for sexual pleasure with the sensual ones—menial sins replacing the venial. Sensual pleasures were walks and visits with men, refined conversations, a helpful arm, a peck on the cheek, dinners and nice gifts. Perhaps some kissing, but nothing that would require the exertions of removing the Harry Houdini/Rube Goldberg appliances that transformed her body into that of the younger, more nubile Edwina.

Nothing ruled out, however, mental sins, and they were always of the venial variety, and Edwina would sometimes remove her constrictive public armor, slather on some Bellodgia, put a record on the turntable, and take a “nap,” during which she returned to a more robust form of male company. Tenn admitted that he enjoyed this activity too. Slumber in the afternoon, “a drink and a self-massage,” he called it. Both he and his mother laughingly used the same term to describe their sensual times alone.

They both called them “reveries.”

Seven

TENN ENCOURAGED ME to develop and maintain the ability to see things as a young and curious person. When he was walking city streets, dreaming of an actress, of a foggy stage, and a story waiting to be told, he felt young, his eyes were sharp. A note I scribbled read, “Jessica Tandy preserves young eyes,” to which Tenn added that it was imperative that an artist remember the frightened and scabrous rube who first came to the big city and tried to achieve his dream. “I was happiest when I was dreaming of the achievement,” Tenn confessed, “far happier than I was when I actually succeeded, and I miss those hungry and hopeful eyes of mine: eyes that were very similar to Jessie’s. What we shared was our inbred lack of sophistication, and our mortal fear that we would be found out. Her salvation was in her eyes.”

I found another entry, this one a quote from Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Tenn provided his own annotation: “You find yourself not by purchasing maps and setting across new lands, but by purchasing some quiet and restoring yourself to your young self, eyes open, ready to receive.”

Jessica Tandy had a face that was delicate and beautiful and expressive: her skin, as thin and pale as onionskin, would literally sag when she was moved or shocked; conversely, her delight was often accompanied by a rosy glow that transformed her face into that of a young girl, and her laugh was as delightful as that of a child. As she thought of the similarities she shared with Tenn, she looked utterly devastated.

Jessica Tandy, in the mid-1940s, as she prepared to appear in Tennessee’s Portrait of a Madonna, her calculated audition for Blanche DuBois (illustration credit 7.1)

“I always knew that Tennessee Williams was my salvation,” she whispered, “but I never dreamed that I was of any help to him. I wish I had been more to him; I wish I could be more to anyone. That is something else we had in common: our utter failure to believe ourselves worthy of another’s interest or affection.”

The subject was changed, but several days later, as we walked on the outskirts of Central Park, a few blocks from her home in the Hotel Wyndham, Jessica returned to the subject of young eyes. “My mother wanted me to succeed,” she told me, “but she wanted me to succeed in a distinguished manner. Her definition of ‘distinguished,’ mind you, what was distinguished in her eyes, but it was the manner in which I was trained. I was to be silent and kind and I should never forget the circumstances into which I was born, which were horrid. I should never forget that I was a nobody who succeeded because I used my brains and I taught myself breeding, but my ambitions should be kept to myself and carried out by others. This is something else Tennessee and I shared: we uncovered our secrets and our desires with those who were strong enough to see to it that we would have the opportunity to show up and shine, without ever being dirtied by the unseemly residue of ambition or negotiation or compromise. Our compromises were made within and for the work, but the doors that needed to be opened so that we could do our work were opened for us by others, and the reason we allowed others to be so in control of so much of our lives had to do with the fact that we always felt that the moment we entered into a situation with anyone of a better station—which in my case was virtually everyone—we would be discovered and asked to leave the room. I only felt comfortable in a situation where I was an actress working on a role, and Tennessee always told me that he only wanted to show up as the writer, to offer assistance with words. We were only gifted in our single area of expression, and otherwise we were totally lost and useless.”

I asked Tandy once if she could describe herself, and I did so in the presence of her husband and frequent acting partner, Hume Cronyn. She laughed the beautiful, silvery laugh and responded that she was still, at heart, the young, frightened, rustic girl from “poverty and pretension,” but also an alternate person, “who was patched together by desire and design.” Cronyn interrupted and said to me, “You—or any outside observer—are in a better position to decide who Jessie really is. I don’t think she can see herself clearly anymore.” Jessica grew silent, and the delicate skin sagged. Under her breath she muttered, “As always, Hume has the last, correct word.”

Tenn saw Jessica Tandy clearly. She was, to him, “Big Lady,” the epitome of manners and refinement and kindness, always perfect in deportment and always available with the right word, the right sentiment, at the right time. “She was marvelous,” Tenn admitted, “and to my mind, the ideal lady by Southern standards. Women in organza, with corsages, just the right dab of scent, behaving impeccably no matter the circumstances. Given the mess that I was when Streetcar began, I latched onto Jessie with a most indecorous ferocity, and she kept me on balance. Initially, I loved her for the lady she was, and I didn’t feel she was the actress that Blanche needed and deserved. I clung to her for her kindness, and she clung to me to be seen as deserving of my lovely Blanche.”

I kept trying to imagine Jessica and Tenn in 1947, clinging to each other, working toward their goals, frightened of many of the same things, seeing this extraordinary play through young eyes; but I never could see them coming together, I never could imagine them having their corrosive self-images.

It was Elia Kazan, with his brutal and brusque vision, who told me why I was failing.

“You’re seeing them with your young eyes,” he said, “and you think they’re great and wonderful. Don’t be blinded by the gilding. Go back to the beginnings, and find the rubes they’re speaking of. The greatness of these two people lies in how they got from their squalor—real or perceived—and became artists. Always go to the beginnings. The real person will always be found there.”

On a walk through the French Quarter, Tenn pointed out to me the bars and restaurants that had once offered him hospitality. He pointed out the places in which he had lived and written, and he finally walked me to the actual streetcar named Desire, which stood outside of the old Federal Mint. He grew silent, and in the silence I asked him how the play had come to him. The question seemed to revive him. “Let’s go to the water to talk,” he suggested, and we went to the promenade across from Jackson Square that looks out over the Mississippi, and sat on a bench. The day was humid and the air was still, but there was a slight breeze coming off the brownish water, and Tenn felt calm looking out across it.

“Streetcar,” he continued, “was my literary manifestation of my very present fear that I would not be able to support myself as a writer,” he began, “and that I would be forced to fall upon the mercies and the coffers of people unsympathetic to my plight and to my needs. Which is to say, everyone—for no one really understands or sympathizes with artists until a profitable emission is seen and utilized. My family looked upon me for support, which only added to my neurotic obsessions with money, and who else could I search for sympathy, for food, for a roof over my head? As time went on, and I saw no ease of my debts or my fears, I became paralyzed with the fear that I would be sent to live with some relatives in Mississippi or the outermost regions of Louisiana: religious, rustic people who not only had no understanding of the artistic temperament or needs, but who probably felt that an artist was an aberration. How would I survive in their world? How would I earn my keep and my peace while leaning upon them to keep me alive and able to write? Would I have to give up completely my ambitions and become one of them, a toiler of the earth, or a volunteer in the rectory, or a day laborer, hiding my own reality behind a veneer of normality just to have a home? That is where Streetcar began. Within my very real, very possible fear that I would become a ward of venomous people who would rather see me destroyed than to survive.”

As Tenn thought more about the play, his “fear-based fantasia,” the main character became a woman who was an “amalgamation of me, my mother, my sister, and an actress [Lillian Gish] with whom I had become incongruously obsessed,” and it was, as Tenn always insisted, the play “that grew the fastest, gave me the most satisfaction, and ultimately speaks more about me than any other. It is my clarion cry for survival, and I believe that it is heard by most everyone who sees or reads the play—if they have a heart and a shred of truth within them.”

However, the version of Streetcar that reached Elia Kazan was not the theatrical landmark that, in Kazan’s words, “propelled the American theater forward to an almost unimaginable degree.” The play was, instead, “a diamond in the rough, a jewel thrown atop a dung heap. Everything that ultimately made it so brilliant was in there, I assure you,” Kazan told me, “but the script was not focused. Anyone reading that script immediately knew that something remarkable, perhaps revolutionary, was going to occur when this play reached a stage. We just couldn’t always believe that it would reach a stage, and the primary cause of our fear that it would not was Tennessee. And the primary cause of Tennessee’s insanity and inability to focus in those early days of work on Streetcar had to do with the actress he had decided would be his Blanche.”

That actress was not, of course, Jessica Tandy.

“When I first imagined a woman at the center of my fantasia,” Tenn revealed to me, “I immediately saw the pure and buoyant face of Lillian Gish, and Portrait of a Madonna, which is Streetcar in postulant mode, was written for her and dedicated to her. It is, in every sense of the word, her play. My perceived knowledge of her, which is always very intimate with me, imbued that piece, and she was very taken with it. Her enthusiasm and her graciousness toward me led me to develop the play, and hers was the figure that walked out of the fog toward me.

“When I write,” Tenn explained to me, “I am not myself, really. I cannot sit down at my typewriter or my pad of paper as Thomas Lanier Williams or Tennessee Williams or anybody at all, really. I need to completely erase all that I was thinking of and allow myself to be made captive to the creatures who actually lead me through my plays.

“My writing is very much of the automatic variety, almost incantatory,” he continued. “Almost anyone observing me in this state would assume that I was dreaming or was the victim, perhaps, of some cerebral incident, but it is actually when I am most focused, and I do not understand it at all.”

Tenn paused, looked at the water, and closed his eyes.

“As I close my eyes and think upon some recent series of events or a dream or a nightmare,” Tenn told me, his hands pantomiming the act of typing, “a woman will appear to me. She will walk toward me and begin speaking and will, literally, lead me through what ultimately becomes a play. I do not need this process so much with stories, as I now feel my stories are the residue of plays best left abandoned. However, everything that is in one of my stories has been through the mental theater, has had a figure from the fog as its escort. And Lillian Gish was the escort who brought me to Blanche. I love her for this gift, and I love her for the journey she provided, but there was a point at which she abandoned me, or I abandoned her.”

Tenn offered the analogy of a wedding he had once attended, in which the bride, a young girl, the product of a particularly acrimonious divorce, had been walked only halfway down the aisle by her errant father, then met by the dutiful mother, who had always been there for the daughter, and who now delivered her to the pastor, the groom, and the hoped-for, prayed-for good graces of a happy marriage. Lillian Gish had taken Tenn halfway down the aisle of his mental theater, and as he stood there “among the red chairs and the worn carpeting, somewhere around row L,” he laughed, “I looked up at the stage, well lit but free of fog, and realized I had come to the theater on the wrong evening. The stage was empty. The woman had abandoned me. I looked to my left and Lillian was gone. I needed a new woman, a new escort. I could not be delivered to my stage, my altar, my hoped-for, prayed-for marriage of playwright and play.

“When I wrote Menagerie,” Tenn continued, “I knew that Amanda was, at her core, my mother, but given that I could not countenance my mother’s presence in the real and present world, I was certainly not going to allow her admission into my mental theater, so Amanda soon became part Miriam Hopkins and, later, very much Laurette Taylor, and those women are deeply invested in that character. With Streetcar, which was Portrait of a Madonna, and The Poker Night, and Miss Blanche Thinks About Things, and The Moon and the Royal Balconies before it finally found its moorings as A Streetcar Named Desire, I always imagined Lillian Gish in the leading role. I did not know her at all when she first entranced me, but I had become quite enchanted with her through her film appearances, and very early in my years in New York, young and impoverished both of pantry and of soul, I had seen her walking along Broadway, very happy and gay and smartly dressed, and I wanted so much to be in her mind-set, to have the comfort of accessories that were perfect, to have that sheen of happiness and wellness that she emanated. I recall that she caught my eye and smiled at me, a warm and open smile.

“I lived at the movie palaces in those days,” Tenn said, “at a time when they were palaces: huge, gaudy buildings with secret alcoves for assignations or naps, and the utter neglect of the staff, who would allow you to sit for multiple viewings, and who would allow me cups of ice for my own liquids. There were always revivals of old films, and those films are really what inspired my own dreams and my own productions in my mental theater, for my women look like those cinematic women: pale and perfect and terribly demonstrative. Demonstrative they would have to be, as I am a most lazy person, and it is a strong woman who must pull me toward my conclusions.”

Lillian Gish held Blanche DuBois—and its creator—firmly in her hands until Tenn began to rewrite and refashion the play under the forceful direction of Elia Kazan.

Forty-five years after this period, Kazan was candid in his assessment that Tennessee was, for a frighteningly long period of time, incapable of taking his diamond in the rough and transforming it into the play we now know. “He was, in an annoyingly honorable way, devoted to Lillian Gish playing the part,” Kazan explained. “He truly believed that since hers was the vision that was his first of Blanche, he would lose the character completely without her performance of it. I had great respect for Miss Gish, and her film legacy is not to be slighted, but she quite simply failed to understand any aspect of Blanche or any of the other characters in the play. Her intelligence was very simple, very openhearted, and Blanche was as alien to her as if she were playing a Martian, and in order to make her real, she applied an odd salad of philosophy and religion atop her head, and I simply couldn’t stomach it. I was very harsh with Tennessee, and I told him that his play was being diluted daily by the presence of Miss Gish.”

“I was digging far into the earth to find these characters,” Tenn told me, “finding oil and bones and buried treasure, and far away, safe and pristine on the lip of this enormous hole I had dug into the human soul, stood Lillian Gish—remote and not at all a participant in what I was happily excavating.”

It would be the job of both Tenn and his producer, Irene Mayer Selznick, to let Lillian Gish know that she would not be Blanche DuBois. Kazan confirmed this story, and recalls his own happiness when Tenn revealed that the play could go forward without his spiritual muse. “I’m only slightly ashamed to say that I was jubilant,” Kazan confessed, “because, in the end, A Streetcar Named Desire is, and ever shall be, far more important than Miss Gish’s feelings.”

Tenn had no way of knowing that his play, which he revised extensively, was garnering attention in other quarters. “I thought I was typing in the dark,” Tenn told me, “with occasional flashes of light from Kazan, who hovered and hummed and scratched through scenes with a Blackwing pencil.” But there were others who were aware of this new play: Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy had heard of it—as bright and as destructive as fire, messy but potentially brilliant—and they were friends with its director. Jessica hungered for the part, and Cronyn shared her desire, which he expressed in various long-distance telephone conversations with Kazan. “I’ll admit now,” Kazan boasted, “that I was obnoxiously excited. I knew what this play could be, but my gloatings to Hume and Jessie were not because I ever saw Jessie in the role: I simply trusted Hume’s wily intelligence and taste. However, if I should be recognized for nothing else in my life, I brought Blanche to Tennessee.”

In one of the telephone conversations, Hume Cronyn asked for a copy of the play. “There isn’t a play … yet,” was Kazan’s reply. However, Kazan did mail them a copy of Portrait of a Madonna.

“And the moment I read it,” Jessica Tandy told me, “my life began. I was, for the first time in my life, unafraid to be ruthless in order to get something I wanted.”

Jessica Tandy was thirty-seven years old when she first felt unafraid to be ruthless. “I’m the first to admit how idiotic it appears,” she confessed, “that a morbidly shy and ashamed person should choose to go on the stage, but my fear of recognition was as the person Jessica Tandy, not as a character. Characters were what I was hiding behind, transforming myself into something or someone interesting, perhaps, or useful, but I wasn’t even able to pursue roles for myself. I was—and to a degree still am—passive. I endure far more nonsense than anyone my age should, but I am emotionally paralyzed in so many ways, and whenever I feel myself getting a little confident, or feeling that I may be doing things fairly well and should be proud, I am immediately drawn back to poor little Jessie Alice Tandy, forever without.”

Jessie Alice Tandy was born on June 7, 1909, in London. She recalls one of her earliest days in school, when her vital statistics were entered into her teacher’s ledger, and she heard the words “Tandy 6-7-9” read aloud. “I thought those numbers, which were simply my birth date, were somehow a judgment, a rating of sorts,” she remembered. “At even that young age—and I guess I was six or seven—I knew that we were poor, we didn’t come from ‘fine’ people, and that I would be called upon to do more to simply acquire the most basic education or courtesies. I held that ‘Tandy 6-7-9’ in my head for years. It still makes me ashamed, and I can still hear it being called, and still remember my shame at what I thought was a public accounting.”

Tandy’s family was poor, and there was always a struggle for everything, but things seemed always to appear. “I now know,” she told me, “that there was family and a few friends and neighbors who helped us; we all helped each other.” However, when Tandy’s father died of cancer when she was twelve, the family’s finances, and their sense of identity, became even more precarious. “I don’t even know how my mother kept us alive, my two brothers and me,” she told me, and was clearly touched by the memories she held. “I have been fortunate for so long in having things, in not having to worry about so many things that were once entirely out of my reach, but even from my healthier perspective it becomes more amazing to me that my mother maintained a home and managed to instill in me a dream or a motive, however distorted it might have been.”

Tandy’s mother took on as many jobs as she could manage, and she was perpetually saving money to attend classes. “My mother,” Tandy said one day, beaming, “was very American in her belief in self-improvement, so she constantly enrolled in classes: sewing, public speaking, cooking, whatever she could manage. And since she worked at a school for retarded and handicapped children, she was often offered free tuition. When she knew the tuition was free, she would ask if her daughter could join. And in one of those classes, I discovered Shakespeare.”

Tandy recalled that the first class in which she became enamored by the sonnets of William Shakespeare was a public-speaking course, but after she displayed an affinity for reciting, she was referred to a course better suited for aspiring performers. “Mind you,” she told me, “these ‘aspiring’ thespians were my mother’s age, but they coddled me and treated me kindly as I worked on those sonnets, and I was truly transported.”

Tandy was encouraged in her dramatic studies and eventually earned acceptance at the wonderfully Dickensian-sounding Ben Greet Academy, which, as she told me, “was no RADA or Central School, I assure you”; but the young, shy actress earned parts and respect. “I was, if nothing else, the most polite young girl in any acting school of that time,” Tandy joked, and she was also, as was her tendency, “maddeningly passive. My reports from my teachers were always the same: ‘Do more,’ ‘Define yourself,’ ‘Let us know how you see yourself,’ ” she remembered. “How could I come out and tell them that I had no idea of the answers to any of those questions? How can I tell you that today, when I am more than eighty years old, I still cannot answer those questions?”

Tandy found work, most of it execrable, as she recalls; but John Gielgud insisted that Tandy was far harder on herself than she deserved. “She was developing into a very ordinary repertory actress,” Gielgud told me, “and she was very conscious of her diction, which was very much the style in the theater in the late twenties and early thirties. There was a great deal of artificiality abounding on the stages at that time, and what made Jessica fetching to me was her reticence, what I gather was her fear, in the performance of these minor plays. She had a realism that caught my eye: that it was fear was not known to me at the time, and it was irrelevant as well, for all I knew was that something interesting was going on with her.”

Tandy also earned an admirer—the handsome actor Jack Hawkins, a burly and virile man who would succeed in the films The Cruel Sea, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Zulu. “He was a wonderful actor,” said Tandy, “and he tried to be a sympathetic mate to me, but I was woefully unprepared for men.” Tandy had spent her entire childhood helping her mother care for her two brothers, attending night classes with her mother, and dreaming of an escape. “I could literally see the cycles of each day,” she remembered, “and as much as I admired my mother for attempting to see us become better, I also resented the metronome-like banality of each day and its tasks. I never dated or spent time with any men other than my brothers and those gentlemen who were with me in classes or who had been my cast members in plays, and none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in me. I also had no girlfriends to speak of, so I didn’t even know that I was lacking anything by having no social life with boys. I was socially inept.”

What drew her to Hawkins was a combination of his striking looks and his overwhelming confidence. “He seemed,” she told me, “to be afraid of nothing, and entered every room unafraid, and was soon its most popular guest. He was the first person to whom I would share my fears of inadequacy, my shame at my upbringing. I told him that most London cabbies didn’t even know where my house was—that was how distant and déclassé my home was. I could tell him that I came to the theater through an adult-education class, and suddenly he was telling me how poor he was and that his theater life had begun in children’s pantomimes and playing Santa Claus for dying children in hospitals. I looked at him and felt I had found someone who could accept me and understand me.”

Tandy and Hawkins were married in 1932 and would have a daughter two years later. “What I remember about that marriage were the constant pep talks that Jack gave me,” Tandy said, “and the constant arguments about money.” Tandy knew the cost of every item and kept an amazingly detailed itinerary in her head. “I tell myself that I’m not good at numbers or with finances,” she confessed, “but I could stretch a little bit of money with great skill, although it wasn’t a skill that gave one a great sense of pride.” Hawkins, while not wealthy, felt that money was to be spent; he was bored with accounting and budgets, and he attempted to tell his wife that her inability to rise to being a great actress had its basis in her crippling sense of limitation. “He may well have been right,” Tandy said, “but I couldn’t change my ways. When I first got some decent, regular income to my name, do you know what I bought? Soap. When I told this story to John Gielgud, he assumed that I had bought some marvelous soap by Poiret or some French parfumier, but it was a simple box of glycerin soap from my local chemist. When Jack got a bit of money, he bought a car. I was horrified.”

Tandy had also never learned the art of flirtation, of keeping a man interested, or of keeping a home intact. “My upbringing was about getting brothers out of bed, out of the house, and off to school or work,” she admitted. “I didn’t know about cooking or decorating or having unexpected friends drop in. I didn’t like it when Jack brought people over; he didn’t like it that there wasn’t a stocked bar and food on the table. He wanted to go out every night, and I was this spinster sitting at home reading.” In time Hawkins found social graces and affection elsewhere, and Tandy accepted it with little surprise. “I just assumed that I wasn’t gifted in that way, so I would stay home with my daughter, and I would work on my acting.”

Tandy’s career remained stagnant, primarily, Gielgud recalls, because “Jessica didn’t know how to make calls or ask for favors. She had had wonderful successes, but she had failed to realize that the blustery confidence that Jack had blown beneath her feet was what had gotten her through so many things, so she was adrift. Jessica as an actress and as a person is very incremental; she moves in small, delicate steps. It is fascinating to witness both as her acting partner and as her director, and I’ve been both. It is as if she is doling out her talents as stingily as she doled out her coins when she was growing up poor and terribly conscious of lack. Jessica feels that her talents are as limited now as her finances were then, so there is this dribble of talent that comes at you as she investigates a role, surveys her players, analyzes the text. She was this way when she was my Ophelia [in 1934], and she was this way when I directed her in All Over [in 1971]. As if working on a collage that will soon be immense, she starts in one tiny corner and adds snippet after snippet. This is fascinating when she has a role to which she can apply this technique, but it is utterly futile when one is sitting at home with a child and needs work.”

A quartet of mutual admiration: Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Lillian Gish, and John Gielgud, backstage at the Martin Beck Theater, after a performance of Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance in which the Cronyns starred, 1966 (illustration credit 7.2)

Jessica Tandy found her impetus to feel confident again in Hume Cronyn, whom she met backstage in New York, in 1940, after a performance in a play called Jupiter Laughs. “It was not a good play,” Tandy remembered, “and I don’t recall that I felt very good in my part, but he was very effusive.”

In fact, Cronyn recalled that he was too effusive. “I saw her and I wanted her,” Cronyn barked out one day in the living room of their hotel suite. “I was stunned by her. I thought she was exquisite.” Tandy blushed as Cronyn said these things, but it was clear that, fifty years later, she could recall the impact of his words. “I told her I would divorce my wife, and she should divorce her husband,” Cronyn told me, “and I saw no reason why she couldn’t.” Cronyn was, according to Elia Kazan, “the little Bantam of Broadway [who] had money, which meant he had clothes and money for dining, which meant he had women, and he was wonderfully cocky and smart and funny. I liked him immediately. I would have liked to have been there when he began courting Jessica because they are so different.”

“Hume terrified and appalled me in the beginning,” Tandy told me. “He thought British actors were pretentious and British theater obsolete. He made fun of my having so many fears about money, and when I lost my last one hundred dollars”—which she had tucked into her girdle—“he made fun of my horror and peeled off two hundred-dollar bills and told me to shut up.”

Eventually, Tandy had a moment with Cronyn when she told him that she was growing very fond of him, but that he was going to have to learn who and what she truly was, why she was fearful of certain things, and what he was destined to live with if he pursued her. “And I listened, and I agreed that it was all good,” Cronyn said, and within weeks both Tandy and Cronyn filed for divorce so that they could begin their life together.

Whenever I spoke to Jessica, she would send Cronyn out of the room after a polite spell of a few minutes, because she felt he would take over the conversation, and because his opinions of people, including Tenn and others for whom Jessica held great affection, were harsh and unforgiving and offered without solicitation. However, one day when I called on them at the Wyndham, Cronyn met me in the lobby and took me up himself. In the elevator he told me what he felt I needed to know about Jessica Tandy.

“When I met her,” he told me, “I not only had dreams of acting opposite her, but I wanted to scour the world for plays she could star in, and I wanted to produce and direct them. I believed then and I believe now that she is an extraordinary actress, and I feel that every movement she makes is beautiful and worth repeated viewings. I think she imbues every performance with her very ardent life story, and that is rare, and I wanted to be a part of it. And Jessica didn’t know how to make it happen. I made it happen.”

When the elevator doors opened onto their floor, Jessica was at the door to their suite, and she looked surprised to see the two of us together. “I can just imagine that Hume filled your ear in that ride,” she teased. “You know I did,” he told her, kissing her on the cheek. “But when has anything I’ve told anyone not been to their benefit?”

In New York Tenn was furiously revising Streetcar. “I knew what the play was supposed to be,” Tenn told me, “but I couldn’t bring all the disparate parts together. I relied heavily on Gadg [Kazan], and he made the play happen.”

“What I did,” Kazan told me, “was to remind Tennessee of where he was in his life when the inspiration for the play had come to him. I told him to remember the days when he didn’t even have a nickel for the subway; the days without food; the sense of utter misery you could feel having nothing, and feeling that you couldn’t get a break anywhere, from anybody.”

Recalling these sensations was complicated: Tenn had enjoyed some financial ease from the production of The Glass Menagerie, and while not rich, he had a place to live and food and books. “Kazan told me to remove myself, as much as possible, from my comfort,” Tenn told me, “and return to the young Tom who had first encountered Blanche in that fog.” In his early days in New York, Tenn had been so broke that he had survived by cadging meals at the Automat, and his agent, Audrey Wood, would send him books, because “without books, I absolutely would die. I could forget about food if I had something marvelous to massage my mind.” Once, in a volume of poetry, Wood had placed a twenty-dollar bill. “My God,” Tenn enthused, “can you imagine the paroxysms I endured to be reading a poem and to have money flutter toward me? Oh Lord, that was heaven!”

Tenn began walking everywhere in the city, refusing subways, buses, and cabs. He walked the streets, cold and alone, and looked into warmly lit windows and felt he would never know the simplest comfort. He ate in the small, simple installments he had known in his poorest days, stretching bread and milk and cheese to their farthest limits, setting goals for himself as to how far three or five dollars could take him. He did not realize, at that time, that he was living his life in a similar fashion to that of Jessica Tandy.

“I was very happy then,” Tenn told me, “so don’t be afraid of lack. Obviously, I had control over my lack, and I had people who would have stepped in, but the creative energy that swept over me was remarkable.”

As Kazan recalls, “Streetcar was very much a patchwork quilt at that time. We had the entrance of Blanche, which was very effective and poignant, and we had the sister, Stella, who, unlike Blanche, had not been calcified by her alleged Southern aristocracy. We did not yet have the powerful contrast of Stanley, and so I began to talk to Tenn about the types of men he feared. As it happens, they were the type I envied and recoiled from as well: virile, earthy, pagans to Blanche’s wobbly spiritual sense. Once Stanley was introduced, we could see that Stella willfully chose all of this carnality because she saw the deadness of Blanche’s narcotized existence. When those ideas fell into Tennessee’s head, then the play took off.”

Producer Irene Mayer Selznick, Tennessee, Elia Kazan, and an unidentified man during a rehearsal for A Streetcar Named Desire, 1947 (illustration credit 7.3)

“And so I walked and I wrote,” Tenn remembered, “and the play was like a wild dog on a leash, leading me headlong into places I not only didn’t know existed, but which frightened the hell out of me, but Kazan approved, and I knew he was right. I must tell you,” he said, “that without Elia Kazan, there would not have been a Tennessee Williams. Certainly not the Tennessee Williams who inspired you to write such a lovely letter seeking advice on becoming a writer. He made me a better writer, and not by rewriting my work, or forcing me to change a word, but rather by making me fully understand the responsibilities I owed to my talent and helping me to better understand the delicate and decidedly odd equipment that is within actors. I don’t think that anyone ever had or ever will walk among us who had so broad an understanding of the human condition; the needs and abilities of actors; the possibilities and confines of theater; and the remarkable magic, true magic, that happens when you fully engage an audience in your act of discovery.

“Every writer should have so brilliant and honest a critic to champion their work,” Tenn continued, “and Kazan’s passion amazed me. He was ferociously hungry for stimulation, information, entertainment, joy, amazement. He was also fearless, which I am definitely not. There was nothing that terrified him, and he faced his fears, his enemies, his weaknesses with great boldness and strength, and was never happy with himself or his discoveries once he had obtained them.

“He loved fully,” Tenn marveled, “but he also hated fully. There was nothing he hated more than dishonesty, and he always reminded me that one person’s honesty was another’s mendacity, and that there was brute courage and strength in the greatest effort made by even the weakest person, and the step was a monumental occasion that should not be lightly dismissed.

“He always worked on my plays by first letting me know that he believed in me, he knew what I was trying to do, but that we must now bring ‘this lovely, this important play’ to every mind receptive to it. I tend always to write too much—and to talk too much, can’t you see?—and Kazan always admitted that he was the same, he understood this trait, but that we must remove the extraneous, the fatty, and reveal the lovely structure that lay beneath whatever we were working on. He loved to talk about the scaffolding that could come only after we had the strongest foundation, and he taught me how to give a play the strength onto which others could grow and contribute.

“He hated talk of themes, and insisted that from truth every condition known to man could derive,” Tenn said, standing up, excited and imitating the director. “ ‘Let the future talk about your themes,’ he might say, ‘just write what is true, and everyone will find themselves.’ To truly enrage him, you might suggest a coup de théâtre. ‘The audience provides those,’ he told me, ‘not the director or the designer.’ He nakedly thrust the characters, with all their flaws and their gifts, into the very faces and hearts of his audiences, and knew that they would provide the revolutionary moments, the fireworks.

“ ‘Show me a truly honest actor realizing the words of a truly honest writer,’ he would say, ‘and you have a revolution in the theater.’

“He hated stars who performed rather than became, and he couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want endless aid and criticism, and no one sought it more than he did.

“I love him, but I had times when I hated him, because it is never easy or comfortable to be so revealed. We shared a fear of time wasted, love misunderstood, and he was unashamed of tears if he was moved or challenged. Both of us thought ourselves ugly, odd, out of place, and we both worked doggedly to not be thought of as lesser than those we admired.

“He helped me,” Tenn continued, “to realize that everyone in Streetcar was right to fight for what they needed. The human need to survive is honorable; others may be destroyed, but everyone would understand that survival, its beauty and its fragility, received top priority. He saw the most touching moment in that play to be when Stella lies to Blanche as she is about to be led away to the hat factory. ‘I’ll go with you,’ Stella says, but of course both realize the lie. She will not be there, and how many walks have we taken alone, when we begged for company and support? The need is to get Blanche out of the house and their lives so that their own lives can begin their own descent into fantasy: fantasy that will help them live with themselves—just as Blanche, just as I, have our fabulist devices to cope. That scene was the play, in Kazan’s eyes. And he was right. And he cried like a baby every time he saw it.

“I never had the power of my earlier work once Kazan stopped being my director,” Tenn said, then nodded as if to reinforce his statement, which he regretted but could not deny. “And I never had the joy of working in the theater once he moved on to other projects. I thought of him often, and I tried to be true to the standards he imparted to me, but no one can emulate something so original, so rare, and so brilliant.

“He is now as much a part of me, my work, as my own tired, grateful heart.”

Twelve years later, when I was working in the Ecce Panis bakery on Madison Avenue, which was frequented by Kazan and his wife, I called him on the phone and read him the words that Tenn had shared with me. Kazan, seemingly so tough, dissolved into tears and, gasping, asked if he could hang up. Later, he would call me and say, “I am always amazed at what I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by, and the loss of these people is too much to bear. You will feel this one day yourself. Prepare yourself.”

Jessica Tandy could remember clearly the day she read Portrait of a Madonna. “It pierced my heart,” she told me. “Here was a character who had the same frightened sense of self as I did, who stumbled through life constantly afraid of discovery, clinging to her own methods of survival. It was me. With my obsessive counting of money, time, opportunities, experiences, I could understand wanting to impose a fantasy world where I actually was in control.”

Cronyn called Kazan after hearing Tandy’s estimation of the play, and even before he had read it himself, he wanted to produce it. “I didn’t fully understand that Portrait was growing into Streetcar,” Cronyn told me, “but Kazan informed me that Tennessee was working like a demon, and the play was growing greater by the day. I immediately realized that Jessie would be in Streetcar, but she would only have the opportunity if she was seen acting a part that was similar, so I mounted a production in Los Angeles of Portrait.”

The production, financed and directed by Cronyn, played in a tiny theater to small but appreciative audiences. “The only audience member that mattered,” Tandy confessed, “was Elia Kazan. Hume told me that once he saw me in Portrait, he would see me in Streetcar. Now I still had not read Streetcar; it was, as I recall it, an unfinished play. But my faith in Tennessee’s talent and my faith in Hume, coupled with my incredible need for a part, led me strongly.”

Kazan recalled the performance as “striking, and Jessica was clearly more of an actress than I had imagined. She was still far too reliant on effects—her voice was doing far too much to convey emotion or a change of moods, and her gestures were not entirely believable. But her ability to dissolve emotionally on the stage was phenomenal, and I knew that she could be our Blanche. I knew that she understood the lies we tell in order to survive, and that was an admission I was not getting from any other actress.”

Kazan brought the news of Tandy’s performance to Tenn, and he did not find a receptive author. “Tenn thought she was a phony British actress,” Kazan recalled, “and he couldn’t imagine her as Blanche. Ironically, he thought of Jessica as ‘brittle,’ and she is the last person to whom I would attribute that description.”

But Tenn agreed to the casting of Jessica Tandy as Blanche, relying entirely on the judgment of Kazan. Once she had the part, she realized that she had another role that she craved: “I wanted—and needed—desperately to become Tennessee’s friend,” Tandy told me. “I realized that I would have to have him with me and for me if I was going to succeed.”

Tandy suggested that she and Tenn have dinner together, and Tenn accepted.

“Big Lady and I formed an immediate mutual-admiration society,” Tenn told me, and he recalled the meeting with great affection. Tandy recalled that, in her life, she had had three meetings with men where she freely revealed her secrets, what she saw as her shameful self, and those men were Jack Hawkins, Hume Cronyn, and Tenn. “We were comfortable and intimate from the beginning,” Tandy told me, “although I was afraid of him, in the sense that his talent was, to me, so incredible, and yet I saw before me a boy, an overgrown child.”

Tenn was in his self-imposed poverty, walking the streets of New York, and seeing life through the eyes of a person who would never survive without aid, who was perpetually changing masks to appear acceptable and to make life tenable, and it had given him a happiness he had not expected. While Tenn had Frank Merlo in his life, during this exercise in which he was delving into his own derelict past, he had made himself believe that he was completely alone.

Then Jessica Tandy entered his life.

“I was feeling even more confessional than I normally do,” Tenn said, “and so our first meeting was full of disclosures. She revealed herself to me as utterly afraid and utterly unrefined, and we laughed at our mutual charade. Suddenly, I had a sister, a soul mate, along for the adventure of Streetcar.” They each had the ability to make the other comfortable, to provide calmness. “Jessica could not imagine that she could ever pull off this role,” Tenn admitted, “and what hung her up was the sexuality of Blanche. Jessica was not comfortable at all with flirtation, and she ran strenuously from seduction. She found Kazan a very strong, sexual force, and she feared his direction of those scenes where Blanche needed to be seductive and, later, conquered. So I worked with her on those instead.”

“I was torn, also, between two Stellas,” Jessica revealed. “Marlon was very much devoted to the teachings of Stella Adler, which were unknown to me, yet fascinating, and Kazan had begun an affair with Kim [Hunter, the play’s Stella], so I felt adrift as an actress and as a woman. Marlon was an extraordinary actor and a beautiful man. No acting was required to tremble before him, but I could not easily face the Blanche who could effortlessly flirt with him, and I could not convince anyone that I was the Blanche who indiscriminately entertained men.”

“What Jessica could believe,” Tenn told me, “was that a woman—or anyone—can and will do anything to find surcease. ‘Surcease’ became our word. If Jessica could not play Blanche as a whore, she could play her as a woman who craved affirmation as a lovely, refined lady, and Jessica completely identified with that. When Jessica was nervous, she became terribly, terribly polite, she shook a bit, and she sought the nearest exit, and that is how I told her she should flirt with Stanley. Her Blanche might not have wanted Stanley in her bed—or any man—but she needed it. I told her to think ‘castor oil,’ not ‘cock,’ and as distasteful as both were, they ultimately did her a world of good.”

When I repeated this to Tandy, she burst into her wonderful laugh and couldn’t believe that Tenn had told me that. “I had forgotten that wonderful mental trick I played on myself,” she giggled, “and only Tennessee could have given it to me in such a fashion and so freely.”

Tenn invited Jessica to join him on his forays about the city, his “promenades of the poor,” and she found it wonderful. “Even though we were both going home to comfortable places,” she remembered, “and we had food and money, we fully fell into our fantasy of being unknown, unloved, unaware people, hopelessly wandering. We ate in greasy diners, allowing ourselves each sixty cents, and it brought back my entire life prior to Hume, who simply swept finances out of my head and my life. As we walked, Tenn would recite poems or talk about situations that might work in the play, and I could snatch, from the deepest parts of my mind, the sonnets I had loved so much, as well as long portions of Hamlet and Henry V. Tennessee reintroduced me to a vital part of my past, and a vital part of my person, and although we were both in our late thirties, on the cusp of an amazing experience, we were terribly, happily young. One of my fondest memories of that time with Tenn was going to his apartment and finding him flipping furiously through books. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, and he admitted he was looking for money. He had found money once in a book—a gift—and I often stashed money in books, one of my eccentric habits. We laughed ourselves silly over that, and I remember Tenn telling me, ‘Stay young, honey. It’s all that will save us.’ ”

When A Streetcar Named Desire was published in hardcover, Tenn sent an inscribed copy to Jessica. Inside, he had slipped a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto which he had taped a small note. It read: “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

“Jessica took baby steps toward Blanche,” Kazan recalled, “but goddammit, she got there. She was luminous, not only due to the fairness of her complexion, but from this fervent belief she manifested in the fantasies of Blanche DuBois. She was otherworldly, she was wonderfully correct and precise, and so when she sank to the level of Stanley Kowalski, you truly felt a woman you cared for had been degraded. When she arched her back and walked off at the end of the play, your heart broke, because someone very similar to your mother or your aunts or a beloved teacher was lost to us forever, and who could fathom what we might have gained had she stayed, if we had only been a bit more eager to be kind?”

Helping Jessica along in her baby steps were Tenn, Kazan—and Hume Cronyn. “I believe that Hume wanted a stronger role in the production,” Tenn revealed, “and his presence was not pleasant. He was very protective of Jessica, but he was also quite dismissive of everyone else in the company, and he had to be told several times by Kazan that his presence was not appreciated. I never felt that Hume thought much of me: I think he was grateful that I had written a play that would help his wife, but I always felt like the most flagrant queer around him, as if he were trying to conduct a conversation with an armadillo, so strange was the concept.”

Cronyn began making staging suggestions, and ultimately Tenn left rehearsals. If Tenn was in the theater, Kazan, sitting behind him, would report “Good news” on the entrance of Tandy, then “Bad news” on the entrance of Cronyn. “Believe me, we were a happy company when nothing but good news came in that door,” Tenn said.

Jessica knew that maneuvers and machinations by Cronyn had led her to this moment, to this opportunity, but she deeply resented the belief, now a part of theater myth, that Cronyn had served as a merciless puppet master to this pliant actress. “Listen,” she admonished me, in the presence of Cronyn, “you sit here talking to me because of Hume Cronyn and Tennessee Williams, but I was ready for anything—not only ready, but hungry. I can say now—after some success and a lifetime in the theater—that I cannot think of anything or anyone who could have stopped me from making a better life for myself in the theater. I was not going to be counting coins and opportunities in some council flat in my old age. Hume was simply the one who saw in me the potential to take on roles that no one else felt I deserved. I was not passive, however. I was an active participant in those things I pursued.”

The most valuable lesson Jessica learned from Streetcar was to inhabit the mind of the playwright. “Because I became so close to Tennessee,” she admitted, “each and every night that I said those words, I imagined myself with him, saying and defending his words, and it made all the difference in the world. I wanted Tennessee Williams to believe in me again, even if I was in a play not written by him. I would imagine us walking the streets of New York, so young, our eyes so full of possibility and wonder and that longing we were so soon forgetting, and I could make any playwright’s work real to me.

“And when he died,” Tandy said, her face crumbling, “and I had to say those words of Blanche’s at his memorial service, it finally hit me that he was gone, that there was no smiling face, no set of young eyes, receiving my words, judging my input, and so I was devastated. I have loved my life in the theater, but now, after all these years, I can think of perhaps three experiences in the theater that fulfilled me or drew upon half of what I had as an actress. Tennessee said that Streetcar utilized all of his skills as a writer, and its production filled him with great satisfaction. It was also my greatest experience, but it only drew upon some of my reserves.”

Jessica and I shared a love of poetry, and when I told her that I was emulating the walks that she and Tenn had made across the city, and that I was keeping my eyes young and trying to forget my bare pantry, she wanted to know which poems I was using. (She also, against my wishes, and with incredible stealth, managed to have food sent to me.) One day, as I was reading a book of poems, I found something that appeared to have been written for and about the young Tennessee Williams. I was in Central Park, and I found a pay phone, called the Wyndham, and got Jessica on the phone, who promptly invited me up to her suite. The poem, by Czesław Miłosz, is called “Youth.”

Your unhappy and silly youth.

Your arrival from the provinces in the city.

Misted-over windowpanes of streetcars,

Restless misery of the crowd.

Your dread when you entered a place too expensive.

But everything was too expensive. Too high.

Those people must have noticed your crude manners,

Your outmoded clothes, and your awkwardness.

There were none who would stand by you and say,

You are a handsome boy,

You are strong and healthy,

Your misfortunes are imaginary.

You would not have envied a tenor in an overcoat of camel hair

Had you guessed his fear and known how he would die.

She, the red-haired, because of whom you suffer tortures,

So beautiful she seems to you, is a doll in fire.

You don’t understand what she screams with her lips of a clown.

The shapes of hats, the cut of robes, faces in the mirrors,

You will remember all that unclearly, as something from long ago,

Or as what remains from a dream.

The house you approach trembling,

The apartment that dazzles you—

Look, on this spot the cranes clear the rubble.

In your turn you will have, possess, secure,

Able to be proud at last, when there is no reason.

Your wishes will be fulfilled, you will gape then

At the essence of time, woven of smoke and mist,

An iridescent fabric of lives that last one day,

Which rises and falls like an unchanging sea.

Books you have read will be of use no more.

You searched for an answer but lived without answer.

You will walk in the streets of southern cities,

Restored to your beginnings, seeing again in rapture

The whiteness of a garden after the first night of snow.

I read the poem aloud to Jessica, and she was devastated. She cried as one might upon hearing of a great tragedy or the death of a loved one. We sat in her living room, crying and thinking of Tennessee Williams, and, I think, the youth of Jessie Alice Tandy. “That poem is Tennessee Williams,” she whispered, and then she began to cry again. “Oh, Jim, was anyone ever there to help our friend? Did anyone ever reach out to hold him?”

Kim Hunter left me with the most potent image of the relationship between Jessica Tandy and Tennessee Williams. After the opening night of Streetcar, with its rapturous curtain calls and ovations, with the cast amazed at its own skill and good fortune, Tenn stood in the alleyway of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre smoking a cigarette. Close to the street were Hunter, several other members of the company, members of the press—a small mob. Tandy exited the theater from the stage door, which was several feet ahead of where Tenn was smoking, and when she arrived at the mob, she was unable to move forward, and stood there, a smile frozen on her face. Suddenly, from behind her, Tenn’s voice boomed. “Step aside,” he bellowed, “there’s a great lady coming through.” Without looking behind her, Tandy’s face beamed, and as if choreographed, her hand slipped behind her back and fell into his, which he had stretched toward her at just the right moment. “In that moment,” Hunter recalled, “was consummation. They had done it, and they were acknowledging it.” All night long, through all the drinks and all the photos, Hunter kept looking over and seeing, too many times to recount, Jessica’s hand in Tenn’s.

Eight

I WAS UNFAMILIAR with the method of praying the Rosary, so Tenn purchased for me a small, blue booklet entitled “Pray the Rosary” and tried to explain, in his own way, the proper way to use this holy tool.

“Ignore these pages,” he would say, dog-earing particular pages, and writing on others.

The act of the Rosary, as Tenn put it, had become a meditation on qualities, a pursuit of desires. The history, semantics, and directions offered by the book were unnecessary, beyond the colorful, rich illustrations, along with the remedial instruction it offered to the uninitiated. “I need words,” Tenn said, “and I need visuals, and I need women. The beads are steps to walk; stones to build; women to inspire.” The essentials: There are fifty-nine beads that comprise the rosary, or garland of roses, or “flowers at the feet of the Lady,” as Tenn named it. Flores para los muertos. There is also a crucifix, on which is recited the Apostles’ Creed, and above that a large bead, on which is recited the Our Father.

“You do what you want,” Tenn told me. “Nothing of much good came from the Our Father. Use a quote that means something to you. Find a woman who moves you. We do what we can. We make our walks alone, scared but stoic, but we have our support systems, and prayer; God, all myths, all ladders of hope. Fashion them to your fears. Fan your fog. Do what you can.”

The mind of Tennessee Williams, as he put it, had always been full of female inspiration, feminine means of escape, salvation. “Women know where to look for the escapes we need,” he said. “I suggest you follow a woman.” Some of the women Tenn held in his thoughts as he tried to write were not close friends, but what he called teachers and examples. “They are of use to me in reminding me how I should act; how I should behave; how I should proceed.”

When Tenn mentioned Lois Smith, he seemed to say, as if in prayer, “Ah, Lois Smith: lyric and rustic and pure; a grandmother’s feather bed, comfortable and easy to sink into, but also barbed, full of opinions. At first sight, a haven, soft and pliant, but really an old Recamier piece covered with a more comfortable material. Oh, Lois, where have you been?”

Tennessee claimed that a still of Lois Smith from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) hung above his typewriter for a number of years. “She is an inspiration to me,” Tenn said.

Lois Smith possessed a soul that Tenn had earmarked for subsuming. She would be, he insisted, the gentlest spirit in the cabal of women to whom he was sending me, a virginal handmaiden to all that is “fair and clean and morally uplifting.”

Tenn first saw her when she was twenty-four years old; he was forty-four. It was 1955, a good year, a “sitting-on-the-fence” year, with good things behind him, and the hope of greater things ahead. Despite the difference in their ages and experiences, Tenn felt that he was her inferior in judgment and he envied her equanimity, the glow that surrounded her and kept her employed in roles that called for vulnerability and gossamer charms.

“I liked her,” Tenn said, “because I like ethereal women, but I can’t really be friends with them because they really are not of the earth: they are Puck women, and their feet are nowhere where you need them—on the ground or on your back. What I truly admire are those women who are both ethereal and perfectly simple. I think Lois is this way. She’s worldly, but she is also a Shaker woman stranded on the isle of Manhattan.”

On a morning that had turned hot, Tenn and I were setting out for Decatur Street. We began our jaunt from the Café du Monde, and along the way stopped for pounds of coffee, items of negrobilia, chunks of pralines, a glance at a drugstore window that featured both vintage advertising and bold examples of soft-core pornography (“Medicine for some, I suppose,” Tenn quipped), and, desiring a brief respite, a stop in the Central Grocery, where Tenn had a beer and one of the city’s cherished muffuletta sandwiches, which he cut into four wedges and ate as carefully as he chose his words, which came forth at a slow, painful pace.

Tennessee claimed that a still of Lois Smith from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden hung above his typewriter for years. “She is an inspiration to me,” Tenn said. (illustration credit 8.1)

“I have begun a portion of our story that has me concerned,” he said. “I don’t know where to take it.”

Tenn showed me the passage of a story inspired by Lois Smith. He allowed me to copy his attempt in my notebook. It read: “She had known from the time her childhood priest had told her so, that she carried within her a private altar, completely arrayed with all that was sacrosanct to her. Her daily duty, as well as her decision, was to polish the implements that lay on this altar, or to allow them to sit in dust and neglect, lonely, disabused, unserving in her quest for perfection.”

“What I feel I am trying to say,” Tenn admitted, “is that our redemption begins within, which is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that I, on a personal level, have faced myself. So I’m feeling a little punk tackling it on paper.” He dismissed the problem of the story—not to say of redemption—and we continued our walk toward Decatur, which eventually led us to a fenced-in market that trafficked in terra-cotta ducks, fountains, Blessed Mothers, and a myriad of angels in earth tones, which hung on chain-link fences, their faces a bewildered judgment of their resting place. “This would be a great backdrop for Sebastian Venable,” Tenn cracked, imagining his character from Suddenly, Last Summer, clad in tight-fitting white silk, his sinewy arms crossed, waiting, beneath the angels, for his prey. Tenn joked with the proprietor for a moment about the angels, then about the man’s not having the remotest idea who he was. Tenn grew silent and picked up a cherub as white as a piece of divinity fudge and held it away from him, observing it as if it were some noble ruin recently uncovered, or as if he were the father of a particularly odd newborn.

“The rustic cherub,” he mused. “A personality I’ve often searched for in my women, real and imagined. Anna Magnani was one. Maureen Stapleton is another. The most complex one—in my opinion—is Lois Smith. Let me tell you about her.”

Before he began his description, Tenn purchased the rustic cherub, which the proprietor wrapped in cerulean paper. Tenn gave it to me, and I kept it above my desk for nearly ten years, until I gave it to Lois Smith, who had inspired its purchase.

Like so many of the women who inspired Tenn, Lois Smith’s first exposure to theater was through a church, a fact that was vital to Tenn’s understanding of her. “As I understand it,” Tenn told me, “she is a Nazarene! Isn’t that wonderful? Lois Smith, Nazarene.” In notes Tenn made for what he called the Lois Smith story that he wanted us to write together, he made the following notes about Lois to help in the creation of a character.

She felt that she was always in that church in which she first felt happiness, and through the years, she has built within and around herself sanctuaries that promote peace and harmony, and [she] has made the theater something of a professed house of worship. It was not in her nature to find the ugly in life or situations, but she was not weak or restrained by ancient mores: she would, if she must, say what she felt.

She resides in a brilliantly white cocoon in which she placed herself gently, surrounded only by what was deemed absolutely necessary, which more often than not was merely her person.

There is within a lavish, hidden altar that everyone would be surprised she owned and loved and kept private to all but one other. With others she is apt to erect those pillars that announce her dismissal of a thought or a person who harbors thoughts that might disturb what she has fought to attain.

She wondered about people who lied. While she wouldn’t let them into her life, she often thought about them, their motivations, their final, secret thoughts as they lay in bed in the dark, plotting their next move. What propelled them? Why did they choose to immerse themselves in the dank waters of deception when she herself longed for the clear creek of purity?

One day she hoped to find within herself that special something that would allow all other events to click, to move into some meaning that might explain her desires, her perpetual moving toward what she couldn’t know, but was obsessed with.

In the margin of the last passage, Tenn had written some lines from a poem by the French poet Valery Larbaud, whose death had occurred during preparations for the premiere of Orpheus Descending, in which Lois played Carol Cutrere. Larbaud was an elegant man, fastidious, sickly, addicted to spas and arcane treatments. Tenn could imagine becoming this type of person, gulping supplements, surrendering to mud baths and enemas and the ministrations of muscular therapists. From this frail man came images that haunted Tenn, but all he could remember of his work was “My reader, my brother, place a heavy kiss on my forehead and my cheek and press upon my face, hollow and perfumed.” These are the actual lines:

Oh, that some reader, my brother, to whom I speak

Through this pale and shining mask,

Might come and place a slow and heavy kiss

On this low forehead and cheek so pale,

All the more to press upon my face

That other face, hollow and perfumed.

“All of our faces,” Tenn said, “need the attention and the affection of some observer, some lover. We—as men, as people, as writers—do not exist or matter until someone believes enough to come closer, to examine, to praise, to hate, to let us know we have been observed. We can then fill the mask with our reactions.”

I possessed all of these words, all of this information, for eight years, until I finally met Lois Smith myself, and sought to find out about her hidden altars and her masks. When I told her of my intention, she laughed heartily and said, “Oh, you brave and foolish young man! Well, come on!”

Tenn believed that Lois possessed a deep commitment to spiritual and physical well-being, and this became her shell, her armor. When I shared this observation with Lois, she quickly agreed. Yes, she admitted, the theater is a cruel place, occasionally populated by good people and great teachers, but for the most part unforgiving and harsh and “precipitate and foolish.” What she has chosen to do is to remove herself from the utilitarian aspects of the theater—fund-raising, backstage gossip, tales of its imminent disintegration—and focus on the work, devote herself to the pursuit and the praise of what she finds worthy. Her opinions are true and often harsh, but they are brief. She moves on.

“I like to think of myself always as a rube, or a neophyte,” she told me. “It keeps the experience as special and as wonderful as it was when I started, before I had my eyes opened—or my skin thickened.”

Tenn had watched her during the production of Orpheus Descending, adored by its director, Harold Clurman, respected by the company, and absent from the turmoil surrounding the quality of the production. “I was so touched,” Tenn told me, “by the manner in which she held the script: like a newly ordained priest holding his first host, or a young lover caressing the breast of a lover.”

The production of that play was not a happy time, and the year in which it took place—1957—was one that Tenn relegated to a pile of memories he referred to as “bad times.”

“It was not a good time,” he remembered. “I was not well, and I did not feel that I contributed very much to Harold’s direction, which is something he wanted very much. He was a collaborator, a loud, screaming inspirer of people, from the stagehands to the set designer to the playwright, and I was utterly mute in the face of his exhortations. I failed the play and I failed Harold. I failed everybody.”

When Tenn recounted the times of Orpheus, he remembered manic discussions over coffee with the “wild-eyed, warmhearted Clurman” and an increasingly bemused Maureen Stapleton, who, as Lady Torrance, felt adrift in what Tenn called his “murky sea of words.” In the midst of this confusion was the implacable Lois Smith.

“It takes years to gain that resolve, if one ever does,” Tenn marveled, “and here she had it while in her twenties. I was not a little impressed. Such iron beneath so flawless an exterior; her silk had steel underpinnings.”

Tenn claimed that he had brought about Lois’s hiring in Orpheus by virtue of his constant ravings about her talent in two previous productions: The Young and Beautiful, an adaptation of the stories of Sally Benson, in which she played what Tenn called a “Middle American, middle-class Gigi coming of age,” and a revival of The Glass Menagerie, in which she played Laura opposite the redoubtable but miscast Helen Hayes. In that production, mounted at New York’s City Center, which Tenn likened to a cross between the New York Port Authority bus terminal and an offshoot of the Federal Theatre Project, Lois dispelled the myth that Laura was an unplayable part, a symbol with no substance, a device.

“She understood the part perfectly,” Tenn said. “She revealed the anger that rests beneath so fragile an exterior: the rage at one’s imprisonment; the rage at the dissonance between what we see of a person and what a person actually is, actually feels, actually wants. She proved that Laura’s fragility is as much a ruse as a defense. ‘Take care of me; rescue me. Pity me; dominate me. Remove me from my current station. Take me—along with my crystal counterparts—off this shelf. Break me if you must, but set me free.’

“Lois works in tiny movements,” Tenn remembered. “Hers are not the bold strides of a dancer, but the mincing, delicate steps of the geisha, and with each rehearsal she brought a new strength, a new dimension.” If Lois Smith works in small spaces with tiny gestures, it is only appropriate that another artist who worked in a similar fashion should have offered an homage to her abilities. Joseph Cornell, whose intricate shadow boxes held tiny objects that captured the essence of its subject, saw Lois in The Young and Beautiful, then went home to create a tribute. Lois at the time was pale, luminous, “supremely supple,” as Tenn recalled. She seemed to be the epitome of burgeoning womanhood, and the Cornell piece, deep blue, painfully fragile, and bringing to mind a delicately mended Christmas ornament, captures the performance Lois gave in the play.

The box was given to Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, friends of Cornell’s and Lois’s—and of Tenn’s—with the stipulation that it be left in an open place. If Lois saw it and liked it, it was to be hers. It now resides in Lois’s apartment.

“I used to wonder how Lois survived the theater and life,” Tenn told me. “Then I remembered a lovely piece by Kierkegaard called ‘Love Abides,’ and it reminds me of Lois. She doesn’t rely on anything but her own reserves for well-being. She doesn’t need—like mother’s milk or unguent—the affirmation of others. What keeps her going, as if it were blood, is love.”

I found the Kierkegaard piece. It reads in part.

“Love never faileth”—it abides.

When a child has been away all day among strangers and now considers that it ought to go home, but is afraid to go alone, and yet really wants to stay as long as possible, it says to the older children, who perhaps wished to leave earlier, “Wait for me”; and so the older ones do as the child asks. When of two equals one is more advanced than the other, the latter says to the first, “Wait for me”; and so the second does what the first asks.

I had not read the above passage when Tenn recommended it, and I was unable to locate it during our brief time together. I asked him why this piece made him think of Lois. “It makes me think of her,” Tenn said, “because Lois, every time I see her, and every time I think of her, brings to mind the face I saw and the feeling when I was forgiven, when I was given help, when I was safe. When there was love in the room.

“Kazan told me about her,” Tenn told me. “He loved her work at the Studio, and he cast her in East of Eden, and I sought her out, and I got her, in every sense of the word.” Kazan warned me to not stress her sweetness so much. “I think of her as fair,” he said, “as opposed to sweet. There is no willfulness within her that makes her see the sweet. That’s what I think sweet people are—willful, in denial, lacquering their true feelings with some notion of kindness or fairness. Lois is fair. Lois seeks all information, and she has a gift that I particularly envy: she is patient.”

A case in point: the set of East of Eden, dominated by the talented but mercurial James Dean; the diabolically unbalanced Jo Van Fleet; the histrionic and challenging Barbara Baxley; the grand and indifferent Raymond Massey. Serving as the peacemakers on the film were Julie Harris and Lois Smith. “Think of the lions outside the [New York] Public Library,” Kazan told me. “What are their names?” “Patience and Fortitude,” I answered. “That’s who they were. Lionesses determined to keep the peace, see the good, do the great. She [Lois] believes, she projects, and she receives.” When Kazan learned that The Glass Menagerie was being revived for Helen Hayes, “I cringed,” he told me. “As I might cringe if I heard that Danny Kaye was cast in a production of Death of a Salesman. There are people who have gifts insufficient to great works, and I place Hayes in that category. I hated to think of her as Amanda Wingfield. Yes, she was of value—her name on marquees drew in hordes, but the wrong hordes. I knew that she would distort that play. She distorted all plays, and subverted all of them to the contours of her own personality and intelligence. She shrank plays and opportunities and fellow players, and some saw this as intimacy or an ability to ‘connect,’ whatever that means. I thought if Helen Hayes was going to be Amanda, a role at which she had already failed [in London], it was imperative that Tennessee have a real actress, an actress capable of portraying a real person, in the play. I suggested Lois.”

During that production of The Glass Menagerie, Tenn began to study Lois Smith, to imagine future possibilities.

Tenn wrote in the notes to the short story he was considering: “She was never burdened by the reserves she held within her, because they carried no weight. They rested right beneath her skin, alerted by her senses, her nerves, into action. Her reserves were instantly active when aroused, but they were never a burden because they were never lightly used, never abused, never ignored. They were husbanded and shared perfectly, and they were offered selflessly. There was never a possibility of burden.”

In the margin, Tenn had written: “Light heart, light feet.”

The Glass Menagerie is the play of Tenn’s that was most often abused, badly directed, misunderstood. This baffled him, because his stage directions are lengthy and precise—and frequently ignored.

As Tenn explained to me, paragraph 3 of scene 1 reads: “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.”

Offered this description of the scene—what Tenn called the “emotional lighting and design” of the piece—most directors ignore it; most actors in the piece fail to adapt their acting to fit the space in which they are working.

Kazan offered an explanation. “I think most directors resent a playwright directing from the page,” he told me. “I might have reacted strongly, if I had been given the play when it was new. I might have pressured Tennessee to explain to me his descriptions, to make them clearer. I think that he would have done so, but [being] handed a script that is as precise as his is, down to the timing of ascending scenery, might have unleashed in me a resistance that would have harmed the play.”

Tenn took the brunt of the blame for the original production of Menagerie, a bastard child of a production that had, in fact, four directors, none of them, in Tenn’s estimation, up to the task. They were Eddie Dowling, who also produced and appeared as Tom; Margo Jones, the peripatetic director who founded a theater in Dallas, Texas, and became a strong supporter of Tenn’s work; Tenn himself, who, when frustrated, would alter or remove the “fillips of failure” that Dowling and Jones had inserted into his play; and Laurette Taylor, the actress who was cast as Amanda Wingfield.

“Everyone remembers and reveres Taylor,” Kazan told me, “but what no one talks about is what a mess the production was. If you focused on Laurette Taylor, you were transported. If you listened to the words of the play, if you allowed yourself to be moved by the extraordinary power and beauty of the play, you were altered forever. But if you went back time after time, as I did, and looked at the overall production, it was amateurish and forced and set, I think, a standard, a low standard, for that play for all time.”

“Could I have been any clearer?” Tenn asked me, in reference to the opening lines of the play, in which Tom states, “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time.”

“I reverse time,” Tenn continued, “and that is what all dreamers do. It is our earliest drug, don’t you think? Clutching that radio in the dark, in the night. Praying your Rosary. A reverie in the night in your bed, held by someone who understands you. Light and time and space are altered. You are in control, if only for a fleeting speck of time. That is a mood to be sought, to be admired, and no one—I mean no one—gets it.

“Do not be fooled,” he warned me. “The theater is not populated by dreamers.”

Tom speaks again, a few moments later. “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”

“A dream with humor and music,” Tenn told me, “and I usually get a set out of Odets and an acting style from the Philco Playhouse. I wrote a personal play in which I first gained a voice, and it has been tossed about like a whore at a frat party.”

Lois Smith served as the soul and the vital center of the 1955 revival of Menagerie, making it a satisfactory experience for Tenn, as well as, he believed, an opportunity for people to reevaluate his play, whose reputation had suffered from the 1950 film version, which had featured a cast he called woefully inadequate: Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Wyman, Arthur Kennedy, Kirk Douglas. “All of them suitable for some purposes,” Tenn admitted, “but not one of them appropriate for my play.”

A play, Tenn told me, is extraordinarily delicate, a psychic heirloom delivered by its writer to audiences and actors with blind trust. “ ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken,’ ” Tenn said, utilizing a quote from Menagerie, a play that is an attempt, through words cast upon the pale judgment, to enjoy some sense of atonement with his mother, his sister, and that “wayward, silly queer” known as Thomas Lanier Williams. “What you love you become,” Tenn told me. “Of course we are also identified by those things and those people we hate. Our identities are as fragile as the things we write, spoors of our psyche, if you will. We can’t batter ourselves any longer with hatreds and wayward thoughts and wasted energies.”

Laurette Taylor, a mother on the stage in The Glass Menagerie and in life for Tennessee. “She understood me,” Tenn said, “and was not repulsed.” (illustration credit 8.2)

Tenn was aware again of the time knot, that ruthless and enormous serpent that had him firmly in its grip, crushing out time and energy and will. “I always believed I had lots of time,” he told me, “and I also believed I had lots of patience. I believed myself grateful when anyone read or produced one of my plays, but I’m now unable to see productions that fail to understand what I sought to do. What I needed to do. I came to love—was required to come to love—my mother through the writing of Menagerie. You’ll hear of prayers and vigils and excursions that allegedly open the mind and cleanse the soul, and that is what that play was for me. The walk along the Camino; the dip into holy waters at Lourdes; the agony in my own mental garden, and the weeds and the brambles were hatreds and anxieties and grudges collected. To make oneself capable of forgiveness and acceptance, one must be made terribly vulnerable, and I came to think of myself as crafted of glass: fragile, yes, but transparent. Here I am, flaws and all, but utterly clear and open. I have sinned. I have made mistakes. I have tricks in my pocket. I am human.”

Lois Smith can make a person think of himself in this way, Tenn told me. So, too, could Laurette Taylor. The two actresses of two entirely different generations merged in Tenn’s mind, and Smith became a “talisman” for him at a time when he felt he needed to defend his theatrical confession to his mother. “There is gentleness and there is greatness in Lois,” Tenn told me. “I was fascinated by her, watching her. I began to train myself to write in the same manner as she moved through the world: gently, calmly, fully aware, unafraid to be bewildered, detailed to the point of obsession.”

In the upper-right-hand corner of one page during our talks on Lois Smith and The Glass Menagerie, I wrote, “Napoleon House. First Sazerac cocktail,” and I had placed a large star next to this quote from Tenn: “We lie in order to live, and in time our lives become the lie. The writer can see and understand the lies. He does so without judgment. Everything else emanates from this.” I remember that Tenn watched me write his words in the book, then looked at me for a long time. “I’m going to make it as clear for you as I can,” he promised, “but nothing will prove these points in the way experience will.”

The primary point Tenn wished to make on that day, at that time, was that Lois Smith was his link—his only living link—to Laurette Taylor and to his mother. To focus on Lois, an actress and a woman he loved and admired, was to trick himself into believing that his mother was still with him, still loving him, protecting him, appreciating what he had been able to give her. “Lois is the lie, I suppose, that allows me and my mother to live together,” Tenn said.

WHEN TENN BEGAN making notes for The Glass Menagerie in 1943, when he was thirty-two, he was utterly undistinguished, as he saw himself, spending most of his days in the movie theaters of whatever city in which he found himself, waking up in beds “of compromise and incessant farting, a constant morning-after of regret and failed promises.” Within him was something—a poem, a story, a play—but he could not bring it toward him, and in all of our discussions about this play, he always spoke of it as bobbing toward him as if on water, floating toward him like a mist, coming at him like a dream, or fading in and out like a scene from one of his beloved black-and-white films. “I could lose myself in the cinema,” he confessed, as we walked through New Orleans and witnessed cineplexes and ugly, boxlike theaters that couldn’t “possibly hold a dream or one’s attention for an afternoon or day.” No matter his age or the number of spirits imbibed or pills swallowed, Tenn had an extraordinary memory for the films he watched in those years, and a remarkable facility for imitation of the stars, both male and female. “You have to realize that the cinema was my entire life for so long,” he confessed, “so you mustn’t feel ashamed at your young age to be lost and to wonder where or when inspiration will strike. It will strike if you let it. It will strike if you understand and accept that it may come from the most unexpected of places. There I was, more than a decade older than you are now, utterly lost, angry, frightened, and sitting in theaters, growing progressively drunker and happier, at whatever was playing at the time.”

Two films seen repeatedly by Tennessee in 1943 altered the shape of The Glass Menagerie: Ida Lupino (seen here with Joan Leslie), in The Hard Way, influenced his portrait of Amanda Wingfield, and Jennifer Jones, in The Song of Bernadette, “threw a shade” on Laura. (illustration credit 8.3)

Those movie outings were not simply inspiration or entertainment: the theaters were very often meeting places. “My social life was also rooted in those theaters,” he admitted, “for I wasn’t likely to meet similarly afflicted persons in ordinary circumstances. I could not find people who shared my fascinations in the usual social snares, but there was a very heady underworld that lived its life in the dark, smoky, salty-smelling environment of the cinema, all of us as pale as the images on the screen, and the artists among us suddenly seeing in the most remarkable of circumstances the inspiration for that one great poem or the solution to that maddening second act. I am fully convinced that the image—the spectral, hobbling image—of Laura Wingfield came to me from numerous viewings of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette. I seriously doubt that I could watch that film today without a boisterous round of hootings,” he laughed, “but in that year, in that time, in my mind, it served to present me with the shadings of a character.” Tenn also found some important elements of Amanda Wingfield in the performance of Ida Lupino in The Hard Way, in which the actress “brilliantly played a woman hell-bent on finding stardom through the more easily accepted trappings of another, all the while knowing that her own cunning had made it happen. While she had none of the canny and utterly artificial charm that Amanda—that my mother—used to such heady affect, that woman completely entranced me.”

Even more potent than the characters were the images themselves, those many slow fades and wipes and calendar pages flipping by; split screens that compressed decades and multiple emotions into seconds. “Getting the damn thing on the page is what always kills me,” Tenn admitted. “I may live with the characters, the plot, the entire play in my head and heart, but until I can find a way to make it live on paper, I’m lost, and filmic images, which I applied to the page, helped me to get Menagerie from the psyche to the page.” Tenn’s intense relationship with cinema coincided with his employment at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which provided him with needed funds, but which depressed him, because “I never saw the magic, only the industry, and I needed the magic.”

Tenn also wanted to please his mother; to impress her. “I began to think of gifts I could give to my mother,” he told me. “I knew that my mother saved things—odd things—that helped her to remember what she was and what she could have been.” The home of Edwina Williams had held paper and linen napkins on which had been written sentiments and phone numbers and poems; rose petals had been pressed into books; bottles of perfume—often never used—lined tables and shelves, and they were perpetually dusted and touched and fussed over. Each had a story and each had a place in her home until she died.

“Totems,” Tenn told me. “I wanted to give to my mother something she could place on a shelf and love, something as fragile and as transparent as those perfume bottles. Something as beloved and fraught with meaning as those rose petals and those napkins.”

Tenn’s memory of the initial script of The Glass Menagerie is one of “heated but half-hearted intentions, overdirection by the playwright through pages of hoped-for effects, but through it all, a great deal of emotion, which I feel led to its being produced.” While Audrey Wood found much to admire in The Glass Menagerie, and while Tenn felt it could finally allow him to be recognized as a writer, the play was “wobbly, unfelt,” a vital and hungry animal looking for “a friendly lap and an unpunishing hand.”

“Let me tell you my memory of St. Louis,” Tenn said to me after many cocktails. “I think of a jar of snakes wrapped in lace and scented with vanilla. I despised my father, and every cruel act imagined in my plays emanates from his necrotic soul. I hated my mother for blandly accepting the mediocrity that was our life, and until I jumped on her train of outward-bound dreams, I hated her for moving out of the real world, where I felt she might have offered me some aid. I came to realize that my mother could only function in this world of illusions, could only survive if she could believe that one, that any, of these illusions might one day manifest itself. The writing of Menagerie taught me something very important about myself and about others. I believe, as I told you, that we lie in order to live, and in time, our lives become the lie. Our destiny depends on our lie: Is it benign and beneficial, or is it corrosive, bearing a cost none can bear?”

My blue book bore examples Tenn gave me of the lies we need to live, and he summed them up in his belief that “God will not come and save us. Life will not treat us fairly if we dutifully follow the rules. Our friends, the true ones who can be counted on one hand, might come to our aid, unless they are dressed and perfumed and waiting for their own gentleman caller to arrive. We are utterly, completely alone, and when I have been my most fragile, my most shattered, that has been when I have fully realized how vulnerable I am. Far more frightening is the realization that those on whom I often need to lean are equally fragile, and can be—and have been—plucked from my life with sickening swiftness. To face this, brutally and openly, would be for me to die, so I found my solace, my lie, in the illusion of writing, in which I could create alternate worlds with alternate people, and rule them beneficently. I was saved by writing, and later, when I was no longer able to love fully and clearly, and therefore could no longer write, I found solace, and still find it, in alcohol, drugs, in a multifaceted God who does as I choose. We are not created by God; our God is created by us. You cannot find salvation or solace anywhere until you find it in yourself, and it is there,” he said, pointing to his heart, “that you then create your God.

“My mother found her happiness in her past,” Tenn continued, “and it was one we all might covet—a past in which she was pretty and cosseted and appeared to hold promise. Perhaps that was her gift, her one niggardly ornament in life: a beginning in life that held promise. And suddenly the promise is gone, and reality has taken residence in her heart and head, and it is too much.” So Tenn’s mother retreated to sticky summer dances at Moon Lake, furtive kisses from men overwhelmed by her face in the moonlight, gardenia corsages rotting in the icebox, their lives as brief and fragile as the infatuations that warranted them. “And she drug us all with her to those places”—Tenn laughed—“and I knew her conquests as other boys might know baseball scores or the itinerary of Lindbergh. I could not know then, because I hated her, that my mother was allowing me into her heart, was giving me all she felt worthwhile about herself, wanted both to elevate herself in my eyes, in everyone’s eyes, but also because she needed me to see her as she saw herself. She wanted to be loved.”

When Tenn spoke of his mother, he would often stop, literally shake himself, laugh, and either change the subject or resume it with greater animation. “There’s an old Southern saying, common among Negroes, in which they talk of their mothers after they’ve passed away. If you hear a song you associate with your mother; if you smell a scent that was distinctly hers; if you overhear a voice that reminds you of hers—you experience a pain deep within you, at your very core. They call it Mama Bones, and I felt it for the first time sitting in those theaters, watching those movies, and thinking ‘I must tell Mama how outrageous Miriam Hopkins is,’ or ‘Bette Davis has totally incorporated the druggist’s wife’s mannerisms,’ and I would feel this pain, and suddenly realize that the person with whom I wished to share these reactions, these observations, was someone I believed I hated. The person I thought I hated, and felt I didn’t understand, had made me someone who could appreciate these images, these illusions, and who had probably made me a writer.”

Tenn stood on a soft shoulder on a street high above Hollywood, heard the laughter of pretty boys and the repeated playing of “Little Brown Jug,” and juggled coins in his pocket and thought of his mother. Tenn thought of her in the house on Vista with his lover, who cooked and cared for him and sent him off to work with hot coffee; he thought of her and the affection she had either misplaced or he no longer trusted.

Tenn walked the streets of Hollywood and wished he could have his mother with him. Tenn wished he could discuss Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown and Ruth Chatterton with her. “Thank God for the ability to think of characters, real or imagined,” Tenn said, “when we are utterly trapped and are praying for a better scene.”

Tenn began to cry as he related these memories of his mother. “I will tell you how I was able to begin to realize my love for my mother,” he confessed, “how I came to understand her illusions. I could remember her falling asleep on the sofa, waiting for me to return home. Her exhaustion, or her submission to her dreams, was so severe that she would not hear me approach her, and I could look at her without the animating force of her stories, her performance, her illusions. I would then see the face of a child, the face of the girl dancing away her youth with her beaux. Pushing, pushing. Pushing away the reality she felt had cheated her of her due, and pushing me toward a better illusion for myself. I saw, most clearly, however, myself. And then she would wake up and begin talking, and she was in control, and she was masterly. But I recall the sweet, still face of a girl, and I came to love her with that image in my mind, and that image carried me to Amanda Wingfield.”

I asked Tenn if he still thought of his mother, if he still experienced the sensation of Mama Bones. Tenn laughed and admitted that “everything has diminished with age, my darling, but my feelings for my mother and my sister pierce me daily, and it is no illusion that they center me and let me know who I am, and let me know that I have loved and have been loved, no matter how badly or clumsily.”

In 1943 Tenn applied this love, clumsily, he admitted, to paper. Two years later, in the company of Laurette Taylor, the actress who would assume the role of his mother in The Glass Menagerie, he would experience the most profound and immediate and intimate love he had yet encountered.

He was not ready for it.

According to Tenn, The Glass Menagerie came to be, and still exists, is read, performed, and loved, because of Laurette Taylor, whose candor and “unfinished, uncensored” honesty elicited from those around her remarkable achievements, and because a writer named Tennessee Williams “wrote something quite remarkable and personal and sweet, if I may say so.”

When Tenn talked about Laurette Taylor and the initial production of The Glass Menagerie, he frequently flipped the surnames, referring to “Taylor” in one anecdote and “Smith” in another. When I pointed this out, Tenn realized that he now conflated the two actresses because they had “inhabited and owned” this play, and had become imprinted, infinitely, upon his memories of his mother.

“Taylor immediately wanted to know who these people were,” Tenn recalled, “and her demands were kind and intelligent, so that I trusted her and could share with her, but they were also supported by an uncanny and unyielding sense of her own talent and technique and place in the theater. Absolutely nothing escaped her attention or her merciless sense of detail, and she never hesitated to point out a discrepancy or an untruth in my work or in the work of the others.

“After all the talk and all the analysis, what ultimately matters is whether or not you reach the hearts of the audience,” Tenn said, “and this Laurette taught me. That love that I spoke of—that is so important to the crafting of a play—extends in its production and must be carried through every performance. With Amanda I was purging myself of the hatred I had felt toward my mother and was left only with the very strong love I knew was there. So I loved her through the play. The strong, strange love—that for my sister, Rose—I poured into Laura, whose love for her brother is what truly hobbled her. I even found I could love Tom—myself—by showing him in constant turmoil in that lacy imprisonment. A prison is a prison. And the Gentleman Caller is every promise held out to those who seek one, who believe that there is one around the corner. The Gentleman Caller is religion and its God; the newspaper page that holds the horoscope and the society page. The Gentleman Caller tells us that we can be here right now, but the there, the glistening over there is possible and imminent and near. It’s one novena, one afternoon reverie, one cocktail, one rubbing of the Clarence Brown waxed paper away.”

When Lois Smith took on the role of Laura, she understood that her character was a performer as well. Amanda essays roles on the telephone, for the grocer, for the neighbors. Laura tackles the role of the victim, and searches for the love that we can often easily bestow on the sad and the abandoned. “Laura is the freak occurrence against which we pray,” Tenn told me. “When you do your Rosary and pray for humility or a happy death, or zeal, you’ll also pray to be delivered from flood, fire, or famine. You will also love, in a very peculiar and hateful way, all of those who have been visited by these things. Guilt, along with a sense that money invested toward the sad prevents tragedy from visiting our doorstep, also creates a fulsome affection toward the gimpy and the fat and the unprepossessing. Laura knows this—Lois Smith as Laura knew this—and so she perfects her daily performance of limitation and struggle, dusts her little symbols of beauty and imprisonment, and begs to be given a shelf on which she and her mother can live out their days, Amanda free of reality; Laura free of social intercourse with others. Surcease and silence.

“And so,” Tenn continued, “what I learned from Laurette Taylor, from my mother, from Menagerie is that we—writers, people—only conquer when we love, because when we love, we see clearly what is in front of us, and what was our past, and what we own. So love your characters, and by doing so you may ultimately come to love yourself. Laurette told me she loved my mother for me while playing Amanda, and also expressed her love for her own mother through the performance. There was a lot of love in that play, and if an audience can’t identify with these sad outcasts of Dixie, they can identify with those loves that destroyed them and those loves that liberated them.

“And as you can probably imagine, my love for my mother and sister defined and destroyed me, and my love for Laurette, and for my play, liberated me, and …”

And? I asked.

“I never realized that—truly realized that—until this moment, when I said it.”

Tenn excused himself from the table at which we sat and was absent for more than half an hour.

On another page of the notes about Menagerie, I wrote, “What is at stake?” and I remember that Tenn had told me that the characters are racing against time, against which illusions are useless. Each character pursues a singular desire—security, acceptance, sexual pleasure, social standing—and each, as Tenn stated “with a clock ticking in their ears.” Taylor explained her motivation in portraying Amanda as similar to a time when her daughter, Marguerite, was crying, and in her attempts to calm her child, Taylor made faces, bobbed balloons, found candy, and finally held the baby tightly and begged her to please stop crying. “She never forgot this manic desire,” Tenn told me, “this spinning of many plates to calm and control someone she loved, and any mother or child could recognize her actions.”

One afternoon, when Tenn was especially worried about his play, about many things, Taylor called out, “Light be the earth upon you, lightly rest,” and Tenn recognized it as a line from Euripides. He also remembered his image of his mother, asleep and vulnerable and sweet, waiting for her errant son to return home. He shared this image with Taylor, who promptly decided that Amanda never falters in her impeccable performance, her affront to reality, when anyone can see her, but when reality makes its presence and its power known to her, when Tom goes to his assignations, when the Gentleman Caller falls from reach, when the attempt to sell subscriptions seem to be failing, her performance, her posture, and her face all momentarily—and frighteningly—would sag. “Every actress who ever saw Laurette in Menagerie wants to talk about that performance,” Tenn boasted, “and every one of them remembered the shock of seeing her seem to come undone at the seams in those moments in the play. It was as if they were seeing a horrible mistake, the onset of illness or pain, perhaps, in the middle of an otherwise flawless performance.”

The last notes about The Glass Menagerie are an exotic list, but I remember that it was a list of things that reminded Tenn of his mother and of Laurette Taylor, and included Judy Holliday, Giulietta Masina, and Maureen Stapleton, but also Bellodgia perfume, the scent of starched linen, a particular brand of scented face powder, and movies, late at night, when Tenn realized he wanted to discuss what he was watching, but his favorite partner in such things was gone, silent.

“Memory is what cures us of a loss,” Tenn told me. “I was stupidly afraid of my memories for so long, because I was afraid to feel, but memories are the ultimate illusion—perhaps the final one—in that they allow us to believe that those we love are forever with us, within us, and now I no longer grasp for greatness, merely for feeling.”

Tenn gave me Lois Smith—in the form of a rosary bead—because he believed in her purity and in her young eyes, both of which he felt I possessed but might lose. Tenn also adored her for her working habits on the two plays they worked on together, and whenever he saw her in films, on television, or onstage, he had the sense that a beloved relative had been spotted in a large crowd of strangers. He felt safe. “She has the effect on me similar to those coins in my pocket,” Tenn told me, “or that damned piece of waxed paper I rubbed into oblivion in that musty apartment. She centers me.”

Nine

AFTER TENN GAVE ME the name of Marian Seldes, he paused and tried to remember a poem, “a very old and haunting French poem.” He could not recall much of it, but he described it in great detail, as well as the feeling it brought over him. It was a poem, he said, that reminded him of the dream state he required to write and to generate the fog. I found the poem years later.

You are distant, alien—you are

The night of fog,

Foul drizzle over the faubourgs

Where life is the earth’s cold color,

Where men have died untouched by passion.

We have met already, you will recall,

Yes, long since and unfortunately

In some region of vellum and toccatas

In the blue twilight of a quiet house,

Windows of lassitude.

—O. V. DE L. MILOSZ, “L’ETRANGÈRE”

“That poem,” Tenn told me, “helps me to write and helps me to think of Marian Seldes.”

The career of Marian Seldes began when she was a child, in her bedroom, late at night. It is appropriate that an actress of whom Tenn once said, “She came to me from a fog, as so many did, seemed unreal, unmoored, floating free from reality, the Duse of Fogs,” should have come to the realization of her destiny within nocturnal reveries that involved delusion and a mirror.

During these night visits to another reality, Marian glimpsed herself—clad in a long, white nightgown—in a full-length mirror that threw back a reflection of someone far more glamorous and interesting. As she grew older, and began taking dance instruction, she would go to the roof of her parents’ apartment building and reconstruct the day’s steps, throwing her long arms heavenward, drawing down the moon, begging Providence for aid in the pursuit of purpose and beauty, lost in the ecstasy of being someone else, of being free from time.

All that Marian Seldes was during these activities—during the 1930s and 1940s—she still is today. She is someone free of time’s grasp and calamity. She is still the obedient, whispering, hesitant daughter who grew up in comfort (physically, intellectually, spiritually) and was impatient for the night vapors to begin. She is, Tenn noted, lost to us forever. She is enslaved by fantasy.

Marian Seldes was born on August 23, 1928, in Manhattan. She once wrote that “a longing to move from my own time to my father’s, to share in lives before my life … pulled me toward the theater.” Her father’s life was marked by glamour, erudition, and controversy. Gilbert Seldes was a writer of plays, novels, and irate letters to editors, corporations, and boards; an educator; a provocateur; a man who goaded F. Scott Fitzgerald to write, who evoked rapture in Marianne Moore, and with whom Tenn was frankly obsessed.

“I don’t blame Marian for being besotted with her father,” Tenn told me. “I am, too. Hers was the fantasy upbringing on the isle of Manhattan that all Dixiecrats dream of.” Gilbert Seldes lent his keen eyes and generous wit to such publications as The Dial, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. The work for which he will most likely be remembered is The Seven Lively Arts, a book whose theme, according to Seldes, is that “entertainment of a high order existed in places not usually associated with Art, that the place where an object was to be seen or heard had no bearing on its merits, that some of Jerome Kern’s songs in the Princess shows were lovelier than any number of operatic airs and that a comic strip printed on news pulp which would tatter and rumple in a day might be as worthy of a second look as a considerable number of canvasses at most of our museums.”

Gilbert Seldes was married to a woman whose name—Alice—he despised, so he renamed her Amanda, and she is, by photographic account, the parent who bequeathed to Marian her height, her dark, thick hair, her alabaster coloring, and her expressive brows, which usually tell the whole story of her inner being. One friend advised, “Just look at her brows: they don’t lie.” Her mother, who was, in Marian’s words, “lethargic and listless,” also passed on to her daughter an almost neurotic obsession with time, which has exhibited itself most alarmingly in a tendency to scrutinize dictionaries to find especially comforting and useful definitions for the very word. Time is ruthless, and to be within a hairbreadth from opportunity is to spend one’s entire life as a supernumerary when stardom may have been offered. There is about Marian’s life a certain quality that reminds one of a distaff version of Appointment in Samarra, with her persistent fears of appointments missed, time not adequately used, changes not fully recognized and utilized. She walks about town with typed itineraries in her purse, each minute of every day accounted for, every thought recorded. She recoils at the thought that her absences from grade school and performances of Peter Shaffer’s Equus are recorded, and she dreams of finding the books in which the damaging evidence is located, and blotting it out. She fears that incipient sloth will result in lost time or, worse, in its turning against her, having its way with her, leaving her without energy and plopped against pillows (like her mother), watching the rest of the world create and prosper. She says, “Life goes by. There does not seem to be enough time to accomplish in daily living, much less in a career, all that you want to. Your use of time defines the kind of person you are off the stage—and on. When you are in charge of that time—the time of your life—you are happy.”

Tenn shared this obsession with Marian, even if he failed to possess or harness her discipline in reshaping it. “Time has—is having—its way with me,” he said, “and I want to alter this trajectory. I don’t know how, so I reflect on Marian; I think of her moving about the city—a vision in purple or blue—checking clocks, her watch, the location of the sun, and getting things done, sharing herself. I think I can do this.”

Marian’s prestidigitation with time has not only served her in terms of productivity and efficiency; it has also kept her firmly where both she and Tenn would like to be: in her father’s time. When she walks about Manhattan, she is surrounded by wafts of a time gone by. She is apt to inspire one to think of elegant, elliptical short stories, Aubusson rugs, lunch in the ladies’ section of Schrafft’s, and an afternoon assignation beneath the Biltmore clock. This is no accident, no trick of the mind: it is an affect deliberately chosen by Marian, and held to with affection. Her demeanor will bring to mind (if you are lucky and have a long memory) Katharine Cornell, the actress who became so vast an influence on Marian—as did her husband and director, Guthrie McClintic—that Marian consumed portions of the actress’s character as her own and bestowed her name on her only daughter.

Control of time can also keep you busy—hence there is no time for idle thoughts or reflection to intrude. By preventing such an invasion on her happiness, which is stringently created each day, Marian can use ruses and defenses to distract her from the fact that the dream she began in that mirror so long ago was a lie: the theater she dreamed of does not exist.

Tall, dark, moody, “almost inordinately polite,” Marian Seldes fascinated Tennessee, and he thought of her often when he sought a “lost but resolute” female character. Seldes, seen here in Ring Around Rosy, a 1960 television drama. (illustration credit 9.1)

And never did.

Every actress, Tenn repeatedly told me, has within her a mental theater, similar to the one he managed in his own mind. This theater is complete with a repertory company and a costume shop, as well as a dreamed audience: the perfect recipients of what one dreams to create and share. The interesting assignment for me, as Tenn saw it, was to discover how many of these actresses have come face-to-face with a theater life that in any way resembles the existence concocted by their inner fabulist, an entity Tenn claimed required perpetual stoking.

Of all the other actresses to whom Tenn sent me, none has had a longing to match that of Marian Seldes, and none has displayed so servile an attendance to and affection for the workings and workers of the theater arts. No description of Marian can be accused of smacking of hyperbole. She is truly a handmaiden in the temple of Art; she is the slave to her craft; she has made the theater her church and its peripheral activities her religion, the primary tenet being extracted from the writings of Robert Edmond Jones, who wrote:

An artist must bring into the immediate life of the theater … images of a larger life.… Here is the secret of the flame that burns in the work of the great artists of the theater. They seem so much more aware than we are, and so much more awake, and so much more alive that they make us feel that what we call living is not living at all, but a kind of sleep. Their knowledge, their wealth of emotion, their wonder, their elation, their swift clear seeing surrounds every occasion with a crowd of values that enriches it beyond anything which we, in our happy satisfaction, had ever imagined. In their hands it becomes not only a thing of beauty, but a thing of power. And we see it all—beauty and power alike—as a part of the life of the theater.

It was Tenn’s belief that an actress was forever frozen in that time when she had the epiphany, when she found a safe harbor in the theater. For Marian there was the Christmas pageant at the Dalton School, in which she was employed as one of the three angels whose task it was to remain immobile in an alcove, their faces and bodies testaments of supplication and bliss. Swathed in royal blue and swatches of gold oilcloth, Marian felt upon her a light that was “brighter than the sun,” as well as hundreds of eyes. She kept her own eyes steadfastly forward, her hands pressed together in adoration for a Christ in which she did not believe—except as a fellow player in this pageant. She says of that time, “I knew there was no heaven and thought there was no God, but there was loveliness and safety and a secret excitement in that time and place.”

In keeping with her religious fervor, Marian discovered upon changing her costume that she had even been visited by stigmata, red marks searing her flesh as proof of her theatrical bondage, making her, as such, the Padre Pio of grade-school pageants. She says, “My religious training took place in a theater. It became the church of my life; existence there was as magical as what I dreamed of in the room with the mirror. It was the dream made real.”

Life for Marian from that time on was a relentless pursuit of the theater, and it was through theatrical experience that she chose to view things, using drama as a sieve through which she ran each and every event of her life. As she became a young woman, grew attractive, and received attention from young men, she wondered if she, like women in plays and films, would ever be happy. She was perpetually making lists, charts, heartfelt pleas to become important in the theater. She feared that she would become stagestruck, and she did, looking upon the participants of the theater with a soft focus, imagining them superior, horrified that they might fail or have faults. Her comments about guests met at Katharine Cornell’s home on Martha’s Vineyard swoon with delirium (and with reason, since the guest lists included everyone from Billie Burke to the Lunts to Margot Fonteyn to Mainbocher to Marlene Dietrich), and she took each of the people she met as assignments, as challenges to amplify her character and her life, to take from them what would make her better and more valuable—to the world, to the theater, to herself.

“I want to love as fully as she does,” Tenn told me, “and I want to have her young and loving eyes.”

Marian’s abilities to tell time—and therefore to control and manipulate it—to make love, and learn a part are the three things that alert her to the fact that she is no longer the awkward, shy child keeping scrapbooks full of glowing items about her idols. As the years passed and opportunities for stardom and full creative expression did not come to her, she did not become bitter; instead, she substituted earnest—some would say dogged—work for the parts that would tap into the vast, dark recesses of her talent. The positive addiction she has adopted to assuage disappointment is to become the ideal worker, so she will make the record books by appearing in a play for over four years, never missing a performance (in Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, from 1978 to 1982), when she would have preferred that the same books note her talent. Her utilitarian spirit has taken dominance over the intelligent actress who sees the lack of challenge in the theater she has pursued.

Robert Edmond Jones (who agreed to see the young Marian in his large, dark, imposing apartment, where he served her wisdom along with brandy cake and a glass of B&B) wrote, at precisely the time Marian was graduating from her theater studies at the Neighborhood Playhouse, that

we all have our hopes and our dreams of a theater which is to be. But when we attempt to discuss the theater of the present day with any seriousness we discover at once that we have very little to discuss. What we are practicing today in the name of theater has almost nothing to do with the theater. It is so unrelated to real theater that sometimes it actually seems as if you would have to grow a new set of faculties to create theater with. This thing that I am saying is not a whim, nor a beef, nor a gripe. It is a fact. What we are taught to call theater today isn’t theater at all. True theater isn’t, with the rarest exceptions, to be found in our playhouses. It has gone out of the window. It has hidden itself bitterly away.

Tenn had said to me, “Here is your life lesson. You should know that there are people in the theater for whom the stage is all. They have not allowed the real, functioning part of their souls and hearts to develop, so all they can be is a thespian. Away from greasepaint and an excuse to emote, they are masks waiting for a human touch to allow them movement, a reason for being.

“This is what happened to Marian,” he continued. “She got lost in a childhood mirror in which she could be someone else, in whose reflection she was an actress, something grand. And what we are left with is the prepubescent girl who only wants to extinguish the very real, very wonderful person she is, for she feels that, au naturel, she can never please anyone. Believing that she is ugly and knowing that she will never be the star of the theater she hoped to be, she allows herself to be abused by the theater, by its practitioners, by men, by friends.

“But,” Tenn offered, smiling, “there is a fantasy Marian, who is erudite, glamorous, beautiful, and I have seen her become consumed by this fantasy at rehearsals and parties, but it truly thrives on the stage. The stage is her narcotic, which she needs to keep herself alive. The stage no longer functions as a means of communication, but a means of fulfilling some craven desire, gorging some inner lacuna that can never be filled. I think I have this in common with Marian. I’m dreaming as I live.”

Because I had already met Marian (in the fall of 1978, on a theater trip to New York with my high-school drama club, during which I went backstage at the Music Box Theatre, where Marian was appearing in Deathtrap, and we became friends), Tenn armed me with special items for my visit with her. The first was a prayer to St. Joseph, which we had found stuck in a discarded and well-worn missal in St. Louis Cathedral. It was typed on a piece of onionskin paper, and read:

O glorious St. Joseph, model of those who are devoted to labor, obtain for me the grace to work in a spirit of penance for the expiation of my many sins; to work conscientiously, putting the call of duty above my inclinations; to work with thankfulness and joy, considering it an honor to employ and develop by means of labor the gifts received from God; to work with order, peace, moderation, and patience, never shrinking from weariness and trials; to work, above all, with purity of intention and with detachment from self, keeping unceasingly before my eyes death and the account I must give of time lost, talents unused, good omitted, and vain complacency in success, so fatal to the work of God. All for Jesus, all through Mary, all after your example, O patriarch Joseph; such shall be my watchword in life in death. Amen.

“I think this is perfect for Marian,” Tenn had said.

Tenn purchased for Marian, in a gift shop on Magazine Street, an old rosary of wooden beads that had been made in Jerusalem, and when he gave it to me, he wrapped around it a piece of paper he had found in the cathedral: a tiny calling card that had been wedged against one of the statues and which was worn from penitential homage, a sign of wear that impressed Tenn. The card read: “Devote yourself to Marian Worship.” On the opposite side, Tenn wrote: “I am no longer surprised by what karma does to me.”

Marian Seldes was cast in the 1964 revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, as Blackie, the secretary to Flora Goforth, the flamboyant center of the play, who is transcribing the memoirs of her rich and shattered life, when she is not being seduced and recruited by the Angel of Death, who arrives in the form of a man—“lovely and fertile and fleshly accessible”—named Christopher Flanders. A friend of opulent and devious qualities, called the Witch of Capri, visits and shares the psychic components of Flora. Blackie is the character who maintains, and can still recognize, what Tenn called “intercourse with the real world, with real people, seeking real results.” Blackie is not a fabulist or a fraud: She needs a job and Flora needs a screen onto which she can project her image, the events of her life that, once collected, may tell her who and what she is before she is consigned to the “bone gallery.” Blackie is that screen. Blackie is also Tenn. So is Flora. “I am almost everyone in that play,” Tenn said. “Lost, confused, hungry, messy, mean.”

Marian also became the screen for the production of Milk Train, which was being revived only a year after its original production, which had featured Hermione Baddeley, an actress of “enormous talent and ingenuity” lost in a cloud of “farts and Fracas,” and Mildred Dunnock, one of Tenn’s greatest friends, who had said, throughout rehearsals and the brief run, that “we were drowning, and instead of life preservers, we kept being thrown words that held nothing: no truth, no beauty, no meaning.” A faint whiff of creativity arose from the script of Milk Train, like the fog of dry ice, but the production was a mess. Tenn, convinced that his play—and the story it told—had merit, began to revise it even as it was being performed. The British director Tony Richardson, fresh from directing the film Tom Jones, and much lauded for his stage work with John Osborne, decided, for reasons never made clear to anyone, to revive and to salvage this play, which, he told Tenn, held more meaning than any he had read in some time.

“He wanted to be my savior,” Tenn told me, “or rather, the savior of Milk Train, and I cannot tell you why. He spoke eloquently and at great length about what he hoped to do with the play, about what the play meant to him, but I could never discern any of his intentions or desires in the completed production. As a director, he was like the flirt who talks sweet and rubs fast on the dance floor, but who takes you home and consummates nothing. In fact, pants never hit the floor.”

Hermione Baddeley and Mildred Dunnock in the first Broadway production of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in 1963, a nightmare that the revival—and Marian Seldes—helped to exorcise for Tennessee in 1964. “The play never worked,” Tennessee said, “but at least Marian threw some good dirt on it.” (illustration credit 9.2)

A great impetus for reviving Milk Train was the opportunity to cast Tallulah Bankhead in the role of Flora Goforth. “Tony loved the idea—the very camp idea—of directing Tallulah in this part, which he believed to have been based on her. It is true that there are elements of Tallulah in Flora, but there are elements of people like Tallulah in many of my plays, because people like Tallulah—hothouse flowers bred in the garden of Narcissus—grow all across the world. I have known many. There is a great deal of my mother in Flora, but also Ruth Ford [who played the Witch of Capri in the revival] and Miriam Hopkins and Ina Claire and Ruth Chatterton. Uta Hagen and Elaine Stritch and Judith Anderson and Elizabeth Ashley. And Tallulah. And any number of aunts and grand ladies I listened to and learned from in St. Louis and Louisiana.”

People like Flora Goforth do not fear death by organ failure; they do not fear the actual act of death and whatever judgment awaits: they fear that failure will visit the production of life that they have written, produced, directed, and star in, frequently above the title, the fray, and the law. These women tend to be very “rich-blooded,” as Tenn put it, aware of the station they have designed and to which they have assigned themselves. There is a great deal of effort in maintaining the “ruse of living” when you are one of these grand creatures, people who cannot actually create or understand art—literature, music, painting, sculpture—but who can sculpt and enhance their persons to become ambulatory, dilatory works of art. “They have a richness of voice,” Tenn said, “cultivated by repetition. They have a way of moving their heads and bodies, cultivated by time spent in front of a mirror. They are hesitant in their beliefs, because they have no real soul or sense of self. Well, they have no self to speak of! They have to wait to see what others think of something, then they weigh in. They must be outré in their desires and allegiances, but they also must align themselves with bourgeois loves, because that is where the traffic is, and the traffic holds people—an audience.

“These are very tiring women,” Tenn continued, “but fascinating. The role they have created for themselves has been cast and is played continuously. Christopher Flanders and Blackie are paid audience members to Flora. We all need an audience, even as we approach our final curtain. And every fabulist like Flora needs to be surrounded by people who are not yet bold enough to create an identity, a life, a self through the machinations of imagination. Blackie admires Flora, even as she grows impatient with her and doesn’t understand her at all times. Blackie, you see, is very much like Marian Seldes. This is no facile statement. Marian Seldes makes herself a better person so that everyone can benefit. Marian needs a Flora Goforth—and, I might add, a Tallulah Bankhead—to learn what one should and should not do. She needs a Tallulah to serve and to honor, and she did.” Marian loved Tallulah for what she had been and for her stardom and her glamour and her daring. Marian also feared Tallulah as if she were an infectious agent: the drinking, the drugs, the nakedness, the lost memory, the lack of discipline were dangerous elements that Marian came to believe might be catching. Marian also had her young daughter around during out-of-town tryouts, and she must have wondered what the girl thought of the marcescent diva.

Tenn believed that Marian gave the only legitimate performance in the revival of Milk Train, seeking to play a real person rather than a construct or a symbol or a camp icon. The original production had been designed as a Kabuki nightmare by Jo Mielziner, but everyone, especially Richardson, wanted a simpler, starker production, so Rouben Ter-Arutunian, a handsome, manic designer, kept some elements of Kabuki but stuck them within a set that Tenn believed bore elements of German expressionist, Art Deco, and WPA “mentalities.”

“The original production had possessed an ornate and absurd set,” Tenn related, “and the revival possessed an ornate and absurd cast. Whatever had been extreme and silly about the original had been contained, for the most part, within inanimate objects—sets, costumes, lighting effects. Now the extreme and silly had been thrust front and center with the cast.”

In addition to Bankhead, Seldes, and Ford, Richardson completed the primary cast with Tab Hunter, the handsome blond star of such films as Battle Cry (1955), Lafayette Escadrille (1957), and the Hollywood version of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees (1958). “He was mobile cotton candy,” Tenn remembered, “pretty and weightless and dumb. Beware the pretty idol in career rehabilitation.” Richardson was mad for Hunter, flirted with him outrageously, marveled at his beauty. Tenn was distressed by the relationships that developed through that brief production. Richardson and Bankhead never understood each other and gave each other no more than perfunctory notice. The relationship that fascinated Tenn was that between Marian Seldes and his play. “She taught me how to love what was flawed and frightening,” Tenn said, “and she taught me how to remain calm and caring in a time of confusion. I did not write Milk Train as an avant-garde exercise. That play, like all of my plays, was a very real manifestation of my present thoughts, and they took a turn toward the grotesque, toward the Grand Guignol, because that is where my mind was, my thoughts, my feelings. I think I speak for a great many people when I say that we were in confusing times then. Kennedy was murdered during our rehearsal period [of the revival]. I would run out for a sandwich and coffee and blacks had commandeered the luncheon counters and the cash registers. I was over fifty and afraid that my powers, always capricious, were waning. All around me my compatriots were floundering, wondering if we had a theater to which we could report for work. Bill Inge was falling apart in some house above the Hollywood Hills. Arthur Miller was drinking some bitter cup of forgiveness with Kazan at Lincoln Center and producing tracts [After the Fall, Incident at Vichy] disguised as plays, given a sense of importance, attention paid, because he came from a gilded age and had a dead movie star on his résumé and within his inventory.”

Tenn was also addicted to a series of pills and was “taking them in, my murderous Eucharist,” with a variety of alcoholic concoctions. “I needed to feel something to write,” Tenn said, “but I had reached a point where I could no longer feel anything too strongly with any comfort. It was a numb age, but I wrote truthfully from within and about that numb age, and while Herbert Machiz [the director of the 1963 Milk Train] sought to emulate my garish and frightening turn of mind with costumes and sets that he thought complemented it, Richardson subverted the entire play into a big, camp joke. He thought we should laugh at Flora, I suppose, because he laughed at Tallulah, who he thought was outrageous and idiotic and some relic from another time. Well, Flora—and Tallulah—are you and me. Tony Richardson, I would imagine, is having his Flora Goforth times right about now and is probably feeling some sense of identification with her. But at that time, bright with his own brilliance, he simply saw an excuse to throw some glitter in the air and entertain the boys.”

Richardson was not alone in his sabotage, however. Tallulah Bankhead was soiling the stage as ferociously—and far more openly—than its director.

Born in Alabama finery in 1902, Tallulah Bankhead had been one of the voices he had heard on radios cradled in the dark—in bedrooms, cubbyholes at the YMCA, in hotel suites. Bankhead epitomized for Tenn the stylish New York, and he imagined that she would be as crisp and scintillating as the person he had assembled from memories and sounds over the years. Tenn adored Bankhead, saw her talent, wanted it—like his—to be revived, to be noticed.

Bankhead’s theatrical successes were firmly behind her when she tackled the role of Blanche, in 1956. Her Regina in The Little Foxes and her Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth were performances Tenn recalled as incandescent. “Even her voice on the radio, as she repeated the role of Regina,” he remembered, “was the work of a real actress.” But as Tenn would later learn, Herman Shumlin, the director of Foxes, and Kazan, her director for Skin of Our Teeth, were perpetually atop the actress, giving her line readings, herding her into rehearsals and into constricted places on the stage.

Tennessee’s mother kept photographs of Tallulah Bankhead in scrapbooks and folded into books—including the Bible—because the Alabama-born actress epitomized Southern finery and Broadway glamour. Tennessee was elated to meet her and work with her—initially. (illustration credit 9.3)

“If you told her what to do and where to do it,” Kazan remembered, “she was effective, but it was persistent, backbreaking work.”

As Tenn would sadly learn, however, Bankhead could no longer sustain a performance throughout an evening, and she was incapable of investing any veracity into a character. “I think an important point is often forgotten,” Tenn told me, “and that is that Tallulah was a great actress—was capable of being a great actress. She certainly was a great theatrical personality, and the cult—the frenzy—that surrounded her cannot truly be understood by those who didn’t know of, hear of, or attend to that phenomenon.”

All Bankhead had, and trusted, by the time of Milk Train was faith in her public, who dutifully attended her performances and enjoyed a relationship, “a persistent conversation,” with her as she struggled. “Toward the end,” Tenn remembered, “no intelligent playwright ever trusted her, because her pact was with the public—that slavering, fanatical public. It is inconceivable to us now to realize that there was an actress, a theater actress, who had throngs of fans lined up to watch her eat, shop, and walk down a street. And the theaters! They throbbed and pounded like sports arenas, and there was always that glorious moment—and I use the term facetiously—in Coward, Barry, and, God help us, Williams—when she broke character and beamed out at the audience. ‘It’s all for you, darlings,’ she transmitted. Maddening but fascinating, and so exciting for the boys. No one cut a figure across a stage like she did. She could upstage a crucifixion with the right dress, and she would gladly do so, if the pay was sufficient.”

Milk Train was a mess. Actors did not bother to bring too many personal effects into their dressing rooms; one brought a sample-size box of soap flakes and a travel-size tube of toothpaste. Everyone knew they would not be employed—in what Mildred Dunnock called “the sad salvation of Tennessee Williams”—for very long.

“Tennessee wanted his play produced,” Seldes told me, “and he wanted us to do our best, and so I did, and so, I think, did everyone else in the play, to the best of their ability. I loved Tennessee; I loved Tallulah; I loved everyone in that play, and I’m happy if I gave Tennessee some happiness or balance during that time.”

“My mistake with so many of the plays of that time,” Tenn told me, “and it really began with Milk Train, was in presenting my new plays along the same lines, with some of the same people, as the earlier ones. So everyone came and expected Menagerie or Streetcar or Cat, and when these gilded gorgons came on, spouting dark humor and beating back time with all the tools in their arsenals, audiences were perplexed.

“I disliked Alan Schneider,” he continued, “when he directed Slapstick Tragedy [in 1966]. He claimed he understood most of my humor, but he cast the play with brilliant actresses”—Margaret Leighton, Kate Reid, Zoe Caldwell—“and then proceeded to direct them in a play of an entirely different tone. Slapstick is an absurd play; so is Milk Train. You may openly and perhaps correctly identify them as products of a diseased mind, but I wrote truthfully about what I saw and felt. The plays, however, were directed as if they were naturalistic, kitchen-sink dramas, and this baffled me in the matter of Schneider, who had so shrewdly cast Buster Keaton in the work of Beckett. That was terribly subversive and effective, but in our work together, he cast actresses from whom audiences were expecting something altogether different, and they sat there dumbstruck and angry. If I agreed to a production today, I would insist on a cast of true clowns,” he told me, and rattled off the names of a number of actresses who would amuse and discomfit an audience: Carol Burnett, Jo Anne Worley, Ruth Buzzi, Joan Rivers. “Let them think they’re in for a few laughs,” he told me, “then show them what is really beneath the clown-white makeup. That is what life is. That is what life was for me at that time, and that is what I wrote.”

Milk Train might have worked with a comedienne in the lead role, Tenn believed, and it might have worked if there had not been so much effort placed on forcing a camp sensibility into it. “It’s a morbid play,” Tenn told me, “and its humor arises from the attempts we all understand to keep death at bay. We are all spinning around, trying to stay alive, and that is as funny as it is sad as it is futile. That’s the play. He [Richardson] didn’t get it.”

“Oh, my!” Seldes said. “I don’t think anyone got it. I tried to get it, but it was like holding mercury in your hand or making a suit out of meringue. There were so many problems: a lack of trust between Tallulah and Tony, and Tennessee’s inability to be there all the time, ready to work, ready to trust. He gave away so much of his work to everyone, and never fought to make his work the best it could be. He gave up, so why shouldn’t Tony? What could he do?”

Prepare to be misunderstood, Tenn told me repeatedly. The production of Milk Train set off two decades of his not being understood or properly respected, of his placing his hopes in the wrong people at the wrong times. Upon the closing of Milk Train (after four days), Tenn immediately began to revise it again. He tinkered with it for years, and kept recasting it in his mind. He joked that our relationship, such as it was, resembled that between Flora Goforth and Blackie.

“Blanche told us she depended upon the kindness of strangers,” Tenn said, “but in fact she had never in her life ever met a kind stranger. She dreamed she might, and she hoped that such flattery might convince her captor to be the kind stranger of her dreams. I came to depend, in that time, upon the kindness and the example of sane women, balancing women: Marian, of course; Lois Smith, of course; and three others.”

I pressed Tenn for more information on Marian Seldes and Lois Smith. With both actresses there was much admiration and affection, but no stories of lunches or talks or evenings discussing the future of the world; dreams; means of escape.

Tenn paused, then asked what I was looking for.

“What, ultimately, was the lesson taught to you by these two women?” I asked.

Tenn paused; his face grew red. He calmed down and leaned closer to my face, ready to tell me not so much what these two women had taught him, but of what they had reminded him.

“Let me explain something to you: no one owes any of us anything other than respect, some courtesy, and the amount of time they deem necessary to hear our story, see our dance, judge our gifts. That is all. I operated for many years under the common delusion that artists are sensitive creatures who require husbanding, cosseting, extreme care to function in the brutal world. This is utter bullshit: all human beings thrust into the act of living require the same amounts of love and kindness and patience, and I came to see that when I adopted the pose of the walking wounded, when I referred to myself as an open scab walking the mean streets, I was asking for forgiveness for the multitude of sins for which I was guilty: ugliness, laziness, a lack of discipline, the inability to make the words and the women that came to me work fully.

“I was asking for a break I did not deserve at all. You either are a good person or a good writer or a good actor or you are not. You cannot then apply a collage of sickness and neuroses to your person and ask for exemptions. It is unfair; it is dishonest. Make this decision today: Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.”

That lesson, Tenn told me, came from Smith and Seldes.

Ten

“THE ONLY JOY in the world is to begin,” wrote Cesare Pavese, one of Tenn’s favorite writers, an Italian poet and a suicide, whose poems and diary entries Tenn recalled from a forced but fervent memory. Long before Tenn had read this Pavese sentiment, he had overheard his grandfather and other church elders and members offer the same advice, in different forms, to a variety of grieving, curious, or confused parishioners. “I like balance and order,” Tenn told me, “and my first memory of seeking it was in the act of beginning again, after an event had made solid footing and thinking an impossibility.”

Unimportant and virtually invisible (or so he believed), Tenn moved about the rectory and the church property with freedom and easy access. The church always smelled of polishing oil—touches of lemon and verbena—and the flowers that were tended daily by the women of a flower guild. The church—as well as refined St. Louis life—operated through a series of guilds, clubs, organizations, and societies, and each had its leaders, its rules, and its methods of “mattering and ordering.” Tenn eavesdropped on the women of the flower guild, each flower thrust into Styrofoam or water accompanied by a judgment, an aphorism, or a sentiment served with a sign. “They had the world in the crosshairs and by the short hairs,” Tenn remembered. “They had the answer to everything.” The women came to their functions dressed formally and with frills, their faces caked with powder, which flaked and smeared in the summer months, and the reapplication of powder and rouge and lipstick rendered them cartoonish by the time afternoon refreshments were served. Tenn could remember that the air smelled of their perfumes—flowery, musky, heavy—their starched apparel, their lavender-scented underthings. Their cups and napkins were smeared with stains of crimson, amber, blood orange, Chinese red, brick red: they had left their mark by dint of opinion, perfume, cosmetics, and influence. The flower arrangements grew higher and bigger the more fervent their demeanor or their resolve. Their primary complaint? Things were moving too fast. The world was simply too confusing. “These were my first female characters,” Tenn said. “They had invented their own stages—church, society, the home, my imagination—and they fascinated me.”

When death visited a parishioner, calls were made and these women appeared. Some were sent to comfort the widowed spouse; others were dispatched to divert the attentions of children, the weak, the simple, or older survivors who might not be able to handle the news, and so were given information in tiny installments, like drops of sugar water to hummingbirds. Tenn could remember cries and screams beginning in the parlor of a home, followed by howls from the backyard swing, and then sniffles in driveways and along sidewalks circling the home that death had now visited.

“Death has come to our community,” Tenn’s grandfather would always state, in sermons and bulletins and conversations meant to comfort. The term always horrified Tenn, and he passed on this fear to many of his characters, most of whom recognized that death, like a wayward misfit with a gun and a grudge, was prowling the neighborhoods—of real estate and psyche—and waited for the open door, the unlatched window, the friendly gesture to gain entrance and make his visit permanent.

Death propelled the community into action. Those who had been sent to inform and to console were now joined by those who sought to explain, to bring order and balance to the unsettled. Another group brought food, trying in vain to get the grieving to eat, to store up their strength “for what lay ahead.” Tenn remembered their sunken chests and vacant eyes at the mention of this event or the destination known as “what lies ahead.” There was never any answer provided to their questions as to what this would be, but it was a requirement that they have faith, and that they bring to the tasks strength that would serve them and their family well.

“We wait and we have faith that whatever He may bring to us, He will also bring us the aid we need”: so said Tenn’s grandfather. The vagueness infuriated Tenn. “I began to see the cruelty in the casseroles and the confessions; the refreshments and the sweet hugs and aphorisms,” he told me. “There was no clarity, no concrete answers, just a vague cloud of words and phrases and prayers that we were to cling to and hope would serve as armor when ‘the time’ came, when ‘what lies ahead’ knocked at the door still resounding from the knock that had brought death or disease or doubt.”

There had been a woman, normally composed and in control of her senses and her wardrobe and her mind, who had been brought into the office of his grandfather to be told her husband had been killed in an automobile accident. Tenn could remember her screams, the smeared lipstick, the hat that fell to the floor, its veil pointing upward, as if in confusion at the disorder and discord that had erupted. Her screams demanded answers, cried out for revenge or clarification, damned the automobile (progress, the world changing), repeatedly asked if her informants were sure of what they spoke.

All that was given to her were muttered Scriptures, affirmations that His way is greater than ours, that there is an answer and a blessing in all things. An obscenity flew from the fine woman’s mouth—one of the first Tenn could remember hearing, although he knew immediately that its utterance was verboten—and the group moved in closer, a constricting circle of censorship and comfort.

“They pressed that lady down,” Tenn remembered, “and I realized right then, as a child, that no amount of service to a flower guild, no award for hymns sung or cookies baked or casseroles scooped or sick parishioners visited, was enough to prepare you for what life has waiting for you. We seek order and answers in the rituals, in the order, in belonging—strength in numbers. We behave well and we take care of things. We seek and then we follow the natural and proper order of things in our homes, our communities, and our churches, and when ‘what lies ahead’ now lies before you, walls and floors melt into nothingness, people become obstructions that prevent you from running toward—what?”

Tenn turned to me and asked me to write down, once, “We are in this alone,” and then, three times:

How to begin

How to begin

How to begin

The woman who had lost her husband in that accident, who had demanded answers and had shouted an obscenity in the offices of an Episcopalian rectory (a mighty and pregnant sin), never recuperated, and Tenn could never look at her in the same way. “She’s gone from us,” Tenn’s mother said. “She just broke apart, and lost her faith.” Tenn’s grandfather would ascribe this loss of faith to the fact that the woman had loved her husband—and all that he represented—more than she had loved the Lord. “Her relationship with her husband was too strong and too dependent,” he explained at dinner one evening. “Perhaps God took him away because he was lonely for her. Now she’ll develop the relationship with God that had suffered in the past. We ignore God at our own peril.”

Tenn remembered the woman as formidable, a “Big Lady,” proper and well-dressed and assured of her place in all communities, societies, guilds. She was the type of woman he would describe to Jessica Tandy and Geraldine Page, to help them become this woman, to be assured, to know who she was. This woman had dressed impeccably. “Shiny buttons,” Tenn remembered, “and silky skin and every hair in place. A large, proud bosom. A flash of gold.” The woman had lovely handwriting, and Tenn had loved to read her letters to his mother, and had once asked her to write something, anything, so he could admire the swoops and the flows of her penmanship. She made mints in her kitchen, pouring the fondant onto a large, oval piece of marble, forming perfect rounds onto which she placed a flower of pink icing, a bit of green for a stem. She had told Tenn that each flower, each bit of icing that dripped from the bag, was a prayer, perhaps a kiss, to the person who would enjoy the candy.

Order and control: “Whatever I have learned of life and order and the method of coping,” Tenn told me, “has come from women, and from the earliest days of my life.” In order for him to understand things, Tenn felt he had to “walk into a woman’s mind, and see what could be done, what could be fashioned.”

Tenn watched the woman shrink from lack of interest in food, her body lost in the fabrics that had once proudly enclosed her body. It was never believed that she was lost in grief, shattered at losing a husband of nearly four decades. She had merely lost her faith, and she drifted away. Her eyes never met another’s. Her appearances at the flower guild ended.

“This is why you need faith,” Tenn’s mother told him, and that is when Tenn remembered that he began to pray, to beg for order, to be buffeted for “what lay ahead.”

On some occasions of death, the body of the deceased would be brought to the church and prepared for presentation at the funeral service. Tenn’s grandfather would, of course, officiate, but he was attended by yet another guild of ladies, who sought to bring order and comfort to this awful occurrence. There were candles to be lit and particular linens, starched and perfect and blindingly white, to be placed in a certain way at a certain time. Each act, timed and holy, announced to the bewildered that there was control and understanding in this house, in this act, in this world.

Tenn remembered all of the prayers, and his childhood was full of times when he was led to pray for the Increase of the Military, for Fruitful Seasons, for Congress and Courts of Justice, for Fair Weather, and always In Time of Calamity, a prayer he remembered as a title, emblazoned as if in neon, calamity a particular time set aside like the flower guild meetings or a bridge lesson or a beauty-parlor appointment.

O God, merciful and compassionate, who are ever ready to hear the prayers of those who put their trust in Thee; Graciously hearken to us who call upon Thee, and grant us Thy help in this our need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

So much grievous suffering, so much fear and doubt, all of it remembered by Tenn as being surrounded by the smell of perfumes and flowers and candle wax and lemon and verbena and starched linen, and all of it failing to answer even the simple questions of this wandering child, listening to adults in moments of emotional extremity and “horrible human strain,” as he stole cookies from the church kitchen and looked at the stained-glass windows for some sign that there really was a God to whom everyone was reaching.

“This is what I came to realize,” Tenn told me. “We spend too much time throwing our prayers up in the air and hoping that an answer, a miracle, will fall from above and explain everything. The lessons, the prayers answered, are right here. They are in front of us and we can learn from them.” They rest, Tenn told me, within women. All of life’s lessons hold a feminine form. Men may carry out what has been learned from the lessons, but the instructions—“like life itself”—came from a woman.

Tenn wanted me to go to these life lessons, these “ambulatory answered prayers,” and learn from them not only for my own sake, but for him as well. Tenn wanted me to ask them if he had mattered to them; he wanted their advice, their strength, their order and balance. “They say God is in the details,” Tenn said, “and these particular women are those details. Use the beads if you wish, but by all means use the examples I’m about to give you. Women who help me to reach balance and order, and who allow me to believe I can begin again.”

Frances Sternhagen first came to Tenn’s attention in the 1950s, when she began to be praised for a series of sharp, intelligent, and stylish performances that were offered primarily in off-Broadway theaters that Tenn compared to “well-meaning closets.” Sternhagen, who typically asks everyone to immediately call her Frannie, was a blonde of average height who, onstage and in character, gave Tenn the appearance of height, of great bones holding up skin that knew care and breeding, and she cut through characters and their lines, as well as the stages on which she acted, like a piercing and jeweled scimitar. “I loved her immediately,” Tenn told me. “She was like some heavily buffed apple, shiny and good for you, that had been placed on the stage as if it were the teacher’s desk, and everything around her became immediately superfluous.”

As Tenn explained it to me, “I believe she came to particular fruition as an actress when she began to get better parts and greater challenges. She was remarkable in a double bill of Harold Pinter plays that were gorgeously produced, delicately and frighteningly performed, and which made absolutely no sense whatsoever: in other words, quintessential Pinter. If you should ever meet Ms. Sternhagen, long before you ask her any questions about life, love, and the literature that is theater, ask her for me what the hell The Room was supposed to be about. I would like to know. She played it like she did, but she is quite nefarious.”

The radiant, positive face of Frances Sternhagen was one that Tennessee sought on the stage and at most theatrical events and openings. Tennessee and Sternhagen were both avid swimmers and converts to Catholicism. “I think we are on to some good things,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.1)

When I met and came to know Frances Sternhagen, she did not claim to know what Pinter’s Room was about, even though the playwright was present for rehearsals. “He just told us to play it as we felt it,” she told me. “Your truth is the play’s truth. So … I don’t know what it is about, I really don’t, but I played the woman as if she were present in a very real situation and something was terribly urgent for her. I suppose it worked, but I don’t feel that I am necessarily nefarious. I’m just an actress working. We look for the truth as the character sees it. I don’t find this extraordinary.”

The evening’s second play was A Slight Ache, in which Frannie played Flora, who, along with her husband, observes a stranger in their garden. They bring him into their perfectly lit and appointed home, and he sits, silent and passive, as they share their stories with him. There is discussion of lawns and the ideal marmalade and lives of order and balance; but Flora is decidedly off-balance, and she comes to love, to the best understanding she possesses, this stranger, and her devotion to and need for him unnerved Tenn. At one point, Flora throws her arms around this man and exclaims, “I’m going to keep you!”

“I was changed by that performance,” Tenn remembered, “because here was a woman of a certain standing, who played by the rules, belonged to the guilds and the societies, but who had always wanted, and had never received, answers to some big questions, such as: What is love? Will I find it? She clearly had not had sufficient outlets for her passions; so when this man arrived, and for reasons known only to her unique heart and her unique eyes and her unique glands, she felt what she took to be love for him. And she leapt for it. She sought to possess it. She needed someone to tell her story to.”

There was another prayer—or rather a portion of one—from the Book of Common Prayer that came to Tenn’s mind when he thought of Frannie in the Pinter play, and when he remembered maiden aunts and young, frightened women praying that they may find a companion, love, acceptance, desire. The line Tenn remembered was: “We commend to Thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body, or estate; that it may please Thee to comfort and relieve them, according to their several necessities.…”

Those “several necessities” haunted Tenn from childhood until the day I met him, fresh into his eighth decade. What were the several necessities, and were they all worthy of comfort and relief and “prompt succor”? “I will never know,” Tenn admitted. “None of us will ever know, but in that performance, I thought, and I cried, and I spent some time in touch with my own necessities, and I prayed and hoped for comfort. I found some small measure of it in her performance, and I would have to say that is the highest praise I can offer. She put me in touch with my needs and partially filled them.”

Tenn continued to follow Frannie’s career, asking questions of women who worked with her and whom he admired, like Colleen Dewhurst and Maureen Stapleton and Madeleine Sherwood. Who was this Frances Sternhagen? Tenn was delighted to discover that one of Frannie’s first professional assignments was playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie, in summer stock, when she was only eighteen. “So she truly is mine,” he said.

“Bigger and better roles came to her in the 1970s, and that is when she came to me in corporeal form,” Tenn recounted. “I was being honored by the Drama Desk, a group of people who always seemed to know who I was, but I always found myself feigning recognition, even as they fed and feted me. I always felt like a man arriving in a foreign train station and being fulsomely greeted by strangers, and thinking that I must go ahead and go home with them and nod in agreement at their statements.

“I am very bad about being disingenuous when I am praised,” Tenn confessed.

It was at this Drama Desk “scene,” as Tenn characterized it, that he ultimately made fleshly contact with Frannie. By all accounts Tenn was miserable at the event, at which he was being rewarded for “surviving, apparently,” and Frannie was being honored for her featured performance in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Tenn admitted that he was both mildly drunk and solidly stoned that evening, and he remembered “gaudy colors and loud patterns and perfumes and Sterno,” and he was not happy. “I had not had a good time of it,” he recalled. His most recent plays had not succeeded, either by his own standards or by those of the critics or actors he admired. The Red Devil Battery Sign was having a difficult and painful birth, and the revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire produced in 1973 for a twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration he didn’t fully welcome or understand had been, in his estimation, abortive or unpleasant or amateurish. “I felt like an old failure,” he told me, “and the idea of being given a plaque or a medal for hanging on, muddling through, was not something I desired or wanted.”

But?

“Well,” he laughed, “I am very bad about being disingenuous when I am praised, and the praise was running erratically and in small spurts.”

Tenn recalled that he was placed, for the duration of the event, on a large and uncomfortable wicker chair of vast proportions. “It proceeded to make a waffle out of my buttocks,” he remembered, “and each time I moved in it to achieve some sense of balance and comfort, it creaked and shifted, and as I was on a raised platform of sorts, displayed like a war criminal or an especially succulent duck in Chinatown, my shiftings drew attention.”

Drunk, stoned, uncomfortable, his tongue darting about his parched lips like a startled chameleon, Tenn endured, watching people “largely unknown to me” receive their awards. “I creaked and shifted and swayed,” he recounted, “which is when I saw Frannie’s face, which exhibited so much sympathy toward my plight and my discomfort. She would smile at me as if to imply that my ordeal would soon be over, and I found myself pulling her toward me, literally and figuratively, and she got me through that night—with her kindness, yes; with her support, yes—as we stood with our awards, which we held as if they were dead babies, and my grace and gratitude were directed toward her. Not merely for that evening—awful and draining as it was—but for the memory of so many evenings I’d spent with her genius.”

Tenn would continue to seek Frannie’s company within the confines of a theater, but he never attempted a personal relationship. “I thought of it,” he confessed, “but I wanted to enter a relationship that was based on work, and I could never find a woman—faked from the fog or of natural derivation—that could serve her.”

Tenn claimed that he kept mental and actual notes on actresses he loved and admired, and he wondered how it might appear if these notes should ever be discovered. Tenn noted their physical characteristics, their age, his impressions. “In Frannie’s case,” Tenn told me, “I was making a case—to myself, to the universe, and on her behalf—that she should come to inhabit a play of mine, and to enter my life.”

When Tenn had his encounter with Frannie at the Drama Desk Awards in the spring of 1975, Frannie was forty-five, but she appeared “buoyant, ageless,” and she was at an awkward age for the visions he was having of women on his mental proscenium. “She was too young for the victims I was imagining,” he said, “and she was much too vital to be a mother or an aggressor. I couldn’t place her.”

Tenn imagined that Frannie was a rich and “polished” woman. He knew that she had been born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a judge, “well-placed from all I can ascertain,” and she had attended the Madeira School and Vassar College, where she soon came to dominate the drama department. During the run of Equus, Frannie’s mother had died, necessitating a leave of absence during which she managed the estate. Anthony Perkins, who was playing the lead role in the play at the time (having succeeded Anthony Hopkins), marveled at this fact with Tenn. “Tony was quite obsessed with money and muscles and meat,” Tenn told me. “Any one of those three subjects was likely to set him off for some time, and he spoke at some length about Frannie’s alleged wealth, which might have embarrassed him, given that he was among the least generous of people.”

Frannie then entered a special niche of actresses Tenn reserved in his notes—the rich and removed. Tenn placed Frannie next to Beatrice Straight, born to the fortunes of the Whitneys, and “so far removed from the cares and frictions of the world” that he adored and envied her greatly. Frannie, however, laughed when told of this perception Tenn had held of her. Her life was comfortable, but her education was provided by wealthy relatives who wanted her to do well. The settling of the estate was, like the acts of the women in all those guilds of Tenn’s childhood, a series of actions and rites that might help Frannie come to grips with the loss of her mother, and with the new direction her life was now likely to take.

“What tends to make people think of Frannie as rich,” Marian Seldes told me, “is her generosity. She gives freely and fully, as if there was no want in her life. She gives richly.” Frannie also operates from what Tenn called a “rich heart,” which he imagined was routinely stocked by her devotion to the Catholic faith, to which she converted when she married her husband, the actor Thomas Carlin. “Frannie radiates goodness,” Tenn told me, and the knowledge that she was a member of the Roman Catholic Church played some part in Tenn’s own conversion. “I imagined if it passed the exacting eyes and senses of Frannie Sternhagen,” he explained, “I could do something with it.”

Frannie’s religious beliefs were not the only thing that helped her rise from the bonds of a cruel world, with its exacting God of no answers, its endless rites and passages and disorder: like Tenn, she was an ardent swimmer. “I wonder if her special sense of balance derives from her habit of swimming,” Tenn asked. “No one seems to know that I am never far from a body of water. I always urge my theatrical compatriots to swim—many in the hopes that they will drown, of course—but primarily to know the bliss that comes when you are freed from the heavy bonds of the earth, of being rooted in a particular time and place. It is often cruel that we find ourselves where we are, and with whom, but you can feel utterly insignificant and free, floating there in the water, gazing at the sky, thinking. You can feel wonderfully superior once you hit dry land, knowing, as others cannot, that you’ve been free for a minute and came back of your own volition. I think that Frannie knows the value of pulling away from this scene we work in. It isn’t always healthy.”

In the memory book Tenn kept on Frances Sternhagen, there was no darkness or doubt: Frannie was perpetually sunny and balanced and ready to work. Frannie was representative of all that Tenn hoped he could become, and the pages of the memory book were all happy and full of rites free of superstition. It surprised Frannie that Tenn never mentioned the fact that she had six children with Thomas Carlin, that the family was raised in New Rochelle, and that Frannie’s life, both in and out of the theater, revolved around these seven people and the house they shared. “I always felt,” Frannie told me, “that everything I did, or wanted to do, was filtered first through what was needed at home, by the needs of the children and my husband. Maybe my superstition was that if I always thought fully and lovingly about my family, everything else would take care of itself. All would be well.”

Frannie’s church attendance, her walk to a nearby body of water for a swim, her reading, her particular rites of life, were all to make herself a stronger and better mother, person, and, finally, actress. “Whatever I do in the day,” she told me, “goes into the mix and winds up on the stage, so I knew I had to watch what entered my head and my heart. I didn’t want to spoil. I only wanted to bring good into a situation.”

Perpetually curious, Frannie continues to study other religions and philosophies, and while she treasures her daily Mass and the prayers that came to her as a new Catholic, she picks up bits and pieces that help her “get it going and get it together.” She is all about action, direct but polite, no flab, no fuss. One friend noted that when Frannie developed celiac disease, and could no longer consume gluten, it was probably only another attempt on her part to streamline and condense her life; there was now more time to focus on the things that mattered; fewer foods to worry about, more time at hand. Frannie is very much about getting on with things.

The only thing about her life shared with me that caused her pain was the alcoholism of her husband, particularly when she realized that a letter he wrote to alcohol, on the advice of a counselor, was a passionate, unbridled love letter. “I don’t know if he ever felt as ardently for me as he did alcohol,” Frannie confessed, “and it hurt me; it embarrassed me. It was full and free and unashamed, and Tom was often shy and reserved, so this was a very concerted effort, a break from his normal means. I still wonder if there is a human being on earth who could inspire so much devotion and dependency. I guess I always will.”

Thomas Carlin died, of a heart attack, at 11:11 a.m., a time and a numerical construction that continue to haunt and follow Frannie. Once when we were together, racing toward Grand Central Station, where she hoped to catch a train home to New Rochelle, she glanced at her watch. She stopped, stunned and shocked. Her watch read 11:11, and it gave her pause. November 11th is also a reminder, and, perhaps, a prayer, a rite of passage, something to help her begin to keep living, to keep going.

“I think lies of a certain nature are better than truth,” Frannie said one day. She was thinking of a time when her presence in the hospital with her young son was forcing him to stay awake so he could be with her. Frannie didn’t want to leave him, but she recognized that he needed sleep, so she lied and told him it was better that she leave. He slept, but Frannie wept once she was away from the side of her child. This was, to her, the good lie. “There has never been a trying time that didn’t push me toward the good things that would help me and others get through them. Maybe it’s my German background, but when a challenge arises, I think to myself that it should be investigated, studied, pondered, conquered. I never come out the other end of it anything but better.”

To watch Frannie was a distinct and intelligent pleasure for Tenn. He felt he could see her brain at work, that her intelligence—one he described as “astringent”—fueled her every action. “Her control of herself and her material,” Tenn told me, “is so firm—so rooted in theatrical correctness and her own sanity—that I immediately relax when she commands a stage, because I know that energy will be directed in the right places. No actress can elevate meretricious theater, but a good actress can elevate me, momentarily, from a meretricious theatrical experience. And Frannie has done this for me many times. What I always feel is that she focuses well and intelligently; she shares fully and freely; she laughs at the right things and the right people; she knows when to leave when a scene isn’t good.”

Tenn paused for a moment and then laughed, solidly and loudly. “She also has,” he continued, “and this took me by surprise, a great ass. Watch her in Outland, a perfectly outré sci-fi thing with Sean Connery. She runs with great grace and alacrity through a labyrinth of hallways and hairy men, and in these white pants one glimpses a perfectly wonderful ass. I was looking at hers; not at Sean Connery’s.

“So,” Tenn surmised, “Frannie is also an agent of change.”

Tenn smiled at the thought, then remembered another prayer of his childhood, one he never heard from his grandfather, in the city of St. Louis. It was a prayer for those persons going to sea. Tenn thought of it for Frannie Sternhagen the swimmer. Tenn could only recall snatches of it, because he never heard it offered in a church, but only in explanation by his grandfather and from reading the Book of Common Prayer:

We commend to Thy almighty protection, Thy servant, for whose preservation on the great deep our prayers are desired. Guard him, we beseech Thee, from the dangers of the sea, from sickness, from the violence of enemies, and from every evil to which he may be exposed. Conduct him in safety to the haven where he would be, with a grateful sense of Thy mercies.

“I offered that prayer to the memory of Hart Crane,” Tenn told me, “wishing I had thought to utter it before he felt he needed to lose himself deep in the sea, to drown away whatever was pressing upon him. I offer it to Frances Sternhagen, who helps me to stay above the water, to place words, like stones, one on top of the other, to move forward, to begin again.”

Tenn told me he would offer the prayer to no others.

“That prayer is taken,” he told me. “My heart and its plea have done all they can.”

Julie Harris was an actress who never worked with Tennessee Williams, save for a recording of The Glass Menagerie for which she took on the role of Laura. Tenn had few memories of it, as he exerted all of his energies and concerns toward Montgomery Clift, who, as Tom, sputtered and frayed and held everyone in the shaky palm of his hand. “I would look at him,” Tenn remembered, “and think to myself, ‘Not only can he not play this part, or any part, but he is worthless at living.’ And near him, almost always, would be Julie, a hand at his back, on his arm, smiling at him. She was serving a purpose for him similar to what Jessica had done for me: holding him up, helping him to see what he had been, nursing him through.”

Harris had created pages in Tenn’s theatrical memory book almost from the onset of his own New York debut. A costume designer of “a malignant camp sensibility” told him of a marvelous and unformed young actress who was a member of the company of Eva Le Gallienne’s Alice in Wonderland. That production appeared in 1947, and it was approximately one year later that Tenn had an audience with Le Gallienne. The two of them discussed Julie Harris.

“What I told him then,” Le Gallienne remembered, “was that the intention was there, but the equipment was lacking. The voice was inadequate.” Tenn recalled that another “power” in the theater referred to Harris as “an unshelled peanut,” dry and perhaps void of a center or substance.

Harris continued to work.

One of the happiest times in Tenn’s life was his 1949 revision of Summer and Smoke, composed by typewriter and occasionally by longhand at one end of a dining table. At the other end sat Carson McCullers, who was laboriously adapting her novel The Member of the Wedding to the stage. Both plays were suffused with longing—of their playwrights as well as their protagonists—and both were, like the prayers and rites of Tenn’s childhood, progressive and fearful and full of stones laid, metaphorical linens folded and applied, flowers plunged through psychic Styrofoam.

“If I reread Summer and Smoke,” Tenn remembered, “I can feel, and almost see, the writer that I was in that time and at that place. Alma moves fearfully and slowly but purposefully toward her desire. Alma comes to respect her need for love, for physical pleasure, for an acceptance of her gifts, no matter how niggardly or unnecessary they may appear. Alma is a woman who would have no problem finding a place on altar guilds or prayer councils, and her baked goods would always find a place at the tables of the best clubs, but her amatory gifts go begging, and her carnal desires, which she examines and recognizes in solitude, in darkness, grow stronger and hungrier as they find themselves attended to by only her own hands and ministrations. Alma moves slowly, each step a brick, perfectly shaped and sanded and placed in a wall that blocks what she finds unpleasant, and then, later in the play, each step a small scalpel that scoops away the plaster and the bricks of this wall, through which she hopes she can walk and find what she needs.”

Alma Winemiller has at her core a young woman named Julie Harris.

The prologue to Summer and Smoke begins in the park near the angel of the fountain, at dusk. It is May, in the

first few years of this century.… Alma, as a child of ten, comes into the scene. She wears a middy blouse and has ribboned braids. She already has the dignity of an adult; there is a quality of extraordinary delicacy and tenderness or spirituality in her, which must set her distinctly apart from other children. She has a habit of holding her hands, one cupped under the other in a way similar to that of receiving the wafer at Holy Communion. This is a habit that will remain with her as an adult. She stands like that in front of the stone angel for a few moments; then bends to drink at the fountain.

I brought a copy of Summer and Smoke to my meetings with Tenn, and he took the book and pulled the pages back, cracking the spine, and reading it as if it were something he had forgotten, or a work he had only heard of and had finally obtained. He read and reread passages, and pointed to the prologue. “If I spaced this differently,” he said, “and added a few things, it could be a poem. Was I imagining Julie Harris when I wrote this? When I showed my pages to Carson—and she showed hers to me—did my Alma mingle and mate with her Frankie Addams?”

Tenn could not answer that question, but he recalled that when he was introduced to Harris prior to the premiere of The Member of the Wedding, he felt he was seeing a version—short-haired, blunt-fingered, and freckled—of his Alma. “There is a radiation of goodness and urgency that surrounds Julie Harris,” Tenn told me. “She is fervent and fulsome, and there is an element of hysteria that never fully develops into anything dangerous or destructive, because, I believe, once she steps toward the lip of oblivion or unwise action, her love of life and people, her basic decency, pulls her back, and she again walks among us.”

This element of hysteria gave to Harris a sheen of sadness that Tenn could always sense and identify. When he later learned that Harris had lost a brother to suicide—as Tenn had lost his sister to medical tampering and madness—he felt a stronger bond with her, and whenever he witnessed Harris in a scene that called for a sense of attraction to or dependency on another person, he was moved to write “strongly and well.” Harris transmitted to Tenn both a sense of attachment and the “shattering sense of disorientation we all know and feel when we are snatched from home, or our concept of home. She has the most incredible ability to make me feel the utter barrenness of life that has lost its bearings, and then she can smile or begin again, and I want to live another thirty years and see what might happen.”

Julie Harris was clear of prejudice and pretension, wise, and unafraid to tell Tennessee how to improve his work and his life. Watching her rehearse as Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding was, for Tenn, a master class in acting, writing, living. (illustration credit 10.2)

Tenn joked that I was “the King of Prefaces,” but he labeled himself, among other things, “the Regent of Revisions”: he loved nothing more than the act of deconstructing an earlier play, short story, or essay. Maria St. Just recounted how she had once found him, in his studio in Key West, revising an essay he had written for the New York Times to commemorate the opening of Orpheus Descending. When St. Just pointed out what she saw as the absurdity of revising, “tampering with,” a piece that had been published months before and was now lining cages or had itself been revised into pulp or mulch, Tenn’s response was quick and blunt: “It is never absurd to try to get it right.”

Words on a page and thoughts in one’s mind, Tenn believed, should always be revised, improved, analyzed, explained. A writer’s work could always be improved, a thought clarified. Revisions were “metaphysical and spiritual” as well as literary, and he was heavily influenced by the working habits and writing style of McCullers, a woman Tenn admitted could be difficult, but who worked “with the ferocity of a demon and the delicacy of an angel,” and under whose spell Tenn had finalized the script of the play.

At lunch one day in the French Quarter, Tenn thought it best to invoke his friend and “geographical collaborator” Carson McCullers by quoting from memory (so “ruined but still holding the greatest of the gems”) the lines of her prose that had meant the most to him. With the exception of the opening line from her Ballad of the Sad Café (“The town itself is dreary”), it is impossible to find any of Tenn’s quotes in the collected works of Carson McCullers. It is also possible that McCullers would resent the synopses Tenn offered of her novels and short stories; but in the months and years following my time with Tenn, as I read and reread works he had told me to study and emulate, as I looked through stacks in libraries and private collections, it became clear that Tenn had deeply personal relationships and reactions to works that moved him, and he reshaped and rewrote their words to suit his own needs.

The Member of the Wedding began, for Tenn, with this paragraph:

I wonder if you can remember that green and crazy summer when Frankie turned twelve years old and realized that she was a person who was joined to nothing at all. It was a terribly long summer, as all seasons are unbearably long to the young, when time is abundant and choices are few, and she could see that during the weeks of that summer she had belonged to no club, was a member of nothing, and was not even comfortable with her position in her odd and small family. Frankie’s mother was dead and her father was absent, forgetful, busy, and like most adults around children, uncomfortable, impatient, unfeeling unless there was some extremity of emotion. The trees that summer were dizzying in their color and their size—Frankie wanted to feel, and to be, as rich and as ripe as those trees. The sun would hit those trees and you could be blinded. The same sun would bear down on the grey sidewalks of the town and they would glitter like glass or the baubles Frankie had won one earlier, better summer at the State Fair. Dizzying, dazzling. Lovely words. Lovely ideas. Would they ever apply to Frankie?

It was McCullers, Tenn claimed, who wrote the following:

Do not search for the human soul. It moves with alacrity and capriciousness, and it does not wish to be located, looked over. It operates best when its owner is in doubt, plagued with questions, stranded. Some believe that it hovers above a person, visible to mystics and saints and people trained in the dark arts, but more believe that it is deep within, and you can feel it react and constrict when tragedy approaches or when great happiness is felt. Part of the soul atrophies in moments of great extremity, and if it is subject to too much, it dies. The soul cannot endure too much sadness or happiness. Its ideal home is one of equilibrium. No one has yet determined what the soul actually does for a person, but like an appendix or tonsils, it lies there, thought of, written about, pondered over, waiting to explode or disappear.

These words, these thoughts, which Tenn believed derived from his friend, often kept him focused and hoping to write. McCullers’s influence on Tenn was, in his own words, formidable—she was a writer of extremity, as he was, and her ability to “observe, fully and painfully, a person in isolation” was her greatest gift as a writer. Her greatest gift as a housemate—and as a person who shared his writing space—was her painstaking approach to each and every word, every single sentence and paragraph, even though she was adapting a work that had already worked well as a novel, and whose contours and shadows she knew well.

“She approached the work as one totally new to her,” Tenn remembered, “and she agonized over the placement of words, emphasis, the ideal place for a blackout or a dash of humor or a sparkle of violence or melodrama.” McCullers loved melodrama, but only if it was earned. “She used to say to me,” Tenn continued, “that if you show a reader or an audience a baby-sized casket, and ten minutes later the group begins to tell jokes or sing a hymn, that’s melodrama, but it’s earned. People need to live again, to begin again, and they reach for whatever represents for them life or color or the dazzle. ‘Dazzle’ to my mother meant nice soap or perfume, gorgeous flowers in a bed outside or in her best vase or on her bosom. Carefully applied powder and dinner with a nice man. Life continues. The dazzle returns.” For Carson it was the company of a sympathetic listener, or a reader who had been moved or altered by her work. She was devastated by failure, even if it was imaginary, anticipated. She was convinced that the critics would savage her for being lazy by adapting her novel to the stage, so she typed and she smoked and she sighed. Her most comfortable position was a crouch in which she was warding off blows, and the blows were always forthcoming, and they were always earned. She would reread her work and wonder why she’d written a scene or a character as she had. While she could exhibit pride in certain sections of her work, more often than not she wished she could rewrite each book line by line. This obsession was one she shared with the man who sat opposite her at that table, keys clacking and pages coming at a fast pace.

Carson McCullers (right) was the only writer whose company Tennessee could tolerate when he was working, and his visit with her, in Nantucket, remained one of the handful of happy times he could recall. McCullers hosted a party in her Nyack home in 1959 for Isak Dinesen (seen here, left), an occasion that was a bit grander than the “fun squalor” of her times with Tennessee—but, she told him, his name came up often during the festivities. (illustration credit 10.3)

“We could never have been so close for so long,” Tenn said, “if we had been working on original pieces, but adaptation could survive the presence of another. Carson was moving her novel to the stage, and I was finalizing a play that had been in at least three different earlier versions. Carson would stop me every hour or so and ask me to read what she had done, and I would show her my pages. I knew that I was doing right by Miss Alma if Carson sniffled or if she told me that I was ‘killing’ her. And Frankie was the tomboy Alma might have been if she had not been raised in that oppressive, doily-infested house.”

Tenn had made the acquaintance of Carson McCullers by writing her a fan letter, one as fulsome and sweet as the one I had written to him. “And mine was successful,” he remembered, “as yours was. She could feel in me, as I did in you, a sympathetic reader, a seeker, someone lost and worth finding, someone with a soul contracting.” Their earlier meeting, perhaps in 1946, was in Nantucket, and Tenn remembered those times as deliriously happy, full of “the dazzle”: gorgeous weather, abundant food, the pages of pale judgment filling up daily, the company of people who fulfilled all mental and physical needs. Tenn was in love with “buoyant, brown” Pancho Rodriguez at that time, and the house at 31 Pine Street was full of laughter and argument and the scent of crab boil and patchouli, on which Carson was overly dependent. “The house was always full of patchouli clouds,” Tenn recalled, “and the pocked wooden floors held a thin layer of patchouli dust. Our footprints were visible on the floor at all times, and every breeze, every move, sent it up in a sweet-smelling cyclone.” In the kitchen on Pine Street, Carson experimented with odd dishes, like a soupy version of mashed potatoes into which were blended olives and onions, and Tenn, Carson, and Pancho would eat the concoction while reading aloud the works of Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov. “We would eat and drink and smoke and read,” Tenn told me, “until Pancho would tug at the cuff of my pants, and then it was time to fuck.” The curtains were light and made of linen and they floated on a breeze. “It was like the time on Royal Street,” Tenn reminded me, “with the right breezes and good music—we had a record player on Pine Street, too—and soft, warm skin in the night. And cats.” While the cats of Royal Street had mewled from below waiting for food, on Pine Street a rainstorm and a broken window convinced a pregnant cat to take up residence on Carson’s bed, where she delivered her brood. “We cared for the kittens,” Tenn said, “and to everything else, we could add tenderness to the season.”

Tenn had been deeply affected by Carson’s second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye, for which he would later write an introduction. He made no attempt to quote from it, but he spoke at great length about the descriptions of Private Ellgee Williams, the soldier who stoked the desires of the sleepy Southern town.

“I felt she had found out about me,” Tenn told me, “and was writing about someone I recognized. It felt as though portions of my journal had been purloined by this young girl, and I was amazed and embarrassed.” While Tenn could criticize the fact that Reflections, like Ballad of the Sad Café, opened with a statement of the locale’s dullness, he exulted over the descriptions of the town’s foliage and the eyes and thoughts of its characters:

The soldier in this affair was Private Ellgee Williams. Often in the late afternoon he could be seen sitting alone on one of the benches that lined the sidewalk before the barracks. This was a pleasant place, as here there was a long double row of young maple trees that patterned the lawn and the walk with cool, delicate, windblown shadows. In the spring the leaves of the trees were a lucent green that as the hot months came took on a darker, restful hue. In late autumn they were flaming gold. Here Private Williams would sit and wait for the call to evening mess. He was a silent young soldier and in the barracks he had neither an enemy nor a friend. His round sunburned face was marked by a certain watchful innocence. His full lips were red and the bangs of his hair lay brown and matted on his forehead. In his eyes, which were of a curious blend of amber and brown, there was a mute expression that is found usually in the eyes of animals. At first glance Private Williams seemed a bit heavy and awkward in his bearing. But this was a deceptive impression; he moved with the silence and agility of a wild creature or a thief. Often soldiers who had thought themselves alone were startled to see him appear as from nowhere by their sides. His hands were small, delicately boned, and very strong.… Private Williams did not smoke, drink, fornicate, or gamble.

Although Tenn did not attempt to quote this passage from Reflections in a Golden Eye, he laughingly recalled that at the time the novel was written, he was certainly engaged in the four qualities that held no interest for his literary doppelgänger. “Oh, we smoked, and we drank, and we fornicated, and we gambled. Oh, how we gambled!”

In what way? I asked.

“In the only way that matters,” Tenn replied. “With our hearts planted on the pale judgment, risking exposure and ridicule. Gambling it all, line by line, in a cloud of patchouli dust.”

Tenn applied tiny but decisive cuts and the occasional “bloodletting” to the 1949 revision of Summer and Smoke. He gave to Alma a more delicate entrance, allowing her to build slowly toward her neurasthenia, which he felt had been too obvious in the premiere production, something that might have been attributable to the actress, Margaret Phillips, who created the role. “She was a lovely but certifiably insane woman,” Tenn told me. “She accepted direction as if it were a dagger to the heart. She took everything personally, instantly. Her Alma was ready for the hat factory in scene 1; there was no layer of Southern proprietary holding in this cascade of illness and regret and passion that was building and boiling. She was oozing—no, she was drenched—once the lights were up.”

When I met with José Quintero, the director who staged the revival at Circle in the Square four years after the failed Broadway production, he remembered the alterations to the play as thematic rather than as literary, and his recollection was that Tenn wrote the original version of Summer and Smoke in the presence of McCullers, not the revision, which was actually brought forth in the rehearsals for the revival, which now featured a young and brilliant actress named Geraldine Page.

“I think you need to realize something,” Quintero told me. “Tenn’s chronology is very romantic, and he revises it as often as he does his work. I understand that he needs to think of that time with Carson as the time during which he improved or ‘saved’ Summer and Smoke, but the play was pretty much set by the time I was called in to direct it. We altered a lot, and the name Julie Harris was bandied about a lot by Tennessee, much to the annoyance of Gerry, who was convinced that we wanted her to emulate Julie. Tenn needed to destroy the memory of the original production, which I had seen, and which was not good, so he began to speak of the ‘restoration,’ as he called it, in much larger terms, with entire acts and whole pages ripped out and apart. But the script did not change much. The emphasis changed entirely, but I don’t recall great changes in the text.”

José Quintero, the passionate and incisive director of the off-Broadway revival of Summer and Smoke. Tennessee felt comfortable with Quintero, and allowed him to make suggestions and revisions to his play. “I think it can be said that José improves people,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.4)

Tenn’s notes for Summer and Smoke are exacting, and Quintero did his best, in the cramped playing space of the original, downtown Circle in the Square, to accommodate them. Tenn wrote:

As the concept of a design grows out of reading a play I will not do more than indicate what I think are the most essential points.

First of all—The Sky. There must be a great expanse of sky so that the entire action of the play takes place against it. This is true of interior as well as exterior scenes. But in fact there are no really interior scenes, for the walls are omitted or just barely suggested by certain necessary fragments such as might be needed to hang a picture or to contain a doorframe.

During the day scenes the sky should be a pure and intense blue (like the sky of Italy as it is so faithfully represented in the religious paintings of the Renaissance) and costumes should be selected to form dramatic color contrasts to this intense blue which the figures stand against. (Color harmonies and other visual effects are tremendously important.)

In the night scenes, the more familiar constellations, such as Orion and the Great Bear and the Pleiades, are clearly projected on the night sky, and above them, splashed across the top of the cyclorama, is the nebulous radiance of the Milky Way. Fleecy cloud forms may also be projected on this cyclorama and made to drift across it.

So much for The Sky.

Now we descend to the so-called interior sets of the play. There are two of these “interior” sets, one being the parlor of an Episcopal Rectory and the other the home of a doctor next door to the Rectory. The architecture of these houses is barely suggested but is of an American Gothic design of the Victorian era. There are no actual doors or windows or walls. Doors and windows are represented by delicate frameworks of Gothic design. These frames have strings of ivy clinging to them, the leaves of emerald and amber.… There should be a fragment of wall in back of the Rectory sofa, supporting a romantic landscape in a gilt frame. In the doctor’s house there should be a section of wall to support the chart of anatomy. Chirico has used fragmentary walls and interiors in a very evocative way in his painting called Conversation Among the Ruins.

Now we come to the main exterior set which is a promontory in a park or public square in the town of Glorious Hill. Situated on this promontory is a fountain in the form of a stone angel, in a gracefully crouching position with wings lifted and her hands held together to form a cup from which water flows, a public drinking fountain. The stone angel of the fountain should probably be elevated so that it appears in the background of the interior scenes as a symbolic figure (Eternity) brooding over the course of the play. This entire exterior set may be on an upper level, above that of the two fragmentary interiors. I would like all three units to form an harmonious whole like one complete picture rather than three separate ones.…

Everything possible should be done to give an unbroken fluid quality to the sequence of scenes.

Finally, the matter of music. One basic theme should recur and the points of recurrence have been indicated here and there in the stage directions.

The notes are marked “Rome, 1948,” but Quintero recalls those directions being expanded for the revival in 1952. In New Orleans, in 1982, Tenn recalled those stage notes, and told me it was one of his most autobiographical pieces of writing.

The rectory described in the stage notes is the one in which he spent those formative years of his childhood, haunting the dark, oiled hallways, hiding beneath Gothic eaves, eavesdropping on adults and watching the actions of the ladies of the church.

The sky, that oppressive sky “as large and as unyielding and unfeeling as the back of an absentminded God,” was an image he claimed he cadged from McCullers. “All those green, dizzying summers that Carson wrote of,” he recounted, “all those slanting rays of the sun, were held against and fueled from an expansive sky, and the sky is a judgment, an eternal witness to all of our struggles. I came to feel that Frankie Addams looked at the sky and saw it as proof that the world was large—it stretched for millions of miles, perhaps even back in time. There had to be places and people to which she could escape and find friendship and acceptance and membership in a club or a society, and the friends you did have didn’t die suddenly, and people weren’t betrayed and people didn’t lie. I always felt that Carson’s people were always in the longest line of all time—like something from a George Tooker painting—and the window would slam shut when they finally had their number called. Horribly hopeful and naïve, you just held your breath for the disappointment that was to come.

“My Alma, on the other hand,” he continued, “sees the sky above Glorious Hill as a rebuke. Look at this tiny toy town of perfect lawns and manicured women and order and balance applied to all of those things for which there can never be order and balance. The body is dead and now lies in a room attended to by people who cover it in linen and bathe its limbs and mutter prayers for its proper deliverance. The body is still dead, and its survivors still devastated, but the prayers continue. Food is delivered, comfort murmured, backs and hands patted. Casseroles and cards and comforting words. A beautifully handwritten note at the top of which a hole has been punched, a piece of pink ribbon pulled through it: a prayer for healing you can hang from a wall. All of this comfort, all of this attention comes down upon you and smothers you and ties you closer to the town; your roots sink ever deeper into its soil, even though you never felt loved or welcomed here. And there is the huge sky, laughingly reminding you that there is so much out there in the world beyond Glorious Hill, places to go, people to meet, passions to be plumbed, and here you are, a ribboned prayer on the wall, a corset to be tied, a church social to be attended, at which you will serve sandwiches without crust or complaint, and you die some more, your soul constricted beneath that girdle and beneath that sky.

“And that is Alma,” Tenn told me, “and that is me.”

Carson McCullers gave him that image, and Tenn claimed that Julie Harris magnified it, first with her performance in The Member of the Wedding, and then through other transformational appearances that made him think of her as an emotional pilgrim, completely lost until she is able to inhabit a character, a person utterly real to her, and to whom she is in complete service.

Tenn imagined that Julie Harris, like Frances Sternhagen, came from wealth and the protections it offered. He envied her Grosse Pointe, Michigan, upbringing, her attendance at Yale, her ability to appear unaffected by the mundane practicalities of daily life—bills, meetings, meals, frayed furniture, appliances. “I think that she rises above it all,” Tenn believed, “and casts aside what she can’t—or shouldn’t—use in her work.”

It is true that Harris was born in Grosse Pointe and attended the Yale School of Drama, but she laughed when I told her that Tenn imagined her untouched by life. “I happily live,” she told me, in a suite at the Hotel Wyndham, where she resided during the short run, in 1991, of Lucifer’s Child, a one-woman show about Isak Dinesen, “and I also happily bear the scars for having done so.”

Tenn had purchased a gift for Julie in the French Quarter. In a voodoo shop, he passed up a number of amulets, skulls, animal skins, beads, and candles to find a tiny and lovely photograph of a dark-skinned girl encased in bright material. It was clearly handmade, and Tenn asked the proprietor about its provenance. “It’s from Milagro,” he was told. “What does that mean?” Tenn asked. “It means it’s powerful,” was the response, so Tenn bought it for Julie, and I held it for almost nine years before giving it to her.

She wept and told me that she had recently attended church services for the Easter season. “In one church,” she remembered, “the cross had been made bare, the Christ figure removed. This was not a time for sadness, for he had arisen and was in his place. He will be back on that cross in time, of course, for us to look upon and grimace and love and try to understand, but for now he’s away and all is well. I look at this,” she said, looking down at the icon, “and I know that Tennessee Williams is dead, and I know that this is devastating to me, but he’s on no cross at all—he is arisen, and he arises every time a play of his is read in a bedroom or a classroom or a library; every time it is produced in a basement or a high school or a theater. They can’t hurt my friend anymore. He’s gone from all of this.”

TO FULLY APPRECIATE a Julie Harris or a Frances Sternhagen, Tenn explained to me, one must have in one’s company a Kim Hunter. “I adore Kim,” Tenn told me, “and there is about her a rudimentary quality that is very appealing—and very necessary at times. But there has never been a sense of liftoff with Kim. She is very dutiful and very intelligent, but there is nothing within her that wants to push at the confines of a character or the wall of the theater. She is very pliant, and I learned a lot about life and women and the theater working with her, but it has never occurred to me to seek to inhabit her skin or mind to find a woman to speak to me.”

It requires a certain bravery—or recklessness—to read the above directly to the woman about whom it was said, but I did so, in the summer of 1989, in Hunter’s apartment at 42 Commerce Street, at the top of an incredibly steep staircase, where she stood, smiling, radiant, asking, “Is this intimidating or what? I think it would be rude to not wait for you here, but it is very off-putting.” Hunter and her husband, Robert Emmett, welcomed me and talked about Tennessee Williams and everything else that came up in a seven-hour conversation. Hunter, who was an avid cook, had prepared a lovely meal, which she claims was inspired entirely by Paul Bocuse. (Hunter had also written an autobiographical cookbook called Loose in the Kitchen, a copy of which she gave me before I left.) I liked her instantly, as Tenn told me I would. Theirs had been a short but intense time spent together—the production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she created the part of Stella—but they were always able to pick up quickly and intimately, usually through a late-night phone call, when Tenn would call and confess that he felt lost. (Tenn may have never inhabited Hunter’s skin or mind, but he frequently inhabited her ear and her apartment, where he was cared for, listened to, loved.) Tenn had explained to me that he found her “loving and rational and calm,” but Hunter scoffed at that and said that she thought that Tenn called her because she represented a happy and productive time.

“The time of Streetcar,” she remembered, “was blazing with life and work, good work, and success and fulfillment, and he could call me and we could remember that time. If it got him back to a place where he could work or think or feel good about himself, I’m happy about that, but I’m not a pillar of sanity or balance. I was a memory of a happy time, and I don’t think he felt comfortable picking up a phone and calling Jessie or Karl [Malden] or Marlon—and even before Vivien Leigh died, Tenn didn’t have a rapport with her. He thought she was a bit of a machine, an acting machine, and she didn’t have time for his doubts or concerns. She had her own problems; she didn’t have time for Tennessee Williams’s problems. I didn’t, either, but I loved him.”

When Kim Hunter came into the life of Tennessee Williams, she was known as a film actress who had been signed to a contract with David O. Selznick, and who had appeared in The Seventh Victim, which Tenn loved as a camp horror film, and the Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger film Stairway to Heaven, with its Art Deco ethereality of the afterlife. Both films amused Tenn, but he couldn’t quite see how the comely, slightly round young actress featured in them could be his Stella Kowalski.

“Kazan was mad for her,” Tenn told me. “I don’t know how they met or when, but she was presented to me as a virtual fait accompli.” Irene Mayer Selznick, who produced Streetcar, claims that Hunter was a “property” much bragged about by her ex-husband, David O. Selznick, and that is how she came to meet her and have her read for the role. “Elia Kazan,” Irene Selznick told me forcibly, “took what was presented to him, and I was the very active producer of that play.”

Hunter herself couldn’t recall how she came to be cast in the play, but she was very open about the fact that she and Kazan conducted an affair—not terribly discreetly—during the time of Streetcar, and the fact embarrassed her. “It was foolish and very dramatic,” she remembered. “I was a very young twenty-five, with one marriage collapsing, and my career seemed to be without focus. Kazan was all about focus, and he passed it on to me. He pasted it on me, and he got me into the Actors Studio, where he and Robert Lewis really taught me what acting was about. They opened my mind; they told me what I should read and see and hear. All of that was good. I should have left it at that, but I also fell madly for Kazan, which was easy to do. He shaped me on the stage, and he shaped me in the bedroom. That experience—that experience of A Streetcar Named Desire—completely changed me in every way, artistically, sexually, intellectually.”

Kim Hunter was a young mother overseeing a hectic household, but she always made time and space for Tennessee, inviting him for meals and holding him up when he doubted his talent. “She was, I guess, a sort of sister,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.5)

Both Tenn and Hunter conceded that her performance grew incredibly under Kazan’s tutelage. “There was an unabashed amateurishness to Kim’s performance in the early days,” Tenn remembered. “She had it in her head that Stella was nervous, jumpy, and so she remained—one note and one dimension—for the length of the play. I admired her tenacity and her ability to concentrate on that one aspect, but the performance was abrasive and thin. Whatever Kazan did, it worked.”

“He spoke to me as an adult,” Hunter revealed. “He sat me down and explained the full text of the play, and he compared the four [major] characters in the play to people we knew in common. Kazan believed that there were a limited number of people, or archetypes, in the world, and our individual personalities determined how we lived and how our personalities were revealed. He allowed me to see that I shared a great deal in common with Stella. I also came to see some similarities I shared with Blanche. He led me to realize that no one, and no action, could or should be alien to me.”

The conversations I had with Hunter were very much like the phone calls Tenn shared with her when he called “deep in the blues” and needed some balance. “He wanted to hear that he was a good writer,” Hunter said, “and he wanted me to know that I had meant something to him, that he meant something to me. He wanted to talk about our human bond, the world being connected by our similarities, our shared fears and dreams. I think he called me when he had gotten a bad review or he had been rejected by a lover. He needed to hear from someone who looked up to him, who wouldn’t judge him. He needed to hear from someone who had grown up—grown in every way—right in front of him, and because of one of his plays.”

Kim Hunter openly addressed the issue of her not having a sense of liftoff, in Tenn’s eyes. “I would have to agree with him,” she confessed, “but let’s look at the facts.” After the Broadway production of Streetcar, Hunter gave a praised performance in Darkness at Noon, Sidney Kingsley’s adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s novel, and another in the film version of Streetcar, for which she won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. “There was a good and clear line going,” Hunter recalled. “And then the bottom fell out of everything.”

The event to which she referred was the blacklist: Hunter’s name appeared in Red Channels, and film producers were urged to reconsider casting her. In 1953 alone, she knew of seven film roles for which she was wanted (including the one ultimately played by Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity) and about which she received polite but evasive calls changing the dates and times. Soon the calls ended altogether. Hunter found work in the theater, but films and television were almost completely blocked to her. Her role in the 1956 film Storm Center was given to her solely because Bette Davis (an actress who admired Hunter and who had accepted her Oscar) demanded her inclusion. “Bette Davis told the producers and the studio that I was in or she was out,” Hunter told me. “She thought that the blacklist would only be broken if the stars, the people with power, stood up and refused to be bullied any longer. That is what ultimately happened, and Bette was among the first, at least in my experience, to go to bat for actors.” Davis also wrote letters—and checks—on Hunter’s behalf in the hopes of getting her back on track. When I spoke to Bette Davis by phone—about Hunter and about other things—she agreed with Tenn’s assessment of her friend’s career, but she was quick to point out the circumstances. “You have to think of Kim’s career as having suffered a sort of amputation,” Davis told me. “We will never know what she might have done if that ludicrous blacklist hadn’t happened. Those were years where she would have grown in film roles, elevated to starring roles on the stage, but she was pushed to the side, was a bit scared. Stunted! That’s what I mean to say. She was an injured actress.”

One other person sent checks and notes of encouragement to Hunter during the time of the blacklist: Tennessee Williams. Hunter recalled that a recurring line from all of the notes was “I need you; hold on.”

Hunter did not wish to reveal too much about herself to me, or to anyone else. When she looked at notes I had made of my time with other actresses, she admitted that she would never be as forthcoming. “If I wanted to tell as much as those women,” she told me, “I would write my own book. I’ll tell you some things, and that’s it.”

Those areas she was willing to discuss—her affair with Kazan, her phone calls with Tenn, and the spotty but loving relationship they had—led to free and full conversations, but she was far more comfortable talking about books and plays and food, and I was invited back many times to the apartment. And on one occasion, when a play she especially liked, called The Sum of Us, was playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre—which was housed in the building next to Hunter’s—she invited me into her bedroom. “Come and lie down,” she said. “Don’t be nervous.”

There was nothing romantic about the request: she wanted me to listen to the play, which reverberated through the wall above her bed. On several occasions, we would lie there and listen to the muffled second act, and occasionally Robert Emmett would join us; but before the conclusion and the curtain calls, he would repair to the kitchen. When the play was over, and Hunter and I would leave the bedroom, we would find dessert and a New York Times at our places on the table, waiting for us. I loved being in their company, and I trusted everything she told me about the theater, even as I regretted that she didn’t want to say anything more about her life.

We were talking one evening over dinner when I mentioned my bizarre living arrangements. I was still in my early months of living in New York, and was staying with Dorothy Hart Drew. When I mentioned the artist’s name, Hunter literally gasped, then looked in disbelief at her husband. It had been Dorothy Hart Drew, under the direction of Congressman George Dondero, who had written a letter to Hunter in 1952, urging her to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as to “repent” her ways. In time a call came to Hunter’s apartment: it was Drew, castigating her for taking her “God-given talent” and allowing it to be misused by Communists. Hunter told the woman on the phone, “a certifiable loon,” to go immediately to hell.

Remembering the conversation—and the woman—Hunter began to laugh, a lovely, girlish laugh, then a boisterous, full-throated one. “What are the odds?” she asked me and her husband. “What are the fucking odds? He’s living with Dorothy Hart Drew. Sometimes I don’t think life is a mystery at all. It’s a slapstick comedy constantly replayed, over and over! And here we are again!”

Tenn and I discussed all of these things—and all of these people—on one afternoon in New Orleans. Clearly inspired, he returned to his hotel room and composed a poem about our conversation, and he showed it to me, some parts typed, some handwritten, lines crossed out, written over, inserted, transposed. I could not read it, so Tenn read it aloud to me, and I wrote it down.

When I was very young, I would sit, alone and in the darkness,

Facing a first day of school, or a funeral, or a baptism,

And I would not know what to expect or how to behave.

And I would think of you.

You were the memory I called on.

I don’t know why I had this ritual, alone and in the darkness,

But I was afraid, and I believed that some ritual, like all the rituals,

Would help me to make some sense of what was to come.

And I would think of you.

You were the memory I called on.

Nothing beneath this cruel and blind sky can ever hurt a person,

Who has seen the light and the color and the heat that comes from this sky.

And you saw the gifts and the blessings in the funeral, the baptism, the beating.

Anything can be altered with kindness, a scent, a reading from Crane or a Sousa waltz.

If I can’t imagine any of these things,

If I can’t recall the horns of that Gershwin record,

Or the poem about creative manifestation,

Or the scent of my baby’s back, scrubbed, smooth, touched by breeze and affection.

I’m going to think of you.

You’re going to be the memory I call on.

When I was very young and sat alone and in the darkness,

I could not have known that you would be a part of my life, invested in my heart.

I imagined you on those dark nights, and that was my ritual.

Creating friends, partners, who would know what to say and how to feel.

Who would dance in a cloud of perfumed powder,

Who would write a sentence about love that could help me accept that I had seen it,

Who would display it toward another person so that I could accept that it was real.

Who would give to me, just hand it to me, and say “I love you.”

I’m thinking of you.

You are my memory.

There seemed so much time then, when I dreamed you, in the darkness.

I was frightened of time, then, not knowing what it would introduce or take away.

But I’m afraid now as I watch it recede, slink away, droop like a drunken come-on or an old man’s neck.

I want to bring it back and tell it what I’ve seen, through your eyes.

I want to bring it back and sing it the songs I’ve heard from your lips.

I want to bring it back and take care of it, as you took care of me.

When the curtains lifted and brought us the scent of sand and salt.

When the words came easy and often so that we could tell each other how lucky we were.

When we could talk and no one was alone and in the darkness.

I will always think of you.

You are always a part of my memory.

Because of you there will be hope for the frightened child in the dark.

They haven’t met you yet, but they will.

They may have to dream you into existence, but they’ll find you.

Traces of you will be in their happy memories.

The days may dawn as a judgment—of our souls, our work, our right to live,

And the nights may press down on us like a bad debt,

But I go back to the young person I think I once was,

The young person who dreamed you up and then found you.

I will always think of you.

You are my memory.

Tenn told me that he wrote the poem as if imagining a sturdy, bare piece of tapestry. Julie Harris was a large and strong needle, made of gold, and Frances Sternhagen was a strong string of brilliant thread, multicolored, that he used as he plunged the needle through the tapestry and created the poem. Kim Hunter was a bright and luminous white thread, needed to set off the colors around it.

I closed my book, hugged Tenn in Jackson Square, found my car, and drove home.

Eleven

I HAD NOT BEEN home for more than thirty minutes when the telephone rang. It was Tenn, and he was apologetic: he felt he had terminated our conversation far too abruptly. Might he explain why?

I propped the receiver against the left side of my head and wrote what he said, but he was speaking to me from a location full of voices and music and clattering plates and cutlery, and his thoughts raced about madly. My notes are full of dashes and dots, an improvised shorthand that make it impossible for me to quote him directly. Here is the essence of what he told me that night in that phone call.

The discussion of Carson McCullers and the pairing of his mind with that of another writer had led his thoughts to William Inge. The life and death of William Inge weighed upon Tenn tremendously, and the prayers and rituals he had cobbled together to help him write and learn to live by the lies that fuel our days, the “manic and masturbatory steps and apologies for surviving,” were always accompanied by an image of Inge’s haunted and beautiful eyes, clear and long-lashed; his arms, which Tenn remembered as lightly furred and warm and strong; and that high forehead, like something out of a Tenniel drawing by way of an Arrow shirt advertisement.

“Bill and I were rubes,” Tenn told me. “Rustic and golden by way of the fire of ambition and sexual fear, and both somewhat retarded, in a tertiary manner, by means of our time spent in the Midwest, a dry and flat terrain in which secretive souls such as ours could never hide and touch and dream and compose the life we hoped to live.” Tenn had benefited from his time in the South, “full of shadow and moist heat and the forced intimacies born out of a need to remain cool, to get through the night.” The South had been the “great rock” for Tenn, the rock upon which he felt he could build his new identity, and he liked to think that he was able, fitfully, to provide Bill Inge some shadow time beneath his rock, a “splotch of darkness in which he could relax and reveal himself to me, to himself. Call me St. Peter,” Tenn quipped, “and from beneath my rock, Bill Inge began to be built.”

Tenn and Bill Inge met in St. Louis in 1944, when he considered himself a “raw and angry” person, bruised by the reaction of Boston critics and audiences to Battle of Angels, and conflicted about his brief time in Hollywood, where he had loved the weather, the money, the easy physicality and humor of his Italian lover, and access to MGM and routes and locales that held so many memories for him of films he had loved. Foremost on his mind, however, was that he was a failure as a writer. “I felt terribly old,” he told me, remembering himself at thirty-three, “the words and the characters so close to the surface, so ready to be exposed and shared, and yet I knew I hadn’t been fully free with whatever talent I might have had.”

Inge, himself a frustrated writer, was working as a reporter and critic for the St. Louis Star-Times and requested an interview with Williams, “a young and promising playwright sprung from our own environs,” as Tenn remembered it laughingly. “As you know,” Tenn told me, “and as I keep saying, I am very disingenuous when I am being feted.” Tenn agreed to the interview and remembered the electric current that coursed between and around the two men, who began their time together in great propriety, sitting in separate spaces in the famed S curve taught to aspiring models and proper young ladies at the John Robert Powers school, smoking, smiling—emblems of professionalism. This pose broke down in what Tenn recalled as less than an hour, and they became “fast and rampant,” exchanging “sensations and fluids, and vowing to each other a devotion to a prepared and examined death.” Tenn paused for a moment and told me to be sure and write the words as a title: A Prepared and Examined Death.

William Inge, a natural playwright, but a man, according to Tennessee, utterly alien in the world, afraid of virtually everything. They were only comfortable in Inge’s apartment, discussing art, theater, and music. (illustration credit 11.1)

“I won’t hide anything from you,” Tenn said. “I’ll tell you everything. Perhaps it will be of some help to you.”

When Tenn first walked into the small apartment kept by William Inge in St. Louis, he noticed a piece of onionskin paper, folded in half and taped to the wall above his typewriter. On the page was written “Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.” The translation: “The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.” The quote came from Mallarmé, a poet unknown to Tenn.

“I was taken by this man instantly,” Tenn remembered, “but I began to feel far more passionate as I looked about his monkish little apartment, the important books, the stark devotion to work, and this quote, in French. Here was a man like me: a frightened rube, tiptoeing toward his work, his passions, himself. Straining so hard in every direction, tight and tense and ready to fire if only a target existed.”

Tenn and Inge also shared a belief—morbid but embraced with a brio that made it appear joyous—that they were each on a short-term lease on Earth, and everything needed to be consumed and burnt off in pursuit of the few works they could manage before they fulfilled the destiny of a prepared and examined death.

In the midst of a pusillanimous America in the midst of a World War, Tenn and Inge had cast their minds back to the avant-garde 1920s, a “great flowering of aberrant minds,” the “diseased diaspora” of restless Americans who settled in Paris and threw off the trappings of the puritanical states that had shaped and rejected them. “We were much taken by Harry Crosby,” Tenn told me, “and we wanted to latch on to some of the fire he had harnessed. We knew the great burning would come for us eventually, but we wanted the white heat of the fire, the illumination of the flames, before we were engulfed.”

Crosby, the son of great Bostonian wealth, had witnessed carnage and death as an ambulance driver in the First World War, and as Tenn would later learn in conversations with Malcolm Cowley and others who had known the young man, he had created, in the grey and wet hills of France and the blood-slicked halls of army hospitals and tents, his own religion, one that would best fill the emptiness he now felt, with so many young men like himself maimed so quickly, so senselessly. “He wanted grandeur,” Tenn recounted, “and he found it, initially, in the religion he fashioned in which he worshipped the sun, which might ignite some life inside the deadly shell he now inhabited. Looking upon the blanched corpses of young soldiers, he imagined the sun, angry at times, but also pulsing with life, beaming over their bodies, and he wrote, ‘Lost things were warm with beauty,’ and ‘The sun is our God and … death is our marriage.’ ” Marriage for Crosby, as Tenn intuited him, existed between men and women, men and men, men and literature, men and art, men and the locales they lived in, and the people fate and their own will had determined would be their neighbors or friends. Everything moved according to the cycles of the sun: the farmer knew to turn his soil according to solar charts; the sea responded to its mighty determination; and death, prepared and examined, should be timed to guarantee one’s deliverance, one’s ascendancy to the sun. “Fly into the sun,” Tenn remembered Crosby urging all artists. “Sun/Speed/Darkness/Death—these are the cycles of life as we know it. Inhabit the sun, be a person of light, burn out fast.” Crosby founded the Black Sun Press, which published Hart Crane, the poet who most influenced Tenn’s own thoughts and approaches to writing. “In those early years,” Tenn remembered, “I never began notes on a play, a poem, a short story, without rereading all of Hart Crane, thinking of him, trying to be with him on the deck of that ship from which he slipped from us forever. He fell to the bottom of the sea, but I think he was actually flying into the sun, seeking to find his ultimate membership among those who might understand him, those who, like him, could only be destroyed on this planet.” In life the mind of Hart Crane raced and scattered, but Tenn imagined that there was calm and quiet “and no jarring distractions or rejections” on the cool floor of the Gulf of Mexico, whose waters had always been a part of Tenn’s life, the source of frolics on vacations or fear when storms arose, and which was now the final resting place for his favored poet. Tenn had kept a jar of water from the Gulf on his writing desk for years, and even as he hocked typewriters and changed addresses, the cloudy water traveled with him. Tenn’s lover Pancho Rodriguez, when told of the provenance of the water, replied that he had always thought it was holy water, blessed in some way. “It is,” Tenn replied, “and it was.”

TENN FELT for a brief time that he and Bill Inge might be able to bond and become a working and loving unit—bold writers drawing words from the sun and throwing them back up and toward their fiery source. “We wanted so much to love and be loved, to meld with someone who loved as we did. We could transgress in spirit. We wanted to change things; we wanted to blow away the plays that we found boring, that didn’t speak to us; we were queer and finding ways to be so openly and freely and with some sense of enjoyment. In those ways we were pushing against things as they were, but our work was very simple and orderly in comparison with the men who were fueling our dreams.”

Both Tenn and Inge felt old and failed when they met, but Inge was on the cusp of thirty-one, and Tenn was thirty-three. “We were much older than our years,” Tenn admitted. “We had ambition, but we were mentally and physically slack.”

Tenn was not typically attracted to a man with Inge’s attributes, but he assured me that the sexual response he felt for the writer was instant and genuine. This response grew as he observed Inge at work and realized that he possessed a sense of discipline that was as strong as his confidence was weak. “He wrote and wrote,” Tenn remembered, “and then he shredded and burned. I have no idea how many reams of paper he filled with plays and stories and then destroyed. He could walk proudly and erect toward an idea, but then he flinched and fell away when he began to read it over and consider it.”

Tenn thought of the characters in his plays as being observed from a great height, and he confessed to Lillian Gish that what helped him the most in moving toward his strongest female characters was watching, over and over, those D. W. Griffith films in which his brilliant cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, risking life and limb, rose high above the sets and the actors and most of the lot, to reveal the characters, all of humanity, scrambling like ants across “this sticky plate we call Earth, soiled with our plans and our beliefs.” Tenn could close in on his female protagonist and race toward a conclusion once he could imagine the situation in which she was placed and see it, God-like, from a great height, the “seat of Fate, which carries in its cushion foresight and perspective,” and then, once we know that she seeks a rescue from the reality that keeps battering her (Blanche), love and relocation that are both forever out of her grasp (Alma), and identity that will give her a secure perch in her environment (Serafina), he could zoom in tight on the woman, allowing us to better see her place and her predicament.

William Inge, on the other hand, had no sense of distance or great height: he saw the situation in which his female characters were set in small, mincing steps “from the toaster to the sink,” as Tenn put it, from the utterly sexless twin bed to the lavatory, from the phone to the back porch where a dog was pitifully called, pudgy thighs patted in the hopes that the dog (youth, love, promise) would come bounding out of the hedge and life could return to a schedule easily managed and freckled with affection.

There were no sweeping panoramas from which we could see where Lola and Doc Delaney of Come Back, Little Sheba lived or had been or where they were headed. We discovered their biographies and their grievances and regrets at the pace one would find while reading faded, frequently folded letters, the kind that the mothers of both playwrights saved, tied with ribbon, collected, pulled from beneath beds as vindication or damning evidence. “Bill Inge’s mother referred to letters from her husband, her beaux, her children, bill collectors, as if they were Scripture,” Tenn told me. “Her placement in the world could be proven or solidified by a letter from a handsome man from 1935. She was very much like my mother, encased in a past that was both real and fantasy, a terrible mixture of what might have been, what was imagined, and what should have been given to them. Their sense of entitlement—or rather their outrage at entitlements snatched away from them—was epic, horrible, and Bill and I both grew up suffocating on this scent of rot and retribution.”

Inge was literally frozen in his actions, having been so coddled and watched over by his mother, Maude, that he had a habit of looking around for permission or physical clearance if he simply needed to rise from a chair, even if he was alone. Tenn could remember pretending to be asleep and watching Inge, in his own apartment, move with the careful steps and exaggerated quietude of a burglar or a “man made of glass, awaiting the next loud noise or powerful movement that might shatter him.” Tenn assumed he moved with such quiet agility as a courtesy to his presumed sleep, but even when preparing a meal or showing him pages of a play, he moved with an irritating slowness that tried Tenn’s patience.

Inge found drama and death in household appliances and daily toiletries. His older brother, Luther, recalled by the playwright as young and handsome and recently married, had nicked himself while shaving, introducing into his body a rare blood poisoning that took his life. Inge had desired Luther, a fact that filled him with considerable dread, even as he admitted spying on his brother as he showered and shaved. The act of watching Luther shave was Inge’s first memory of erotic pleasure, as he sat on the closed toilet seat and watched his older, naked brother at the bathroom mirror. Inge had resented Luther’s leaving the family to marry, and now he had left the earth altogether, his body a waxy off-white in the coffin, “the color of maggots,” as Inge described it to Tenn. “Bill Inge wondered his entire life if his eroticization of his brother’s shaving had infused it with some horrible and evil power,” Tenn told me, and in Inge’s novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver, he wrote what Tenn considered to be one of his most honest sentences: “Sex was as fearful as black magic to all of us.” Sex—both the act of intercourse and the pursuit and deification of various acts—had destroyed Harry Crosby, and perhaps Hart Crane. These were erotic, inverted men—amatory mentors to Inge and Tenn. Sex, therefore, had to be denied, repressed, rerouted. Little Billy Inge, as he was known, took to imitation, dressing up as a refined dowager or one of the female film stars he loved, doted on by his mother, detested by his father, held like a treasured doll by his older sister, Helene. “Performance trumped consummation,” Tenn surmised.

Tenn discovered his love of imitation, shared with his mother, Edwina, in the sickbed, as they pored over comic books, movie magazines, and gossip columns in various newspapers. “My mother would become the columnist, the film star,” Tenn remembered, “and this was extraordinary, because the films were silent. We did not know the caliber or timbre of Constance Talmadge’s voice; we could only assume that Garbo was deep-voiced. So we improvised, often attributing to a film star—say, Pola Negri or Lillian Gish—the voice of the church pianist or the girl at the grocery store with a harelip. I must say we got the voices right more often than not.”

Tenn’s fantasies were fostered in the darkness of the illnesses that visited him as a child, which he told me included scarlet fever, “virulent rashes,” and “breakdowns of nervous and digestive systems.” Tenn admitted that he welcomed, even feigned, outbreaks of illness when he dreaded school or encounters with his father, and off he would be whisked to his sickbed. “There was no threat of the radio being taken by my father in the darkness of sickness,” Tenn told me, “and my mother liked to take care of me, to get away from her own barren life by laughing and performing with me.”

Both mothers hated their husbands and resented the skimpy, hateful lives they had provided. Inge grew up in a Kansas that was becoming an oil metropolis, and Harry Ford Sinclair had become a millionaire from his investments in oil exploration, creating the famed Sinclair Oil, whose logo haunted Billy Inge: it was the wealth and the freedom he hoped for, for himself and his mother. Rumor had it that Sinclair had shot himself in the foot in order to gain an insurance settlement, which he then invested in oil. Inge and his mother fantasized about a perfectly placed bullet—in a foot or a thigh or an elbow—that might produce for them a chunk of money that would make their lives better. Or, maybe, a deadly bullet sunk into the body of the hated father, Luther Sr. The thought of this, as well as of the plans that would be necessary, would send Billy and his mother into gales of laughter, which were often silenced by the barbed statements of the intended victim.

Finances were tight in both the Inge and the Williams household. Tenn’s father never shared the bulk of his paychecks with his family, so Edwina took on a variety of “suitable and respectable” means of bringing extra funds into the house. She was also not above writing to well-off relatives for financial aid, citing illnesses that did not exist or departures from her husband, which were hoped for but had not yet been scheduled. Inge’s mother took in boarders for extra income, and she and her son obtained extra entertainment, laughing at the predilections of certain men and women who took up residence with them. Some tenants drank, others had odd eating habits and squirreled away chocolates or maple candy, which Billy and his mother would find and consume when they snooped in the rooms. Inge first encountered pornography in the bureau drawers of a male tenant. His mother snatched the pictures away from him and replaced them beneath the socks and shirts, but Inge returned and looked at the blurred black-and-white images and saw for the first time the male form in its fullness and its beauty. He would later see it in its all-too-real state of decline when he watched the man whose magazines and photographs he had purloined: he had an enormous inguinal hernia, which he would forcefully push from his groin up into its proper placement, then attach a truss, a contraption with wires and heavy laces, which he would ask Billy to help him pull tightly and into place. Inge was always aware that there was incipient “decay, decline, and disappointment” waiting to visit the body. Inge could never imagine that his own body could give another pleasure, and Tenn recalled that their times together were awkward and would never have advanced except for the fact that he became aggressive and all but demanded sex. “The exception,” Tenn recalled, “was when liquor was introduced,” at which time Bill was amorous and skillful and bold. But with the morning, and sobriety, guilt would set in, the furtive movements would return, the cat burglar would tiptoe into the bathroom, where tiles and sinks and strops and razors presaged death, where the kitchen held the prospect of odd boarders or angry encounters with his father. “His life,” Tenn told me, “his very apartment, his every step, was haunted by phantoms, bogeymen who might beat him or ask him to help him into a truss or show him pictures of naked men, or his mother, ready to dress him in her Sunday finery and put on a show. It amazes me now that he could even get up in the morning and get things done.”

Tenn and Bill liked to lie in bed naked, smoking and reading and talking. They both knew large swatches of Hart Crane by memory, and because each was influenced by films and drew inspiration from repeated viewings of those they liked, they loved this section from The Bridge:

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

Foretold to other eyes on the same screen …

“I think,” Tenn told me, “that we took this as a sign from our poet that we were not misguided in seeking comfort and impulse from the cinema.” Both of them would re-create scenes from films they had seen over and over, and they thought of films as ephemeral, burned away in an instant. In the days before television, and in cities that did not harbor a revival house or a curious university, films came and disappeared. You could often find an abbreviated and recast version of a film you’d liked on Lux Radio Theatre or Academy Award Theater, then recline in the dark, breathing in the nicotine and the musk on a lover’s neck and reveling in having Bette Davis or Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert emanating from the radio by your bed. These were among the happiest times with Bill Inge, laughing and remembering films or deconstructing plays.

“We knew that the hymen had not yet been broken on the twentieth century,” Tenn said. “Eugene O’Neill had his greatness, but he was very much of the previous century, and so many of the other plays being done were British and pale and careful, or American and written in the British style. Aborted babies encased in amber or framed in gilt. Lifeless. Here we were, a nation at war, and here we were, two queers under the influence of rebels who worshipped the sun and appetites and new ways of speaking and writing, and we were also too careful. We weren’t smart enough to blow the conventions of the theater, but I think we were creeping toward something.”

Tenn believed that the revolutions lurking within him and Bill Inge were not so much structural as emotional. You could keep your characters in the kitchen or the living room, talking things out, arguing about grocery bills and prom dresses and typing classes, but the subtext, the ground on which they all stood and argued and dreamed, was loaded with land mines and shards of glass, and every corner hid shadows and secrets. Watching Bill Inge creep around the city of St. Louis, his own apartment, his own bed, navigating his own body with apology and fear, Tenn came to see that Tom in The Glass Menagerie was a perfect blending of the two men who had found each other—frightened, hesitant queers who lost themselves in movies and booze, and could only enjoy the flesh of another man while tipsy and in the shadows of an ornate alcove of a movie theater, accompanied by the sounds of Barbara Stanwyck or Gary Cooper or the music of Miklós Rózsa. Sexual acts in balconies or alleyways managed to blur in the account ledger Tenn kept of conquests and adventures; they allowed him the pleasure of men and movies, but they failed to be real, so they failed to disappoint. He expected only a quick blast of warmth and pleasure, and then came the parting. In Hollywood, he had enjoyed the openness of his time with his Italian on Vista, but he had also known that the time was limited—he would be called away from his odd temporary assignment at MGM and have to face the work that still felt thin to him. With Bill Inge, he knew he needed to get back to work on Menagerie and make it work and salvage the reputation he felt had been soiled by the failure of Battle of Angels, but he allowed himself time to observe both Inge and his own reactions when he was with him.

“I allowed myself to be slow with him,” Tenn remembered. “I wanted to see all that there was of Bill Inge, and primarily there was fear.”

When they discussed Hart Crane, Inge obsessed over the fact that Crane was coddled and fawned over and pressed upon by his mother. Born to wealth (“They were rich in chocolate,” Tenn told me), he had no material worries, other than those his sexual desires presented. “He seemed to know at an early age that he wanted to be with men,” Tenn said, “and he knew at an early age of the risks this presented. He was ridiculed and beaten frequently.” Crane’s mother was an adherent of Christian Science, a religion that was first presented to Tenn through his study of the poet. Inge was horrified at the thought that Crane’s mother, seeking to heal her son of his desires for men and liquor, had poisoned him against his own passions by continually telling him that God had not created him in this aberrant image. There was no man but perfect man, and perfect man does not lie down with another. In notes that Tenn made for a play he was considering about Crane, he wrote of a mother physically holding her son down and asking him to deny all that he was and all that he felt. “Both of our mothers did this to us, in their way,” Tenn said, “but neither of them secured the services of God or Divine Mind to set us straight, so to speak. We were simply told to be good and respectable gentlemen, to present good and noble faces to the public. We could dress up and camp up in privacy with our mothers, but the world needed to see two men who may have been writers, but who could have passed for members of the Rotary Club.”

Tenn spent only a short time with Bill Inge in St. Louis, in that apartment of good books and posters and a Scottie dog named Lula Belle, who may have been the only creature around whom Inge felt any sense of comfort. Inge would later have to give up the dog when he moved to another locale (one not predisposed to animals), and Tenn would recall that he received calls of despair from Inge about this. “Thus was born Sheba,” Tenn said, referring to the lost dog for whom Lola Delaney pines and calls on that forlorn back porch. “Bill believed that all of his life he had been abandoned and betrayed by everyone,” Tenn continued, “but with the relinquishment of his beloved dog, he was finally a member of the betraying class.” Within all of those rooms of the houses he built for his plays, with their memories and soiled furniture and seemingly mundane daily activities that could kill, Inge now added the ghosts of pets abandoned or dead, and his characters were haunted by pillows where they once sat or felt phantom sensations on legs they had once rubbed against. “I am an obsessive person myself,” Tenn concluded, “but Bill worked the dog angle longer than was necessary, in my opinion.”

Bill Inge visited Tenn both in Chicago and in New York, to see the new shape of The Glass Menagerie and to spend more time together—in and out of bed. “He had been teaching a lot of dumb coeds,” Tenn remembered, “and writing reviews of touring productions and local dramatic societies, and his mind was becoming sclerotic.”

Openly enthusiastic about Tenn’s writing, he no longer considered him a promising playwright, but a genius, and he began to talk to Tenn about his literary future. “I was in my own particular hell with Menagerie, so I was probably dismissive. I know that I pushed Bill away, as well as his script. I just couldn’t be bothered, and I was not in a mind in which I wanted to read someone’s work and figure out how to improve it: I was trying to improve my own.” Tenn preferred that they spend lazy mornings in bed, reciting poetry. “It was an aimless, wasted time,” he recalled, “but I was happy while I was in it. It was only when he was gone that I saw that there was nothing gained from the time. It was selfish snuggling, really. I drained the little affection from Bill that he could share, and then I wanted to get back to the play. I was looking for a lover, and I got an apprentice.”

Time passes and a play, Farther Off from Heaven, is sent to Tenn. It is from Bill Inge, and it is a “sepia-toned Valentine,” a sweet and slight little play that will later become The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a family drama about overdue bills and an absent and unfaithful husband, confused adolescents, sudden death—all played out within and about a seemingly perfect midwestern home in a postcard-ready town. “But poison pulses in the blood of all the characters,” Tenn told me. “No one is to be trusted; appearances are both deceiving and wicked and carefully constructed, like the piecrusts of the worn and defeated mother. I did not care for it, but I passed it along to Audrey Wood, who passed on it.”

Wood’s rejection of the play sent Inge into a torrent of anger and depression—and voluminous drinking. “I was already myself something of a drinker,” Tenn told me, “and I was amazed with the amount of drinking he was doing.” Inge visited Tenn in New York around this time—right as Tenn was completing A Streetcar Named Desire—and “Bill was a mess.” Not only was Inge drinking heavily, but he was engaging in that “laughable series of tricks” long employed by alcoholics—frequent showers, copious quantities of the powder used in barbershops, chewing gum, and Sen-Sen—all in a vain attempt to diminish the odor of alcohol and sweat that was oozing from his pores. “He had grown flabby,” Tenn remembered, “and lined. His eyes were ancient, witness to God knows how many trials and horrors.” Tenn was now involved with Frank Merlo, but he still arranged for trysts with Inge. “I wanted the comfort I had once known with him,” Tenn said, not happy with his admission. “I wanted the warmth and the sweetness, but he was now weak and girlish and passive. He slept and he smelled and he whined.” Tenn pulled away from Inge and wondered if he would have to “suffer the sad declivity he had become” any longer.

Farther Off from Heaven found a home with Margo Jones and her theater in Dallas, creating a rift between Tenn and Jones. “Now our conversations included Bill,” Tenn said, “and I didn’t like that. I’m dying with Summer and Smoke, for instance, and Margo keeps telling me about the new play Bill is writing. I seemed incapable of transmitting to Margo how little I cared about any of this.”

The play Inge was working on was Come Back, Little Sheba, and after a production at the Westport Country Playhouse that Tenn heard about from a number of people, including Eva Le Gallienne, it came to Broadway, where it was a success. Inge had built a home of rooms full of phantoms and dangerous memories, and a couple, Lola and Doc, defeated and desiccated because they had succumbed, as we often do, to the transitory glories of youth—muscles and taut flesh and dewy faces. Romance renders us blind to all that we can lose when we fall into a bed under which rests a ticking clock and a few explosives. Babies are lost and replaced by a dog, Sheba, upon whom Lola can bestow the love that Doc now finds repellent. An impotent alcoholic, he had been forced to abandon his plans for medical school and has become a chiropractor, a trade that Tenn remembered was a notch or two above witch doctor or back-alley abortionist at the time Inge wrote his play. Doc serves the lower middle class, who often cannot pay, so he barters, coming home with poultry and vegetables and crocheted afghans. To boost their finances, Doc and Lola rent out a room to a young college student, who is pretty and bright and ambitious—a young Lola, brought right into that house to haunt and humiliate them. A boyfriend visits, and he is handsome and muscular and he can throw the javelin—long and hard and thick and strong—farther than anyone else, causing it to land in the ground with a groan and quiver. “I introduced the ambulatory penis in the form of Stanley Kowalski,” Tenn told me, “and Bill brought it onstage in the form of a piece of athletic equipment. The good-looking guy was an aside, but the talk of his arms and his javelin … well, the point was made.”

So much youth, so much sex, and the Delaney household is again full of the resentments that had been hidden beneath heavy meals, mindless chatter, alcohol, and that damned dog, which—Inge told the actress who created the part, Shirley Booth—was frequently dressed in clothes and held as if it were a baby. All masks are ripped away, and Doc drinks the sherry that Lola, in an act of simpleton cruelty, has kept in the kitchen cupboard. He lunges at her with a knife, hoping, as Inge told Tenn, “to cauterize, at long last, this cancer, this Lola, from his life, from the horrible, sagging body that once housed a brain and a soul.”

“The play worked,” Tenn admitted, sounding surprised as he said so, “and I must admit I was surprised, and not a little envious. It had never occurred to me that Bill could write, or that he would find success. I was not entirely sure how I should react, and I doubt that I did anything honorable or direct. I’m sure I felt threatened. I know that I was told I should feel threatened. So many people told me I had someone gaining on me. But I must admit that I had one primary thought as I watched that play, and as I read it several times: I had lost a sweet lover and gained a dangerous rival.”

For nearly a decade, from 1950, when Come Back, Little Sheba opened on Broadway, until 1957, when The Dark at the Top of the Stairs premiered, becoming the fourth play to be included in a volume of his collected plays, William Inge enjoyed a series of what Tenn called “seamless successes.” Tenn resented the failure of so many critics to ask tough questions of Inge, while he felt he was routinely held to a higher standard.

The film version of Sheba earned Shirley Booth both an Oscar and the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As Tenn was suffering both the failure of Camino Real and what he felt was the dismissive attitude of its director, Elia Kazan, Inge’s Picnic, which Tenn claimed to have read more than five times, offering revisions and advice—most of it unheeded—earned Inge the Pulitzer Prize and was sold to Columbia’s Harry Cohn for more than a quarter of a million dollars. The film version of the play, released in 1955, and starring William Holden and Kim Novak, was a box-office success and earned two Oscars. Bus Stop, which opened on Broadway as Picnic was still in movie theaters, was pitted against Tenn’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for most of the season’s prizes; and in 1957 Elia Kazan (“My director!” Tenn exclaimed to me) agreed to direct The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a play that Tenn, in a meeting in 1956, had told Inge to discard. (Tenn recounted all of this information as seriously as he did the mysteries of the Rosary: they were ingrained in his memory.) “That play never worked for me,” Tenn told me, “in any form at all, and I told him so. His response was to find and use Kazan, to plaster over the holes and pockmarks in the foundation and walls of that particular house he had constructed, and make it work one way or the other. I was not amused.”

When I broached this subject with Kazan, he remembered how amazed he had been at Tenn’s pettiness. “Tennessee never should have possessed for a moment any fear that any other playwright, any other writer, might have presented to him,” Kazan told me. “He felt very threatened by Inge, and I could never understand it. Bill Inge literally trembled at the thought and the presence of Tennessee. ‘Idolatry’ is the word I am most apt to use as a description, and Tennessee was very dismissive of him. He went through the script of Dark, ridiculing virtually every line and scene and pressuring me to remove myself from the production, allegedly for the sake of my reputation, but really, I think, because he saw Bill as intruding, once again, as always, on his turf.”

Elia Kazan and William Inge on the set of Splendor in the Grass (1961). Tennessee introduced the playwright to Kazan, and later envied the success the two of them shared. “I was not yet comfortable in the role of mentor,” Tennessee confessed. (illustration credit 11.2)

An article written by Robert Brustein for Harper’s magazine served as a cruel and oddly fortuitous wish fulfillment for Tenn. “It was a barbaric piece,” Tenn remembered, “and I was soon enough to suffer my own injuries by virtue of Mr. Brustein’s malicious pen, but it was the first, the only, piece that asked the questions of Bill that I had raised in our conversations. Brustein’s was the only critical piece that pointed out precisely what Bill was up to play after play, scene after scene.”

Titled “The Men-Taming Women of William Inge,” the piece opened with this salvo: “Considering the modesty—one is tempted to say the mediocrity—of his work, it is clear that the excitement over Inge has been inspired by something other than the intrinsic value of his plays.” After disemboweling Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Brustein presents his thesis: “Specifically, Inge’s basic plot line revolves around a heroine threatened either with violence or sexual aggression by a rambunctious male. Both terrified and attracted by him, she tries to escape his influence until she learns that, despite his apparent confidence, he is riddled with doubts, loneliness, and need. Once he has confessed this, he loses his ogre quality and the woman is able to domesticate him without difficulty.”

“Exactly!” Tenn said he exclaimed upon reading the piece. “Bill Inge neuters his men through the offices and the orifices of his wan women, and peace reigns in the house. The oilcloth-covered table groans with pies and roasts and the husband squeezes the waist of his good wife, soaking dishes and his truss in the kitchen slop.” Tenn boasted that his men were emasculated in a more “realistic” way, as Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending and Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth can attest, and that, as in life, the “strong and the sure, the brutal and the willful” prevail. Inge’s view, Tenn believed, was dishonest, an attempt on the part of Inge to bear witness to what had escaped him all his life: domestic harmony, a home in which he was loved, a planet, like the sun of Harry Crosby, to which he could ascend and rule, while Tenn was blunt enough to know and to reveal that what we often must face instead is the cold ocean floor of Hart Crane to find any level of release. “At all other times,” Tenn insisted, “we submit, we forbear. We do not walk lovingly into arms that fail to excite, that pin us down, that serve as fleshly straitjackets.”

As Brustein wrote of Inge, “Marriage demands, in return for its spiritual consolations, a sacrifice of the hero’s image (which is the American folk image) of maleness. He must give up his aggressiveness, his promiscuity, his bravado, his contempt for soft virtues, and his narcissistic pride in his body and attainments, and admit that he is lost in the world and needs help.”

This portion of the article was particularly apt, a deeply personal and sharp observation of how Maude Inge had raised her son to adapt and behave, “holding down her son and asking him to relinquish all of the things about a man that he either desires or is proud to possess or has earned,” Tenn explained. “His goal should be to submit to the particular insane and feminine notion of the ‘good man,’ absent any sexual pleasure or curiosity, any desire to question his place in the world or his rights among his family or his peers. I found—and I find—this repellent in his work.”

Tenn admitted that he found guilty satisfaction in the Brustein article, and in reports that Inge broke down on the phone with the critic and with friends, for whom he asked advice. “I have never sought advice when I failed,” Tenn boasted. “I have asked, as I have asked you, to find out if my work ever mattered, if what I have written ever possessed any level of importance among the people I’m sending you to look over and learn from. Never, however, has it occurred to me—nor would it—to call someone, dry-eyed or not, and ask them how I should write, ask them if I could write.”

All of the pain that William Inge experienced in the last fifteen years of his life, from the publication of the Brustein article in 1958 until his suicide in 1973, could have been avoided, Tenn believed, if only he had listened to his inner voice—and to Tenn—and written the play that Picnic was supposed to be, and deserved to be.

Originally called Front Porch, the play that came to be known as Picnic began as what Tenn described as “postcards of despair, sepia-toned, seemingly gentle, but depicting harsh realities in the so-called gentle heartland.” The women of the play, even Madge, the town’s beauty, find disappointment in their pursuits of companionship, with both men and women. “As I remember it,” Tenn told me, “you could not trust anyone, whether you were looking for a dance, a necking session, a look at last week’s homework or a cobbler recipe.” Lives of desperation were being lived in this town, and activity—butter-churning, church socials, PTA meetings, picnics, dress fittings—all served, vainly, to fill the horrible void that resided in the center of each character. The women had their pies and their gossip, their days ending in exhaustion when the radio transmission concluded and only a pop and a hiss emanated, and sleep, another diversion, came to end their day. The men boasted of financial or sexual conquests, fish caught, marriages avoided, touchdowns remembered. Bragging or charming their way through a day, the town’s frayed schedules are shattered when Hal, a “priapic construction,” enters the town. Hal’s rampant sexuality, “hovering like heat rising from asphalt,” unmoors the women, who had long forgotten the joys of a “good rutting,” and the men are threatened, their bodies turned to fat, their jowls expanded, and their hairlines in swift retreat. Madge, who shares her home with her mother—“another of Bill’s dry, tired domestic slaves”—her tomboyish sister, Millie, and a series of plump, mother-hen women who amble in and out discussing sewing patterns and the weather and the upcoming picnic and the crowning of the “Neewollah Queen” (the Halloween Queen), the pivotal social event of the town, and the event that will serve to bring the play’s characters toward their emotional conclusions. The play that Tenn read, at some point in 1952 as he remembered it, had all of the characters “missing the romantic and sexual trains they had hoped to board.” Madge and Hal do not run off together, as the town’s women help the young girl realize that he is a loser and a drifter, and nothing good would come from congress with him; Rosemary, the town’s spinster schoolteacher, fails to convince Howard, the unprepossessing salesman, to settle down with her and give her an identity different from that of old maid. The original play ended with the women scattered across the stage, one at a clothesline, another tending a garden, and Madge and her mother, deep in despair, simply looking ahead—at nothing—as the lights dimmed.

“It was brutal,” Tenn said, “but it was true, and Bill vowed that it would be the conclusion that would appear on a New York stage.” Almost immediately Inge was encouraged to give the play a happier conclusion. He had hoped to retain Harold Clurman as the play’s director, but he proved to be unavailable or uninterested. Elia Kazan was involved in a film and had already committed to Tenn’s Camino Real. Joshua Logan was then suggested, and Tenn was immediately against it. “I was never impressed with Josh Logan the man or Josh Logan the director,” Tenn told me. “He operated under the delusional notion that we were similar in nature, being Southern and queer and all, but I found his taste deplorable, and I urged Bill to find another director, even if it meant postponing the play.”

But Bill Inge did not believe in or understand postponement, and he imagined, not without some veracity, that Tenn might not have his interests at heart. Inge was not excited about Logan, whose reputation rested on musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific (which he also co-wrote and for which he won a Pulitzer Prize) and light entertainments like Mister Roberts, but he was available and was quick to move ahead with the play, even as he told Inge that it had to be rewritten. “Logan told him,” Tenn told me, “that the original ending would have the audience in an uproar. They would storm the stage! The audience must have romance, they must believe the myth that hopes are rewarded and every season brings, along with death and the rotation of crops, a new batch of love and sex to brighten the soul and the complexion.” Logan fought for the revision, and Tenn visited rehearsals at one point to see how things were faring.

And he saw Elizabeth Wilson. Cast as the town’s newest schoolteacher, Christine Schoenwalder, Wilson had a small part, but she was a “tall, shiny woman, with coal-black hair, perfect posture, and a look on her face that conveyed that she was patient with the shenanigans, but she recognized their foolishness.” As arguments raged all around her, Wilson would repair to the sidelines, taking no part in the discussions, refusing to engage with the other actors in conversations about the direction of the play.

“Bill,” Tenn said to Inge one day, “take as your role model that young actress over there,” pointing to Wilson. “Imagine yourself committed but distant; passionate but professional. Do what is right.”

Tenn offered the greatest gift he could imagine: a woman to shape and inspire Bill Inge. “I pushed a woman, a teacher, toward him, as I would have wished someone would do for me. A gift, a rope to pull me from the waters.”

Exhausted by phone calls and visits from Logan, Audrey Wood, and various producers and friends, Inge ultimately relented and had Madge follow Hal out of town, but he managed to make it a Pyrrhic victory: what would Madge gain in the company of this man? And look at the women on the porches, alone and back to canning peaches, headed for another night of restless sleep. There was the whistle of dry air across the stage as the curtain descended, but most audiences cheered that Madge “found love and release.”

“I thought the play was now silly,” Tenn said, “which of course meant it had to succeed mightily, which it did.” Tenn suffered the power of his own honesty about love and myth when his Camino Real was met with puzzlement and empty seats, while Picnic satisfied audiences for nearly five hundred performances.

Elia Kazan disagrees, however. “I think the girl has to leave town,” he said, “even if she dries up and dies in some other awful town: she has at least taken ownership of her life, has driven a stake in the ground and told the world, ‘Here I am. Let’s see what I can do.’ And in her own way, she has shaken up the town, reminding them of what love and lust can look like and accomplish. She has devastated her mother, who now has the younger daughter, who is probably destined to join the other gentle midwestern lesbians, teaching civics and gym, and whose hands and knees will ultimately give out, so that sewing is no longer possible. Hell, Madge and Hal may have to come back to the town, full of strip malls, and care for the old lady. The play is a tragedy no matter how you revise it, but I don’t know that it worked any better with the bleaker ending. But it worked. I saw it. I don’t respect it, but it worked. It was a Valentine that had fallen from a girl’s purse and been stepped on, and you could see the dusty, insensitive footprint across its lacy contours.”

Tenn’s jealousy and vehement judgments against Picnic perplexed Kazan, given that two years later, with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tenn would make changes to his own play that made those Inge made to his pale in comparison. “Tenn speaks of honest emasculation,” Kazan laughed, “but Jesus, what he did to Cat! It’s what I wanted, and I think I was right, but he acquiesced far more than Inge did. Far more.”

Bill Inge’s emasculation, both personal and professional, was a play, Tenn said, “of multiple acts and multiple attempts at mutilation,” and it required a number of instruments: alcohol, a lack of faith in himself and his talents, and a woman who would make Hart Crane’s Christian Science mother look like the girl on the Art Nouveau candy box Madge Owens was meant to be.

“Oh, Lord,” Tenn said, “I kept telling Bill to look at Elizabeth Wilson and learn from her balance and her calm, and instead he flew right into a toxic cyclone, sat himself right down on a fence of barbed wire, and waited for … I don’t know what he was waiting for, but what came couldn’t have been what anybody wanted.”

Twelve

HER NAME WAS Barbara Baxley.

It is impossible to write of her without spraying an inordinate number of literary bullets, because in the telling and the living of her life she was wild and disparate and spread about in many places. Her mind was like those cluttered desks owned by people who can nonetheless find any item you might request. Barbara’s mind was populated by years of memories, regrets, ambitions, and encounters, and they were related without regard to chronology or relevance. In the telling of her stories, Barbara would glow with happiness or rage or enlightenment. It was this quality that led Tenn to liken Barbara to the “firefly, because it flits about so mercilessly, and you’re amazed by its phosphorescence, and you wonder if the flight can be sustained.” When I asked Tenn if this reference was to Barbara’s stage work, he said that it wasn’t, for while he had the highest regard for the work she had done for him and for William Inge, he felt that her greatest performance was the one she pulled off in life.

“Barbara doesn’t want to be here, you know,” Tenn told me. “I think she turned off to life in 1973, when Bill killed himself. I think Bill took a huge piece of her with him, and I’ll never be able to let him get away with that; I’ll have a hatred for him forever because of the destruction he caused her. I know that she never loved a man as she loved Bill, and she gave herself to him indiscriminately, and he abused that. He had an intelligent, captive acolyte in Barbara, and he threw her to the ground with great force, first with his actions against her—like refusing to cast her in his plays, then refusing to marry her—and then by killing himself, which was his way of saying, ‘All your efforts were in vain. You weren’t enough to make my life worth living.’ He sought affection, not arousal, so he could ‘function’ with Barbara. He wanted to be wanted, and if he found that acceptance, he felt he was done. There was very little revision applied toward Bill’s sexual activities; he offered no rewrites or improvements or deletions. Once he felt you wanted him, he was no longer present. I think that with me he found comfort, acceptance, but it was two writers holding each other—holding each other up and holding each other in bed, music on the radio and plots coursing through our heads. Bill used to say that he hoped he’d get his resistances weakened when he was older or richer or better-known, and I finally told him that if he was really smart, he’d learn that you either have a healthy approach to sex or you don’t. I do not believe in analysis and I do not believe in miracles of the libido. Bill was career-driven, and he should have learned to love and depend on his friends more. And besides, few marriages are based on sex, anyway. The strongest ones are usually between two people who act as if they were good friends away at summer camp, sharing pocket change and suntan lotion. Barbara offered him that, as well as freedom to write and read and spend time alone, which is vital for a writer, and was mandatory for Bill. The biggest mistake of his life was in abandoning her.”

When I broached the subject of Inge with Barbara, she was surprisingly unemotional and uninvolved. She spoke candidly and unhesitatingly. When I remarked on this, she said, “Well, all the deeper feelings were buried with Bill. Now the retelling is just trivia; it’s not information about anyone I know.”

BARBARA MET INGE accidentally, and in fact she couldn’t remember exactly where the first encounter took place, but she thought that it had been at a party thrown by Lee Strasberg during the run of Come Back, Little Sheba. Barbara admired Inge and wanted to meet him, because she had liked his play, and wanted to be “in his world, his theatrical world, which I understood. I came from country people, prairie people, who used few words, worked hard, and hid a lot of secrets. Those secrets would often explode, but more often than not, they were swept under rugs of denial or alcohol or sexual outbursts. Life always returned to the pillars of the community: family, work, church. All was forgotten, or all was attempted to be forgotten.”

Barbara Baxley, seen here in the 1960 film The Savage Eye, entered into a strange triangle with Tennessee and William Inge. She was a true friend, a brilliant actress, and a woman almost diabolically driven to destroy her career and herself. (illustration credit 12.1)

Barbara also found Inge attractive, as Tenn had, and she was surprised to learn that he was a homosexual. “He looked at a woman,” Barbara remembered, “or rather, he looked at me, with so much affection and understanding. I felt a sexual attraction for him—and from him—that very first time.” Baxley and Inge began seeing each other socially and sporadically, and in 1953, after Baxley had had success replacing Jean Arthur in Peter Pan and Julie Harris in I Am a Camera, she was deemed “appropriate escort material” for Inge to openings of plays, museum outings, and, finally, his bed. “I was not frightened,” Barbara told me. “I am not someone who is shy or afraid of a challenge, and I believed that the affection I felt for Bill, which soon developed into love, would transform both of us, and everything we did together.” Baxley also imagined a fruitful partnership between playwright and actress. “I wanted us to be together for everything,” she told me. “All the way down the line. Heart. Home. Bed. Theater. Film. Death.”

Tenn noticed the pairing and gave his blessing. The awkward man and lover Tenn had known in Bill Inge would profit from finding creative and spiritual solace from a woman (as Tenn always did) along with sexual and domestic comforts (which Tenn understood were lost to him).

Inge approved Barbara as Kim Stanley’s understudy as Cherie in Bus Stop, a role she would assume many times, as Stanley had alerted both Inge and the play’s director, Harold Clurman, that she had no intention of playing the part for very long. As Barbara put it, “She would start to feel all stretched out from a part, and she was afraid of becoming ‘Little Miss Xerox,’ so she never stayed very long. Thank God for me.” Inge came to feel that Barbara brought things to the role that had been unexamined by the brilliant but mercurial Stanley. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Barbara would later say of her time in that production, “but I’d really walked into an alley that was completely blind, littered with all sorts of shit. I thought I was taking on a role that would change my career, and it did: I was immediately seen as a leading actress, not just a gifted supporting character actress or a replacement. But it came with a price, and the price was Bill.”

BARBARA BAXLEY’S FINGERPRINTS are all over The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. I was told this by Elia Kazan, who directed the play, and who saw Baxley at many of the readings and the rehearsals, and it was confirmed by Barbara, who told me that the play was “jointly autobiographical,” blending elements of both her life and those of Inge and some of his childhood neighbors. Barbara was turned down for the leading role of Cora, a hybrid of herself and her mother, because her name was not considered sufficient to sell the play: the part went to Teresa Wright. Barbara would play the role in the national tour, however, and the revisions to the play continued on the road.

“Truth is very powerful,” Barbara told me, “but it is also very elusive: It slips away, changes form. Bill and I kept feeling the truth move around and alter, and we kept getting ahead of it and improving the play. That may have been the most creative and intense time I’d ever known in the theater.”

Barbara’s immersion into the world of Bill Inge created a rift between her and Tenn, one that would continue until their collaboration on Period of Adjustment. “Tenn never liked for me to be with Bill,” Barbara said. “Tenn was very possessive with almost anyone, but he always felt that Bill had sidled into the theater not only on his coattails, but by way of his bed, his immediate sexual needs.” Inge served for Tenn several clearly delineated purposes—sexual comfort, conversation with a passionate reader and writer, the devotion of an acolyte. Tenn never imagined that Inge would become a successful playwright, and he never fully accepted it when it became a reality. “Tenn thought Bill was a dreamer,” Barbara said. “Although he was only a couple of years younger than Tenn, he was always seen as a kid, a yahoo, someone definitely beneath Tenn’s station in life and the theater.”

While Tenn had encouraged the relationship between Baxley and Inge, he was not happy when he saw that it was “taking hold.” When Tenn was told of the solidity of the affair—during the many meetings he had with Inge over the proper final act of Picnic—he was livid, then quickly became dismissive. “He thought it was a Method-actor sort of thing,” according to Barbara. “I was trying something out, and Bill was ready for someone else to lie in bed with him and listen to music and smoke and talk about literature. But I see now that Tenn felt that Bill was taking one more thing from him. I had, after all, been in Tenn’s life first.” Tenn came to resent the gift he felt he made to Inge of Barbara Baxley.

There would soon be—briefly—a Williams-Inge-Baxley triangle, as Tenn, during a brutal rehearsal period of Camino Real, again sought the comfort of his “carnal collaborator.” Tenn would visit Inge at his apartment, and Baxley on several occasions had the “horrible, bizarre” experience of leaving Tenn at the National Theatre, where she was tackling the role of Esmeralda in Camino, only to arrive at Inge’s apartment to see Tenn, in a bathrobe, sitting in the kitchen, smoking and laughing with Inge. “I was trying to be good and true in my performance as Esmeralda,” Barbara told me, “and then I was trying to be good in my performance as Bill’s lover. Both parts were impossible, unplayable, but I kept showing up, kept trying, kept getting caught up in it all.”

The meetings between Tenn and Inge came to an end, but not because of any ultimatum issued by Baxley. A pivotal and poisonous moment occurred not long after the opening night of Camino Real, a night that included not only poor reviews, but vitriolic arguments that flared between Tenn and Kazan, Tenn and Cheryl Crawford, the play’s producer, and Tenn and Baxley, who had the temerity to remind him—the playwright of a failed play—that he had sought the advice of Bill Inge for help in making his play more accessible to audiences. “Tenn had asked Bill for help,” Barbara told me. “Camino is wonderful, and I loved it. I love it still. But it was not always clear in its intentions, and it was not like anything Broadway had seen before. It was very dense, very rich. It required some knowledge of its characters. It isn’t a play you can walk into, plop down, and start watching. You have to think. Bill kept telling Tenn to put a spine in the play, some bones on which to hang the lovely pictures he had made, and Tenn took his advice and tried to make his play stronger, to give it a stronger foundation.”

Tenn took as much of Inge’s advice as he could, applied it where he thought it worked, but the play failed nonetheless. Kazan remembers a trying time with the play, but he assigned himself a great deal of its failure. “I wasn’t as present as I should have been,” he confessed. “I had a lot on my mind, and my life was as shattered and fragmented and full of hallucinatory images as Camino. I did what I could, but it was halfhearted at best. I sat in the theater on opening night, and my mind suddenly expanded with ideas on how to improve the production and the play. Too late.”

The “poisonous” moment that ended the interactions among Tenn, Inge, and Baxley was when Inge attempted to comfort Tenn. “Bill only wanted to console Tenn,” Baxley told me. “He put his arm around Tenn, and that was very bold for Bill, very unlike him, as he was not easily demonstrative. He told Tenn that things would be okay, that he was sorry it hadn’t gone well, and Tenn responded as if Bill had wrapped a serpent around his neck.” Tenn pushed Inge away

“They didn’t speak, except in brief, social occasions, for years,” Barbara told me. “And I did not try to patch things up, because, without Tenn around, Bill was a bit stronger, a bit sweeter: he was all mine. And without Bill around, Tenn could spend all of his time with Frank, as he should, because Frank loved him, wanted nothing, took nothing.”

Speaking of that time, Tenn told me that the experience of Camino Real was a “slap in the face, a comeuppance, evidence of an angry and stingy God,” who was alerting the writer to the fact that resources were limited, talent waned, and time was running out. “That was one of the first times,” Tenn confessed, “that I began to think that a trip to visit Hart Crane, deep in the Gulf, might be a pleasant vacation to book. As a writer I was perfectly dry, and I wanted to take to the waters, the permanent waters.”

“I needed William Inge very strongly after so much time with Tennessee Williams,” Barbara told me. Camino Real had made her not only hungry for, but appreciative of, “straight, clean, propulsive narrative. It is true that Bill’s work had fewer layers than Tenn’s, but it’s also true that there is immediate engagement with Bill’s work: you get it. You may hate it; you may look down on it, but you get it. You understand it. Camino was lovely and haunting, but it was like a literary vortex: you got lost; you got confused. People would tell me they were moved at scenes, and then they were abandoned and had to fight to return to the feeling they had had.”

Alone with Bill Inge, Baxley sought to give him the greatest gifts she felt she could bestow: she would give her lover herself—her entire biography and history and heart—and she would urge Bill Inge to place in it the heart, the domestic heart, of Tennessee Williams, a former lover whose affection and attention he had lost. This is how The Dark at the Top of the Stairs came to be written.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is the story of the Flood family, who are, according to Baxley, a “nice, middle-class midwestern family who are figurines, not of glass, as Tenn created, but sturdier bisque, frozen in one appropriate expression, resting on little doilies in what would seem a perfect environment, but the tables on which they rest are scarred, eaten by termites, ready to fall. Bill was really channeling Tenn, or trying to channel him. He used a spare and strong line of narrative—the one he had tried to throw out to Tenn during Camino—and he inserted it into a tender portrait of his family and mine.”

The father of the family, Rubin, loses his job as a salesman, one that provided the family with security, and which kept him on the road, jovial and grandiose and unfaithful. Rubin Flood was the absent and feared father that had dominated the lives of both Tenn and Inge, and his returns, with hugs and occasional gifts, are dreaded by the sensitive, sissy son, who is bullied by his classmates and neighbors, and welcomed by the daughter, who is coming into her own sexually and socially and loves her father, whom she sees as strong and attractive, “a force of nature,” as Barbara put it, “a literal flood, of words and emotions and feelings.” The mother of the family, Cora, is thin of emotion, voice, patience. She runs a house with efficiency but no warmth. Affection has perpetually disappointed her, either because it was never reciprocated or because it led to the children, who need her fulsomely and give her no sense of satisfaction. Cora has wealthy family members who remind her of what she could have had and could have been. Although Rubin has provided a home for his family, and always addresses their needs, if not their desires, Cora views his inability to give them “things that shine and change a person, pretty things and happy times,” as especially niggardly, a withholding of affections. Cora and Rubin no longer attempt anything but rudimentary physical contact, and their discussions are all about busted appliances, frayed rugs, and the dress their daughter will need for her first school dance. They worry about their sissy son: “Billy Inge, in every way,” Barbara pointed out, “who runs to his mother and asks for help, who would love to have the town visited by a tornado, if only to prevent the torture of Monday mornings at school, when the bullying began again.”

The Flood house, loveless, joyless, and airless, pushes the father and daughter outside of its walls for some comfort and diversion. Rubin reacquaints himself with Mavis, the town’s beautician and an alleged women of promiscuous gifts, with whom he can be “gentle and open and served”; and the daughter finds a new friend, a young Jewish boy whose mother, a famous actress, has plunked him, alone and wild with imagination, in this dry little town for his education.

Barbara Baxley was Cora Flood in that she retreated when most hurt and withdrew sex when she couldn’t face a man, but she was more fully Mavis, an open, nonjudgmental, sexually free woman who felt most comfortable affirming the prowess and the promise of her man. “You were my Mavis,” Bill Inge told Barbara, and he went to her for approval of every line the character uttered, and he tried in vain to earn the role for her in the 1960 film version. (It went, instead, to Angela Lansbury.)

The Flood home is a mortuary of memories and resentment, and it was modeled on the St. Louis apartment of Tenn’s Glass Menagerie. “It wasn’t supposed to look like the Wingfield home,” Barbara said, “but it was the same in nature, in its feel. People twirled fruitlessly in the home, dreaming, plotting to leave or to grow or to feel. The flood of emotions that are headed toward that house, to drown everyone in it, led to the family surname, and Bill wondered if ‘Wingfield’ was an ironic statement on Tom’s ability to fly away from the home, while the wingless birds—those without a dream—remain on the ground, flapping and flailing and dying.”

The writing of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was a contest for William Inge. As a boy his head had become lodged in the banister of the family staircase, and the boy and his mother and sister became panicked; the young Billy Inge screamed in terror. Rubbing his back and neck, Inge’s mother gently talked him out of his trap, all along praising him for being a “big and good boy, a little man.” “Bill always remembered that,” Barbara told me, “the day his mother told him to grow up, and let him know he could rescue himself—but only, it seems, if a woman was there to rub and console and praise him.”

Once freed, the embarrassed Inge ran up the stairs to his room. He was left undisturbed, but he remained embarrassed by the event. The play was his announcement to the world that he was no longer afraid, he no longer needed his mother to rub his head and neck and tell him he was a big boy. Like Tom Wingfield, who had to flee his mother to grow and to be himself, Bill Inge, through the writing of Dark, let his mother, Maude, go, let her return to her own dreams and plots, and he got himself out of his troubles. “He had me,” Barbara said, “so he could let go of his mother.”

As was often the case, Inge soared while Tenn fumbled. As Dark was succeeding on Broadway, Tenn had a small success off-Broadway with Garden District, an evening of two one-act plays—a smaller score. “Bill Inge was perpetually plundering my toy box,” Tenn told me, “and I was against a wall on which I could not imagine a mural and against which I could not imagine an escape.”

When the script of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was published, William Inge dedicated it to Tennessee Williams.

Tenn was not amused.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs would be William Inge’s last successful play, as well as the last one his mother would ever see or read: Maude Inge died in 1958. “The attack by Brustein, and then the death of his mother, unhinged him,” Barbara told me, “but then he grew very calm and began thinking of ways to remember her, to love her again.” Inge had lost his mother, and eternally. Tenn, however, was still alive, still in the corners of Inge’s mind. The “final act of love” Inge constructed for both Maude Inge and Tennessee Williams was A Loss of Roses.

The story of the play: It is Depression-era Kansas, where Helen and Kenny, a widowed mother and her twenty-one-year-old son, cobble together a modest living with minor jobs and major sacrifices. Kenny is attractive and hungry for sexual and intellectual adventure, seeking the former with the town’s randiest girls. Into this home arrives Lila, a former neighbor who had once done household work for Helen and Kenny, babysitting the boy, and who now visits the town with the touring company of actors she has joined. Brassy and free and funny, Lila deeply arouses Kenny, who wants to hear of her travels and who would like to sample the experience she has gained with a variety of men across the country. “This was Bill’s fantasy,” Barbara told me. “When he knew that I had slept with Marlon Brando, or any other men he found attractive, he had a greater interest in sleeping with me. He wanted to gain access to men he found attractive in whatever way he could, and that was often through me.” Kenny presented himself to the world as heterosexual, but Inge wrote him with the knowledge that he was most aroused at getting from Lila not what she offered physically but what she had experienced physically with others. “That was Bill’s religion, if you will,” Barbara told me. “He didn’t want to get God through Jesus Christ, or to be entered by Jesus, or to give his soul to something above: he wanted to be consumed by a furtively sought, fantasized sex, one that had been prayed for, hoped for, imagined.”

Kenny aggressively moves on Lila, his former babysitter, and she resists him, to a point. “Like Bill, Kenny arouses the women around him,” Barbara told me. “It’s the classic pity fuck: ‘I can help this confused man, and I do find my saving him sexually to be attractive, even if I know that it will bring me nothing but grief.’ ” As Kenny moves toward the desired Lila, he fashions a means of leaving his mother, who wants him to be independent, stand on his own, move along, but who is horrified that he has made inappropriate advances toward Lila, even as she is relieved to discover that her son has “normal” male urges.

“It is far beyond time for the son to leave that house,” Kazan told me. “It was so clearly the experience of Bill Inge and his mother: the clinging affection, the staying too long, the incongruity of a young man stuck at home with his mother, acting as a surrogate husband.” Kazan had been offered A Loss of Roses, but he rejected it, not merely because he was consumed with Tenn’s Sweet Bird of Youth and the film Wild River, but because he couldn’t imagine a coherent theatrical shape for the play, and he couldn’t conceive of coaxing Inge to tell the play’s whole truth. “He gave us this dinky, dime-store Oedipal story,” Kazan continued, “and it comes at you with the delicacy of a train. The real story—of the play Bill wanted to write, and of the life Bill had led—is that the boy is queer. This terrifies the mother and it intrigues Lila, the tent-show actress who has not only had her honor and her body sullied, but who is drawn to the only people in her circus world who have ever shown her any sensitivity—the queers, the freaks. I would have been interested in a play that had this boy—in the middle of a truly unique and intense circle—pulled and coddled from these two very different women, both of whom had raised him and were now trying to raise him up toward manhood. Instead, we get a horny little stud who, for reasons that no one can accept, is at home with Mommy, henpecked, docile, horny after dinner.”

Inge set the play in the Depression, in Kansas, because that was the time he recalled with his mother, dreaming of finding riches, of escaping the dry, flat land and the corrosive attentions of “the father-husband monster,” the name Inge had applied to Luther Inge. Kenny tries to be both son and provider to his mother, and when he is feeling strongest, when he has begun to make sexual advances toward Lila, he presents his mother with an expensive watch, for which he has laboriously saved: it is a replacement for a watch given to her by her late husband, and the mother refuses it. “Bill never loved or understood his father,” according to Barbara, “and all he could ultimately give him was money, which he did. There was some rapprochement between the idea of his father and himself when he stepped in and began to care for Maude, when he metaphorically turned to his father and announced, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ Bill always loved The Glass Menagerie, but he hated that only Tom gets away, only Tom leaves the suffocating apartment and the mother’s past. Bill decided that in Roses, everyone finds their freedom. This does not mean they find happiness: Bill always maintained—as did Tenn—that it is a myth that freedom means happiness. It doesn’t. It usually means that you’re now free to make colossal mistakes, ruin your own life in your own style and on your own time—but you’re free. Bill was not going to leave Helen and Lila—as Tom had left Amanda and Laura—in the dark, literally and metaphorically.”

At the conclusion of A Loss of Roses, Kenny realizes it is folly to pursue a life with Lila, but it is equally impossible to live in the house with his mother. He leaves to begin his own life, with whatever sexual roles he is most comfortable playing. Helen, free for the first time in her life of domestic obligations, may become a new person, or she may drift away entirely. Lila, offered employment that may include blue movies and stag shows, leaves the town and the sweet boy who made her feel like both a lady and an instrument of sexual pleasure. On her way out of the neighborhood where she once lived, she sees a young girl heading for the local school, with a bunch of roses in her hand, a gift for the teacher. Lila recalls that she had once taken roses to her grade-school teacher, and later in the day, sharing this experience with classmates, she had been punished and humiliated by the teacher. Hurt by this action, Lila had wanted her roses back: she felt the gift had been voided. “That was crafty,” Kazan said. “Roses are symbols of purity and innocence and romantic intention. If they are red, they can be symbols of womanhood, menstruation, fecundity. Rose also happens to be the name of Tennessee’s poor sister, who, when she expressed herself—wildly, crazily—was lobotomized. Lila gives of herself, gives the roses, and that is her purity and her innocence and her sweetness, but when she speaks out, when she is most herself, she is slapped down, silenced. Not lobotomized, but traumatized.”

Barbara urged Bill to include some sort of homage, in any way he could manage, to Luther Inge, and so Kenny learns, as he is trying to replace and remove from memory the dead and distant father, that his father had died saving his life. “There was too much compressed in too little a space of time,” Kazan told me. “The boy learns he cannot have Lila or his mother; he decides he should get out on his own; his mother rejects and resents the boy’s attempts to push the father out of memory, and is told that he was actually something of a saint, saving the kid and losing his own life; and then they all bravely face their bleak futures. Great issues and great themes, but presented in an inferior way.”

The inclusion of a subplot concerning the father—seen initially as unlovable, but actually the victim of a loving and risky act—was another effort on the part of William Inge to tackle something of which Tenn felt incapable: love for his father. “That was the hardest part of the play,” Barbara told me. “Bill always knew that Tenn had forced himself to love or to understand his mother in The Glass Menagerie, and Bill hoped to achieve the same dramatic and personal release with this tribute. It wasn’t fully realized in the play because Bill couldn’t fully deal with it.”

Herbert Machiz, who had directed some of Tenn’s off-Broadway works, was approached and did not respond. Even Joshua Logan, with whom Inge had tense relations and for whom he had little respect, was approached. He, too, turned it down. Ultimately, Barbara suggested Daniel Mann, who had done well by Inge with both stage and screen versions of Come Back, Little Sheba, and by Tenn with The Rose Tattoo. There was no question of casting: Inge had written Lila for Barbara Baxley, and he had written Helen for Shirley Booth, with whom he had forged a tender, if not close, relationship during Sheba. For the role of Kenny, it was Kazan, through the urging of Stella Adler, who recommended a young actor named Warren Beatty. “I remember Stella’s words to this day,” Barbara told me. “ ‘He’s smart and he’s stunning and you’ll believe that these two women—along with all the women in the town—are fighting for some time with him.’ ”

Mann, however, was a poor choice to direct, because, according to Kazan, “he wasn’t a terribly good director, which is a detriment to begin with, but he also could only build on something good. He had no ability at all to reshape a play, to shift focus, to talk to a playwright and coerce him to alter something that wasn’t working. He was a passive director: he showed up and followed the lead, generally a female star. You can’t go too terribly wrong when Shirley Booth or Anna Magnani [whom he directed in the film version of The Rose Tattoo] or Maureen Stapleton is the focus. Those women directed whatever had Danny Mann’s name plastered on it. He was a gofer with a DGA membership.”

Daniel Mann also did not care for Barbara Baxley, and flatly refused to cast her as Lila, a part that had been written for her. “He had heard I was difficult,” Barbara said, “and I thought, ‘Well, okay, so much for my suggesting him for the job. We’ll just get another director.’ ” That did not happen. To everyone’s amazement, Bill Inge agreed with Mann and told Baxley that he “was going another way.”

“I was devastated,” said Barbara, “and that ended my relationship with Bill for a number of years. I had been aware of his many weaknesses over the years, but I always believed—stupidly—that he would stand up for me, defend me.”

Carol Haney, a singer and dancer who had won a Tony Award for her role in The Pajama Game, and who had begun a career as a director and choreographer, was chosen to play the role. “That was ludicrous,” Tenn told me, “because she became a cartoon. It was like when Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows would play a femme fatale. You would fall out of your seat laughing, and that’s what happened with Haney. She was a sexless beanpole of a girl, and every line became a laugh line. There was no sexual tension, and I would have thought Warren Beatty could look at a credenza and force it to lubricate. There was nothing with Haney.”

Shirley Booth came to hate her part, which she realized, correctly, was a supporting role, and she quit when the play was rehearsing out of town. She was replaced with Betty Field, touted as a “William Inge actress” because of her roles in the film versions of Picnic and Bus Stop; but whatever allure or appeal Field had possessed in the days when her husband Elmer Rice had written Dream Girl for her were gone. Suitably fat and tired for the role of Helen, she was unfocused, inaudible, and unable to understand her character.

A Loss of Roses closed in less than a month, but turned a profit nonetheless, thanks to a film sale. (The film, renamed The Stripper, would star Joanne Woodward and be released in 1963.) Warren Beatty earned a Tony nomination for his performance as Kenny—a triumph of “priapic appeal,” according to Tenn.

Alone on opening night, Inge wrote a letter to Tenn, begging forgiveness (“For what I could never surmise,” said Tenn) and alluding to the prepared and examined death they had discussed so many years ago. Tenn offered no reply, in any form, to the letter.

“Life is so odd,” Tenn told me. “I only came to be reconciled with Bill Inge through failure and tragedy. Failure and tragedy and friendship—our odd Holy Trinity.”

Inge now lived in California, having renounced New York, where, he claimed, there was the scent of failure on every corner, and deception in the eyes of everyone he saw. California had brought him the success he thought he wanted: he earned an Oscar for his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, directed by Kazan, and he bragged to friends that young actors circled around him for advice, stories, affirmation. Inge lived at 1440 Oriole Drive, in the Hollywood Hills, what he called “the bird street,” a residential homage to Tenn, who was forever known as “Bird” or, to Inge, “the Glorious Bird.” The address might bring him luck, he thought, an amulet via address to tap into the greater talents of his friend; but his writing was torturous, and his drinking became, as Tenn put it, “Olympian, outrageous.” “He tried to dry out,” Baxley told me. “He went to fat farms and health clinics and took vitamins and tried to walk around California. He could always give a regimen about two weeks, and then he would go on a bender that was stronger than the last.”

“There was a period of time,” Tenn explained to me, “when Bill and I compared battle scars, which is to say, we talked about our failures, and we came to a level of understanding and comfort that was close to what we had when we first met.”

Inge would rethink and reshape A Loss of Roses, Natural Affection, and Where’s Daddy?, while Tenn would mount defenses for the quality inherent in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Slapstick Tragedy, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. “What we had, I now see,” Tenn said, “was a Rosary of failures, and if we had had some beads to work, we certainly would have, expanding characters, hiring new directors, altering dialogue. In our phone calls and in meetings we had, we imagined our lives as successful writers and fully integrated people.”

When Tenn and Inge got together, they would repair to the bedroom, lying “on bed” talking, holding each other. There was no longer even a pretense of romance, only of comfort, and there was a feeling, this time, that a final watch was in effect: they were no longer the young, dreaming writers with Mallarmé quotes on the wall or Harry Crosby’s fiery sun to look to for inspiration. “This was a sweet form of Extreme Unction,” Tenn said, “final rites for our talents and for our friendship, but we were back to the old days, and I told Barbara to do the same when she went to visit him. ‘Just hold him. Talk to him. Treat him like a writer. Tell him the failures were some sort of mistake, not his fault.’ This was, of course, what I was also telling people to say to me as well.”

William Inge began to write novels: They were met with mixed reviews, and he attempted suicide. “If I can’t write any longer,” he told Tenn, “why do anything any longer, like live?” Inge’s sister, Helene, was sent for and moved into his house. Inge had turned to mysticism, religion, the occult. One spirit diviner contacted his long-dead and much-loved brother; another his mother, who told him she was appalled at the condition in which he was keeping his home. “Was that all she said?” Tenn asked. “Yes,” Inge replied. “Mother always told me I never took care of my things.”

Inge threw some runes for Tenn to divine his own future. It was not good. “Somehow my future included an alphabet that was missing several vital letters,” Tenn said. “I never could figure out how Bill got this from a velvet bag of little blocks, but it felt as genuine as anything else I was consulting at the time.”

Both writers investigated Catholicism at the same time, with Tenn ultimately converting to his own design of the Roman faith, while Bill found comfort in the prayers and the ritual. Ultimately, Inge would claim comfort from a faith that was described to him by Tenn after an encounter with Anne Sexton.

Sexton, a poet of “sensitive and suicidal intent,” as Tenn put it, had come to his attention through Robert Lowell, who told Tenn that she was a strong but dangerous talent. “He added that I was such a thing myself,” Tenn told me, “so I felt compelled to read her work, which I found fascinating. She had managed to tap into the same fears and self-hatreds I understood so well. We both loved music, and we both hated to be too close to anyone. She loved me, or said she did, so something of a relationship was established.”

In 1969 Sexton was working on her first—and only—play, Mercy Street. She sent Tenn the script, asking for his advice on any revisions he thought necessary. Tenn read the play and admired it, envied what he called its “epic scope and chilling fatality.” Tenn made no notes, even though Sexton had requested them: all she got was his praise, both for the text and for the decision to cast Marian Seldes (“my wise and tender servant”) in the role based on Sexton. Told by Tenn to adhere to Seldes, Sexton did so, wearing a pair of shoes given to her by the actress, which cushioned her feet against the Manhattan sidewalks, watching her every move, even imitating her speech patterns. Tenn even told her they looked like sisters: tall, raven-haired, pale, like “a duo of seers from medieval vaudeville.”

Tenn became obsessed with Sexton’s poetry, and he called the poet at her home in Massachusetts several times, telling her he was looking for peace or God or some comfort. Sexton told him he would be better off taking the advice of her therapist, who said that God, whatever that was, was deep in her typewriter. “And so,” Tenn told me, “I went to my machine, my deus ex machina every day, looking for God. I was typing toward God.” Tenn urged Bill Inge to search for the same God in the same way.

Tenn took copies of Sexton’s books to Inge and read them to him on his cluttered bed, the drapes drawn, traffic on Sunset Boulevard sounding as if it were hundreds of miles away. The central air-conditioning hummed. Bill Inge survived on soft food and televised sermons. “I wanted to tell him stories when there had been a future for us,” Tenn said, “because we both wanted to know if we still had a future, if we still could dream and write and matter.” The stories were told in the language of Anne Sexton, “severe and strained and seared into the mind and on the page.” Although the room was dark and no reflections were available, Tenn asked his friend to imagine bouncing lights on the ceiling, and to each one he should attach a thought, drop a memory. ‘Look upward and latch on to whatever happy memory or need arises.’ This activity lulled Bill Inge into sleep. The next day, according to Tenn, Inge had scribbled some notes on a pad for a play that was based on their conversations of the previous evening. Tenn was enraged by the notes, and he destroyed them not long after he discovered them. He left abruptly and would never see William Inge again.

Back in New York, Tenn began writing a play about his “shattered” friends Bill Inge and Anne Sexton. “For so many years, I had resented the competition that had been brought to me by Bill. I loved and wanted and needed the comfort he brought instead, and I failed to understand that the competition from his plays grew stronger and asked the same questions I had. I see now a large and golden bed—golden by the memories that are happy and remind me that we were once young and time was an ally, and by the ministrations of a Jo Mielziner who is not dead but ready to cast one of his lemony sunsets on a bad memory—and Bill and I are there and songs of our time are playing on a radio that can’t be taken from us by our bad actions or our misguided erotic affections. We speak of plays and novels and paintings and stories told. We both understand that stories are what get us up in the morning and to sleep at night. Myth and fable and the simple story of a woman who has a breakdown making a grocery list; myth and legend and the image of a young man attempting to outrun an imagined team of athletes, hoping for a victory on the field. He’s trying to outrun the truth and the power of his feelings, and the only victory, he realizes, late in the game, is death or a life suspended in lies of action or of liquid. Alcohol builds for us an amber gel into which we can submerge our minds, but our minds fight the action, like the kittens the lady down the street used to place in burlap sacks, stuffing them into garbage pails of warm water, drowning them, keeping the yards and the streets clean, and the children screaming. The truth wants to win.

“And a woman—Anne Sexton, tall and dark and serious—walks through that window with the billowing curtains, and on the street below, happier cats roam and mewl. She is fine with the image of two male lovers relaxing, and asks for a cigarette. She sits and smokes deeply. ‘Time is wasting,’ she reminds the men. ‘There won’t be much more time for nights like this.’

“Anne Sexton walks into my dreams now, as she walked into my life in the late sixties, a dead decade, when my brain had been submerged in amber, my limbs on a course of action separate from that for which my brain had arranged an itinerary. Sexton never doubted my talent, never doubted the worth of what I might be trying to do. She only doubted the ability we had to stay on the job, to endure the rigors of our employment, to keep marshaling our puny endowments to keep providing the poems and the plays.

“ ‘We have our limits,’ she always told me. ‘We run against and away from the limits.’ But the limbs don’t always work, and to get the mind working, I need liquor and pills and powders and help from the saints and the legends who lived before us. What should I do?

“As she did in Manhattan in 1969, Anne Sexton tells me—and a slumbering Bill Inge—the same things in that timeless dream: ‘I don’t believe in looking so high. There’s nothing up or out there that can help us. We’re earthbound now, and there is help right here, right now. Not for me, but for you.’ ”

“I LOOK BACK NOW,” Tenn said, “and I remember that on that bed, in that cold, dark room, Bill and I were both men—queer men—who spent our lives creating the perfect woman—or perfect women—who would make us whole and happy and operational. This is true in both our work as writers and as men.” What the two men kept seeing in imagined reflections on the ceiling, what the dropped memories revealed, were women—those kind women who had supported and inspired them all their lives. There was no hope in money or awards or production of a play, but a female friend, a soft shoulder, a kind voice, embraces Tenn called “the rescue in the dark night with a mother’s cool palm,” was what they most wanted. Tenn recalled nights in that room when he and Inge exchanged recipes for the ideal woman: If Edwina Williams could not give Tenn warmth and unconditional love, he would find it with Maureen Stapleton or Marian Seldes or Elizabeth Ashley; if he needed someone to champion his work without “daggers of doubt,” he would call on Stella Adler, Eva Le Gallienne. Inge replaced Maude Inge with Eileen Heckart and Barbara Baxley and Elizabeth Wilson—strong women who would fight off his bullies and keep him safe, get him back to work, tell him he was loved, a “good boy.” All through the night they added quarters and halves of certain women, until they might get the formula right.

“The construction of the ideal woman, either from flesh or the fog, is what I do,” Tenn said, “and I came to see that it was also what Bill did.” Tenn realized, he confessed, that Inge had been—could have been—his soul mate, the male friend he felt he was never able to cultivate or endure.

“Wisdom arriving late is particularly brutal,” Tenn told me.

IN THE SUMMER of 1973, Tenn discovered again the joys and the benefits of cocaine, and he consumed a great deal of it as he tried to write and as he watched the televised hearings concerning the Watergate scandal and the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. “I was unable,” he told me, “to know what was real that summer of 1973. I kept confusing my play with the Watergate hearings, and conversations with friends with the testimonies of various pudgy men at that green, felt-covered table, with cocklike microphones sticking up in their faces. I came to believe that Mo Dean was the manifestation of Wallace Stevens’s emperor of ice cream, although she had whipped-cream hair, a sort of clitoral baked Alaska. I had dinner with Harold Clurman one night and could not tell if he was the man who had once directed my plays or Senator Sam Ervin. I kept asking Clurman questions about Watergate, about Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and he ultimately left, something for which I do not blame him at all.”

It was during this time that both Barbara Baxley and Maureen Stapleton called Tenn to tell him that Bill Inge had entered a “terminal” phase. Inge was constantly drunk, seriously abusing pills. His sister, Helene, informed Tenn that there were hundreds of pills underneath her brother’s mattress. Tenn agreed to call his friend, in the hope of steering him off an obvious suicide course.

“We talked for a long time,” Tenn told me. “I wasn’t as high as I usually was. I talked to him about writers who might help him, who might inspire him to find the God in his own typewriter. I quoted to him from Joan Didion, who had the lapidary toughness we both loved and could never accomplish. I would read sentences from Play It as It Lays and show him how marvelous they were. I would describe how the paragraphs were broken up, how the words looked against the page. I read to him—from books and from memory—Bill Goyen’s The House of Breath. I reminded him of the majesty and the mystery of Goyen’s people, of how surprised we could still be by ourselves and others.” Tenn attempted several other calls to Bill Inge, but he wouldn’t come to the phone. Tenn would speak to Helene, and he would hear Bill’s labored breathing in the background, listening on an extension, the inevitable click when he hung up, and he would wonder what Bill was up to. Regretting that he had destroyed Bill’s notes for a play, Tenn tried to re-create them. He imagined making them a gift to his friend, so he wrote, under the manic snowiness of cocaine, a fast version of what he had remembered.

Tenn was unable to type fast enough: William Inge committed suicide on June 10, 1973, stumbling out to his garage, climbing into his immaculate and rarely used car, and turning on the engine. Inge had always been a nervous driver—his passengers never felt comfortable being in a car with him. His novel My Son Is a Splendid Driver held a title that was ironic to his friends.

Tenn wondered if his friend found, in that car, at long last, the comfort and peace that he always believed a prepared and examined death would bring. “I wondered,” Tenn said, “if he thought of all the teasing he had endured, all the misunderstandings, all the gifts he had offered and that had gone begging for a loving recipient, and I hoped that he could let it all go, perfumed by carbon monoxide, falling into a deep and final sleep.” One of the notes Inge had made for his play had read: “My final comfortable place will be one in which my mind will contain no memories except of being held and hugged and pulled up and away from harm. Everything else will fall away.”

Tenn returned to New York and to a writing table that contained two piles of pale judgment: typing paper and cocaine. He would write and snort in marathon sessions. On or near July 4th, friends became worried about him and called to see how he was doing. Maureen Stapleton tells me that his words flew from his mouth so quickly that she had no idea what he was saying. She urged him to lay off the drugs, drink some coffee, and watch some TV. “And I got my ass over there from wherever I was supposed to be,” she told me. “I did what we always did for each other: dropped everything and went to see about my crazy friend.” Stapleton fed him coffee and Chinese food “to soak up the poisons,” and they turned on the television. “It was a fucking double feature,” Stapleton told me. “Picnic, of course, which, because of the timing, made us cry like babies. I saw so much in that film that I had never seen and will never see again, and Tenn and I were basket cases.” The second film was The Music Man, and “it saved us. We could laugh and live again. That musical was a world that Bill Inge wanted to join, but didn’t really understand. Bill Inge’s Harold Hill would have been fucking his mother and wearing ladies’ panties, and the women of the town, led by Hermione Gingold, would have been eating schoolchildren. Tenn and I watched the movie knowing the underside of it, and it saved us.”

Stapleton stayed the night, boiling coffee and throwing out cocaine. “The plumbing was paranoid and jumpy,” she quipped, “but Tenn began to calm down.” Stapleton got into bed with Tenn and they began, once again, to talk things out. At one point Tenn began to cry and Stapleton cradled him. Tenn was asking, over and over, “Who will take care of Tennessee now?” Tenn asked it repeatedly, and just as often Stapleton would reply, “Baby, I have no fucking idea, but I’m here now.”

Tenn returned to his typewriter “occasionally visited by God,” and took breaks to watch the never-ending saga of Watergate. He was joined in the watching, via phone, by Carrie Nye and Kate Reid, who were filming Maxim Gorky’s Enemies in upstate New York, where they often refused to report to the set during good moments of testimony. At one point, while working on a poem that had come to him in a dream, he phoned Anne Sexton to read it to her.

“She was polite but without praise,” Tenn told me. “She told me what was good about it, but that was only about a quarter of it. I told her I would throw it out and start over, even as it killed me to do so. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘but that’s being a poet. Gutting and sewing up and smiling through the shit.’ ”

The Watergate hearings came to an end. Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency in August of 1974. Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, assuring the citizenry that “our long national nightmare is over.” Tenn liked the quote and wrote it down, for the title of either a play or a poem or a short story. He thought he should call Sexton and ask her what she thought.

On October 4, 1974, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s fur coat and walked out to her garage and got into her not-so-immaculate car and turned on the engine. Tenn liked to think that the mother’s coat smelled of Arpège or Norman Norell or Bellodgia, to soften the thick but welcoming smell of carbon monoxide. “I hope she felt that the coat was her mother’s arms,” Tenn told me. “I hope that, like Bill, she went with ease and a sense of peace.”

Thinking of William Inge and Anne Sexton in New Orleans with me, Tenn came up with an idea for a poem. He dictated the following, in fits and starts, over several hours, to me:

So tell me, if you can, if you will, is there peace?

In the deep or the dark, wherever you ran,

Is what we wanted and needed there? To own, sense, or lease?

I would follow you—think of it—will if I can.

Somewhere—in my memory, of course—is a noisy café, full of smoke and laughter

And questions that find a reply—gifts that find a happy recipient.

All of us sought answers in machines and medicines,

Not trusting people or the God who had hastily created them,

Who made them empty, if occasionally pretty and useful.

We found comfort in beds that held no sex, in which nothing would be born

But resentment. If we couldn’t be held in bed by a lover, we could be held by a story.

I have a new story now, one I wish I could share with you, but you ran ahead of me

As you often did. In my story there are tomorrows with no fear and typewriters that

Are full of Gods and extra letters, to help us tell our side of things, to reach out and

Fill up all these people we keep meeting and losing.

I hope you’re full now, your stories complete and neatly typed and indexed with the

endings you craved, wrapped in your mother’s arms or sitting by the sink,

Heart and life expanding, the blood on the tiles innocent and pure, so unlike your thoughts.

This café will have music soon, I think, and the instruments will always sound out the clearest

notes, the purest tones. There is celebration in the air, for all that you did and all that you left behind. The sound is faint now, considerate for your slumber, your need for quiet, but the sound will grow, a party will begin, and you’ll join us, and you’ll be welcomed, and you will join the sound of the music with your voices.

This is whatever it is. Notes. Thoughts. A poem.

It is not, and never will be, a farewell.

When Tenn had finished the poem, I asked him what I should do with it. He asked that I give it to Barbara Baxley, if and when I ever met her.

Thirteen

TENN WAS a different person after discussing Bill Inge: organized, focused, hurried. I would not know until many years later that he had returned to his hotel room and made a phone call, deep in the night, to Elia Kazan, to share some ideas about Camino Real, to score some points. Tenn was scratching at scabs, digging in what Kazan called “the dirt of that garden we had neglected so long ago.” Kazan had been critical of Tenn in that call, lamenting his wasting of time, the blurred thinking, the failure of faith, and he told his friend to leave him alone, to get back to work.

Tenn handed me a small piece of paper on which was written: “Intention is the hard, straight line on which you should be walking. Let it lead you where it wants to.”

I read the note, twice, and then looked to Tenn for an explanation. He then handed me several sheets of paper on which he had crafted a family tree of characters.

The tree of characters was populated with the names of actresses we had already discussed, and whose names I had scribbled on the menu from our lunch that first day. In the middle of the tree, straddling it somewhat, I saw my name and Tenn’s. Mine was followed by a question mark.

“I no longer know where this is going,” Tenn told me, and since the statement was made as he gestured toward the cluttered shopping bag, I wasn’t sure if he was referring to a particular project, our course of action, or his life as a writer.

“I’m alone now,” he explained, and he soon made it clear that he meant in his current hotel room, which no longer housed the person, never named, with whom he had traveled to New Orleans. It was the first time I learned that during our discussions across the city, someone had sat, somewhere, waiting for his return; and since Tenn had arrived each morning with examples of writing or descriptions of calls made to various people at all hours, there could not have been much interaction or discussion between them. Nonetheless, Tenn described this person, a young man, a writer, as a distraction and a nuisance, who needed to “sort out his own things, in his own way—something I could say for both of us as well.”

Our time together was now limited, Tenn explained. He had been writing all night, and he learned that his work could not continue with his given inventory. His mind seemed to him now to have grown smaller, poorly maintained. As people age and are moved to smaller, tighter, ignored spaces, one can find an armoire, a night table, a chair—emblems of the house they had once lived in fully, happily. These pieces of furniture, still beautiful, vintage and proud, stood next to the bedpan and the hospital bed and the plastic flowers from the inattentive front desk of the hospice in which they now sat. “This is my theater,” Tenn told me, savagely slapping his forehead. “It is dark and dusty and it is no longer in the beautiful building, but housed in some small, dark artery, dusty and ignored. But good pieces are still scattered about.” The good pieces were not chairs or desks but characters, women looking for a writer to help them out of their predicament, to give them voice, to get the fog rolling.

One of the first pages to come out of Tenn’s shopping bag was an outline of sorts, jagged and fast, of a memoir he now hoped to write. Tenn had published his memoirs only a few years prior to our meeting. I had read them and we had hurriedly discussed them. It was not a book of which he was proud; it was an effort he had avoided, rushed through, skimmed over, and forgotten about. He had not been honest in the book, not fully, and he had not marshaled his talents and his thoughts toward its completion. “It was a project created to give me momentum,” he admitted, “to allow me to continue as a writer, to inject myself into the flow of things, to be noticed.” The book was full of anecdotes of what he had done and what he had thought, but he now wanted to write a book that would be, as his notes attested, “a document of the elements that made me write and made me want to share my thoughts and my fears with others. A testament to the people who led me to the act of writing and allowed me to complete it.”

In the margins were references to the house at Coliseum and Constantinople, the balconies of Royal Street, the stage directions of Summer and Smoke, the days and nights spent with Lillian Gish and on the soft shoulders of streets high above Los Angeles. Tenn was, in his thoughts, in his words, and in his notes, continually circling the same locations, the same people, the same themes.

“I’m drowning,” he confessed, “and I know that. I know there’s a reason that I keep returning to those memories, those points of departure, but I don’t know what it is. I can’t progress from the memories and the notes and the dreams, all of which give me hope and that intense warmth and brackish recognition that I know precede the truth of things.”

Tenn paused for a moment, fingering the pages in the bag.

“I’ve approached this terribly,” he told me. “Entirely inappropriate. I’ve wandered. I have not been truthful. I want to try another method, another project.”

I did not understand what the new project would be, or the method needed to complete it. I did not ask for clarification.

The name that took the top position on the tree of characters, Tenn’s family of function, was that of Geraldine Page, an actress to whom Tenn had made numerous references, but who had always been pushed aside, saved for later, when time and energy might be more abundant. Page, like Tenn, had a history in Missouri, a state and a mind-set that both had escaped and that both reflected upon with the same mixture of humor and embarrassment.

Born in a city called Kirksville in 1924, Page always quipped to Tenn that it was full of churches and crayons—that was her primary memory. Like another rustic yet supernal actress—Lois Smith—Page found her first outlet as an actress in a church, finding her greed for the attention and for more and more lines to learn in direct opposition to the humility and grace she was supposed to search and yearn for within the walls of what she called a “square and stark and solid” building. Thirteen years younger than Tenn, Page was the “little sister of the dramatic arts” to the older playwright, and if he didn’t always trust her opinions and her intentions off the stage (she could be niggardly with her affections and her opinions, and she burned off boring situations and people like an athlete burns off fat), Tenn never failed to ask her how things were operating on the stage, both with plays in which she starred and with those he would beg her to read. Page, in a fashion similar to that employed by Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, had an ability to shift the focus of a play toward its leading female character, and as with Taylor, this was not done in an attempt to garnish all of the attention or the acclaim. “She recognized that the women I had written into my plays, and which I had asked her to play, were the center of the play, the scaffolding of the building I had constructed,” Tenn told me. “So she always made sure that the intentions grew from her, radiated from her position.”

Tenn crafted a statement (as he titled it) for me to present to Page, in the hopes that she would read or hear it and then call on Tenn to write for her, or she might call to recommend some means of improving himself. This is what Tenn wrote:

She has the mind of a writer, which is, I assure you, the highest compliment I could pay her. She was also unafraid of honesty or silence, two things I always think of when I think of her. She didn’t need approval or find comfort in silly talk or empty conversations that bond people together: She came to work and to work well. She wore herself out. Shaw writes something in his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, I think, that always makes me think of Gerry: “Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.” Gerry used everything, and she was not afraid to ask everyone around her to use everything as well. She had an understanding of why we were all gathered together to create theater that I have only found in perhaps two or three other people. She did not take a lot of things seriously, but she certainly took her work seriously, and she took herself seriously in the ruthless pursuit of getting her work to the highest level of accomplishment.

Geraldine Page is a great actress. That is not a statement one makes freely. It wasn’t that she simply had talent—everyone has some bit of talent, a speck of something sparkly—she had a genius, a maddening intellect that came with a supernatural vision—of people and things. She pushed me. We argued. We worked it out. She made me a better writer and she made my plays better plays. Friendship? I wouldn’t say so: I don’t think of leaning on Gerry’s shoulder or calling her up in the middle of the night for comfort and a few laughs. But I would call her—and I have called her—to remind me of why we do this, why we matter, why we have to get it right.

Geraldine Page is all about getting it right, and just above that goal is getting it brilliant, which she does. A solitary genius.

When Page read the notes, she snorted, look stunned, smiled softly at me. “I tried to be a friend to Tennessee,” she told me. “I really did, but there was always a thick wall around him, defenses and artifice and deflections. Maybe that’s what I also have; maybe that’s what he’s talking about. I will say that I thought I was being a friend when he called me, when he sought me out, but I was never enough: I could never give him what he needed, and what he needed was ludicrous, because he wanted a simple answer or a simple method to get himself together and to work and to mean something to people. And there is no simple way. There is no one way!”

Page noticed a quote from Oscar Wilde in the upper-right-hand corner of his notes: “She lives the poetry she cannot write.” “Why is that here?” she asked.

I told her that Tennessee had struggled to recall this quote as he spoke of her, an actress he certainly adored, but a woman he never came to understand. “I’m a dreamer,” he told me. “I anticipate events, emotions, outcomes, and I am always disappointed. Gerry does not dream until a task is at hand, and she dreams with the assistance of a writer and a director and a design crew, so her dreams find manifestation, even if she is never satisfied with the final presentation. I could learn so much from her. I haven’t learned yet to not dream of or for anything unless it is directly related to work, to survival, to getting by. The people in our daily midst are not deserving of our dreams. We must be like Gerry and walk and move and take care of daily events, but we must not commit to these activities our priceless ability to transform through a dream.”

“I have no idea what he means,” Page confessed. “I think that we dream precisely to work and to survive, but I also think we dream too much. Tennessee dreamed too much. The dreams took over. It is, I suppose, what we must do initially: dream. We dream our way into a fantasy and we dream our way out of whatever town or situation or identity we found at birth, and we craft a new one. When we craft a way out and a way forward, the dreamer is replaced, I guess, by the worker, the craftsman.

Geraldine Page in the 1961 film version of Summer and Smoke, much as she first appeared to Tennessee a decade earlier in the off-Broadway production of the play. Page was intense, driven, and, in Tennessee’s words, “obsessive about working and observing.” (illustration credit 13.1)

“When I get a script, the dreams of the writer are a gift to me, to open and unravel and play with. I don’t dream when I act—I guess I expect a lot, I work toward a lot, but I do not imagine or dream an outcome or a reaction. What I try to do instead is take the writer’s dream—like with Tennessee’s work—and meld it with images and feelings I’ve noticed throughout my life. Maybe I’m melding the dreams of the writer with the waking, walking dream of life to create a part. Who knows what people are thinking about when they walk around or do their daily chores? Is that dreaming? Hoping? Expecting?

“But you see, dreaming is a negative thing, in a way, and I think Tennessee’s dreaming—that lifelong plunge into darkness—was a negative thing. Dreams come when we’re asleep or unconscious or drugged or near death. We see white light and dead friends and relatives in a sort of dream when the brain recedes. It’s very poetic, but it’s not a state in which I care to work. I need all of my senses when I’m working. I need to remember and to be alive and afraid and able to edit and censor and evaluate. There’s an age to dream, and I’m past that. So was Tennessee. So are you. The dreams are the first act, I guess. The overture. And the work begins. One should always be beginning to work. And then you allow others to dream.”

Page came to Tenn through the ministrations of José Quintero, who had been assigned to direct the revival of Summer and Smoke, a reclamation of Tenn’s play, a rebuke to the failure that had been presented on Broadway by Margo Jones, whose affections Tenn now rejected, and who had been pushed to the mental sidelines. “Tennessee had a particularly sharp ability to remove from his line of vision, and from his thoughts, anyone who had, in his opinion, failed to serve his theatrical aspirations,” Quintero told me. “The revival of Summer and Smoke had a cloud over it, of revenge and of settling scores. Tennessee was determined to show audiences and critics that it was a play that worked, that it was a fine piece of literature, that it could move people. These were points he reiterated over and over, after which he would tell me—in clear terms—that these wonderful attributes had been degraded by the limitations and prejudices of the director. I had very little trust handed to me by Tennessee during our time on Summer and Smoke. I don’t think that he appreciated—and certainly never acknowledged—my contributions to the play until the reviews were in and the play was well-received, and this is, of course, ludicrous. Tennessee could trust an actress, a designer, a composer simply on the basis of how their contributions made him feel. He would point to his heart and tell me that the primary critic—that bruised and knowing heart—had passed the crucial judgment. He did not extend the same courtesy, by way of his heart, to his directors—certainly not to me, not at that time.”

Given that he did not trust Quintero, whose work was largely unknown to him, Tenn did not approve initially of his casting choice for the role of Alma, a woman who, more than Blanche DuBois, was a reflection of the playwright’s “errant and hungry heart.”

“It has become a sort of concrete truth that I am Blanche,” Tenn said, “but I am much more like Alma, peeking through actual and metaphysical curtains, spying on the things I want to love and to feel and to have, but afraid to get much farther than the porch. My porch is the stage, I suppose, or the pale judgment, where I can place stage directions and characters and move them about in a fashion that is more to my liking than those presented by my limitations and my fears. Blanche, I suppose, is Alma after years of denial and needs unfurnished. Blanche is Alma beyond that porch, the lacy curtains through which she has peered now tied about her head, a mantilla she will tell people came from some nobleman from Barcelona who had hoped to marry her. We lie when we cannot love, when we are not loved. Alma has learned only to lie to herself, to keep believing that she is worthy of love, that she may one day possess it. Her delusions have not taken root in the land beneath her feet.”

Tenn wanted an actress of great strength who could also convey the ethereal and “spiritual nobility” of Alma Winemiller, and Geraldine Page, an actress who had spent most of her professional time on stages outside of New York, did not seem ideal for this purpose. “Geraldine burned with intelligence, with concentration,” Quintero remembered. “This is a quality that she had even at that age, at that stage of her development, and it was very disconcerting when it was not in the service of a character. It could create the appearance of arrogance or coldness. I came to know and to love her very much, so I could see what she was actually thinking or doing, but I think that when I presented her to Tennessee, he looked at her as a temporary diversion before we got back to seriously casting the part.”

Tenn recalled the first meeting with Page as one in which she interviewed him; she dominated the conversation. Quintero confirmed this, but added that Tenn’s passivity may have been born out of his conviction that she would never play the part, and that he was simply briefly entertaining the curiosity of a rube. “She was very sharp, of mind and of feature,” Tenn told me. “She was almost violently scrubbed, very pale, almost bleached looking.” Page arrived wearing no makeup, not because she had begun to imagine the physical characteristics of Alma Winemiller, but because it was simply not her style to dress up and powder down. As she told me, “I wanted to come to Tennessee as a blank slate. I wanted him to look at me and ask me to become whatever he wanted, and I would have, and I could have. I can glow or show any particular emotion you might need, but I had no interest, and still have no interest, in smearing on makeup and scent and certain clothes to show you a character. That’s not character; that’s costuming. I walked in there as an actress, ready to work.”

Geraldine Page had only recently celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday when she met with Tennessee Williams, but he recalled that she could have been fifteen or she could have been forty. She arrived with her hair pulled back from her face and fastened into a bun, which was appropriate for Tenn’s concept of Alma, but as the conversation progressed, Page’s hair, shiny and brown and abundant, fell to her shoulders and she ran her fingers through it, both nervously and flirtatiously; she lashed it about like a whip; put strands of it in her mouth and chewed; she draped a shank of it over her eyes as if in embarrassment. “She seemed to orchestrate her oddness,” Tenn told me. “She did not present herself to me as an attractive woman, but as she spoke and as she explained herself and her understanding of the play, her features changed, the color rose in her cheeks, her mouth might shift from a sneer to a ravishing smile.”

Page possessed hands that never sat in her lap or stood still. They flew like speed-injected doves across her face, up in the air, over her mouth, which seemed to be the orifice from which some truth was always likely to emerge. “I focused on her mouth and her chin,” Tenn told me. “She seemed to be terribly self-conscious of her mouth, but her teeth were fine—she was not hiding some dental catastrophe. Her smile could be lovely or it could be too strong, almost demented in its demonstration. Her hands were lovely. They reminded me of a porcelain box that had once rested on my mother’s dressing table: a jewelry box on top of which rested these lovely porcelain hands, clasped together in resignation or prayer or death—I never knew. Geraldine Page had those hands, and she kept them in flight, all about her, energy and diversion.”

Quintero laughed at the description of Page’s hands. “Someone somewhere is writing a dissertation at some wonderful drama school on Geraldine Page’s hands,” he quipped. “I know from directing her and from being her friend that her hands were the instruments that she felt kept her from pursuing things both good and bad. If she was harboring some negative thought about something, you would find her pressing her fingers into her forehead or her temples, to suppress or push away the thoughts. If she sat on the edge of an opinion she might regret expressing, she would place her hand over her mouth, to keep it housed where it couldn’t hurt anyone.”

Page also became embarrassed when praised or aroused or exhilarated, and she grew flushed and would bring her hands over her face, to hide her delight and to defuse any criticism or examination that her joy might invite. “I never felt comfortable showing my pleasure,” Page told me. “I thought it unseemly, and I thought I would be criticized.”

Both José Quintero and Lee Strasberg, with whom Page studied at the Actors Studio, would instruct her to control her hands, with Strasberg going so far as to tie them, with rope, to either her sides or a chair. (The story varies, and when I met Page she refused to discuss Lee Strasberg at all.) “I wanted her face and her intentions to show,” Quintero told me. “The story was always in Geraldine’s face. It was also in her hands, but I wanted her to combine all of her methods of storytelling, all of her limbs, to become the great actress I knew, even then, that she was.”

But on that day when Geraldine Page first met Tennessee Williams, she had no control over her body or her hair or her hands, and as the meeting progressed, and Page’s hair and blouse and demeanor altered and loosened and moved about, Tenn came to see that she could be Alma. “She asked the right questions,” Tenn remembered. “There was no waste of time, or energy, or intelligence. She cut right to the point. She begged for nothing.”

When I read those words to Page, more than three years after Tenn had given them to me, she cut me off and said, forcefully, “I never begged for anything, except piano lessons, which my parents couldn’t afford. I got the lessons and I loved them, but I did not become a pianist; I never conquered that instrument or the world of music. I learned not to beg. Never beg for anything. Earn it. Demand it. Seek it. Never beg for it. You see, I knew I was meant to be Alma. I knew I was meant to play those parts. I knew that it was my time. I had to trust that people would see that. But I didn’t beg. I never, ever begged. What I’m trying to say is that nothing was ever given to me, and nothing that really matters in the world ever is. You earn it in that special time of your life when everything combines to make you prove yourself.”

That day in 1952, when Geraldine Page met Tennessee Williams, was that special time of her life, and she admitted that she was not terribly shy or polite about making it work out to her satisfaction.

From the notes in Tenn’s shopping bag:

There is a place to which I once had swift and easy access. This is not a geographical location, but a psychic one, I suppose. It swirls with memory and a generous if not always healthy need to share these memories. I do not understand how I came to possess so much extraneous thought and fear, but it drags me away from this place to which I would like to return.

Several lines were crossed out, to the point that I couldn’t read them, and then the thread continued.

Just jump, my brain tells me. Take the thought, take the intention, and place it on the page, share it, see what happens. But my heart is full of fear, and I hold back. What if? What if? Years ago this was the question in classes, and actors asked “What if?” and imagined things “as if” and found new dimensions to their work and to themselves. Here I am, old and stiff and afraid, and I need that flexibility and forcefulness that I envy in so many others. I need to develop an intolerance for fear. I need to stop wasting my time on the edge of writing and caring and simply do both of those things. I had no fear once about testing the tolerance of others with what I had witnessed, and now I’m afraid to even discuss my hopes with an aspirant with whom I walk and talk and write in circles. We dream and we hope and we bring nothing to the page or to the point.

This was the first time I had seen myself mentioned in the notes Tenn made during our time together. Later in the notes, after stating his desire to return to discipline and intention, Tenn writes of his phone call with Elia Kazan:

He was right, of course. It is time to get back to work and back to the point. I was brought back to the memories and the examples of the people who had made me want to write, and I held them as beads in prayer, but Gadg was right to note that I had earned the beads, and I had them and I could use them, but I had also acquired a barnacle on my boat, and travel was now impossible. I’m weighed down by many things, and some of them may be permanent impositions, but some I can cast off quickly and painlessly and get back to the pale judgment.

It is in my best interests now to leave New Orleans.

I never said anything to Tenn about these particular notes, and I chose to believe that there was no malice or regret in what he wrote. I returned the notes to him and we resumed our conversations. Our talks now were focused and frenzied. Tenn was very clearly on a deadline.

“Do you remember when we discussed the stage directions to Summer and Smoke?” Tenn asked me. We were in a room at the Royal Orleans, one that had clearly not been housing him for very long: there were no clothes in the closet; the soaps in the bathroom were still wrapped; other than a pile of folders on the television set, every surface was pristine. A portable typewriter, installed by a bellman, sat on a folding table, which Tenn immediately moved within inches of the television set. The day was hot and the room was air-conditioned to an Arctic degree and the room service was swift and obsequious. I found the notes and read them back to Tenn.

“I was really trying to bring Geraldine back into my consciousness,” he explained. “The stage directions were important, and they clarified my intention, but I really wanted Gerry in the room, in my mind, moving me toward the work.”

Tenn thought of Geraldine Page as the finest, sharpest needle, capable of piercing any fabric and creating any number of patterns. I thought I had heard him say this of another actress in another context, but I took the notes and I listened.

“The play is a pattern,” he continued, “a pattern by Simplicity or McCall’s, and the actress cuts and shapes the crisp paper of the pattern and attaches it to the fabrics, and the fabric is all that she brings to the part. It is her life and her experience and her unique take on all that passes before her. Read that back to me.”

I read it back to him.

Tenn handed me several folded pieces of paper. “Type those notes when you get a chance,” he told me. “It’s television work.” The work was not toward some play for television, but observations he had made of things recently seen on TV—“sparks,” he called them, material for the fog.

I found last night, in an episode of Hazel, in the gait of Shirley Booth, the intention of Amanda Wingfield. [Booth had assumed the role of Amanda on CBS Playhouse some fifteen years prior to this note, but Tenn claimed no memory of that production.]

The voice of Polly Holliday is the voice of so many aunts and fine ladies of my childhood, joined in guilds and societies and secrets and resentments, and I could follow her to a resolution.

I can endow, if I wish, the theater and the work I create for the theater, with the power and the love I once held for it.

I put the notes aside and turned to Tenn, who was snapping his fingers at me.

“Do you have the notes on the Mexican artists?” Tenn asked me. “The ones I studied for Camino Real?” I reached into my backpack and found the notes and I read them to Tenn. When I was finished, he paused, thought, then looked at me.

“I think there might be a way,” he said, slowly and seriously, “that we can apply all of that to a play for Geraldine. Or a memoir.”

Geraldine Page had read Summer and Smoke several times before she met with Tenn to discuss the possibility of playing Alma. Page admitted to José Quintero that she had seen the Broadway production twice, cringing each time at what she called its “lost possibilities.” My time with Page was severely limited, lasting less than half an hour, and it took place backstage at the Promenade Theater on the Upper West Side, where she was appearing in Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind. I was in New York for only a few days, catching some plays and seeing some friends and beginning to craft plans to move to the city. I saw the play and, when it was over, asked a theater staff member where I might wait to see Miss Page. The young man nonchalantly waved me toward a door in the lobby, and once I opened the door I was face-to-face with Geraldine Page, still in costume, preparing to head to her dressing room, and a bit startled at my sudden arrival. I told her that I had met Tennessee Williams three years earlier and that I had something from him that I wanted to read to her. Page’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline and she let out a gruff laugh, but she looked around for some chairs for us and she sat and looked at me, her demeanor sending forth the message “Proceed.” She put one of her expressive hands under her chin and she stared at me. I got about two sentences into the notes Tenn had dictated to me about her when she suddenly and viciously grabbed the page from my hand. “I’ll read it myself!” she said, but I saw that she was crying, was terribly moved, and as she read, her hand found mine and she caressed it. Over and over as she read, she said, “Why? Why?” She finished reading and looked at me and began talking, telling me her reactions to what Tenn had said and what she thought I needed to know.

I could not write anything down as she spoke, because she never let go of my hand.

Geraldine Page was an accumulator of ideas and images and memories, and she often joked that her mind was as cluttered as her home, and both were stuffed with interesting and loved and rare things. Page hated inactivity, idle minds or chatter, conversations for which there was no point or theme or purpose. Tenn thought that she possessed, along with Marian Seldes, one of the strongest obsessions with time he had ever encountered, but Quintero disagreed with that assessment. “She wasn’t obsessed with time running out, or time having its way with her,” he told me, “but she did believe that every single thing, every moment, should serve toward some bigger purpose, so she was prone to asking a room of people what they were up to, and really mean it, and really want an answer. You could have drinks and talk about things, but the conversation needed to be, had to be, intelligent and open and about something.”

She had no patience or sympathy for unintelligent, unexamined people or situations, and in that first encounter, Page let Tenn know that Summer and Smoke, on Broadway, had been two of her least favorite things: thoughtless and unclear. “And I agreed with her,” Tenn told me. Page admired Tenn’s extensive stage directions in the play’s script, and she marveled at his use of language. “Trust me,” she told me, “I knew all about Alma—as much as I could at that age. But I felt that Tennessee was acting as both the writer and the director of his play. I came to feel this way even more as I read more of his plays, but I tried to let him know that what made Alma was entirely here”—she pointed to her heart—“and here,” as she pointed to her head. “It’s not in her hands or her hair or the color of her dress or the way she holds her prayer book. There was so much projection and labeling in both the script and the direction of that play. It couldn’t breathe. It didn’t move. It was so cloudy and heavy and thick with symbolism and ‘meaning’ that you lost the whole thing.”

Quintero and Page formed a partnership of sorts, because both believed in the play and lamented the abuse it had endured in its initial production, and both saw in it the potential to showcase their talents. “That play allowed us both to grow as artists,” Quintero told me, “and we both knew that would happen when we pursued it. We had both looked at the Margo Jones production slack-jawed with shock. It was a very bad stock production, and I began to think of casting it properly and directing it almost immediately. When I found Geraldine, I knew precisely how the production would look and sound and be received.”

From Tenn’s notes on Page:

She suffered nothing except the insult and negligence that is attached to all matters of love and attraction. She had no fear of beginning, of jumping off where she should, over and over, to get to where she needed to be. I would like to emulate her in her impatience with delusion. I delude myself all the time, still, and it offers me no reward. I do not believe that she ever saw the benefit of delusion, and so never suffered its various harms.

Nearly every actress I came to meet in the course of finding the people who had mattered to Tennessee Williams would ask who else was on the list, who else was on that menu from the Court of Two Sisters. They wanted to know what Tennessee had said about them, about the other talent in the arena, and they did not wait to share their own opinions of those named. The exception was Geraldine Page. She did not ask for names or the comments of others, and she did not care to hear how I had come to the Promenade Theater to find her. She responded immediately to what I had brought her and sought to help me find out something about the writer with whom I had spent time; and yet she, more than any other actress in Tenn’s index of follies, was the one others wished to discuss, jumped to praise, tried to understand.

Page’s talent has been described in a variety of ingenious ways. Her work on a part has been compared to photography, in which the tray of chemicals is the play or the various intentions of the playwright, the director, and the designers, and the photographic paper is the actress, who surrenders to the liquid and a sharp image magically and suddenly appears. Her emotional intensity has been compared to a singer capable of holding a particular note for an astonishingly long time, leaving an audience on edge, wondering if the artist can survive such a commitment, then marveling when the note ends and a new note is pursued, held, conquered. Her impossibly high standards of conduct and creativity have led her to be compared to any number of wild and ferocious animals, the female of said species all too eager to maim or kill those who would trespass on her grounds or usurp her authority.

After studying numerous film stars, including Bette Davis and one of Tennessee’s favorites, Ruth Chatterton, Geraldine Page felt comfortable in applying the armor she needed to become Alexandra Del Lago of Sweet Bird of Youth, in both the 1959 play and the 1962 film, for which she sat for this photograph. (illustration credit 13.2)

“Her ego was wrapped securely in getting the part right and serving the playwright,” Elia Kazan told me. “I respected that about her and I thought very highly of her gifts, but I did not find her easy or terribly inspiring when we worked together on Sweet Bird of Youth.” He found her courteous and professional, but also set in her ways. “She knew the character of the Princess before we ever had a rehearsal. She understood her emotionally; she knew where the scars were and how the heart operated and what the eyes saw and did not see. All of that was set, and all of that was, for the most part, true and correct to the play. She only lacked confidence in her appearance, in her movement. She did not believe herself to be beautiful or to have the composure—or should I say ‘comportment’?—of a movie star, of a grand lady who got what she wanted.”

Tenn was helpful in that regard, describing the physical movements of the actresses “born to drama and convinced that the world had been brought into existence to ease their passage toward perfumed comfort,” and showed her how they moved. Tenn’s time with Tallulah Bankhead and Miriam Hopkins showed him how nearsighted actresses, too vain to be seen wearing eyeglasses, sidled against men or railings or walls to wend their way about town or a party or a premiere. “Their confidence was such that they did not hesitate one bit,” Tenn remembered. Their creamy beauty and smooth transitions would lead them wherever they must go, and it was irrelevant that they had no idea whom they were passing. Their importance was so great that they would be sought out, as they always were. Tenn stood with Page and showed her the walk, slightly somnambulistic, slow, sure. “I always thought of what Geraldine did with her walk to be Lillian Gish by way of Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel right through to John Everett Millais’s great painting Ophelia,” he laughed, remembering that Page listened to his references, then waved him away. “Tennessee always gave too much too quickly and too indiscriminately,” she remembered. “His ideas were fulsome and rich and perfect, but he had no concept of how I might be working or thinking or feeling, and he would just pile on all of this stuff. He couldn’t understand that I—or any other actress—might want to discover some things on our own. We weren’t there solely to emulate images or visions he had entertained.”

Kazan took Page’s natural impatience and told her to use it to convey the imperious rush that surrounded all of Alexandra Del Lago’s activities. “She literally jumped, as if with joy, when I gave her that direction,” Kazan remembered. “It was so perfect and immediate and it altered her performance. Blind and beautiful and willful and in a hurry. Seeking to be sated at all times. I think that may have been all that I said to her in that production. The rest was hair, lips, dresses, sounds. I had to show her how to yelp in a way that was sexy rather than shrill. Everything else was some sort of covenant between her and Tennessee.”

“One doesn’t teach Geraldine Page anything,” Tenn told me. “You do your work and you are aware that she is observing you. She picks and studies and ponders what you do and what you didn’t do and comes away with an idea or a philosophy or the knowledge of something, but she doesn’t share it with you, unless it can be transmitted through a part, unless she can show you through a gesture or an act she has imagined for a character.”

“I do not like to talk,” Page told me, as if to explain her reticence at my questions, even though she gave me her address and her phone number and asked me to call her as I progressed with whatever it was this project might turn into. “You have to hold on to what you have and what you’ve picked up,” she explained. “I was never one to talk about what I’d done or seen. I guess I never thought anyone cared what I thought about things, and I came to believe, as I think most shy and solitary people do, that things increased in value if they were hidden and kept in a special place and brought out at special times. I mean, you don’t put up a wreath or a tree until it’s Christmas, and you’re presumably celebrating something big and important. It means something when the tree goes up and the candles are lit and people are in the house. You do something like that every Tuesday and it soon comes to mean nothing. It’s a joke or some desperate act of a sick mind to hold on to all the Christmases of the world and time. I feel that way about memories or images or experiences: they have their place and their time, and our responsibility toward them is to keep them special and to use them well. All I have, really, to bring to a role is that history of experience, those stories.”

Tenn wrote in his notes:

In a box I have all of these snapshots of my life, old, sepia-toned photographs and newer, stiffer instant photographs of parties with friends I’ve often forgotten. In another box I have old toys and ornaments that can transport me to Missouri or Mississippi or Louisiana, to 1923 or 1937 or 1943. There is an album on which one can find “Little Brown Jug” and I play this song on this album and I can smell citrus and remember a cool breeze rising up a hill full of lupine. There is a crocheted doily made by my mother and I can look at the thread and remember her hands moving as she made it, and I hold it in my hand and here is my mother and what year is it? Here is a spool of thread, almost used up, old, worthless, but I took this spool of thread with me thinking that it could be unraveled and hold me to a place where I did not always find love, but where I always felt somewhat wise in searching for it.

Geraldine Page made Tenn aware of thread, an artistic thread that connected all artists. “I suppose it runs through all of us,” he told me, “and from this psychic fabric we create what we create when we create it. It is husbanded by us, shared by us. We often abuse it; we far more frequently craft it into and onto items that hold no shape or offer any comfort, so we pull it apart again and wait for a receptive fabric or canvas into which we can press it. Again and again. Over and over.”

Tenn had me read these notes, both scribbled and typed, several times, asking me to edit and revise sentences as I went along. “What I want to impress on you,” he told me, “is the need to husband your talent, which is housed in such a fragile and fickle vessel. We destroy ourselves every day, and then we rebuild. Some of us can survive this damage and use it to some good effect—through work or sympathy or charity or awareness. I do not have this ability, and my failure to be a good steward of my talent led to many clashes with Geraldine, who is a fearsome guardian of her work, of her mental theater, from which emerge her characters, which are crafted from something I can only call majestic. Hers is a titanic talent; her vision is frightening—I don’t think that I could withstand being in its line for very long. She has an intellect that I would match against that of anyone else in the world, and it is attached to a talent that is something like a ton of dynamite bearing a one-inch wick. It explodes frequently and beautifully, and it is lethal to be stupid in its path.”

Writers, Tenn explained, “create scratches on pieces of paper. We hope and we dream. We try to locate those moments in our life when things happened and we were left stranded and stunned and wondering and asking ‘Why?’ To these scratches some people bring blood and flesh and perfume picked up from having stood in places long enough to catch an essence, a memory, of life. Geraldine Page poured blood and flesh into my pages—and the pages of others—and left me wondering ‘Why?’ ”

Tenn asked me to type up his notes, and I began working on the typewriter he had borrowed. The ribbon was new and it blurred and several keys stuck, so typing was slow and tortured, and the table on which the machine sat wobbled as I continued. Tenn remarked that it was growing late; it was time for dinner. Perhaps room service should be called. I did not know if he intended to include me in his plans, but he had me look at the menu for what I might want. He was aware of my surprise, because he told me that although it was late, he had other things to say about Geraldine Page, and he wanted me to stay and handle those notes.

Tenn spoke into the night about Page’s performances. “If I knew how,” he told me, “if I had the gifts of the greatest magicians or sages or warlocks, I would wish that I could transport you to the theaters all over the world in which I’ve seen the great performances.”

On an index card stuck into the corner of Tenn’s bureau mirror was typed the following: “The most exquisite prayer in the world is the memory of beauty, of art created and shared in space and air and time in which we lived, for a moment, within its reach.” It was attributed to Luchino Visconti, with whom Tenn had worked on the film Senso, whom Tenn had loved, and to whom he had made one of his desperate phone calls, in the supernal hours, alone and mad, looking for a release, a reason to continue.

“Visconti gave me back my life more times than I can recall,” Tenn told me. “He was the first artist I ever encountered who was also regal, both of carriage and of ancestry. Visconti had a nobility in his pursuit of art that I’ve never encountered in anyone else. An emulation of him would serve as a great line of intention to place at your feet. His passions—for life, for work, for people, for spirits—were large and grand and generous, but they never got him away from his purposes. When I was at my most desperate—in person, by phone, by wire, by letter—he always calmly put me back into the position of postulant, talking about experiences we’ve shared, the prayer of art: The nights with Pasolini. Callas onstage. Laurette Taylor. Jean Cocteau. Jean Renoir. E. M. Forster. I told him of the actresses I’d shared air with—women with whom he’d never shared proximity.”

Luchino Visconti, stage and film director with whom Tennessee had what he called a “close and sweet relationship.” Visconti taught Tennessee how to analyze his characters—from their place of birth to their dialect to the style of shoes they might wear. “No one was safe around him,” Tennessee said. “He saw through every layer a person might have.” (illustration credit 13.3)

Tenn described for Visconti (and for me) the sight of Geraldine Page, in a play called Mid-Summer, arriving home late in the evening, exhausted, her face and ankles bulging from weight and fatigue and despair, her eyes blurry, the lid of one eye twitching, an alabaster hand rising to hold it down, keep it still. The woman is met by her children, who are happy to see her home from work and bearing food. The children tear into the food, ripping apart bread and meat and fruit, and the mother laughs and sighs, her hand over her heart, her lips clamped tight to ward off tears. She needs and wants the food, but her maternal instinct, her large and savage heart, recognize the need to share, so she gives it to her children, who then clamber off to bed, sated, calmed for one more day, assured of survival; and Page, as this mother, looks into the empty bag, sniffs it, imagines what might have been eaten, looks off into the distance, and the scene ends.

“I cannot tell you the name of that play’s writer,” Tenn told me. (Her name was Vina Delmar, and the director was Paul Crabtree; both are as lost to the rubble of time as the theater, the Vanderbilt, in which the play ran.) “I cannot even tell much about the rest of the play, these poor people in a hotel room at the turn of the century. But I can tell you about Geraldine Page’s posture and her voice and the strangled cry she stifled when she was sad when she couldn’t be, and which she let out when she needed to get something that might mean another hour of life, such as it was.”

Tenn had believed that actors were incapable of thought in their acting, that perhaps they were discouraged from displaying this action in their work. American actors, he felt, demonstrated, indicated, spoke, moved, and all intentions, all motivations, all desires had been worked out prior to performance—in study with an acting coach, perhaps, or in discussions with a therapist. Nothing, however, appeared to Tenn to happen in real time in that shared space. This began to change for him with Taylor in The Glass Menagerie, where one saw a woman range from deliquescence to giddiness to machination to panicked improvisation in a matter of minutes. It happened again with Brando in Streetcar—a human being caught in all the gaudy abundance of his being. “Marlon never did anything physical twice,” Tenn told me. “He let his body sweat and move as nature chose on that stage, and he hitched or removed his shirt accordingly. He scratched where it itched, in that time, in that moment. He wiped real sweat off of his brow in real time, regardless of where he was in the script. He dragged life and thought onto that stage.”

No one, however, in Tenn’s estimation, brought the process of thought and intention to the stage as Geraldine Page did.

“I wrote a play called Summer and Smoke,” Tenn told me. “I endured a production of that play in 1948, knew every word, comma, semicolon, exclamation point. And yet what I saw on the stage was alien to me, strange, unfelt. I did not recognize that play in the flat badness with which it was presented. When it was done again, almost four years later, I still knew every word, comma, semicolon, exclamation point, and I fought to have each and every one of them properly emphasized and retained. I fought to have some semblance of my vision retained in that tiny space downtown. I fought with José to assure the truth of the play. I was there, is what I’m trying to say, and yet all the times I watched that play, from a seat, from the back of the theater, from behind a pillar, in the company of an usher, it came to me new over and over. What I think Geraldine did was to subsume my own fears and fantasies of life and sex and self-destruction and shove them into her own skin and mannerisms, and then she played with them—which is to say, she responded in ways that were appropriate for the reactions or incentives she was given onstage each night. There was nothing frozen or rigid about her work: she understood that Alma, that all people, may operate from the same fears and patterns each day, but each day calls for a new means of pursuit, of preying, of getting what you need.”

There was the memory of Page endowing the actor playing John with so astounding an ability of arousal that the audience became uncomfortably complicit in her unsound pursuit of him. “Tenn wanted to know how she did that,” Quintero told me. “He wanted to know if she looked at the actor and imagined cocks sticking out of every pore on his body, and Geraldine was horrified at that thought: She understood that there was power in sex, that we needed sex, but she also knew that it’s not enough to just want a man; it’s not enough to want some physical action. The need extends beyond the act of sex. It’s the fulfillment of a great and longstanding lack, so Geraldine looked at John and imagined that he had the heart or the kidney or the lung she would need to live throughout the week. The words and the actions of the play indicated that the need was sexual and emotional, but there was not, to Geraldine’s thinking, any great way of portraying that, so she took it higher. Alma’s full, total survival depended on John and what he could give her. Alma’s pact at the conclusion of the play—and, later, in the film—was a sad and puny one: she would submit to the mere physicality of a union with a man, and maybe he was simply cock and form and function, and it was chilling to see Alma on that level. You recognized her demotion from crazed romantic to avaricious victim.”

Tenn had once described to Visconti, late into a Roman night, the effect of watching a young and pliant and joyously sexual James Dean dancing and swaying, clad in a robe and bearing scissors, taunting an unyielding yet clearly amused and intrigued Geraldine Page, her back hard but her eyes eagerly taking in the boy’s body. The play was The Immoralist, based on the novel by André Gide; and to the play’s director, Daniel Mann, Page described, from her reading of Gide’s work, a religion of male beauty to which she nightly converted and submitted. When she looked at James Dean on that stage, he was her God, his body her Eucharist, and her soul empty and ready to be filled with his gifts. Offstage she found Dean to be gifted but silly, undisciplined, and spoiled.

Visconti asked Tenn to demonstrate the dance performed by Dean, as well as the reactions of Page, and he later incorporated elements of this re-creation into his film The Damned, in which Helmut Berger bandies his male beauty about like a new toy, which some find captivating and playful and others as dangerous as the impending Nazism that presses down on the film’s characters.

Tenn had me write on three index cards the names Luchino Visconti and Lee Strasberg and Kim Stanley. I wedged them into the mirror of his bureau, and was told that they would crop up later, “if needed.”

“Geraldine Page suffered no one outside the confines of her own home,” Tenn believed. “Her nature was soft and passive in social and professional situations. She was not one to make scenes; she tended to drift away, to move onto other subjects and other people. She shifted focus, and anyone who bored or angered or threatened her was suddenly relegated to an area where no harm could come to her.” Maureen Stapleton referred to Page as the “gauzy ghost,” a woman whose soul seemingly left her body when she no longer felt the need to be present. When I mentioned this to Page in our meeting, she laughed, and that hand went over her mouth, her characteristic gesture when she felt she had been found out. “I wish I could be bolder with people,” she confessed, “but I’m not the type of person who can announce that I’m unhappy or furious or tapped out. I always think it’s better to get away. I never felt I had to announce my absence. I think my absences spoke for themselves.”

Fourteen

“THIS NARRATIVE,” Tenn wrote in those pages he left behind in the hotel room, “what I call my fog, which I need to see rolling across my boards again, comes only to those who dream it into existence, who need it, who honor it. Any narrative that has found a home in my mental theater has been a literary orphan, and I gave it a home. One needs to be a suitable recipient of the narrative, the fog. I am no longer suitable to receive. Am I, to quote Paul Tillich, too proud to receive? Or have I debased the dreaming part of myself? Find the places where I once dreamed. Take young eyes and fear nothing.”

Tenn had written next to this passage the name Joan Didion, and farther down he wrote that

streets and counties and trees and winding roads deep in the pines of Mississippi belong forever to Faulkner; any map of Hawaii has among its arteries the memories and the experiences of James Jones; the street on which I stood high in the Hollywood Hills holds my memory of standing there and feeling young and on the verge of not only a city of dreams and possibilities and beauty, but a play about loving home and leaving home, and that city belongs to Joan Didion now. They have dreamed the strongest about those places, and those places belong to them, respond to them, produce for them.

My places were emotional, primarily. I wrote of locales in which I had lived, or in which I imagined I could live, but the topography was primal and sexual and terminal. It bore no distinct architecture or design or dialect. It was merely human and in peril, which is to say universal. But on Royal and Coliseum and Vista—streets I cannot relinquish—I found my places and I dreamed a narrative. Can I go there and find it again?

Below this Tenn had written: “Pare down. Make it matter. Widen the margins. Increase the stakes.”

I do not know if his note concerned what he had written or what he felt he needed to do personally, because throughout are notes about the reordering of his mind, his body, his living quarters. Particular notebooks were required. Pens with the finest points would allow him the maximum speed to get onto paper what he felt was imminent. “Pray for fog!” he wrote over and over, in excitement, next to paragraphs that pleased him. Alcohol consumption should be limited to the “white waters,” since they caused him less upset and lost time. Heavy meals no longer interested him; they “bogged him down” and kept him up late, gassy and anxious. “I adore the Mexican spirit,” he wrote, “and I am most comforted by soft Mexican skin, but the cuisine of that country leads me to the most ignominious conclusions.” It was vital that the odor of pine not be present in the apartment in New York or hotel rooms or any place he hung his “hungry hat”: it unnerved him, reminded him of hospitals and the house on Oriole where William Inge grew cold and sad and kept loitering in the garage, until he “finally maneuvered his smoothest drive, straight down a road that held his firmest intention.”

There was a man, a drug dealer, who might be able to provide Tenn with various grades of cocaine, which to his mind should be, like tea or coffee, labeled as “Morning Blend,” “Evening Blend,” and “Blend Blend.”

“I need a significant bump in the morning,” he wrote. “Nothing works or moves, and the first few lines force the blood into operation, the mind becomes nimble.” Later in the day, energy was called for, “nothing too manic or forced, and when sleep beckons I would like to be in a position to accept,” and when parties or dinners or social occasions were necessary, panes of time through which he passed fearing peril at every step, he wanted a “bold, white friend” to come along for the ride, “helping me laugh and move and hold in my pockets a few laughs, a crumb of inspiration.”

I did not spend time with Tenn as a reporter: my eyes and ears were trained for the inspiration I hoped he would provide. I was not out for a story. I was not equipped emotionally or professionally for the gathering of facts outside my direct line of vision, what Tenn called my “charming purview.” And yet I knew that the frequent visits to bathrooms (he especially loved the ones in the Cabildo and in Tujague’s restaurant) involved pills and powders. The tabletops of the hotel room and the porcelain countertop in the bathroom appeared to have been utilized by a manic baker, and while I knew that Tenn was becoming impatient with our time together, and that he needed to get back to some serious work and be surrounded by people he had known for years, both Elia Kazan and Maria St. Just would tell me that his trip to New Orleans, like so many before it, to so many other cities, had been precipitated or terminated because of the balance of his chemical inventory. An actress with whom Tenn occasionally enjoyed the use of cocaine, and the waves of fervent nostalgia and brainstorming it engendered, told me that once he got back to New York from our time together, he placed an order, through her, for an ounce of cocaine. “The good stuff,” he told her. “I have a lot of work to do, and it feels good, and I don’t.” Tenn had told her that during the days he spent with me in New Orleans, he had been using less cocaine than usual. “This sweet boy,” he told her, was so ignorant and open and fervent that his visits were as invigorating as two or three or four fat tracks of cocaine.

On another page, in a recounting of a conversation he and I had had about writers we both admired, Tenn had written: “Had I ever been this naïve? Had I ever loved words and the patterns they made on a page or on a heart or on the mind as this boy does? Ignorance is often sexual and deadly and poisonously addictive. It is often treacherous and mean, and you share space with it at great risk. I have never known it to be so exhilarating, so capable of allowing me to see things as I did when young and open and utterly unaware of so many things.”

I had wanted to be of some help to Tenn, but I hadn’t known how. I learned in those notes that it was by knowing nothing and asking, as he wrote, “always, over and over, ‘What do you mean?’ I don’t know what I mean! But I keep trying to tell him.” And in the margin, next to this entry, one word: “Lunacy!”

Tenn had asked me, early in our encounters, if I had paid any particular attention to the physical characteristics of the women I hoped might inspire characters in my work. I hadn’t thought much about it, but Tenn clearly had, for all of his writing life, and in our time together. There were six pages bulging with descriptions of every part, angle, and style of actress, along with analyses of what certain eyes, lips, and teeth implied or portended.

Of an actress who hailed from St. Louis and who had appeared in one of his plays in an off-Broadway production, Tenn wrote that she had

an alarming, starkly unappealing lack of proportion of face and head, like something Goya might have imagined or Picasso in making a political or social point. One eye is overwhelmingly larger than the other and it was even glazed and a bit askew: the eye of a specimen in an autopsy report. Her teeth appear to be rotting and her gums are an unhealthy shade of red, far too large, and serving as host to a set of teeth that are little more than squatters in a head that covers a mind that alternates between rich-girl sweetness and avaricious ambition. I want to trust her, and I want to like her. She is fulsome in her praise of me and my work. She claims to have known both my mother and my sister, and I try to imagine a link between us that extends beyond the confines of the theater, but I cannot trust her. There remains the old myth, rooted in my childhood, that one should not trust those with one small, mean, dead eye, or the teeth of a mummy rooted, perilously, in the dark gums of some voodoo priestess.

In the margins Tenn imagined a short story he might call “Mummy Teeth and a Tiny Eye,” and on the opposite side of the page, he wrote a few sentences, which began

The boy smelled perfume, a heavy floral scent, before he smelled the woman who sat in a chair before him. She was young and softly pretty, tired but polite, and she nodded her head toward him, and extended a hand: she hoped he would sit in the chair opposite him, beside which was a table that held a Bible and a small, burning candle. It was a bug candle, citron and chemicals to keep the mosquitoes, big and black and mean, away from their pale skins. Her clothes were colorful and neatly pressed and clean, but a smell, musky and oppressive and unpleasant, arose from her, pushing against him as persistently as the heat and the desire he had to know what lay ahead for him.

The sentences were scratched through and Tenn had added an editorial comment: “Too much like Truman,” a reference, I later learned, to Capote’s short piece “Dazzle,” which had been given prominent placement in Esquire. There were dozens of pages upon which Tenn began profile pieces that he believed might make for a similar collection. One was headed “The Heat of the Cinema,” and had some of the details Tenn had told me about the time he had spent in the balconies of opulent movie theaters, sleeping and drinking and watching movies over and over, meeting men with similar interests, and heading home

with a sandwich and a bottle of milk, the genesis of a hangover, and an urge to type something, anything, that might have the manic energy and the clean narrative line of what I had just seen. Silver and black and flashing images and ideas coming so fast and sharp. Take the vocal thread provided by Gladys George and have her hover over an errant and queer son; admonish him; fog rolls in.

Four lines down he appeared to start the piece anew and wrote:

Film is, in and of itself, an explosive object. Film is a medium that is dangerous in so many ways—injected with silver, poisons, odd recipes to capture, enhance, and transmit illusion. So I am very much alive and present and pregnant—with fear and joy and anticipation when I watch a film. It is for me an act of not only capturing a past event—the event of performance and collaboration—but a living, very kinetic act: the film spools and crackles and shines.

Every film is exciting to me, for the best and worst reasons. Films I’ve loved in the past are new to me because I keep discovering details that fascinate me. I am a writer who was very much shaped by movies, far more than literature and theater. Film came into my life and my consciousness long before I had ever heard of Chekhov or Ibsen or Shakespeare or Strindberg. Flaubert and Turgenev were brought to me at a time when I had seen certain films more than fifty times. I am a student, a lover, a product of films.

On another page, Tenn wrote, “Jim should know more about this,” then continued:

The one requisite attribute that I always notice among film stars is hunger. There is a ravenous quality to film stars that is deeply sexual, deeply disturbing. I don’t think that a person acquires this quality through training: I think it lodges within the system of a person through experience and expression, and I think it begins in childhood, with the development of multiple lacunas that must be filled. Hungers that must be sated. Every film star I ever met, particularly those of the female persuasion (this would include several film actors, obviously), has a core of obsessive connection, by which I mean a craving to connect with each and every person upon contact. This is not always done in an obvious manner, as a Joan Crawford or Bette Davis might be—and have been—with me: a cloying and yet abrasive manner that shifts them to the center of attention. Rita Hayworth was overtly sexual, playful, as was Doris Day, in an entirely different style.

Rapid style is what William Wyler told me all actresses had. They adapt with awesome rapidity and rapacity. Shall I be a slut? Shall my lips be moist? What is my motivation, indeed! An actress becomes whatever she must to be needed, and a film actress, in order to survive, must become whatever she must to be needed and salable and desired. This is some heavy shit. What is especially admirable is the manner in which they take their hungers, their needs, their collective angers and styles, and compress them all into an entity that can then be sold, like soda or lipstick or turtle wax, and give it to a roomful of strangers and … connect.

Barbara Stanwyck has volumes of rage and regret within her tiny frame, and the years of repression bubble and spew up through her body and rest tightly and elegantly right behind her two front teeth. Her words barely fit through this slit that her mouth becomes—I mean a slit created by tension and emotion, not by actually compressing her lips, which are always available and approachable. She is coiled, right down to her vowels, by both rage and resignation. Within my memory of every Stanwyck performance is her slow cocking of the head, the raising of an eyebrow, the languid droop of her lids—resignation, acceptance, revenge. Big emotions, small gestures, an ultimate victory. A lifetime of grievances and lusts and allegiances contained in a flick of the head or hand, a sassy walk, a cinched waist. But always winning, striding forcefully toward victory. She doesn’t always get (or want) the guy or the company or the love of a child. She might even lose her mind or her life. Her victory is won from the audience—who admire, crave, and fear her. She has never not had us where she wanted us, and she has never been far from where she always wanted to be—at the hot, dead center of our attention. I only met her once. I saw her several times, at dismal affairs: premieres, parties, burnished hallways of film supplication. (Which is to say, an appointment with a producer.) She was introduced to me by, of all people, Gertrude Lawrence, who had just endured, shall we say, an embarrassment of poor intentions and rich irony at a screening of The Glass Menagerie. Stanwyck was gracious and laconic; very tiny, very chic, very controlled. But I met her! I doubt I made much of an impression, for I was not only speechless, but I was the author of a play that had just served as a suppository. But I saw the eyes, the lips. Contact was made.

Another page held writing that was markedly neater than the others: it was a report, a presentation of sorts, for me. In the upper-right-hand corner was an address in the East Forties of New York, and in underlined capital letters Tenn had written: TURTLE BAY, HEPBURN, KATHARINE.

This, you see, is true rapid style, willful and consistent and permanent. The life is the performance, the gestures strokes of color on canvas, every word an aria reaching the upper reserves, every opinion a new school of philosophy seeking adherents. Ego and energy and effort. All the time. A wily but limited intelligence. Facts for her are things to be bent and molded toward her needs and ignored if they fail to satisfy or flatter. Her mind, clear and primed at all times for conquest, has been compressed and cajoled, like the foot of a geisha, into a particular size and shape that will get her to the sound stage, the theater, the center of attention.

Another page: “The Center of Attention: The Only Known Address for an Actress.”

A list of hands, with Kim Hunter, Betsy Palmer, and Nan Martin earning honors for having the longest, boniest hands, rendering them unsuitable as sympathetic heroines. “Poor Betsy Palmer,” Tenn wrote. “I liked her and I felt she might have had some talent, which she squandered. She took on Alma, but her hands were too broad and long and hard. They were not the hands of a supplicant.”

He harbored a fascination with the complexion of Glenda Jackson, an actress he found to be diabolically gifted and intelligent, and with whom he hoped to work, on a new piece, as he couldn’t fathom her placement in an existing play. But he was amazed to discover that she was “blotchy and shiny, her face liberally littered with the pimples of a teenager and pores as large and open as the eyes of startled kittens.” With her face clean of makeup, Tenn found Jackson to be shy, soft-spoken, reticent, but once she had assembled her “formidable maquillage and a shiny, defensive wig,” she became a lovely and confident and dismissive “grand lady, as confident behind her mask of liquids and powders and paints as we had been as children behind our masks of goblins and criminals and cretins, haunting the streets on Halloween night. New identities, new personalities.”

Age was a judgment as well as a biological and inevitable fact. Skin sagged and faded in accordance with spiritual valor or its absence; eyes betrayed nothing, or would reveal one’s interests and intention. A downturned mouth might connote cruelty and disappointment, or it might be a calling card left after the visitation of tragedy, physical or psychic; therefore, Beatrice Straight’s “hard, thin, southward-bound” mouth was due to her realization that her vast family fortune guaranteed her nothing but curiosity and lengthy visitations from the needy, while Catherine Deneuve’s “frosty, firm bite” was due to her having witnessed the violent death of her sister, actress Françoise Dorléac. (That this did not, in fact, actually happen did not deter Tenn. “The event has been developed on her face as if it were a photograph,” he insisted.)

I needed to look closely at eyes and lips, both on a personal basis and before I began to write a character possessing the same features. “Keep a journal of those elements that please, annoy, or alarm you,” he told me. “As a writer, whatever you believe about a person is true.” In real life, however, where interaction with skin and sinew is necessary, what is true is highly subjective, and it needs to be sought out. The reality of all people, Tenn believed, could be discerned through eyes, hands, and voice. “I find that the soul of a person, their honest and expressed beliefs and desires, are shown through these attributes,” he wrote, and he gave me examples of the types of voices that not only pleased him aesthetically but also helped him to create characters, to write, to live. Tenn was partial to voices that from experience and “sensual awareness” sounded as if some form of mastication were taking place with the words spoken. Edith Evans sounded to him always as if she were gargling a jar of sour balls; and Helen Mirren, an actress known at that time primarily for her blond good looks, was someone he trusted to do well, if only because when she spoke, her words flowed like the ejaculate that would appear if she had managed to fellate a vat of marmalade. “I see that this is both a physical and a sexual impossibility,” Tenn told me, “but I believe that my auditory point is made.”

Tenn bemoaned the fact that voices of stage actors and actresses were no longer given the place of importance that once existed: a lovely voice was at one time an inducement to seek employment as an actress, and Guthrie McClintic had once told Tenn that the voice of an actress was an indicator of talent to come, talent perhaps hidden, talent waiting to be coaxed from within. McClintic’s wife, Katharine Cornell, had one of the voices that pleased Tenn greatly—deep and rich and slightly mournful. Cornell seduced vowels, and her sentences, especially in her performance in Antony and Cleopatra, tended to end with a nearly imperceptible gasp, as if the completion of that particular act of spoken art had been slightly beyond her abilities. “It was riveting,” Tenn remembered, “and although I know it was the trick of a skilled actress, it was done well, and I bought it. I learned to hear and to understand that play—that type of play—by virtue of how she parsed and shared her sentences.”

Jessica Tandy and Julie Harris, two actresses Tenn admired, had, in fact, poor voices: thin and high-pitched, prone to scratching the ear if intense emotions were called for. Both learned to compensate through the use of facial expressions and the manipulation of their bodies to convey feelings and effects their voices could not evoke. In a long section Tenn wrote about the Actors Studio, he revealed that his chief criticism was the school’s disdain and disregard for the development of its students’ voices and bodies. “Their ids and their egos and their maladjustments were heavily scrutinized and valued,” he wrote, “but their voices were no better, no stronger, no more capable of expressing the multitude of themes contained in the great works than when they first harbored a dream of acting. They sound, always and forever, like the eager and intense students of an urban high school.”

Talent and beauty both bore expiration dates and short shelf lives unless a concerted series of efforts were maintained to keep the heart and the mind growing and learning and loving, unless a “heartfelt intention” was supported. Tenn was amazed by those women who seemed to have landed upon a fast track to “early deaths of potential and possibilities,” but he told me to be wary of them, for they had earned their rapid decomposition.

I found an assignment within the pages: Tenn wanted me to write a short story in which a person begins as attractive or ugly and steadily reverses course, without any descriptions of physical change. “Do it all through characterization,” he wrote. “Do it all with words.” All of us change, he kept reminding me, even if only through our own perceptions. Remain alert: “Wariness,” he told me, “is a gift.”

I discovered that Tenn had come to these pages after our days together and had continued his study of the subjects we’d covered, so I could read that Geraldine Page and Estelle Parsons were “long-term” artists, solid in ways that so many others were not, even as they had “clear indications of neuroses and those concomitant illnesses of the theater.” Page and Parsons were good women to study in contrast to Kim Stanley, whose talents were short-term, aging from birth, and wasting more rapidly than fish in the glare of a summer sun. Katharine Hepburn was a “willful and resourceful star,” striving always to become an actress, with limited results, but her stamina was such that Tenn sent me to see her. “A gilded and willful retardation is a valuable asset,” he assured me. “It is never easy to believe in oneself. Bend the facts; change the narrative. You must always remind yourself that you must win. Katharine Hepburn, while living and moving, appears always to have won. Find out how she has done this.”

“Investigate any and all myths,” Tenn wrote, circling the admonition. All of those people in pursuit of the arts or show business or attention (or all three) will have had their time in the duck press of egos, which is to say they have seen reality and it holds no place for them. This is a truth almost impossible to bear for most people, but a particularly difficult one for actresses, who, unlike writers, have no pale judgment to sit before and scribble upon: their scratches are made on their own psyches and the doors of agents and producers. The isolation of the actress leads her to investigate other realms from which she might find comfort or counsel to help her weather the realm into which she has been born and in which she seeks employment. Any number of gods, goddesses, gurus, shamans, therapists, nutritionists, card readers, and trainers will be called on to give her faith and courage. The metaphysical as well as the theatrical résumés of these women would most likely be padded, Tenn warned, and I should look into their systems of support. “You might learn something you can use,” he assured me, “and you will definitely understand them better, and you will learn if any of it has helped them to matter.”

Places are made, created, protected. No one writes a play or has it produced without struggles that deserve a story, and no actress builds a body of work without some sacrifice and subterfuge that reveal as much about her, if not more, than any performance given. There were no accidents that Tenn could conceive. People moved to the locations that would best serve their desired narrative. They altered their appearances, their résumés, their diets, their peccadilloes. They married well or they did not marry at all. They said what needed to be said when it served a purpose, unless they were Geraldine Page, Estelle Parsons, or Zoe Caldwell, three women who brandished brutal gifts of honesty like “ploughshares or the cocks of captors.” On three separate occasions in these pages, Tenn urged me to be like Page and Parsons and eliminate and ignore the people and the works that were not serious, worthy, deserving of one’s time. As I studied these women, on whom he desired reports, delivered by phone or by mail, I should believe nothing, stay longer than I might want to, look for the facts that had been altered, the man behind the curtain who was pulling the strings. “The man behind the curtain is the id,” Tenn wrote, “and he only appears when someone is tired. Wear them out.”

Above all else, be tough. Actresses, Tenn assured me, were both deserving of and inured to abuse, in the form of broken promises, phone calls unreturned, representation precipitately canceled when returns dwindled or personalities chafed, when the soul pulled the face and body into the forms they now deserved. “If they give you trouble,” he told me, “call me and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, be dismissive and abrupt, and they’ll do whatever you want them to. They will notice the shift of focus, and they will assume they deserve it, and they will endow you with some sort of power forever denied them, and you will get what you need.”

The bottom line: find a voice and use it to give to others. On a neatly folded piece of onionskin paper, Tenn wrote directly to me:

What I want you to know is that I needed to be heard through my art; later to avenge through it. And then I was dependent upon it, because it was all that kept me alive. Now I see that the anger I felt for so long about the gawky queer that I was seems entirely misguided. I was indeed a gawky queer, but I was a cosseted, husbanded, much-loved gawky queer, and my anger soon dissipated, and I was ready to fill my work with the gratitude and the love that has been shown to me by these remarkable women—those who inspired my plays and those who inhabited them. And now, ironically, I have no voice. I have a voice to share with you the names of these women and the generosity I hold for them, but I lack the voice to praise them or to write for them or to say what frightens me the most. I am desperate to give, to share, to love. But I destroyed my voice. I wasted energies on emotions unfounded and unfocused. I want my voice, Jim. I need my voice. Don’t lose yours. Speak truthfully and fearlessly, and for God’s sake, give. Give everything you have. I miss nothing more than giving. All other diminishments and declivities I can suffer. But I remain a gift unwanted in every quarter, and I most want to give.

The final entry within was titled “Strangers on a Train,” but it had nothing to do with the Alfred Hitchcock film. Instead, Tenn wrote:

I have always felt as if I traveled through life on one train, while, on an alternate track an alternate train, of my own creation, moved along with me. This alternate train followed me through my life—and still does—but it is populated with those people I might wish to know or to be, and it stops at those destinations I might have preferred over the itinerary fate and folly have dealt me. So many of the women I have known and admired—and feared and ridiculed—have had similar travel arrangements. I used to think, as I held on to my strap, on the train I did not choose, that if I hoped enough, dreamed enough, I might make the move to that other train. In living my life in this foolish way, I came to realize that every encounter in my life, and therefore in my plays, had at its core a feverish desire, a longing, perhaps a futile one, almost always a futile one, as I think on it. But I came to see that this desire is nothing more than prayer. True prayer. When I fell to the depths and sought help from the religious, they sought to teach me the art of prayer, and I dutifully followed along, eager to learn and to be saved. Then I saw that what they most envied, most desired, was that energetic and stupidly hopeful desire I had manifested, eyes closed, on that damn train of mine.

In the margin: “You are on this train with me now. I know that I contradict myself and may appear angry, but I do my work with love, and I ask that you do the same. God help you.”

Fifteen

IN THE TIME that I knew her, Jo Van Fleet arose every morning and had a cup of coffee and a glass of wine, the latter consumed before a large, framed poem written in her honor by Ben Belitt. As she told me often, she could read this poem and feel better about herself because she had “once been noticed and appreciated.” The wine might have made her feel a little lighter about the loads she insisted others had given her to carry, but the poem helped her in her daily insistence that she had been great, had possessed a talent that startled actors, audiences, playwrights, and at least one poet, who had come to be friends with her when he was a faculty member at Bennington along with William Bales, Jo’s husband. “People used to notice me,” Jo would say, and she would set her mouth in a sneer that is visible in all of her screen performances, most noticeably as James Dean’s mother in East of Eden, for which she received an Oscar in 1956. “Poor Jo,” Tenn had said. “She makes that sneer and it’s as if she’s smelling the rotting of her soul.”

The Belitt poem made her feel appreciated, but so did the words Tenn had said about her, and when I typed them up and gave them to her, she began to carry them with her in a canvas tote bag that she took with her on her walks about the city. On occasion, she would also place her Oscar, now tarnished and a bit mottled, in this bag, and off she would go, to regale shopkeepers, her dining companions in local cafeterias, and the booksellers outside Zabar’s with this treasure, and everyone would marvel at the opportunity to hold this recognized prize. (Once, when a man who sat near us in a diner was holding the Oscar and improvising an acceptance speech, Jo muttered, almost inaudibly, “I wish it gave me as much pleasure as it does him.”) Then she would hurriedly stuff it back in her tote bag and be on her way.

Her daily trip was almost always the same. She would leave her apartment, at Riverside Drive and Seventy-eighth Street and slowly—oh, God, how slowly!—walk down to Ninth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, to St. Clare’s Hospital. Her husband, once a dancer and a longtime instructor at many colleges, was now confined to a hospital bed, a victim of Alzheimer’s, and on several occasions Jo asked me to accompany her. Jo would say the same things to the same people every time (“Hi, I’m Jo Van Fleet, and I’m here to see my husband,” “I used to be a great actress, you know”) and she would introduce me, telling them I was very important and I was going to reintroduce her to a theatrical world that had forgotten what real acting was like.

We would then go up to William Bales’s room, where he lay, stunned and silent, although he would often clearly recognize Jo and would try to speak. Most times, however, Jo simply kissed him on the forehead, put her tote bag on the floor, and sat in a chair by his bedside. She would begin by telling him all that she had done, but mostly she would complain that no one was helping her. (“I called Colleen again. She’s head of Actors Equity, but she won’t help me. She’s such a liar. Anne and Eli brought me some food, but I didn’t like it. They don’t care about my needs.”) Eventually, she would tire of this litany, and she would stand and pace the room for a minute or two, then turn toward the bed and transform herself. Although she was then in her mid-seventies, was in poor health, and drank heavily throughout the day, Jo would proceed to recite Shakespeare sonnets, a monologue from Camino Real (a role she created on Broadway, and which she delivered perfectly), lines from her films East of Eden and Wild River, as well as nursery rhymes and songs that Jo and Bill had sung to their son, Michael.

In these performances, of which I witnessed only three, Jo became an actress again, and she clearly relished the opportunity to perform. “You see,” Tenn had told me, “an actress will create an opportunity to act at every occasion. The ordering of a meal in a restaurant will have all the texture or range or drama of an O’Neill play or a Wagnerian opera. They give it their all, because they live in a business—a culture—that rarely requires even a minimum of what they believe they can give.”

So in that little hospital room, Jo acted again, and if her husband attempted to speak, or if he appeared to cry, she felt that she had done well, had provided a service to an appreciative audience. When I would compliment her on her recitation of a particular sonnet, she would stand tall, thank me, but add in her astringent voice (“all bile and citrus and pride,” Tenn had called it), “That’s sweet, but you’re young and stupid and have no idea of what I can do.”

Jo would pick up her tote bag and begin the long walk home. Sometimes we exchanged words; more often than not we walked in silence. On one of our walks home after a hospital visit, we were standing at an intersection when Jo looked over at a newsstand and read that Tony Perkins had AIDS. Jo had loved Tony, had worked with him onstage in Look Homeward, Angel and on film in This Angry Age, and I heard her yelp with pain before I saw the headline. Jo dropped her bag and began crying, walking in circles, confused. Passersby looked on at this tiny woman and laughed, thinking they were merely witnessing a crazy New Yorker having a spell. When Jo noticed their laughter, she turned on them and yelled, “I’m crying for you, don’t you see? Because you don’t get that it’s all shit! Life is nothing but shit!”

AMID THEIR LAUGHTER, Jo picked up her bag and we began walking again. Mildred Natwick lived in a sunny penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, lemony and spotless and elegant. Tenn had never worked with Miss Natwick, but he adored her, sought her out at openings and auditions, visited her backstage, and claimed that Guthrie McClintic had told him that a season with Millie was worth more than a decade with doctors. “Guthrie was convinced that Millie had healing powers,” Tenn told me, “but when I questioned her about them, she assured me that the powers belonged to Mary Baker Eddy, and she was merely a conduit. I went home and looked up ‘conduit,’ but it didn’t seem to apply to the actress I knew.”

Each morning Millie read her Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly, which comprised selections from the King James Bible and others from Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Millie did not like to discuss her religion, and indeed I knew her for many months before she would talk openly about it with me. “I mean,” she would say, in that sweet, quizzical voice of hers, “they don’t ask Helen Hayes about the Roman Catholic faith, and they shouldn’t, but when anyone learns of my beliefs, they think I’m an expert. I’m merely a student. Edith Evans”—also a Christian Scientist—“used to say, ‘Millie, just go on being perfect and they won’t ask any more questions. They’ll just follow you around and get the point.’ But I hardly think myself perfect.”

After her lesson, which she surmised took her anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour, Millie would ready herself for her day. As she did so, she would recite the Scientific Statement of Being: “There is no life, truth, intelligence, or substance in matter …” But her favorite passage, and the one to which she would cling whenever she was faced with pain or illness or doubt or depression, was: “All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, Man.”

Once, when I was having a difficult time, Millie was instantly helpful, in ways both practical and supernal. Millie had an easy and cheerful generosity, which blended effortlessly with her dignified reserve, and the recipient never felt discomfort or judgment. Because she always noted her gratitude for anything you had done for her, her aid to you was simply, in her words, “fair and deserved,” and she would always add, “Let’s make nothing of this as quickly as possible.” Her devotion to Christian Science had freed her from the tyranny of illness and pain, she admitted, but it continued to help her address the question of who she was and what she was intended to become. Although Millie was in her late seventies when I began to spend time with her, she was actively involved in “the act of becoming,” and she was endlessly interested in reaching her goal of being “utterly in the Mind and out of the body.”

When Tenn and I were walking in the French Quarter, we stopped in a small antiques shop that had once been, he swore, a gay bar for young men who appreciated older men. “So it is in the lease that it must remain in the trade of antiquities,” he quipped, then walked to the rear of the store to use the bathroom. The proprietor said nothing, only warmly shaking Tenn’s hand as he began to leave the store. As we were walking out, Tenn noticed a small, decoupaged square on which was a prayer written by Mary Baker Eddy. Tenn purchased it, which surprised both me and the proprietor, but he gave it to me to give to Millie when I met her. “I think,” Tenn said, “that the words of this woman have helped Millie to realize herself.”

When I gave the gift to Millie, eight years after Tenn had purchased it, Millie was moved and embarrassed, and only said, “I would like to think that I became something, but I’m not yet all that I could have been or should have been.” She looked at me and smiled, clearly closing the subject, but I knew somehow that she would return to it.

“Millie is loved and wonderful,” Tenn told me, “but she has within her, I think, a rage as to what might have been. I believe that she, like all of us, has a deep hurt, a gash, a wound, that she chooses to cure or remove with a positive agenda, where others exploit this wound, or reveal this wound, to achieve uniqueness or attention or surcease. I would like to know how she takes care of herself, and what she feels led her to this obsessive need to purify and reshape herself. How muddy can her waters be?”

Millie was always active. She saw plays and operas and exhibitions. She visited friends with cheer and aid. She attended and hosted parties. She took a huge interest in whatever presented itself to her, but I could see that as she did these things, she was fully engaged in her inner reconstruction. When I told her about Tenn’s analogy about our lives being two trains running simultaneously, she laughed like a delighted little girl, and agreed immediately. “That is so true,” she said, “and I’m the dotty old woman who always misses her stop. But I’m okay, because I would rather keep traveling.”

Mildred Natwick was born in Baltimore, early in the twentieth century (she was cagey with the date) into what she called relative comfort; and while attending college, she finally admitted to her parents that she wanted to be an actress. “I was beautifully raised by my parents,” Millie told me, “and I never felt a lack of anything, but it was not until the day they gave me their blessing to be an actress that I felt accepted, loved, assured.” Early in her career, Millie became a favorite of Joshua Logan, who cast her in several plays in repertory, which led her to her Broadway debut in 1932. While that was a propitious date in her life, far more important was her meeting Guthrie McClintic and Katharine Cornell. “If Christian Science gave me the foundation for life and living,” Millie told me late in our relationship, “then I can tell you that Guthrie and Katharine gave me the foundation for a life in the theater.” While Millie would never have said disparaging things about herself and others, she alluded to the fact that she had lacked confidence in her appearance, but that these doubts had been cleared away by Cornell. “Katharine Cornell was a great beauty,” Millie told me, “and her beauty came not from jars or camouflage, but from within. Mary Baker Eddy tells us that to have more beauty we must have less illusion and more soul, and this was manifested in her. She looked at me one day and she said …” Millie paused, laughed, blushed, and then continued. “She said, ‘Millie, your face is a comfort to me and to others. Its beauty is the beauty you find in things that loved ones have given you. And I like to see you coming.’ So I knew—how could I not?—that I would never be as appealing as Katharine Cornell, but I trusted her so much as a friend and an actress that I felt if she didn’t mind seeing me coming, I wasn’t insane to think I could walk on a stage.”

Mildred Natwick was almost Quaker-like in appearance and demeanor—calm, kind, virtually invisible—but her acting reminded Tennessee of finely spun crystal, and he frequently sought out her clear mind and persistent cheer. (illustration credit 15.1)

Millie appeared in several productions with Cornell, but her greatest triumphs were in plays not affiliated with her mentor. “And I rather liked that,” Millie admitted, “because it meant that I could be surprised by a visit from Katharine when I least expected it, offering the perfect words, as only she could supply them.” Millie created the role of Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in New York, and became one of Truman Capote’s favorite actresses when she appeared in his Grass Harp, an experience he remembered so fondly that he insisted that she appear in the filmization of his short story “Miriam” when it was incorporated into Frank Perry’s Trilogy in 1969.

“What Millie has in her work,” Tenn told me, “is what every writer craves, which is loving detail. Millie’s work is utterly seamless, and yet it never appears overcontrolled or artificial. You never see the work; only the result.”

“It’s funny you should bring that up,” Millie told me, “because when I was working with Ralph Richardson in The Waltz of the Toreadors, I had a difficult part, but I loved it. I once told Ralph that the work was torture, but divine.” When I asked what made the part difficult for her, she winced again, and admitted that she hated to talk about acting. “I just think it’s so impossible. I get sent these books where actors are interviewed and go on and on about approaching a role or analyzing an emotion, and I feel they might as well let me watch them have their teeth cleaned. You pour yourself, all that you are and all that you can spare, into the role that has been written, and you use your script as your guide. Your director is your guide to the script, and if you’re lucky, both you and the director are headed in the right direction. That is that. Everything else merely happens.” She then related how, after one especially good performance, Richardson had asked her how she had accomplished a particular dance step that had as its denouement a line reading that always tickled him. “And I said, ‘Oh, Ralph, I don’t know,’ and he tried to have me reproduce it, and it utterly failed. Outside of the context of that play, without our other actors, and without the parameters that Harold Clurman had set for us, nothing made sense, nothing worked. Ralph, heartbroken, looked at me and said, ‘Never mind.’ Well, I felt awful, like a truly bad actress. Then, the next night, the scene went beautifully, perfect, heavenly. Backstage, Ralph said, ‘Millie, you got it right out there. Why not for me?’ And I said, ‘Ralph, it happened when it was supposed to.’ And that’s all I want to say about acting.”

For many, Millie is known for her reprise of her Broadway role in the film version of Barefoot in the Park, for which she won an Oscar nomination, and for her role opposite Helen Hayes in the television series The Snoop Sisters, for which she won an Emmy, and she is still spoken of with admiration for her work. But no one seemed to capture her special appeal better than Tenn, when he said: “Detail upon detail upon detail. An accretion of apt movements and sounds that add up to an utterly real moment in time. You don’t see huge explosions of theatricality in her work, just tiny flashes of humanity.”

Millie’s eyes welled up when I read her those words. “I never even knew that Tennessee knew my name! And to say something like that! That is enough for me.”

NOTHING WAS EVER enough for Jo Van Fleet. According to Barbara Baxley, who had known her since she—Baxley—was a young girl, this may have been because Jo was recognized as a good actress at an early age, and she continued in her quest despite great resistance from her parents, who felt a theatrical career was beneath a proper and intelligent woman. “So anger and rage and a sense of ‘Look at me now, folks’ energized everything she did,” Baxley told me, and it may help to explain her ease in parts requiring both great strength and cynicism. “When she was most sour,” Baxley quipped, “she was most Jo.”

And yet Jo had her supporters. Herbert Berghof thought her both a marvelous actress and a potential teacher. Berghof’s wife, Uta Hagen, told me that “Jo was good, but Jo was always unstable, so Herbert gave her responsibilities he felt she could handle, which is to say they were limited. Jo used to call me and beg to teach with us here [at HB Studio in Greenwich Village], and right when I would feel sorry for her and might imagine that I could have her do something, she would say, ‘It’s time they were taught by a real actress,’ and I would calmly hang up the phone.”

Jo was cast in Camino Real, in 1953, as Marguerite Gautier, and her scene was not working particularly well. “Gadg [Kazan] alienated his affections from that play very early on,” Tenn told me, “and he adopted a very lax attitude toward the whole enterprise. I had troubles with Jo’s scene, and I literally and figuratively threw up my hands. I was not in a healthy frame of mind then, and Jo saw this and volunteered to work on her own scene herself. Well, by God, she went away and typed up some pages, making her the lead of course, but from those pages I was able to construct her part anew, and it was much stronger. I could see she was happy to have control over a part, and a production, and she was very easy to work with.”

“Jo is tragic,” Kazan told me, “and to mention her name in some settings is to see an entire group of people shudder. She seemed—and seems—hell-bent on destroying herself, and I do not know why. To direct her was often a grueling challenge, for while she wanted desperately to be true to the part, she intrinsically believes that she is smarter than everyone else on the set, including the director and the playwright. Many times she pushed me away, muttering, ‘I know, dammit! I know what to do!’ I put up with it, but more often than not, others decided that once was enough.”

Jo earned a Tony Award in 1954 for her work in Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, then an Oscar for her work with Kazan in East of Eden. “My persistent direction of Jo,” Kazan told me, “was ‘Tight, tight. Keep it tight, Jo,’ and I think she had migraines for a month keeping herself so rigid and constricted, but she was brilliant. Run her scenes and it’s always amazing.” Jo was equally strong in Kazan’s Wild River, but after her cameo as Paul Newman’s dying mother in Cool Hand Luke, she worked only a handful of times. Her last leading role onstage was in 1962, in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, and Jerome Robbins, the director of that play, told me that he thought Jo was capable of becoming a major actress. “I thought she was larger than life, eccentric, a great leading character actress,” he told me, “and I thought that maybe America would finally have its own Edith Evans, or a grainier, meaner Ruth Gordon. But for every good moment Jo had, she had to produce three equally horrendous ones that would shatter a performance or alienate the entire company.” When I told Jo that Robbins thought her potentially a great actress, she yelled out, “Fuck him! He never called me, never sent me a dime, never even sent me a goddamn chicken potpie from Zabar’s! Him with all his money! So I reject that completely. If he really meant that, he would feed me.”

“Epically devious” with both her talent and her attentions, Jo Van Fleet was an actress Tennessee loved to watch, write for, talk to about plays; but her company was, as he put it, “hellish, black with rage.” (illustration credit 15.2)

Time—its passage, its effects, its value—fascinated and frightened Tenn. There was the time that was helpful and healing, as when one takes stock of a situation, thinks things out, perhaps takes a nap. Far more often there was the ravaging time, which took away opportunity and health. Time was money, time was health, time was everything. Again, that analogy to trains, swiftly moving, keeping to their own ceaseless, uncaring schedules: “And heading to a station near you!” he would cackle. “All of my women—in my plays, of course, but I think in my life as well—are frantic, preternaturally aware of this train heading toward them called time, and utterly unaware of who’s going to be getting on or getting off. Youth: heading out of town! Illness: incoming! Work: out of town! New opportunities: service interrupted!”

Tenn would giggle uproariously at these proclamations, seemingly unaware that others might be discomfited by them. Then again, he thought Blanche DuBois was the funniest female character in modern American theater, and that Billie Dawn, the character immortalized by Judy Holliday in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday wasn’t nearly so entertaining. “I mean, when they take her away at the end, I think it’s hysterical that she pops right back into her games. She hasn’t lost a thing, except her hold on reality. And what,” he always asked when the subject arose, “has reality ever done for anybody?”

To be constantly aware of time and its effects made Tenn—and Tenn’s women—jittery, agile at dodging reality and responsibilities, adept at adopting new strategies of living. The most effective foundation that he felt could be placed underneath this shaky edifice we call life was desire, which he felt was nothing more than prayer.

“I was sent to a monastery once,” Tenn said, and he enjoyed my shock of his being in such a setting. “Now calm down,” he said, chuckling. “I was sent there after one of my many travails, mental and physical, and it was believed that it might help me. This was during my rush toward Catholicism, which I felt was my only alternative to death or madness. It was during this sojourn, as they insisted upon calling it, that I realized how much fear we all carry, how fear is the fuel in all of our engines. And when fear motivates us, we tend to fall into a repetitious recitation of requests. When a friend of mine was mugged in New York in the seventies (and who wasn’t?), she just said, over and over, ‘No, please, no, please, no, please no,’ which was merely her prayer to survive that situation. When I was in the hospital, waiting to see if I indeed would die, I actually wanted my mother and Frank, one of whom was useless and the other dead. My desire wasn’t actually to have them with me, but to again feel whatever comfort I might have known with them. But mainly—youth and health! Bring them back!”

The women of Tenn’s plays spoke in a pattern that he felt mirrored his own habits when he was afraid. “Not so much when I’m drunk, you see,” he admitted, “because, of course, I am then not myself, but a medicated person who responds in a wholly different manner than a real person, an honest person. But when I am fully aware, I babble and charm and cajole, and so do my characters.”

Tenn noted Blanche’s endless nattering about literature, life, clothing—anything—to ward off not only inspection by those who might be observing her, but also time’s endless choreography into our space. “Oh, God,” Tenn would laugh, “I used to believe that if I just created enough, just laughed enough, I could hold back the demons of time, and the effects they visit upon us. What was that great quote by Thornton Wilder?” (He was thinking of “He who is happy is forever out of time’s grasp.”) “Oh, let me tell you, I looked for happiness, and happy times are as consuming as the bad times; they just use you up to a different tempo.”

Maggie of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was, in Tenn’s mind, a supplicant crouched, mentally and at times physically, in a perpetual and penitential prayer. “The need for love, physical and emotional, was so strong in Maggie, and in me, that it consumes her life and her mind, and everything she does or says, is clouded, as with a cheap perfume, with this desire, this prayer, for Brick’s love, for Big Daddy’s support, for Big Mama’s understanding and aid, and for Sister Woman’s respect. This longing, this infernal, annoying longing, which we all must disguise as—charm? beauty? wit? talent? I chose to make Maggie alluring and fertile, frantically fertile, and those are the only amulets she has in her long prayer. But in her speech, I made her plead for her moments with those characters, for her redemption, so to speak, and it is my prayer that speaks through Maggie.

“I turned to Catholicism because, at an advanced artery of illness in my life, I felt I had run out of options, had used up my privileges at the other troughs of redemption,” Tenn told me. “However, I remain, at heart, and in style, an Episcopalian, those words, desires, and rhythms pounded upon and within me by the merciless taskmaster who was my grandfather. And when I find that I’m in arrears, it is those prayers that I turn to, those words, those rhythms. In fact, the words are meaningless; it is the rhythms, the intent, that comfort me, and when I wandered into churches on foreign soil, the prayers, uttered in tongues unknown to me, nonetheless offered comfort.”

At that moment, despite a day of alcohol and numerous infusions of pills, Tenn began to quote those prayers that gave him most comfort, particularly this one: “O Gracious Father, who opennest Thine hand and fillest all things living with plenteousness; We beseech Thee of thine infinite goodness to hear us, who now make our prayers and supplications unto thee …”

“I immediately reach for those prayers when I find myself bound by the results of my poor intentions,” Tenn told me. “I wish I had reached for those prayers more frequently than I reached for pills or liquor or flesh, but that story has been written.”

“That train has left the station?” I asked.

“Very good,” Tenn chuckled, “and precisely the point you should have reached.”

JO VAN FLEET CLAIMED never to pray, at least not to God. However, she admitted that when she was most despondent, she often felt she could do nothing but call out in anger or fear, often finding comfort in the exhaustion that resulted from the consistent badgering of … “Of what?” I asked her. “Forces beyond our control,” Jo replied. “Fate, I imagine.”

Jo never admitted to using alcohol, even as I would sit and watch her consume one of the huge bottles of inexpensive white wine she kept in her apartment. If I mentioned the wine she had already had that evening, she would blame me. “I’m only drinking because you’re my guest. I don’t keep wine in this house.”

Prior to the Fourth of July celebrations of 1990, Jo told me she would like to get together with me to “do something.” This was not an idea I relished, as previous meetings with her had not turned out to be pleasant, and she enjoyed creating a scene. Jo liked dining at a diner then at the corner of Broadway and West Seventy-ninth Street, clad only in the mink coat she had purchased for the premiere of I’ll Cry Tomorrow. She made no effort to keep the coat around her nude, aged body. If clerks were inattentive or lines too long at the few stores she frequented, Jo would simply steal the handful of items she had collected. The store owners witnessed this and did nothing; they felt sorry for her and turned away during the commission of her crimes.

One day, Jo called my number and left nearly twenty messages for me. When I played them back and wrote them down, I didn’t hear the words of a drunk woman growing increasingly angry with me for not being available. I heard a prayer.

“This is Jo Van Fleet. I would really, really like to not be alone tomorrow. Do you think you could be with me tomorrow? Tomorrow will be really terrible for me if I’m alone, again. This is Jo Van Fleet, and I’m always alone. Why do I have to be alone? You’re not alone? Do you want to be with me? Would you like to get together with me? I don’t want to be alone. Please don’t let me be alone. This is Jo Van Fleet. I’m still alone. I still haven’t heard from you. I need to hear from you. This is Jo Van Fleet. If we could just get together, I think I would be well enough to get on with things. I think I could feel better. I can’t be alone. Can you come over? This is Jo Van Fleet. If I could just hear your voice, I would feel better. I wouldn’t even care if you couldn’t come over. But I can’t be alone. Please don’t let me be alone.”

“She had an evil about her that vibrated,” Jerome Robbins would tell me, even as he admitted that when he directed her he felt he was witnessing one of “the greatest theatrical talents we would have, but one that wasn’t properly harnessed.”

“I would be happy,” Jo told me once, “if just one person—one person!—would admit to me what I was. A great actress. Somebody!”

On one of our walks, Jo told me she needed some things from a drugstore. The store we entered, now long replaced, was at Broadway and Eightieth Street. Jo moved through the aisles with agonizing slowness (she was both tired and drunk), but she finally made it to the register and placed her few things in front of the bored cashier. When Jo attempted to pay for her items with a check, the cashier asked for some identification. Jo reached into her tote bag, hauled out her Oscar, and proudly and loudly slammed it on the counter. “This is who I am!”

Jo’s check was accepted, and she was happier that day than I had ever seen her.

WHILE JO VAN FLEET’S identity crisis revolved around her recognition as someone of merit (both by herself and by others), Mildred Natwick seemed to perpetually ask herself who she was, ever had been, or was meant to be. Jo’s rage stemmed from her sense that she was a talented, intelligent actress who had been mistreated and abandoned, while Millie was a grateful actress who wondered if she had done, or could do, enough to fulfill her destiny.

Jo was perpetually angry; Millie was unceasingly happy, upbeat, bemused. Nothing was ever presented to Jo that couldn’t serve as proof that life was utterly miserable and untenable; nothing appeared to Millie that wasn’t a blessing, and further proof that life was merely the raw material that was presented to us for the crafting of our identities.

When Jo walked about Manhattan, she was passing the locations of past triumphs and humiliations, both of which served to set her off in a rage. When Millie moved about Manhattan, she was, first and foremost, grateful that she was still ambulatory. “I take nothing for granted,” she once told me, “and I feel that that’s why nothing I ever really needed has ever been taken from me.” Life was full of conflicts for Millie, but she refused to see them as evil or debilitating. One of her favorite quotes from Mary Baker Eddy was as imprinted on her brain as the Episcopalian prayers had been on Tenn’s: “Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” When I asked her one day how she managed to avoid the pettiness that had engulfed so many others in her profession, she replied, “I guess I just didn’t see anything that would force me to debase myself or someone else. I was lucky enough to find a means of seeing things that were real and things that weren’t real. I discarded the unreal.”

SITTING IN THE ROOM at the Royal Orleans, reflecting on Jo Van Fleet, Tenn became decidedly morose, morbid. He rose from the bed and looked out the window for a long stretch of time. I asked what was wrong. “Jo has brought into my mind Rachel Roberts,” Tenn told me. Two years before our meeting, in late summer 1980, Rachel Roberts had committed suicide, in Los Angeles, by swallowing a caustic substance—believed to be Drano or some other toxic drain cleaner—and had then been propelled by pain to crash through a glass pane and die, scratched and scalded, in her verdant backyard. “Brilliant women destroying themselves,” Tenn said. “Rachel called women—brilliant women—late in the night, hectoring them for having values, standards, the good sense to avoid her. I loved her, but, I realize now, I avoided her as I avoided Jo: you cannot sustain their company for long, even as you long for their talents.”

Tenn returned to the bed and told me he wanted to dictate some ideas he had for a profile of Rachel Roberts.

“This will be a tale of gifts that went begging. This will be a tale of gifts that burn and decimate and move swiftly to the next area of destruction. This will be a tale of Rachel Roberts.”

Employing the style of Marguerite Duras and the biography of Rachel Roberts, an actress of “diabolical brilliance, a suicide, a Cassandra of the arts,” Tenn thought he had the beginning of a profile, an exploration. “I did not care for my autobiography,” Tenn told me. “The true story of my life is one that should be told through my influences—those I utilized well and those I failed to utilize at all. I never have and I never will exist without the gifts—shared and studied—of a remarkable group of women.

“Much like Jo Van Fleet, Rachel could find little satisfaction in her talent, and absolutely none in the venues in which it was presented. Resentment was a perfume that surrounded her, cloaked her, made breathing in her presence difficult. Some of this was deserved, I suppose, but I have come to see the effects—the poisonous effects—of holding a grudge, harboring resentments, judging every act, gesture, karmic flip of the cards. There is no way to be gracious in the face of injustice, I imagine, and Rachel was so much better than her material or her memory will reveal, and the few acts of benevolence that were shown to her she chose to destroy. So do we cast her aside? Do we dismiss her as a difficult woman who got what she deserved? Do we fail to study and marvel at her gifts simply because to do so would reveal too many unpalatable truths about talent and its cultivation and its strength and its standing in the world?

“I think that we want to believe that happiness, or, at best, satisfaction, accrues to those who have given us pleasure or elucidation or inspiration. Our work can do this for us, but it requires an understanding both of the art and of ourselves for this to exist. Rachel did not possess this understanding; Rachel did not enjoy her own presence unless she was in the process of working, and working well, on a part in a good play with a cast from whom she could garner experience and respect and a decent drink at the end of the day. She expected too much too often, but her diabolical demands led to her extraordinary work, even as it made her passive hours—the quiet, nonworking hours—so hellish.”

Tenn had photographs of Rachel Roberts tucked into a journal, along with several pages of notes that had been torn from various pads and notebooks.

“Her eyes see everything and like nothing.

“Such a hard jaw, purpose and hunger and power to move forward.

“Hers is a face in front of the open door that holds the bad news, the fateful telegram, the unfaithful lover locked in the arms of another. She has always just been given the news that none of us has the strength to hear. She tries to hear it, but it destroys her.

“She swallowed a corrosive substance, silencing the voice, stopping the heart, sizzling the brain, but long before she ventured into her kitchen and found that brightly advertised cleaning agent and swallowed it, she had swallowed so many bitter things: the truth about our theater, our culture, our world. She had come to see how we lie to ourselves and to each other about what will be, what will come, what will happen if we do the right things or if we fight to make things better or if we just give up.

“She seemed to know the score, and there is something to be said for the divinity of ignorance.

“I saw Rex Harrison not long after her self-murder, that Isadora-like dance she choreographed that ended in shattered glass and silence. I wanted to know if she had truly hated herself that much, that fervently. No, he told me, forever unflappable, so smooth—she had hated us that much, and that acidic toast was her final fuck-you to the world that had so disappointed her. She had married him in the belief that fame and money and good wines and good linens and a castle in the hills could make her happy, make her matter, shove her to a place she belonged—the center of attention.

“Myths. Delusions. How many corrosive things had she swallowed in the villa in the hills? How many have I swallowed? Have we all swallowed?

“I never hated her, and she never disappointed me. I think it is safe to say that she never disappointed an audience or a playwright or an actor who had high standards and a thick skin. Yes, she would call in the night and hector and criticize: she knew all of my flaws and my weaknesses and my own travel kit of myths and delusions. She was always correct, and she was always able to tell me how I could improve myself. I didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t have the strength, the will, the courage to take her advice or to see the damage I had done, but she offered it, she was right, and she was angry.

“There is no way to do things well and gently and consistently. There can be no satisfaction anywhere and with anything until we can accept the flawed and unique prisoners we are—prisoners to our memories and the distinct mechanisms we have for sharing them. I do not have this gift—a sort of faith is what it is. Rachel didn’t have it either. I have her face in my memory and that voice and that brutal detail she brought to her work and to her life and to every conversation we ever had.

“We let her down. She destroyed herself. There is no happy ending here and harsh reminders of what awaits some of us. I feel the incredible need for some reason to apologize to her. I will write words, plays, memorials.

“I will try, however I can, to throw some light her way.”

Tenn concluded his comments, then retreated to the bathroom.

AS THE YEARS PASSED, I saw less and less of Jo. In fact, I don’t know when she moved from the Riverside Drive apartment, and I was shocked to pick up The New York Times on that summer day in 1996 to see that she had died in a hospital in Queens. I did not attend her funeral service at the Actors Studio, but I was told that her son read from the notes I had given her from my meetings with Tenn.

And yet I would see Jo still making her arduous walks about the neighborhood, and she was confused as the neighborhood changed, as the reasonably priced Greek diner gave way to the posh takeout shop, as her drugstore gave way to a GNC health store. Every day, at virtually the same time, she would walk in and tell the perplexed staff what used to reside in that space and tell them who she was. She became the resident crazy lady, but a counterperson at Zabar’s told me that they often gave her free food because she was so poor. Jo was not, in fact, poor: her pensions, and those of her husband, who died in late 1990, were sufficient to support her. But many of us, myself included, continued to leave her food or money or books, always imploring her doorman not to tell her who had left them.

And yet … As we were cleaning up Barbara Baxley’s apartment after her death, Oli Brubeck, one of Barbara’s oldest friends, noticed that there were messages on the answering machine, and she decided to listen to them. Most were from before Barbara’s death, calls from friends, confirmations of appointments, but finally, at the end of the tape was a small, sad voice that said, “Oh, Barbara, I’m so sorry you died.” It was Jo Van Fleet.

As Elia Kazan told me after we spoke of Jo’s obituary in the Times, “We mustn’t cry for her death, but for her life.” I still see her, however, that time with her husband in his hospital room, and even if the performance meant more to her than to him, even if it might have been for her pleasure alone, I remember it as the time she had some sense of peace and control.

MILLIE ATTENDED services at the Third Church of Christ, Scientist on Park Avenue. She invited me to join her for services one Sunday, and afterward we went to a small restaurant that she liked. Millie was in a grave mood on that Sunday, and it was alarming, because while it was common for her to be serious, she had never been so mordant. The previous time I had seen Millie had been at the memorial service for Helen Hayes, and I had assumed that her mien on that day had been due to the grief she felt at the death of a close friend. But I now saw that there was an unraveling effect taking place within and upon Millie, as if she were literally falling apart, and she moved at times like a marionette whose strings had been snipped or loosened. She was still clearheaded and firm and precise, but even her voice had changed, as had her ideas on a few things.

“These women all seem to know what they wanted or what they wanted to do,” she told me in her new apartment, which was a smaller version of her previous penthouse, but still sunny and bright, although today its tenant seemed anything but. “I think I knew, from Christian Science, what I could be and should be, and I used that as my guide to living, as a means to see how I was growing. I could demonstrate to myself how well I was doing by how well I was overcoming any false notions I had as to who and what I was, as well as what others were. Yet I still feel that I didn’t fully develop, except as a student of Christian Science and, perhaps, as an actress. I used to have long conversations with Katharine Cornell about this, but after Guthrie died [in 1961], we didn’t see each other as much, and our relationship grew more polite and accidental. I still loved her, and I still felt her to be the closest thing to a mentor, but the relationship changed. I never could fully divulge how I felt, or about what I wanted to accomplish, but she knew that I was being as truthful with her as I could be.

“Finally, one night, she said that it was difficult to be truly oneself if that self couldn’t find acceptance, if to be what you really were born to be was somehow alien to others or might keep you from functioning at all. Katharine Cornell was a beautiful woman, loved as an actress even by those who only saw pictures of her, because she epitomized what an actress in that day was. She was charming and warm and she surrounded herself with people who never felt as special as they did when in her presence. That is not my presentation to the world. I feel that if I had been true to my emotions and had loved the people I had wanted in the way that I wanted, I would have been seen as sad or sinister, when I don’t feel—and cannot feel—that love, honest affection, can make a person either of those things. Katharine told me that this was how she kept at bay anything negative that might exist in her personality, or that might cause her embarrassment. If she immediately turned her attentions to the work or to her friends and guests, the focus would no longer be on her. No one could hurt her or expose her.

“I did not have her gifts,” Millie continued, “so I put on the mantle of Christian Science and chose to keep myself healthy and pure and of service to others, and to also keep myself from becoming bitter about any lost opportunities I might have suffered. I think you know what I’m telling you. Love whomever you wish, and be generous and open. We place so many spiritual values—golden lights, heavenly views, healing powers—on so many things, but we withhold it from anything that strikes us as odd or alien or costly.” Millie’s sweet smile returned. “I wonder now what Katharine Cornell might have been, what I might have been, if I had the courage to face my feelings and still be healthy, pure, and of service to others.”

I admitted that I had no answers for her, and Tenn had never alluded to any secret self that might have existed within Mildred Natwick. Millie changed the subject, and we continued our visit. The conversation I had with Millie was not, I think, prompted by any dire feelings she might have had about impending death (she lived for another sixteen months), but rather by a sort of reckoning that some of the other women endured when they cleaned out homes and closets and memories, and came across another person they had once known or been.

In our final phone conversations, Millie continued to be upbeat and helpful and curious about anything she encountered, but she was no longer taking her walks, and she missed them. It was not, however, within Millie to bemoan anything, so she quickly added that she had plenty to enjoy right in her apartment, so I shouldn’t feel sorry for her.

Tenn had said, “I wonder if the people we admire and love see themselves as we see them? I’m always surprised when someone I idolize turns out to be as big a mess as I am, but I’m always delighted when I find out that, like me, they have their alternate selves, who walk beside them through life, reminding them of what might be, or could be, or should be. Keep the trains running, honey!”

I walk Millie’s routes on occasion, up and down the East Side, thinking of her, and when I see certain addresses or intersections, I’ll be reminded of a conversation we might have had, and the quotes she felt inspired to share, and which she used for so long to hide what she felt was the unacceptable Mildred Natwick.

“May love and peace cheer your course.”

“Become conscious for a single moment that Life and intelligence are purely spiritual.”

“We should examine ourselves and learn what is the affection and purpose of the heart, for in this way only can we learn what we honestly are.”

And her favorite:

“What we love determines what we are.”

Sixteen

TENN HAD TOLD ME that the ability to succeed in the theater—and life, for that matter—often depended on a person’s ability to withstand whatever had been presented, smile, and say thank you. “The vast majority of expressions of gratitude,” he told me, “are uttered immediately before a retreat.”

We found a café near the hotel and sat at a table for four, spreading the bags and pads generously. “Tell me,” Tenn said, pushing his glasses up to the top of his head. “What is your exact, your precise, definition of faith?”

I had no definition, precise or otherwise, of faith on that day in 1982, and I do not have one today. Neither did Tenn. This was his point, I soon realized, but he wanted to prepare me for the “thicket of nonsense” I was about to enter, the sticky but potentially fascinating field of myth and delusion I would be finding—on his behalf, he understood—discovering if he mattered, if he could survive, if he rested in the memories of the people he used as inspiration, as one of his own systems of faith.

Tenn looked at me and began a series of confessions.

The young boy had hugged a radio in the dark and had hidden in the hallways of rectories and churches and had heard the sorrows and the desires of so many people, and it was all, he realized, fantasy, myth. “The life, our lives,” he told me, present some unalterable and authentic facts. We are born to particular people at particular times in particular places. Geography holds us to a certain, dull reality for a period of time, but the desire to matter, to be noticed and to contribute something, to rise above the mere facts that have been typed onto certificates and into our biological destinies, soon leads us to manufacture our own reality, our own personas.

At a young age, all of us, Tenn believed, begin the act of creating the people we will become, and we use, in this eternal production, whatever tools we may need.

As a child Tenn had the church, which was a theater, whose players gave him characters, structure, the earliest system of organization he would know. People married and found Christ and died and were buried at particular times, in certain cycles. The young Tennessee Williams believed that there was a season of death, because he remembered that certain times of the year seemed flush with funerals and mourning and prayers and houses full of food and recriminations. There were certain types of cakes and vegetable dishes that forever connoted death to Tenn, and he would refuse them. “A Lane cake,” he told me, “or a particular cake of a shiny white, with boiled icing, meant someone had died in the night,” he remembered, and the woman carrying it down the street, its frosting slightly sweating in the heat, was headed for the church or the house of the survivors or a union hall that might now bear bunting or be full of dour relatives and coworkers. “I would follow,” he remembered, “and I would be welcomed. I was the pastor’s little grandson, and some of my family would be there shortly, and I would soon hear the biography of the deceased.” These biographies rose up from grief and guilt and anger and the fear of time lost. The time knot, that massive serpent that crushed life and energy and desire, had come for someone else, and Tenn heard the fear in the voices. A funeral service was the circling of the wagons, with prayers and perhaps pink frosting and the hope of eternal salvation, but, Tenn insisted, “there was still a dead body in the room, and the knot had tightened.”

There was discussion of the dead person’s values and contributions, and Tenn remembered his family often marveling at the revisions the deceased had undergone in the period of time from life to diagnosis to death to ecclesiastical celebration. “If you want to truly be reformed,” his grandfather was once overheard saying to a group of friends, “it’s best to up and die. It does wonders for the soul and the heart and the affections offered.”

All of our biographies, Tenn told me, are born out of fear, are crafted as we jump out of the range of the time knot, cheat it and avoid it. It is unbearable to believe that we may be unnoticed or unloved, so we become what we must to get what we need.

We are born into one identity and we soon learn if we landed on the right side of the tracks, if we fell into the laps of the right people and the better situations. We can jiggle this reality a bit by means of faith. The rustic of the people turn to faith in churches that urge cleanliness of mind and body and a release from the bonds of the earth, of cruel reality, by speaking in tongues, through the agency of God and his many angels, who give wisdom to those who lack food or heat or teeth. These are God’s children who may not matter in the city council or in their schools, but they have a high standing in the “better world.”

The Episcopalians of Tenn’s upbringing were refined people and Christians: they knew their place and it was good. They had no need for superstition, because life had been, for the most part, good to them. They had the nicer homes in the nicer neighborhoods, went to good schools, saw the church as social, a fire around which to gather and commiserate, plan the future, contribute, matter. The Methodists and the Baptists were rural and poor and mean—they needed their God and their faith, harsh and judgmental, to put things in perspective: God had chosen his people, and their respective itineraries of loss and despair and triumph, a scanty sheet of events for which they were to be resigned and grateful while searching for “signs” of what it meant and how they could matter by living with and overcoming whatever it presented. The Catholics lived submerged in myth and its beauty and the fabulist faith that they were covered by a sky full of their own angels and their own God, who knew the numbers of hairs in their heads and who rejoiced that they had joined the true faith and were headed, candle by candle, bead by bead, to their rightful place by His side.

These were the faiths that Tenn and his peers had presented to them, and he sipped at each of their troughs. As he aged and looked around and met other people, he found that there were other means of mattering, and the ability to lie and to craft new identities led to new churches, beliefs, systems of survival. Spirit guides, charts of the sun and the moon, angel visits. Perhaps a guru, and not a God, was called for: Someone hip and corporeal who knew your centers of pain and could coddle and compliment you. “Faith,” Tenn told me, “is the perpetual act of making things work. Fitting what has been given to you into a narrative that pleases you.” Psychiatry presented itself as a religion for those who placed the primary emotions and incentives in the brain—not the soul or the heart, those tertiary organs. It was chemicals and malformations that determined our moods and our destinies, our happiness and productivity. Talk about it or medicate it.

Salvation awaits those who seek it.

Fame and money were belief systems as well, and Tenn began a list of those who had subsumed their talents to the pursuit of both. “They are narcotics,” Tenn told me, “as powerful as any I’ve tried, and every bit as pernicious. They offer their benefit and they exact their cost at precisely the same moment.”

Sex was a church in which Tenn had literally and figuratively knelt, and it burned away as quickly as the youth and beauty that are the costs of admission.

Luchino Visconti would have nothing to do with the concept of any organized set of beliefs, save one. As he explained to Tenn, look to the cultures for revelations: “Visconti invited me into an extended aesthetic and cultural orgasm, training my eye for the color and intricacy of every available moment and every type of person,” Tenn said. “What I learned, and what I want to pass on to you, is this: I must urge you to expand yourself and spend time with people not of your country. The French will teach you what you should hate. The Italians will teach you how to adequately love what you should. The Latins will teach you the majesty of superstition and instinct. The people of Nordic extraction teach us how to clean things and bear up. The Japanese lead us to extremity. Africans will teach you the mystical aspects of the earth, and how to draw power from them. And your American heritage? It has given you the appetite and the entitlement to be rapacious and to take all of these things from all of these people and to hope to be whole.”

The pages filled up, my pen kept racing to capture Tenn’s thoughts, and the coffee kept coming, and Tenn kept on with his pilgrimages to the tiny restroom in the rear of the café.

Tenn returned and asked me to look at the list of topics he had written. The first on the list was “Navigation.”

“Perfect,” he said, and went off, again, to the restroom. “Kim Stanley,” he said as he walked off, and he turned to make sure I had written the name down.

On each of the days we had spent together, Tenn had made references to Kim Stanley. Notes had been scribbled, her name invoked, his eyes rolled in remembrance of time he had spent with her. “Kim is the best of times and the worst of times,” Tenn quipped, “all at the same time, every time.”

A wild and violent woman, with a quick mind and a memory that was at one time remarkable, Stanley had every one of her spigots turned to full force at all times, and damage appeared wherever she rested or cast her gaze. “Kim could not believe that any progress could have been made, in her best interests, until there was serious damage to be found,” Tenn told me. “Serious physical and emotional damage, at which point she felt that her job had been done; she had made her impact.”

Stanley was a tireless and inventive fabulist, and her family history and catalog of experiences varied frequently. The narrative changed to suit her daily need, and she required, at all times, an audience, which was there not only to pay her attention, but to offer, for her many stories, a summation, a defense of her actions, praise for her achievement.

If she was to be believed, Stanley was the daughter of one academic and the niece and cousin of many others, learned and rigid men who forced their erudition and expertise and bodies upon her at an early age. When I made contact with Stanley, in her home on Hillcrest in Los Angeles, she held to this story, made easier to tell, she claimed, by years of therapy and silence and the freedom that certain deaths in a family bring to the survivors.

“I was made, I believe, for abuse,” she told me. “I don’t know if this is something that was decided upon by a God or by fate. It was decided by men, who saw an opportunity and took it. It is what men do.” She stressed the final five words slowly and deliberately, emphasizing each word, then repeating them, then laughing. “I have not had a good time on this earth with men,” she continued. “I was given their abuse for years, and I then went to them, stupidly and blindly and eagerly, for their acceptance and their acknowledgment of what they had done to me. I chained myself to an awful Catherine wheel of rage and booze and sex and protracted scenes of surrender and forgiveness. I have sought out to reform myself thousands of times.”

In the biography she chose to share with me, Kim Stanley spent her childhood in Texas and New Mexico, hot, dry climates where, she remembered, she dressed lightly, moved quickly, and routinely defended her ideas and her body. “I was sexual very early,” she told me. “I was led to believe that this was a natural thing among intelligent and enlightened people. It was a need, like the dip in the pool you needed to survive the afternoon, or the drinks that would help you sleep through the hot night.” Panties were placed in the icebox, a cool towel placed on the neck, and her father, her brothers, perhaps a cousin might visit her, to get through the “beastly night,” she recalled. “All the nights then, and all the nights since,” she said, “have been beastly.” Dinner conversations were debates on literature, biology, physics, history. “I had a good mind,” she told me. “I still have a good mind. It’s full of horrible and outrageous things, but it’s good. It’s helped me to survive.”

A self-confessed fabulist, Kim Stanley, seen here in the 1960s, when she was spending a lot of time with Tennessee, was a brilliant actress and a “tortured woman” who, according to Tennessee, put off the work required of her until she was terrified of attempting it again. She once told him that she would rather jump out of a plane than step on a stage. (illustration credit 16.1)

Kim Stanley saw Katharine Cornell in a 1940s traveling production and decided that she was what all actresses should look like. In the hot, dusty Texas town in which Cornell appeared, she was cool and collected and unafraid. “I looked at my mess of a life,” Stanley said, “and decided that I wanted to move through it like her.” (illustration credit 16.2)

Stanley told me that she earned a master’s degree from a school in New Mexico—when it was not in Texas. A brilliant student, she studied a program of varied subjects, majoring, she insisted, in biography. “I wanted to learn about other people’s lives,” she told me. “I wanted to know points of departure, means of escape. I could escape mentally by remembering things I’d read, snatches of song, but now I wanted to get away, to plan and execute an actual means of escape from where I was.”

The lives of actresses fascinated Stanley, and she read their biographies and articles in magazines like Theatre Arts, and she claimed to have seen Katharine Cornell when the actress toured Texas in the early 1940s. “Oh, I followed her across the state!” Stanley exulted. “I thought she was so beautiful, so composed. We sat and sweltered in our seats, but she glided across the stage, gorgeously costumed, dry as a bone, beautiful, every syllable perfect. I could see the words on the page she had memorized.” Stanley went to bed each night, alone or with uninvited guests, imagining a blank page onto which she affixed facts learned, dreams pursued, revenge sought. Tenn had his mental theater, and Kim Stanley had her psychic diary, which she kept until her death. After seeing Cornell on the stage, Stanley imagined herself beautiful and well arranged, proper. It was inconceivable to Stanley that a person of Katharine Cornell’s bearing might ever be used as she had been. “The blame began,” Stanley told me. “I had been the sort of person, the sort of undeserving, aberrant person who should always earn her place by being smart or pretty or funny or useful in ways devised by men in the hot night.” Katharine Cornell, or any well-preserved and well-presented person, would not be treated so badly.

“Katharine Cornell got me out of the mind-set I had known in Texas,” Stanley confessed, “but I came to despise her style of acting. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t about real people. It was entertainment. Yokels like me, at that point, who had never seen anything like her, could be removed, for a moment, from our real lives and imagine something else, but I wanted to be a character in plays that made people realize that somewhere, right now, there was a girl in a bedroom making lists on a mental sheet of paper of how to survive and escape and be something else, someplace else. I then fell in love with Vivien Leigh. All the things I work so hard to achieve—truth, detail, emotional honesty—Vivien Leigh walked on the stage with. Katharine Cornell overwhelmed me when I was a young girl and I saw her onstage, because I had never seen anyone so pretty and cool and composed. Vivien Leigh had the assurance of Katharine Cornell, an ability to bring a profound light on a stage or press it into film, and then scare the hell out of you with some emotional truths that were so intense you wanted to look away. I did a couple of plays—Chéri and A Far Country—and I needed a particular look, a particular and exact way of looking and moving, and I would think of her and the way she removed a glove while breaking your heart or sauntered across a stage while planning the most diabolical revenge. I think she was remarkable, and she got me through some of those bad years. She gave me a fantasy or two.”

Stanley spent time in California, ultimately claiming that such places as the Pasadena Playhouse held no interest for her. “I was bigger, even then, than the Pasadena Playhouse,” she boasted, “so I went to New York. It was inevitable. My relationship with New York was like the relationship between Blanche and Stanley. When I got off that bus and hit that pavement, I said to that city, ‘We’ve both known this was bound to happen!’ I was where I belonged.”

She lived in squalor—hot, small rooms that she rented by the week, with bedbugs and shared bathrooms, but she didn’t care. By day she modeled for Jacques Fath and Pierre Balmain. “I had a good figure and blond hair,” she told me, “and that’s all you needed for the kinds of shows I did. No one got too close to you, so they couldn’t see that I’d been up all night, reading or drinking or fooling around. They couldn’t see that I sometimes ran out of the apartment without putting on makeup. They were looking at the dresses, these awful buyers for stores all across the country, they weren’t looking at our faces.” Sometimes they did look at the faces and they sought contact. “They were good for a dinner and a twenty,” Stanley told me. “They thought we were glamorous and had spectacular lives, and I made them believe that I did. I told them about plays I’d been in, which of course had not been written yet, and offers made that were entirely imaginary. I was acting, you see. I was training myself, and they, these men from Nebraska and Kansas and Florida and Michigan, could put aside their own mean and little lives, with their wives and mortgage payments and ledgers and spend some time with an actress. I would get a steak and a night in a clean hotel. These were my first acting jobs.”

Tenn remembered that when he met Stanley, not long after the premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire, she seemed very extreme, very odd. “I was not aware of such a thing as a beatnik or a hippie at that time,” he told me, “but that is the best description I can offer of the woman I met at that time—disheveled, very opinionated, wildly inappropriate in her expressions of feelings and desires. I was amused by her, but I also wanted to guard myself against her. She was clearly dangerous.”

Kim picked up jobs in touring companies, repertory theaters. She picked up a husband, a fellow actor, but this arrangement did nothing to curtail her ravenous interest in the company of men. “I was out there all the time,” she told me, “like I was still at that dinner table with my father, making my points, making my case, trying to get his attention. I just went around looking for a man who would treat me as I thought I should be treated. I had a series of scenarios in my mind of how I should be treated, of how conversations ought to proceed, but I kept finding the same men and the same outcomes.” This began to change for Stanley when she studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, and she found a man who would, at last, listen to her, argue with her, give her the benefit of the doubt. Strasberg affirmed her talent and her intelligence, but he also lured her closer to him by offering advice, training, secrets that would open her up to becoming a better actress, a better person. “He was my guru, my church, my salvation,” Stanley told me. “It would later fall apart, and there would be the great Reformation of my life that resembled Martin Luther’s. I renounced Lee Strasberg, but that came years after I submitted to him completely.”

Marlon Brando befriended Stanley at roughly the same time as her conversion to the tenets of the Actors Studio. Although Brando’s name is one that is routinely highlighted on the roster of Studio alumni, he pointedly told me that he owed nothing to Lee Strasberg or to the place that the Studio became during its peak years in the 1950s. “If you like what I do, what I’ve done,” he told me, “then lay your thanks at the feet of Elia Kazan and Stella Adler. They were my teachers. They kept me focused and in sight of the shore from which I always drifted. I liked a lot of the people who studied with Lee, but I never believed in him or trusted him.”

Strasberg held a particular power over women who had suffered some trauma, physical or sexual, in their early years, and who now sought some comfort from a paternal influence who could make them feel safe and smart and special. “He fed on the weakest of egos,” Kazan told me. “It was terribly predictable, but then Lee was among the most predictable of all people I’ve ever met. His machinery was exposed when in operation, and he gathered about him those who would completely surrender to him, body and soul, and those whose fame would elevate him. That is Lee Strasberg. That is all you need to know.”

Tenn did not hold as harsh a view of Strasberg, but he offered a puny endorsement. “Look, the building existed,” he told me. “It was built by Kazan and Clurman, with some janitorial assistance from Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis, minor lights who affixed themselves to two giants, two revolutionaries. Those people, for me, are the true Actors Studio, and they had bolder agendas to follow. Strasberg was the one who stayed behind, dragged along on the long tails left by greater men. He was very intelligent, very well read, and actors are not terribly bright, on the whole, and the actors who sought Lee’s counsel were particularly rough, hard, blank slates with a bright, sharp need to be avenged, somehow, through their work.” This was, of course, something with which Tenn could relate: there was anger in his work as well, and he was attracted to the angry energy he always found at the Studio.

Lee Strasberg was for many—and particularly for Kim Stanley—an acting teacher, a guru, a best friend, and a lover. “I didn’t think I could do anything—anything at all—without his approval,” Stanley said. (illustration credit 16.3)

“My anger was constructed, worked out, smoothed over in a room where I was alone, and my demons were on paper,” he told me, “but at the Studio, there was shared space—in a former church, God help us, with all the attendant ghosts and memories—and a leader, a flawed guru, urging everyone to expose themselves, their weaknesses, their desires, and to use them in the development of actors and plays and lives. I found it fascinating but evil.”

Kim Stanley adored the Studio, and she adored Lee Strasberg. “Lee took the mental diary I had,” she told me, “looked at what I had written on the pages, and put it on real pieces of paper, and he put them at the top of his priorities. I had never lived on a schedule before, and he gave me one. There were classes, there were auditions, there were rounds to be made. He gave a shape to my days and to my mind. He told me what I should eat, how to take care of myself. He loved me and he made love to me. There was nothing furtive or hurried or deep in the night about his affection.”

Stanley got jobs and her work was noticed, but it wasn’t until she began to attend Strasberg’s private sessions, as well as therapy sessions with a psychiatrist of his choosing, that her work became the emotionally intense, almost unbearable experience people now describe.

The first stage performance of Kim Stanley’s that Tenn could recall was in a short-lived production of The Chase, written by Horton Foote, and starring Kim Hunter, who invited him. “Horton Foote writes very deft and sentimental rough drafts of plays,” Tenn told me. “If you stuck some gingham on Linda Loman and put some oilcloth on the table, and then rather than have Willy kill himself at the end, you have a pie baked or a little boy comforted after a nightmare or a criticism retracted, you could refashion Death of a Salesman into a Horton Foote play. He never cares or reaches for the truth of a play, a big moment, the reality of things. He reaches for the truth of an anecdote, a passing feeling. Old, sad people ignored. Loveless women seeking attention and affection. He writes précis, not plays. I don’t know if his study of Christian Science has done this to him, but the sadness of his plays burns off quickly, through song or faith or sugary will or misunderstanding. A false mysticism hangs over his rooms like an odor of cooking or heat or decay. I find his plays to be remarkably like Mexican food. The ingredients—beans, rice, meat—are either rolled in soft flour or plopped on rigid flour. Whatever you order, you bite into it and you realize there is no difference. The presentation has changed, but the ingredients remain the same.”

Stanley, however, performed as if the play held for her the truths of the ages, and it was not impressive to Tenn. “It was too much spread across too little,” he remembered, “but it was the work of a good actress in the wrong play. She had been given no direction, or perhaps the director realized that she was the most interesting thing on the stage and gave her over to her intentions.” Hunter performed simply and appropriately and gave an intelligent performance, but Stanley seemed to burn with some undiagnosed fever. It was a style—if one could call it that—that Stanley would replicate when she was cast the following year in William Inge’s Picnic. Tenn saw the production many times, firmly rooted in his competition with Inge, but also intrigued by the work of Stanley and Eileen Heckart. “Eileen Heckart would escape me,” Tenn recalled. “I never had the opportunity to write anything for her, to work with her, but her work in that play was very real, very troubling.” As an aging schoolteacher, desperate for marriage, even to the flabby, unimpressive salesman to whom she’s anchored, Heckart spared neither herself nor her audiences any unattractive aspects of her character’s grasping nature. “I think that a great deal of that play’s success came from the pathos of her performance,” Tenn stated, still unable to attribute anything to its playwright, while Kim, as a tomboyish, bookish girl, was “neurasthenic, agitated, gasping.” Years later, when Tenn wrote Suddenly, Last Summer, he thought of Stanley in the creation of Catherine, the young woman who has seen too much, which she remembers all too vividly, and whose only salvation lay in the scalpel of a surgeon, who is called to lobotomize her, to eradicate her past and her biography. “That is Kim,” Tenn remembered. “Now try to imagine that character wedged onto the stage of a play set in homespun, corn-fed Kansas, where a bevy of horny women lust after cakes and a wandering stud.”

Tenn could not imagine how a high-school student could have endured or witnessed so much trauma, but the scars were presented by Stanley, in the body language of a girl repeatedly beaten or criticized, and particularly in the speech patterns: a rush of words, a deep intake of breath, the threat of hyperventilation. During the prime of her talents, from 1953 to 1964, Tenn witnessed Kim Stanley on the stage, on television, and in two films, and he was alternately amazed and repulsed by what he saw. “Kim had the capacity to elevate trivial plays,” Tenn told me, “and I never understood why she spent so much time in plays that were simply not good, simply not deserving of her talents.” Elia Kazan believed that she sought minor plays deliberately, as some extremely talented actresses often have as their closest friend a decidedly less gifted actress. “It gives them ballast,” Kazan believed. “They have a confidence with a lesser actress, a lesser play. They are not challenged. They can continue in the confidence of their gifts because no one—certainly not the script—is challenging them, pushing them toward higher goals.” Stanley devoted herself to several plays by Horton Foote, among them A Young Lady of Property, which was presented by Philco Television Playhouse in 1953, and The Traveling Lady, televised by Studio One in Hollywood in 1957. Both survive. Tenn described the former program to me, and recalled that it was his first introduction to Joanne Woodward, who has a supporting part as Stanley’s best friend. Playing a starstruck young girl, almost always without parental supervision, and dreaming of imminent stardom, Stanley radiates a manic energy that was difficult for Tenn to take. By the conclusion of the piece, when Stanley sits on a swing, clutching the chains holding the contraption together, you expect her to tear it apart or to render her hands bloody. She is out of control. Four years later, in The Traveling Lady, Stanley has her bearings, and Tenn was terribly moved by this young mother, her frightened child by her side, waiting for her husband, who is soon to be released from prison. The life she hopes for, for which she has made preparations, will never occur, and you know this from the first scene, from her first nervous giggle and hand to her hair, perpetually making herself presentable, proper—not the wife of a convict and a drunk. “The play is pure soap opera,” Tenn stated, “something out of a ladies’ magazine, but Kim was overwhelming. I felt that she was actively holding back her fear, her disappointment, her immense sadness, and of course it ultimately appeared, and it was wonderful, and horrible, and real.

“The primary identifying characteristic of Kim’s work,” Tenn told me, “is a suppressed emotion, a manic attack just beneath the surface, a willful pushing down of bile and memory. If this tsunami of rage can be countered by some modicum of comedy”—as in Inge’s Bus Stop—“or a direct line of motivation, as when she played Maggie”—in the London premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—“there is great effectiveness. Both her character and the actress playing it are working against and with something—a strong text, recognizable emotions, forces beyond her control. But in most of the plays Kim chose to work with, there is nothing but Kim, nothing but emotional excess, undisciplined and messy and with no suitable outlet.”

Tenn believed that Kim’s talent would have grown and been fully served if she had taken his advice and tackled greater challenges in plays that “were as big as she was,” that would have forced her to rise to situations that required more than the tricks she had learned and kept applying to every part. There was talk at some point of her being in a production of Congreve’s Way of the World, as either Millamant or Lady Wishfort, wherever her weight was when rehearsals began. Plays by Shaw and Pirandello were offered to her, too, at a time when her name would have sold tickets, but she refused them.

Kim Stanley as Maggie the Cat in the London premiere of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, in 1958. Seen here with Paul Massie as Brick, Stanley confessed that she only got the part “half right,” because she could not trust herself enough to admit how much she had in common with the character. Twenty-five years later, she would be Big Mama in a television version of the play. “And that I got,” Stanley confessed. (illustration credit 16.4)

She tried to explain this to me.

“When I was acting on the stage,” she told me, “I was operating on a series of exercises that Lee had provided to me. My audience was always comprised of three people: my mother, my father, and Lee. I ignored the hundreds of people out there in the seats, and I ignored anything that might have been in the subtext of the plays I was doing. Everything I did was an attempt to have my father and my mother notice who I was and what I had become and what had been done to me, and for Lee to see that I was strong and I had overcome all of these obstacles, these terrible moments in my life, and had brought them to the stage, had made them into a truth that people could see. I wasn’t Katharine Cornell gliding across a stage, composed and serene, with pear-shaped vowels and a caring husband in the wings, but I was a real person, hurt and hurting and trying to make some sense of things.”

No matter the play?

“No matter the play,” she told me. “The play is irrelevant, the text doesn’t matter. My story was the primary one, slipped under and between every action and every character. That was my motivation, and that is what Lee gave me to work with.”

And?

“And I now see how incredibly fucked up that was—and is,” she told me.

“Kim Stanley worked very hard—and very well—on improving my spiritual life,” Tenn said. Stanley introduced him to the writings of Martin Buber, a philosopher whose worldview was uncannily similar to Stanley’s idea of acting, of artistic purity. “Acting is constant discovery,” Kim told me, “and it requires an acute awareness, but it also requires a foundation that is bigger than we are, and Buber drew me toward that foundation. I wanted Tennessee to stand on that foundation—any foundation—and know that he was safe to write and to live. I wanted him to stop reacting—I wanted us both to stop reacting—in the dangerous, unbalanced way we always did, and I thought Buber could help him with this.”

Stanley’s favorite quote from Buber: “I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a man’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”

I asked Stanley what the quote meant to her. “When I found that quote, it helped me to realize that I couldn’t rely on Lee Strasberg—or anyone—to tell me how to act. I could not rely on any therapist to tell me what dreams meant or what imagery there was in my life or how it might be controlled by me. I saw that I could not remain the frightened, angry girl terrified in her bed at night, waiting for abuse that I somehow felt I deserved. I realized that the foundation on which I should be standing and from which I could begin a heightened awareness of living was my responsibility. I was the foundation. And Tennessee was his foundation, and I hoped that I—with my shattered background and my shared addictions and patterns—could be the one to lead him to that foundation.”

By the time I came to know Kim Stanley, she had made several attempts to curb her alcoholism and to quell her anger. With the memorized words of Martin Buber, she came to believe that “the world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings,” a maxim that helped her to deal with her past and her parents. The study of Buber also helped her to realize that sin could not be uprooted from the human soul—only forgiven and repeatedly dealt with, studied. “I had studied every inch of my psyche,” Stanley admitted, “but toward the goal of achieving something on the stage. I now wanted to achieve something in the here and now, in real time. I wanted to be a good mother to my children; I wanted to function in the world without drugs or alcohol.” Stanley was appalled at the arrogance and the abuse she had displayed so fruitfully in the years she was working: she rarely completed her commitment to a play, leaving amid lawsuits and enraged ticket holders. “I had allowed myself to believe that my talent was a privilege that only a few were entitled to share or to see,” she told me. “I felt no responsibility to any writer or director or actor. I was beholden only to my talent, to the use of it in a performance that was then laid out for that audience of three.” However, of that audience of three, only one person—Lee Strasberg—was in attendance. The others were spectral, even if they sparked most of the rage that fueled her performances.

Kim Stanley’s dependence on and respect for Lee Strasberg began to wane when she came to realize that he did not have the slavish devotion to his own teachings that he forced upon his students. “There were the canonical teachings,” Stanley remembered, “the same quotes, the same advisements, over and over. The private sessions where he told me, over and over, that I had failed. He had not failed. The Method had not failed. It was exactly like the people in churches who can never feel comfort from the sermons: it is always their fault; it is always a failure of faith, of application.”

In the early 1960s, at precisely the same time Elia Kazan was preparing his Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Lee Strasberg announced the formation of the Actors Studio Theatre, which would be the culmination of everything he had ever hoped to achieve: a devoted company of actors taking on the great plays and utilizing the Method as fashioned and taught by Lee Strasberg. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was considered by many to be the ideal play to launch this new enterprise; instead, the Actors Studio Theatre, in Stanley’s words, devoted itself to “dead or very bad playwrights,” opening its first season with Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, appropriately enough a play about the wonders of analysis and self-awareness (“right up Lee’s alley,” Stanley cracked), and concluding with Randall Jarrell’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which would star both Stanley and Geraldine Page.

Opinions vary on the production of The Three Sisters. Eva Le Gallienne called it a “mess, the after-effects of a huge accident, in which victims are racing about, frightened, confused, unaware of their surroundings.” Uta Hagen, who might have felt some resentment toward a fellow acting teacher, was amazed that a cast of talented actors, “people whose worth I knew, whose talents were unmistakable,” were “so adrift. There was no cohesion at all in the production. You could not imagine that anyone in the play was related, or had even met each other before.”

The Three Sisters had its admirers, however. The reviews were, for the most part, positive, and Kazan enviously noted that in its first season, the Actors Studio Theatre was far more successful than his own efforts at Lincoln Center. “It looked as if we would fail,” Kazan told me, “and Lee would have the national theater that our country has always needed. I never felt that Lee deserved to have that happen for him, not merely because I disliked the man and thought his talents slim and poorly utilized, but because I knew that he could never sustain the effort, could never hold together the people required to have such a theater happen. I knew he would alienate everyone.”

Strasberg did just that when The Three Sisters was performed in London, at the Aldwych Theatre, in 1965, and was savagely dismissed by British audiences and critics. “It was horrible,” Stanley remembered, “and we deserved the abuse. The story you heard—and probably still hear—around the Studio is that the British didn’t supply us with the proper rehearsal space, or the stage of the theater was poorly conceived, or the lighting board was insufficient. Well, the problem was the arrogance of the company, which felt that our greatness was both obvious and settled: we only had to show up and show those stuffy British actors and theatergoers how theater was done, what real emotion and experience looked like. We ignored the rehearsals we obviously needed. We prepared nothing. We had been told—and we believed—that we were great.”

Stanley could survive the brickbats that were thrown her way after the Three Sisters debacle, but she was not prepared for Strasberg’s treatment of the company. “It was entirely our fault,” Stanley remembered. “He stood on the stage of that theater the morning after the opening and told us the critics and the audiences were correct: We were horrible.” Strasberg took no responsibility for the production, and proceeded to lay the blame on the company. “Here was my teacher,” Stanley remembered, “the man who had asked me, forced me, to trust him, to reveal to him everything about myself, in whom I had put my complete trust, and he was disowning all of us, criticizing all of us.”

Barbara Baxley and George C. Scott offered verbal responses to Strasberg, tough and combative, and Scott even physically threatened him. Stanley was in a daze. “I am now grateful for that realization,” she said. “My eyes were opened. I saw that I had done everything wrong, I had botched everything. I had never understood what acting or the theater was all about.”

At the conclusion of her time in The Three Sisters, Kim Stanley was in her early forties, but a visit to her physician revealed her to be in a state of medical crisis: she was severely overweight, her “blood numbers” were astronomical, and there was evidence, even then, of liver damage. “I was in terrible shape,” she recalled. “I was young, but I looked old, and I felt ancient.” Unable and unwilling to work, Stanley retreated to books, finding solace in a particular quote by Buber, which she shared, at one point, with Tenn: “To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.”

The drinking continued, as did a dependence on Seconal and Nembutal, but eventually Stanley found direction for her talents and her energies through teaching. “I failed miserably at Santa Fe,” she told me, referring to her tenure at the College of Santa Fe, where she managed to lure Maureen Stapleton for a production of Waiting for Godot, but where she also directed Greer Garson in a production of The Madwoman of Chaillot, which she played, according to Stanley, “exactly as if she were Auntie Mame. That was the nadir.”

After teaching in New York for a number of years, heavily subsidized by friends, including Tenn, she moved to Los Angeles, where her home served as her acting studio. “I discovered something fascinating,” she told me. “I had read biographies of actresses, and I had read plays, and my thoughts were always of escape—from home, from myself, from whatever despair I had to endure. I read books and plays again and I did not find escape: I found revelations. My point should never have been to remove myself from the life into which I had been born, but to come to terms with it. My point should never have been to overturn the relationships I had with people who abused me, but to repair and forgive them, and everything I ever needed for those acts is in works of literature and music and art, and of course they are also all within, and art takes you within, gives you some parameters for moving around inside yourself and figuring things out.”

The sharing of oneself through writing or acting or painting always involves the sharing of one’s data, including our most intense data—the fears, the regrets, the hopes. But we need to apply a process to our biographies before we commit them to the page or the workshop or the rehearsal room. Think of it as a cleansing process or the burning down of materials needed to make gold—fires to the fear. Remove the biography from the merely personal and apply it to something bigger than yourself, beyond yourself. The act of sharing must begin. Steps must be gentle.

After nearly two decades of inactivity, Kim Stanley returned to acting. “I wanted to see how I would do it with my new mind and my new eyes and my new legs,” she told me. “I wasn’t as strong as I had been, and I had limitations—physical limitations—that I hadn’t had before, but I was so much clearer than I had been before. I understood what being an actress meant in a way I hadn’t before.”

Stanley was well received in the film biography Frances, in which she appeared with one of her students, Jessica Lange. “Jessie was ballast for me,” Stanley told me. “She knew the rudiments of filmmaking, as I didn’t. I had always gone into my character and expected—demanded—that I be followed. I had never thought to learn how a film was made, or how people conserved and utilized their energies. I felt like that young girl just beginning my studies again.” Stanley earned an Oscar nomination for her performance, her second. (Her first, in 1965, had been for Séance on a Wet Afternoon, when she lost, incongruously, to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins.)

As part of the great reclamation project she had undertaken, Stanley resumed long phone calls with Tenn, and she sought out the advice of people she had once ridiculed or openly rebuked. Phone calls were made to Eva Le Gallienne, who accepted them with curiosity and confusion, wherein Stanley apologized for her vehement dismissal of all that Le Gallienne had stood for. “It is terribly confusing to accept such a phone call,” Le Gallienne remembered. “I had no idea I had held such a place in Kim Stanley’s mind for so long,” she recalled, “or that I had annoyed her so. Now I learned that she felt she had been wrong, and she told me all that she had learned from my example.” Stanley hoped to create a theater, a company of players, to examine and exalt and mount the great plays, and she looked to Le Gallienne for advice. When these phone calls took place, Le Gallienne was in her late eighties and Stanley in her late sixties, but both believed that the dreams discussed were possible to attain, if only Stanley could stop drinking. “We talked about alcoholism,” Le Gallienne told me, “and she was looking for nostrums, hopes, plans, and I had to tell her that there is only one way, only one means of victory over alcohol. You stop using it. Period. It’s difficult, I assure you, but it is the only way.” The advice offered seemed dry and less than inspirational to Stanley, but she kept trying to put the drinking behind her. “You cannot remove from your life the situations that cause you to drink,” Stanley told me, “so I was trying to reeducate my mind so that the same situations wouldn’t lead me to crave the slow, sweet death that alcohol brought me.”

Stanley was involved in re-education until the day she died.

She came to forgive Lee Strasberg. “He was a great teacher,” she told me, “even if he was not a great man or a great director. He had an extraordinary eye for detail, and an extraordinary ear. He could see and hear your weaknesses and your needs, and he could tell when you were lying. He took these gifts into places and situations he shouldn’t have, but I was not a passive person. I was his willing victim and partner. I profited, in bizarre and painful ways, from our times together. I wish I had been more fully present for my work in those years, those good years when I got work, but I was hidden beneath layers of anger and alcohol and this insane form of analysis Lee and I had constructed.”

Tenn had told me that I would need to learn the art of navigation. He also told me that it was an art very few had mastered, that almost everyone he had known failed, significantly, in its execution. “Choices are offered,” he said, “avenues opened, and you take the step and you wait to see what you’ll find on this particular journey. None of us knows what the right thing to do is, not even at all times in hindsight, but it is better to be prepared for the journey, to have the Dopp kit of the prepared traveler, to be a smart pilgrim.”

I last spoke to Kim Stanley in 1999, at a time when she was riddled with health problems and obsessed with problems that were visiting her grandchildren and friends. One of her salvations, she told me, was the study of plays, particularly those in which she had appeared. She read in amazement Lillian Hellman’s Montserrat, Inge’s Picnic and Bus Stop and Natural Affection, Anita Loos’s Chéri, O’Neill’s A Touch of the Poet, Arthur Laurents’s A Clearing in the Woods, various versions of The Three Sisters. She imagined taking on these roles again, investing them with the person she now was, with the clarity she now possessed. “I had gifts,” she told me, “but so frequently they were poorly applied, badly used. I now have a mental theater, like Tennessee’s, and I can place myself on its stage and imagine that I’m assuming these roles again, from a better perspective.”

She rediscovered Shaw and Beckett and Pinter, and she forced herself to read all of the works of Edward Albee, an act that represented great courage for her, since she had humiliated herself at a rehearsal for the film version of A Delicate Balance, where, in the company of the film’s director, Tony Richardson, and her costars, Paul Scofield, Katharine Hepburn, Lee Remick, Joseph Cotten, and Betsy Blair, she chose to reveal, in her estimation, the true “alcoholic and beastly and bestial nature” of the character Claire.

“I was out of control,” she remembered, “and I was drunk, and I was angry. I chose to let everyone in the room know that this was not merely a play. This nightmare of a person was alive and well and in their midst.” Writhing on the floor, drooling, touching herself, Stanley turned a reading into something “out of Bosch.” Her good friend Tony Richardson was forced to fire her, after both Scofield and Hepburn lodged complaints. Scofield refused to speak to or about Stanley in our conversations, but when Hepburn was told that Stanley still felt remorse and shame about the incident, she offered a response.

Asking me to take dictation from her, Hepburn urged me to tell Kim Stanley that “we all have, I assure you, moments in our lives that offer us pain and enlightenment. You are far too talented to waste your time and your energy on a moment that is gone, that is forgotten, that has taught you something. At the end of the day—at the end of all the days—we have precisely what we need to move on and do what we must.”

I read the words to Stanley over the phone, and she asked me to type them up and send them to her. When she received them, she called and told me that she was aware of so many blocks that had been removed from her path, from her vision. “I can finally see and move as I should,” she told me. “This is what I wish for everyone. It’s what I always wanted to give to my students. It’s the purest state of being, to always be moving forward, open and aware.”

Marlon Brando had a desire to reconnect with Stanley, whose talent he admired so much and about whom he was most frequently asked. “What was so remarkable about Kim?” Brando responded to me late one night:

When she was truly focused and properly challenged, she had the ability to transmit the reality of human agitation, anguish, elation, concentration better than anyone else. There was a sense of embarrassment in watching Kim when everything worked, because you felt you were violating the confidences of a vulnerable woman, reading the pages of a diary carelessly left open for other eyes. She had the effect—on me, at any rate—of peeling layer after layer apart, from her soul outward, and this must have been exhausting. She is a brilliant actress who was tragically denied a long career—a career deserving of her talent. I would do Kim a dishonor, I think, if I pitied her. The past is gone, yes, but the past is full of Kim’s brilliance, and I think we—I think you—need to remind people of what they didn’t see and can’t understand. When people ask about Kim, I talk about things that no longer exist, in my opinion: passion, genius, truth, danger, fearless exploration. Maybe someone like Kim wasn’t meant to last long on the stage—it may be too much for most to handle. Many an actor walks—lamely, I might add—in lanes she hacked free, cleared, paved, and then left, and they have not been suitably tended since.

I read Marlon’s words to Stanley over the phone, and she was stunned, awed. However, she only responded to one aspect of Brando’s praise. “I just don’t see the passion as much as I used to,” she told me. “I see the dream and the aching want, but I don’t see the hungry passion to give up everything else to become a warrior of the art of acting. Religious orders remind me of how I lived when I first began to realize the challenge that was ahead of me. I think a student—a good student—needs to show some penitential study and understanding before they look out and expect some applause and affirmation. I don’t see as many students ready for the long haul as I used to, and I don’t know if my vision is failing or if the students are failing. But it has me down.”

“Navigation,” Tenn told me, “is not only where you move, but how, and what you take with you.” There was a look at the clock on the wall of the café, another visit to the restroom, and then Tenn returned and removed the envelope from the shopping bag. He slid it across the table to me and asked me to read it. I had, of course, already read it, but I looked over its essentials again. Checkout times, limousine confirmation, flight numbers.

“Let’s try to make something of this as quickly as possible,” Tenn suggested. “I don’t know what we’ve accomplished so far. I don’t know that I’ve been of any help to you, but I feel that both of us, in our own ways, are staring down roads, looking for some direction. Let’s stay with that.”

I do not remember if Tenn asked me at that point if I wanted him to continue our discussion. I cannot find the words in my notes, but I do find that I wrote, “It is coming to an end, whatever this has been, and I don’t know what I have or what it adds up to being, or what I’m supposed to do with it.”

But I stayed. We continued talking.

Seventeen

TENN AND I RETURNED to the “secondary” room he had secured at the Royal Orleans, and found it had been cleaned, the piles of papers and notes, shirt boards and paper plates, neatly placed on the dresser and the two bedside tables. Tenn asked me to collect them into one pile so that we could go over them “one last time,” to excavate what we could. He turned on the television set, working with the remote control to bring the volume to the precise point that would allow him to look at its images and “listen for voices” and still talk to me and listen to me read to him. He asked me to call room service and order two buckets of ice (“the large ones,” he insisted, “not the precious ones from banquet services”), a pitcher (“stainless steel, not crystal or glass”) of iced tea, unsweetened, for both of us, a pitcher (“of any derivation”) of orange juice, a bottle of Scotch (“they know my brand”), and anything I might wish to eat. “But please,” he implored, “don’t let it possess an odor. I’m feeling sensitive to scent today.”

He then went into the bathroom, keeping the door open. As I called room service, I watched him pull a hand towel from a rung on the wall and neatly place it on the porcelain counter, spreading and patting it as if it were flour. When it was in position, bearing no bumps or wrinkles, he reached into his carrying case and placed on it several glassine envelopes and a large prescription bottle, amber-colored, bearing no label. When the towel was covered with these items, resembling a quickly improvised altar bearing a highly improbable Eucharist, Tenn reached behind him with his left foot and slammed the door shut.

I could not decide at that point if he had wanted me to see this routine: with all of the visits to bathrooms and dark corners and doorways, it had been obvious to me what he might be doing, but he had been careful never to let me see him in the act of using any drug that might be “prohibitive,” as he described them. When I had seen him taking pills, he had told me they were for his blood pressure or his glaucoma or a degenerative disease “related, in a tertiary way, to the connective tissue.” (Carrie Nye told me that, on those rare occasions when Tenn would attempt to dry out or rest or undergo a full physical examination, his treatment was always for “conjunctivitis.”)

When he came out of the bathroom, Tenn pulled the shades in the room, extinguished every light except for the lamp that was closest to his position on the bed, where he sat, padded from behind, pasha-like, by every pillow from the bed, the closet, and a cushion from one of the chairs in the room. I pulled a chair close to the bed and watched as he placed a moist washcloth over his forehead and eyes. His face was a vivid pink, sweaty, but the rest of his body still showed no signs of sweating, even though he complained of the heat. The thermostat in the room was set to its lowest level, but he continued to complain that the room was too warm. He was silent for several minutes, and he did not move or speak when our room-service order was delivered. He asked for a glass of water, with lots of ice, and a tumbler of Scotch.

With his face still partially covered by the washcloth, Tenn asked me if I had ever used cocaine. I told him I had, twice, in the summer after high school.

“Did you like it?” he asked. I told him I had.

“And you haven’t used it since?” he asked. I told him I hadn’t, because I felt I couldn’t afford it, financially or physically.

“It is a wonderful, miserable means of temporary happiness,” Tenn told me, still beneath his mask. “It is so clarifying, so healing—in the instant. It is the finest representation of God I have imagined, one I might never have conceived if I hadn’t felt it for myself. I spent so many years—and I still spend so much time—appealing to God, whatever he may ultimately be revealed to be, asking for signs, for aid, for comfort, for understanding, for inspiration. I’m calmed, I’m reassured, I buy a little time, a little corner where inspiration or arousal or awareness may visit, but in minutes or hours or days I’m back in the same state, full of wonder and fear, and I return to my God, and to my ‘gods,’ the pills and the powders. An endless cycle.”

He removed the washcloth and told me of a night in Key West when he had Truman Capote as his houseguest. The night had been hot, but still comfortable, and the old friends had walked the streets of the old, salty town that Tenn loved so much. They had enjoyed drinks and food, black beans he remembered being as shiny as onyx, pompano in a bag that the waiters had burst with great panache, eliciting silly squeals from Truman, who, on that evening, had been amusing, free of resentment, absent of envy.

The two had returned to Tenn’s home, where Truman offered the end to the evening and “the beginning of the rest of that night, and the rest of my days.” An enormous bag, normally used for the storage of frozen foods, was plopped on the coffee table. “Treats!” Truman had cooed. Tenn had no idea how to present or display the cocaine, and had only a cheese platter, used at the occasional party, on which to serve the “dessert.” The plate had to be clean, it had to be smooth, it had to be slick. These were the directives shouted by Truman, and Tenn set about washing and patting down the platter, offering it to Truman for inspection, placing it, with painful precision, painstaking adjustment, in the dead center of a coffee table, where the two of them then sat, talking and laughing, passing the platter, back and forth, all night long. They spoke of sentences, phrases, words. Getting the ball rolling. Dropping a word, dropping a memory.

Tenn and Truman began a game, one they had come to believe might be a writer’s myth, something writers should do, might have considered doing, but never had: offering a word, a sentence, and having their partner take it from there.

A line of cocaine, a line of prose.

Tenn tried to remember some of the lines from that night.

“There were cerulean skies on the night when I killed my son, this I remember,” Truman opened.

“I was looking at the skies,” Tenn offered, “because I could not look at what I had done.”

“But it had been something I had needed—and wanted—to do for some time,” Truman bounced back.

Tennessee envied Truman Capote his success in placing essays in various magazines for high fees. While there was often friction in their relationship, Tennessee recalled that his friend was “a wonderful, traveling show for a long time.” (illustration credit 17.1)

“I know that you will not understand my reasons, or me [right now], but you will,” Tenn replied.

“All of us, you see,” Truman offered, “do what we must. At the conclusion of any tale—moral or otherwise—everyone did precisely as they pleased.”

The game continued, interrupted by observations on peers and friends and plans, but it grew tiresome, silly, strained. Tenn’s head began to pound—a fissure, he thought, had opened right in the center of his forehead. The only solution was to snort more, to “feed the animal.” Tenn looked over at Truman, crouched over the platter, inhaling one line, then another, then another, a marathon of ingestion. Tenn held out his hand for the platter, for more, for relief. Truman began to offer the platter, but when it was only inches from Tenn’s hand, he snatched it away, positioned it on the coffee table again, and leaned over it. “I’m not happy yet,” Truman announced, and snorted two more enormous lines, “railroad tracks,” Tenn told me, “to oblivion.”

Tenn sat up slightly and looked at me. “I want you to understand something,” he said, “and I have no way of knowing if this will mean anything to you, now or ever, but there are only two modes in which I have been happy: when I have been deep in my work, and when I have been willfully insensitive. Those are the only states of being I know of that can render a person—this person—happy.”

Tenn put on his glasses, picked up the television remote control, and began flipping through the channels. He would point the remote at the television and violently press on the buttons, in the belief, perhaps, that the force of his gesture is all that would move the channels, bring on more images, more sounds. Tenn asked for paper, anything on which he could write. I had my booklets, a legal pad. “Something clean,” he said. “For me.” There was nothing in the room—nothing immediately visible—that did not already bear writing, doodles, scratches. I opened the drawers of the dresser and found several pages of hotel stationery. I gave them to Tenn, who placed them on a New Orleans phone directory, which he positioned on his knees. He sat silent for a moment, then began clicking the channels.

A soap opera. Forty-six seconds, and a dismissive snort.

A movie commercial, a soap commercial, a game show. Three minutes and a grimace.

A movie, from the early seventies, on a cable channel. Tenn paused, watched, smiled. He reached for his pen.

He was faking the fog.

“WHEN DID YOU turn to this act?” I asked. “When did you start faking the fog?”

Tenn paused for a moment, put aside the paper on which he was writing, and began to think. “It was in that same year, 1973, when things began to change terribly for me,” he replied. “When I found I could no longer talk to or understand actresses—people in general. I can live, I suppose, without inspiration or input from others, but I can’t survive without a woman to talk to me and through me.” Like the lonely man who has no female company in his life and looks at photographs or videos, manufactures a fantasy life with idealized women whom he can mold and love and move, Tenn had turned to these “distant, divine” representations.

Ellis Rabb, a man described by Carrie Nye as a hybrid of stork, magician, and lost unicorn, was chosen to direct a twenty-fifth-anniversary production of A Streetcar Named Desire, a decision Tennessee described as catastrophic. (illustration credit 17.2)

“I had a sort of creative breakdown in 1973,” Tenn continued. “Beyond all of the things that were happening in my personal life, I had a horrible and divisive and explicit moment in that year when I began to be unable to do what I wanted to do and always had done.” He asked for another Scotch, visited the bathroom, and promised to tell me about it.

Back on the bed, Scotch in hand, Tenn told me that he had approached the twenty-fifth-anniversary revival of Streetcar with excitement and no small amount of hope. It would be produced by the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center and directed by Ellis Rabb, the man who had brought into being the Association of Producing Artists (APA)/Phoenix Repertory Company, and Tenn initially felt good about handing his play over to this “Memphis-born man, queer and bold and manic.” Tenn’s knowledge of Rabb was provided primarily by Carrie Nye, a good friend to both men, Southern and impetuous, who loved and understood Rabb, and by Eva Le Gallienne, who had inspired him to create the APA and who had worked with the company. One of its productions, in 1968, had been Ionesco’s Exit the King, in which Rabb directed Le Gallienne: Tenn saw it, and it led him to believe that prior to the curtain’s rise he had been poisoned by bad food or injected with some new and wild drug. “There was no inherent logic or truth to the production,” Tenn remembered, “and I suddenly recalled that this was a perpetual problem with all of the work coming out of the APA. There was simply no control, or there was only the worst sort of control—a fastidious detail to drapes and clothes and juvenile humor. There was no thread, that thread of which I always speak and for which I always look, that has to hold a company or a play together.”

Tenn thought the company itself odd, full of people he felt might have been unable to work anywhere else, difficult to cast, impossible to hold in the thought, but all slavishly devoted to Rabb. The only times Tenn had enjoyed the work of the company was in its comedies, light fare that Rabb injected with style and allowed to move at a fast pace. “Empty calories,” Tenn said. “Froth and meringue. At these things the company excelled, but I couldn’t imagine that Rabb could do anything worthwhile with Streetcar.”

It was Le Gallienne who persuaded Tenn to reconsider his harsh assessment of Rabb, even as she admitted that she had serious problems with his lack of discipline, his crippling depression, his tendency to disappear and to relinquish control of his work. “Can you believe that I heard this litany of concerns and still proceeded?” Tenn asked me in wonder. “I held to Le Gallienne’s plea that I give this man, this man she claimed she loved, a chance to redeem himself, to reclaim a talent in which she believed.”

“I would do it for you,” she had said to Tenn, a sentiment that moved and enraged him, but which nonetheless led him to accept Rabb as his director, which meant that he automatically accepted his former wife and “artistic channel,” Rosemary Harris, as Blanche DuBois. “And Rosemary Harris pushed me toward the fog,” Tenn told me. “She was the first actress I ever met with whom I could share nothing, offer nothing, expect nothing. I entered an alternate universe.”

Blanche DuBois and Amanda Wingfield, in Tenn’s biased belief, were roles that greatly tested the actresses who stepped into them. “They require a great deal of self-examination,” he explained. “They insist that you have a heart, and one that you are unafraid to place in the service of a part that will expose you in every way, that will show everyone how you, the actress, judge and accept the fate given to these women. I did not write these parts—or any parts—with the express purpose of taxing women, but each time I see these plays produced, I can see that a woman has been placed in a position she might not be able to handle.”

Rosemary Harris was a beautiful and talented actress, but Tennessee wanted a friend and a companion during the production of Streetcar, and the reserved, private Harris did not have time for him. (illustration credit 17.3)

Tenn did not believe that Rosemary Harris could handle Blanche DuBois.

By the time she took on the role, Harris and Rabb had terminated their marriage, had concluded what Le Gallienne called a “silly charade,” but there remained an interdependence between the two that Tenn found baffling until he found it enraging. “There was a cult around Ellis Rabb,” Tenn told me. “The company acquiesced to him on every matter, even as they walked about on eggshells that the sensitive man might bolt, might go on a bender, might meet a captivating boy, might decide the show might not be in his best interests.” The mere fact that Rabb repeatedly referred to Streetcar as a “show” disturbed the playwright, but Tenn also confessed that he was not in his right mind, not on steady feet that year. “I needed consolation,” he admitted, “and I needed to hear that this play, that any play I had written, mattered and had consequence and deserved to be produced, and I simply didn’t get it.” Instead, he heard, by phone and in meetings he characterized as “bizarre, even by my standards,” what Rabb intended with the play. “He spoke in filmic terms—he wanted wipes and bleeds and blackouts.” He envisioned gauze, membranous fabrics that would cover portions of the stage and at times the characters. This was meant to suggest the occlusion of mental illness, a shattered sensibility. None of this would have been alarming to Tenn, except for the fact that Rabb had yet to describe what Streetcar meant to him, what it was about, what it was saying. “I think it’s a good idea to ask your directors—your potential directors—what your play is about. I have a feeling if I had asked this question of Rabb, he would have told me what I came to suspect to be the truth: Streetcar was about giving Rosemary Harris what she wanted.”

Tenn had seen Harris in several of her roles at the APA—in Man and Superman, Judith, You Can’t Take It with You—and in her Tony Award–winning role in The Lion in Winter. “I thought her skillful but cold, the type of actress you see if you go to Chichester or any of the other provincial companies in England. They hit their marks, they have a solidity that is admirable, but they do not set your heart or your mind ablaze.” Margaret Leighton, an actress on whom Tenn greatly depended for her tart advice on plays and the requirements of working with actresses, called Tenn to offer advice on Harris. “She told me that Harris was a scullery worker who had put on the clothes of her mistress. The house was vacated for a vacation, and the help, like something out of Genet or, to be less brutal, in a Renoir film, had gone through the clothes and accessories of the owners of the house, their employers, and had dressed up and were walking about, eating the food and sitting in the good chairs and speaking in plummy tones as if the house was theirs. This was all good and fun and fair, but in the end the help can’t pay the mortgage or the utility bills or the grocer. They cannot sell the house and move on to a new life. They are stuck in the pathetic role of playing a part they can never have. ‘This, my darling,’ Leighton told me, ‘is Rosemary Harris. The maid has assumed the leadership of the house—in this instance, your house.’ ”

Tenn paused. “And this,” he told me, “is what I walked into.”

Both Le Gallienne and Nye, however, let it be known that Tenn went into rehearsals for Streetcar in a foul mood. “He was irritable, quick to rage, ready to quit,” Nye remembered. “He went into every meeting, every reading, every rehearsal looking for flaws, and he found them. Of course, you find them everywhere. I asked him if he hadn’t had doubts about Jessica Tandy, if he hadn’t at first vetoed the idea of Kazan casting her.” Tenn agreed with Nye, but added the pathetic rejoinder, “But Jessie always liked me. I could talk to her.”

This, according to Le Gallienne, was the primary problem: Tenn could not get close to Rosemary Harris, found no comfort in her company, and was offered no flattery or consolation from her. “Rosemary is a cold woman,” Le Gallienne told me, “very private and guarded, but she is a good actress. I thought it foolish that she undertook such a great and exhausting part under the direction of a man from whom she was now divorced, with whom she had a tortured history, but I believe that she went into that part with every intention of giving it everything she had, of making it work.”

Tenn went to her several times, looking for the friend he needed, an actress to whom he could talk, with whom he could examine the contours of one of his women. He was met with firm and icy resistance.

When I met Ellis Rabb in 1992, and when I was employed, briefly, as his assistant for a production he was mounting of Paul Osborn’s Morning’s at Seven, he told me that he was met almost daily with the same question from Tenn: “What is wrong with your wife? Why doesn’t she like me?” Rabb would calmly explain that Harris respected him greatly, but her relationship was with the part; there was no time for friendship.

“In retrospect,” Rabb told me, “it was idiotic of me to have pursued that play at that time, but Le G was right: it was my reformation. My hoped-for reformation.” Plagued by manic depression, alcoholic binges, and periods of doubt that left him “paralyzed, speechless, dumb,” Rabb’s marriage to Harris had ended, and so had the APA. “I met with Le G,” he told me, “and I told her the state I was in. I was brutally honest, and she responded by being brutally honest with me. I had not behaved well in the past. I had not honored the theater in general, or my theater, and my role in my theater, with any degree of dignity or sacrifice. Le G was very big on sacrifice. She would tell us that a mother is said to lose a tooth with each pregnancy—things are needed for the child, the developing baby, and they are pulled from the mother. The teeth suffer. She told me that I had not made the proper sacrifices. I had lost nothing in the pursuit of good theater, only in the pursuit of my own pleasures, and she was right. I had abdicated, as she put it, and I would only become the director and the actor I was born to be by committing myself to greater assignments, test myself, push myself. Lose some teeth.”

Eva Le Gallienne and Rosemary Harris in the 1975 production of The Royal Family, a summing up of the affection that could exist in and around Ellis Rabb and the work he fostered. It was Le Gallienne who urged Tennessee to accept both Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris for the 1973 revival of Streetcar, believing that the duo would bring good things to the play. (illustration credit 17.4)

Rabb worked to limit his alcohol, and he searched for plays that would tax him, and in those years at Lincoln Center he extended himself with works by Gorky and Shakespeare and, to his highest satisfaction, Tennessee Williams. “It had always been my dream to direct his plays,” Rabb told me, sitting in a restaurant and ordering a Salty Dog, the drink of choice for Le G, and one he drank in her honor. “I understood his plays. I saw myself in The Glass Menagerie because my mother is a vivid dreamer, a woman who lived ambitiously and happily through me, and I saw myself in Streetcar. I identify with Blanche, and I recognize her nervousness, her need to fashion a life, real only to her, to survive and to impress.”

Born to a comfortable family in Memphis in 1930, one that indulged his love of plays and films and music, Rabb devised a theme, a mantra, a philosophy while still in college: make yourself indispensable to someone as quickly as possible. “I came to New York and looked for someone or someplace to which I could give myself, offer myself, and do everything.” This would be the original Phoenix Theatre, and the two someones were Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton. Under their guidance Rabb did everything: he acted, he read the plays that were sent to the company, he auditioned actors, he built and painted sets, he learned how lights worked, how costumes were built, and he took tickets. “I completely gave myself to them, of course, but to the theater as a whole. I saw every play and musical. I met and talked to actors and directors and designers. I would drive to the country to see actors in repertory companies in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I learned how they had their own philosophies—how companies operated and thought; how they took a play you might think you knew terribly well and present it in a way that was truthful to the text, but that nonetheless opened your eyes to an entirely new way of looking at it, hearing it.” Tall and handsome, with piercing bright eyes and a mellifluous voice that Tenn, even at his angriest, found soothing and calming, Rabb shared with Tenn a belief in the voices of actors, particularly women, and he designed plays with them in mind. “I heard my company,” Rabb told me. “I wanted a symphony on that stage. I did not want them to sound phony; I did not want them working their vocal organs simply to hear themselves. I wanted beauty of sound. I wanted strong, wellorchestrated voices to serve as the platters on which I could serve plays that we all loved.”

Rosemary Harris had a voice that Rabb loved. Hers was a masticating voice, with something wonderful, perhaps a caramel or something equally buttery and warm, being worked in that pert little mouth. “Rosemary was probably what I wished I could have been in the theater,” Rabb told me. “As dysfunctional and as odd as that sounds, I think it is true. I looked at her and I thought: ‘If I were this pretty young actress with that marvelous voice, I would play the following roles,’ and I started listing them. I was very bold with her, as you can be when you are utterly sure of what you want with a person. If I had been in pursuit of Rosemary for her love and her body and her undying commitment to me and to the family of children we were bound to create, I would have been a mess. I would not have been able to talk to her. What I wanted instead was her theatrical body. Let me costume it, let me direct it in plays that will showcase what I already see in you. Our children will be plays and a company of actors. I could commit to that, and so could she. We might never have had the honesty to say to ourselves and to each other what we were doing when we married, but I think we both knew what we were getting into and what we were getting. We were establishing for ourselves careers and lives we had both dreamed about.”

Rabb and Harris were married in 1960, and approximately one year later, while on a flight in a noisy airplane, Rabb had the epiphany of creating a repertory company. Over the din of the engines, Rabb announced his intention. “That’s nice,” Harris replied, and went back to her book. “Rosemary did not believe in demonstrations of support or affection. In fact, she is not capable of them, but her ‘That’s nice’ was the warmest thing she had ever said to me, and may remain the warmest.” Rabb and I both wondered how Tenn might have felt about the casting of Harris if the playwright had known of this interaction. A lack of enthusiasm was as lethal to Tenn as a lack of beauty or charm or talent.

The APA began to make a name for itself quickly and Tenn began to imagine that they could do a good job with Camino Real. Rabb, however, had no interest in mounting that play, and instead hoped for a revival of either The Glass Menagerie or Streetcar, and, in 1973, he found a way to create his own version of the latter.

“MY FIRST MEETING with Tennessee was wonderful,” Rabb remembered. “Funny and easy and full of talk about the look of the play. If he had any doubts about how I saw the play, he did not express them at that meeting.” Tenn was taken with the handsome Rabb, and he had learned from the scenic designer Rouben Ter-Arutunian, with whom he had once enjoyed some “carnal abrasion,” that Rabb was an ardent lover, amply endowed. “Our first meeting at Lincoln Center,” Rabb told me, “after this charming meeting, and all of these phone calls about his play, and he walks up to me, in front of several people—my company, people involved with Lincoln Center—and he says, in a loud voice, ‘Rouben Ter-Arutunian tells me you’re hung!’ Well, it’s a line from a farce. I can laugh at it now, but at the time I was horrified. It demoralized me. I knew immediately that he did not take me seriously, that he didn’t take the entire enterprise seriously.”

Harris read the part, early in rehearsals, with the confidence and control of someone who had played it before, who had already come to every conclusion as to who and what her character was, and this is exactly the way Tenn came to feel she behaved through the run of the play. “There was no element of surprise in her Blanche,” he remembered. “The vowels were perfect, the catches in the throat timed like a train schedule, but there was no heart, there was no peril. Blanche must always appear to be ready to break, as well as ready to reassemble and try a new tactic to survive. If I had to give an actress only one salient fact about Blanche, it is this: she is utterly unsure of herself and her surroundings. She has no faith in anything or anyone around her. Well, Rosemary Harris is the epitome of an actress utterly sure of her abilities and her charms and her control over her director—if that director is her ex-husband, Ellis Rabb—and I never felt for one moment that her Blanche was in grave danger, was at the edge, ready to topple. Her Blanche struck me as one who was basically fine, perhaps distraught, going through a phase. She acted as if she were a fat and happy cat who had just consumed a large platter of cream and was now lolling about, showing her extended belly, and waiting to have it patted.”

Tenn took his doubts to Rabb, but the director was now so uncomfortable with the playwright that he tended to dismiss him. “I think I shut down a bit,” Rabb confessed. “I just poured my energy into the design of the play, into helping Rosemary feel stronger. You know, she was in knots as well. She felt Tennessee was judging her; she could tell that he wanted something from her that she wasn’t comfortable providing: friendship, company, constant uplift. She needed those things from me. She did not have them to give.”

Rabb admits that there was an especially tight sense of control with the production. “In the past,” he told me, “I had let too many things come undone. I had relegated too many things to too many people. I was trying to be a good director and a good adult and take control of this play and become the director I hoped to be. And I was surrounded by people who admired and supported me, and Tennessee was unrealistic and out of control and demanding. Were we right? Were we sympathetic? I have no idea, but I still think we were right not to let him assume control of the production.”

Tenn made calls to old friends Maureen Stapleton and Elia Kazan. “It was just a jug of wine, a lot of bread, and my fat ass,” Maureen quipped, “and I thought it was going to be a reunion of friends, but it turned into a real rant about Ellis Rabb and Rosemary Harris and these robots he had working for him. I tried to be what Tenn needed at that point: a sympathetic ear and shoulder to get plastered on. I realized that wasn’t all he needed. He needed to be redefined. He needed to be comforted. He needed to be reassured that his work would survive, that he would survive. The revival of this play—all of those revivals that year—were nice in their way, but it was the first realization for Tenn that he might be a playwright in the past tense, that he might not have a future.”

Elia Kazan, the director Tenn trusted the most, had been sent every play he had written all throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s, with Tenn always hoping and asking for both his commitment to direct and his advice. Kazan always refused the first, but was generous with the second. “Look at those plays written in the years before that revival, and you’ll see where his mind was,” Kazan told me. “They really aren’t plays, but dialogues, diatribes. Someone is essentially saying, begging, ‘Look at me. Notice me. I am human and I am here,’ and a play, of sorts, is assembled around it, smuggled in and around a rant. The plays weren’t working, and I think Tenn felt terribly threatened.”

Tenn was not relating well to women on the pages of his plays or to those with whom he was working. To executives at Lincoln Center, he suggested firing Harris and replacing her with Claire Bloom, an idea that was dismissed. “It was insane,” Rabb said. “Here we were working and moving toward an opening, and Tenn was upstairs trying to recast or close down the show.”

Tenn called Jessica Tandy and asked for her advice. She recalled that she was busy and in the midst of several things, but nonetheless made the time for her friend, and they had a stressful dinner. “He wanted me to go and see Rosemary Harris and explain the part to her,” she told me. “A ludicrous idea, and one I rejected immediately. I told him that you cannot do that to an actress. I told him that he had to trust Rosemary to come to the Blanche that she could give him, and I believed that she would be fine. But Tenn wanted a big scene, a revision, a conversion that would turn the play around to his liking.”

“He wanted a friend,” Maureen Stapleton said, “a lot of friends; a friend on every corner, but really a friend in his leading actress. He wanted her to look at him with adoration. He wanted her to walk around the city with him and tell him how the part he wrote had changed her life and her view of the theater. He wanted Rosemary Harris to give him the devotion he thought was going to Ellis Rabb. Well, welcome to the world, honey. The allocation of affection is not fair, and it doesn’t always run in our favor. It was not a great time to tell Tenn to grow up, but I think that’s what I did. Let’s just say there were not dark, sweet nights spent in my bed talking things out during that time. He was pissed at everyone.”

“A writer has to matter,” Tenn told me, “and I no longer mattered. I even began to revisit the plays of Bill Inge.” Tenn had spoken at great length of Inge’s plays, had outlined the plots for me, had been enraged that they so closely resembled his own; but now he confessed that together, “Bill and I make an ideal playwright. He constructs beautifully. His intentions are good and sound. I can build the plays up, put some meat on the bones of the little fish he provides.” No one could convince Tenn that he was wasting his time and his energies. No one could tell him that one bad experience with one actress didn’t mean that his days of communication were over, that he would never know happiness in the theater again.

Maria St. Just knew that the only thing that would help her friend was a new project, one that would compel him to work, to think about things, to look at himself. There was no play in the works, nothing that “needed me,” as he put it, so he committed himself to writing a memoir, the book of his life, full of memories of encounters that had worked, of women who had walked from the fog and found him, walked with him.

“I didn’t go into it thinking I was writing a biography,” Tenn told me. “It was a summation, it was my statement of self. I wanted to share myself with others, but I also wanted to know who I was, who I had been, what I had done. I had lost track of how I had worked and believed and felt when things worked, when plays happened, when I had had the gift of friendship.” Tenn spent months on the book, showed pages to friends, rewrote passages, both to refine them and to bring forth from them what he most wanted: the writer who had once known how to do it, “had known how to share a human soul with other humans; who had known how to communicate.”

Tenn thought of the process as an extensive confession, a harsh self-examination, a fearless inventory.

He would do it again. He could do it again. I could help him.

Eighteen

“KATHARINE HEPBURN, Turtle Bay” had been written on several pieces of paper in Tenn’s possession, and he admitted that he liked to write it out, over and over, as a young girl might do with her name enhanced by the surname of her boyfriend. Tenn remembered receiving the first card from Hepburn, with those words written on the back flap of the envelope, and in his ignorance of that Manhattan neighborhood, he imagined the ruddy, angular actress on the banks of a creek, reading, barking orders to the wilds of nature to do her bidding, to be wonderful all of a sudden for her benefit. This “willful, wonderful rapid stylist” had seductively circled Tenn for years before they ultimately worked together, on the film version of Suddenly, Last Summer, a property delivered “partially stillborn but still screaming” to screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a marriage, Tenn admitted, that was decidedly odd, but not quite as odd as the casting of Hepburn as Mrs. Venable, a woman who was, in Tenn’s words, “an authentic gem, a diamond of great size and worth, but deeply flawed, flawed perhaps beyond the human eye, but stuck in a diadem of dime-store junk.”

Tenn recalled with mordant humor the description provided by Mankiewicz of the play he had agreed to direct: “Rich, crazy, overdressed bitch in New Orleans seeks to have a young woman lobotomized, because she has witnessed the bitch’s queer son involved in sodomy, and then cannibalized by local youths he has propositioned. The doctor craves the truth, a cure, and the funds this woman can provide.” Tenn laughed and remembered that he felt that the director (who was also a screenwriter Tenn admired) had adequately summed up his one-act play. Mankiewicz, for reasons not made clear to Tenn, did not choose to write the screenplay, and the assignment went to Vidal, whose work was “perfectly fine,” according to Tenn; but the film did not make him happy. “You have to consider the time,” Tenn told me, and he recounted the late 1950s for me, a time in his life when he began to understand that talents and bodies and loyalties wane and wither and disappear. The country in which he lived seemed perpetually in peril—by virtue of Soviet menace or disease or cultural atrophy; baby girls fell into wells and dead Irish girls spoke to the living—and while Tenn’s bank accounts were swelling to the point that he required regular maintenance of his funds, his emotional wealth, he recalled, was niggardly, “dribs and drabs and psychic IOUs.” Tenn’s relationship with Frank Merlo was unraveling, and he began to have difficulty with actors, producers, directors. Although Elia Kazan agreed, in 1959, to direct Sweet Bird of Youth, the experience was angry and left both men unhappy—with their work and with the state of their relationship. “There was a desiccation that was setting in with Tennessee,” Kazan told me. “Imagine a band of rubber, a strap of sorts, dry and extended. You know it will snap and crack and become useless, and that process had begun for Tennessee. The suspense was in waiting for his responses, and ultimately for the snapping, the unraveling of the man.”

Unable to sleep without assistance, Tenn began to heavily use sleeping pills, prescribed for him by a small retinue of doctors or given to him by friends, among them Kim Stanley and Maureen Stapleton, both of whom remembered—and regretted—their steady supply to their friend. In the mornings, up early to swim and to brew coffee and to face the task of writing, Tenn found himself logy and out of sorts, so he began to use amphetamines on a regular basis, whereas in the past they had been, as he put it, “dangerous candy, a treat to spark things up, to keep the thread going.”

Tenn felt bloated and heavy and slow, as if his blood had turned to glue, and he found that the amphetamines, “the glorious rush,” only gave him an hour or two of lightness and swiftness, after which he would begin again to fall to the earth, to drift downward. His eyes and nose and mouth were painfully dry, and the habit of flicking his tongue across and through his lips, like a manic lizard, began at this time.

“I had a fantasy at that time,” he told me, “of being submerged in a cool liquid and calming my entire head down. Of having my blood replaced. Of being replenished.” Tenn felt similarly in our time together, complaining of his swollen feet and burning ankles and heels, his dry eyes and mouth, the perpetual weight, “the cross of addiction,” that bore down upon him. “I dwell upon my physical limitations at that time,” he told me, “so that you will understand why I was so eager to spend time with Katharine Hepburn. I believed that somehow she would inspire and invigorate me as the pills occasionally could.” Tenn subjected himself, as he put it, to a brutally clammy climate in London and a set on which he was not particularly welcome or needed to bask in something he hoped Hepburn might provide.

“I cannot be trusted to give you an adequate summation of that time,” Tenn told me. “I would be interested in knowing how Kate felt about it. I would be curious to hear what her impressions might have been.”

I did not think that Katharine Hepburn would respond to my letters, and if she did, I did not think that she would agree to see me. My earliest knowledge of her was that she was diabolically private, secretive, not interested in discussing things or looking back, but I was determined to honor Tenn’s directions, and so I set about finding her. My old, red-clad copy of Who’s Who in America listed 201 Bloomfield Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, as her address, but Marian Seldes assured me that it was best to write to her at the Turtle Bay apartment; she also promised to tell Hepburn about me and my plans.

I had included my telephone number in my letter, and less than a week after I had sent it, I received a phone call from her. And there she was on the line. Surprised. Delighted. Exasperated. She could not imagine, could not understand at all what Tennessee might have seen in her, could have learned from her. The phone call appeared to be taking on the shape of so many calls from actresses, in which they expressed their gratitude and their love of Tennessee, but then begged off discussing him or pursuing anything at all. Hepburn, however, set about to ascertain what I might want, how I might obtain it, when I might be free to pursue what she called “this fascinating, foolish task ahead of you.”

What, I asked her, was foolish about the task?

“Well,” she said, laughing, “I think it’s pretty damn foolish to come to me, for instance, to try and understand Tennessee Williams. To go to any actress and to try to decide what, if anything, matters, but …” Her sentence wandered off.

“Listen,” she said. “Do you know my literary agent?” I told her I didn’t.

“Oh, well, never mind,” at which point she looked through notes or books or calendars and gave me a date for coming to see her—at the Turtle Bay apartment that Tenn had thought about so many times. I told her about his image of the home he thought she might live in.

“Oh, well,” she replied, “you’re going to be quite disappointed. No lakes or ponds or wildlife here, but I’ll show you where he sat, and I’ll try to make some sense out of what it is you’re doing.”

She told me she had finished writing another book, her autobiography.

“It’s fascinating,” she said, “and maddening.”

I was about to reply, but she had hung up.

I had been told that it was in my best interests to arrive punctually at Hepburn’s home. Both Marian Seldes and her husband, Garson Kanin, who, with his first wife and writing partner, Ruth Gordon, had created three of the Tracy-Hepburn films, told me to arrive “prepared,” and I wasn’t sure what they meant. They did not clarify the term too well; they only reiterated that one should be prepared and at one’s best when in the company of Katharine Hepburn.

I had mailed to Hepburn some of Tenn’s comments about her, but she specifically asked me to bring them for our visit, and I had copies with me. On the advice of Jessica Tandy, I arrived perfectly clean, with no scent of anything—perfume, city filth, food—on my person. “I have always found her to be a clean-slate sort of person,” Tandy told me. “Clean, precise, detailed.” Ellis Rabb had told me that she had positioned above her dressing-room mirror a quote from Nabokov, “Caress the detail, the divine detail,” so I was rested and clear and ready to offer details or to be detailed.

I arrived at the house at the precise time that had been requested, and after one ring of the doorbell, the door swiftly flew open and Katharine Hepburn stood there, colorful and alert.

“I was right here when you rang!” she exclaimed. “Perfect! A good start. Now wait a minute.” She was carrying a large shopping bag full of papers, and I had clearly interrupted the journey she had planned for them. She looked about a bit and then threw them into the dining room and made a gesture toward the bag as if to say “Stay there!” She then turned to me and asked if I needed or wanted anything. A drink? Something to eat? A tour? A trip to the bathroom? I told her I needed nothing.

“Perfect! Let’s get right on to this,” and I followed her up a narrow staircase to a bright, white-walled room, comfortable, with the windows open to a crisp breeze, even though it was late in June. “You! Sit there! Tennessee sat there once. Not in that chair, but in that space.” I sat in a chair directly across from her and she looked at me strongly. She paused for a moment and then said, “Now who all is involved in this project you’ve begun?”

Most actresses wish to know the names of the members of the company she is keeping, and Hepburn was avaricious in her desire to know to whom I had spoken, what they were like, and what their response had been to Tenn’s comments and to my questions. She was fearless in offering her opinions of the people on my list, and her exclaiming “Oh, well!” when a name was mentioned meant that I should watch myself. Her greatest generosity was in recognizing and praising the talent of others, and she offered concise and sharp summations of each and every person.

Jessica Tandy? “Oh, she’s marvelous. Seemingly weak but granite and grace fused together.” Maureen Stapleton? “Wonderful actress; funny; a mess.” Kim Stanley? “Tragic. A great talent and a willful, public suicide.” Barbara Baxley? “Trouble. Troubled within and looking to make trouble around her. To make her feel comfortable, at home, I suppose.” Edward Albee? “Closed. Doors shut. Brilliant but buried somewhere I can’t reach.” Marian Seldes? “Well, I may change my opinion of her, given that she brought you to me, but I adore her. Disciplined and devoted. Slavish.” Geraldine Page? “The type of actress I would have liked to have been; the sort of person I tend to avoid.” Helen Hayes? “Well, what can you say about Helen Hayes? She’s no longer one of us, is she? She’s like the color blue or ore or Benjamin Moore paint. She exists, she is used, she serves a purpose. What is there to discuss?” Stella Adler? “Beyond me. Brilliant. Wise. Regal. I wish she would act more and pontificate less.”

On the Venice set of David Lean’s Summertime (1955). “I wish I could move through life with her ease,” Tennessee told me. (illustration credit 18.1)

Hepburn was delighted to learn that I did not use tape recorders, and she wanted to know why I did not. I told her that the subject and I invariably became obsessed with the machine, stared at it, checked on it, and our conversation grew slack in detail because we believed, and hoped, that it was all being recorded on tape. I told her about the tape literally coming unspooled in the apartment of Mildred Natwick, the brown, snakelike material oozing out of the machine and onto Natwick’s coffee table.

“Mildred Natwick! My God, you spoke to Mildred Natwick? What on earth did she have to say?”

I told Hepburn that it would be difficult to condense all that Natwick had told me, at which point she interrupted to demand that I tell her the best thing Natwick had told me. I told Hepburn that Natwick refused to be limited by lack or despair or troubles of any kind, and her reaction to anything was to say, boldly and cheerfully, “Let’s make as little of this as quickly as possible.”

“Perfect! I love that. I love Mildred Natwick, and she’s quite right. Now … what did Tennessee tell you about me?”

I drew out my papers. Hepburn, in white pants and a crisp chambray shirt, had her leg up on a table and her left hand on her chin. During my reading to her, she frequently adjusted lamps, moved books on a table, readjusted pencils in a mug, but she made a point of keeping her gaze on me at almost every second. She did not interrupt my reading of Tenn’s version of this person he idolized called Katharine Hepburn, but she often emitted a loud, sharp snort, a humorous editorial comment, and whenever I looked at her, she would motion for me to continue. I read it to her as she commanded: clearly, loudly, and exactly as I had written it down and remembered it.

Katharine Hepburn: Goethe in Gingham.

She cannot enter a room quietly or make a statement that doesn’t have within it a tiny but lethal explosion of truth. A shock effect, of course, but true nonetheless, worthy of attention, yes, but worthier still of one’s thought. Not really all that tall, but she appears to be so, through posture and both a sense of entitlement and of purpose—she is always moving toward a goal, an end, an explanation, an end to some nonsense. Work achieved; a sense of satisfaction; beginning again. This is her Holy Trinity, I think, while mine was a bit more exotic, darker, confused, overdone. Analysis to her was not conducted in sessions with doctors or experiments with pills and injections or through prayer to some supernal overseer, but through work. Whatever she wanted to find—and whatever she ultimately did find—came through work, through the seeking. Knowledge is nestled deep within the marble that is life, and she relentlessly hammers away at it, chipping away all that is superfluous and silly until she can see what she needs, admires it, uses it, cares for it. Like the axiom attributed to Goethe, Kate understands the magic and the power that begins and survives through boldness. For her there is nothing holier than the sacrificial act of making that leap toward the creation of something: a part in a play or a film; the reading of a book important to her; the creation of a meal; the conquering of a task. I toil in a church festooned with the images and the intentions of saints, their progressions noted and offered to us as examples of how to accept and apply all that has been given to us. Exemplification, my mother always told me, is what we are here for. I cannot find a reason to make my own leaps in the lives of Mary or Veronica or Bridget or any of the Theresas, but I can look upon this vivid woman, scornful of limits and blockage, and move toward the edge of whatever I need to do, to achieve, to exemplify.

On an index card Tenn had written: “Katharine Hepburn has one goal. One bar of soap for face, hair, teeth, body. A bar of soap big and white, like the pale judgment. Pressed against her body to get it going in the morning. The pale judgment awaits me in the morning, looking for me to press myself against it. To come clean.”

In conversation with me: “I went to Kate in a form of supplication. I was unhappy and I didn’t feel well, and I was divorced from this play of mine, which was now the film of other men, the property of other men, and I had my check from the film people, and I had my curiosity piqued at being on the set with such beautiful and vibrant people, but I was in terrible pain. Everything hurt, and things were beginning to be blurred for me. I did not have that clear intention that Kate always had, and I went to her, foolish and fulsome, to learn from her, to be guided by her, and she was a busy and committed actress. She had no time for my fears and my complaints, but she received me. She received me in the truest sense of that word. There was nothing holy or reverent about our time together; there was great laughter and a number of arguments. There were no secrets or covenants. But what I came away with I could have used effectively and persistently and been a better writer and a better friend and a better person—if I had had the courage and the discipline. That,” he told me, no less than three times, “she gave me: The knowledge that I, and I alone, had to be and should be responsible for myself. For my talent and for my ankles and my dry mouth and blistered lips and itchy eyes. For my bad back and my bad intentions and my maddening ability to see the poison in the fruit and the sniper in the trees. To be, at all times, an adult.”

For most of his life, Tenn had been surrounded by—had chosen to be surrounded by—women of a volatile nature, skittish, manic, tuned at times to a frequency no one else could hear or decipher. These were women with whom he felt comfortable, finding solace in their inability to function any better than he did, their tendency to foster appetites similar to his, to veer toward the illegal and the immobilizing. “You can talk deep into the night with a crazy woman,” Tenn confided to me, “but you can’t get the groceries with one, or meet a deadline, or get the lights turned back on, or take yourself to the doctor on time, or meet with someone who might produce or publish your work. They work against the grain of productivity and function. They howl at a moon of entertainment, endless and garish, but they are never a foundation upon which one can operate or from which one can propel oneself toward work or action.”

The initial and predominant model of such a woman was, of course, his mother, a frantic fabulist, industrious with invention and denial, but never boring, whether she was creating stories about her ancestors or devising threats in the sounds of the wind or the whispers of Negroes on the streets of St. Louis. Edwina not only believed that the fruit was poisoned, but she had an idea who might have planted the cyanide or the curare within the flesh, and the snipers were on the roofs and in the bushes and they were placed there to prevent her from claiming the truth of things, which only she knew and had the presence of mind to share. “I grew up in a psychic circus,” Tenn told me, with more wonder than anger or regret. “There was confetti in the air and it was madness, ideas floating in the wind of my mother’s invention and madness, like my leaves of invention and illness. There was shit in the sawdust of that circus, but it was all self-produced and allowed to remain there. It was a dirty house, not to appearances, of course: my mother would have nothing but a neat and proper home. It was dirty in spirit, cluttered. Not evil; just terribly unfocused and misguided.”

This was what Tenn believed all women must be, and he learned to navigate the world with his mother as his guide. Charm, guile, lies, hysteria. When I asked Tenn what his mother had given to him that had served him well, he had replied with those four words, qualities and attributes from which had sprung the other gift she had bestowed upon him: his ability to tell stories, to construct four walls around any situation and to get a woman talking and moving and aiming for release.

Talent, he told me, does not originate purely: it derives from something else, as a pearl or coal does, as pain must. Talent is the result of some friction, consistent and substantial, and the defense a person devises against it becomes a painting or a poem or a play. Or a tantrum. “The line between art and bad behavior is terribly fine,” he told me. “Something that is of some use to others can arise, or simply a means of getting attention or a particular reaction. You need to know how to discern the difference in yourself and others.”

Tenn’s earliest memories of his own navigation involved his bed in various homes. The bed in which he was sick and was comforted by his mother, who brought him ginger ale and soup and magazines he was allowed to cut apart, finding images that appealed to him, settings into which he would have loved to disappear and belong. A bed to which his mother would come and read to him, acting out parts and editorializing. The bed in which he would lie at night, hugging his radio and listening to the stories of others, which he could imagine being a part of, or improving. The bed in which he lay, deprived of his radio by his angry father, and listening to the sounds of the neighbors—arguments, laughter, music from down the street, a train’s whistle, a boat’s horn, a dog barking, a baby crying. Trying to determine how far or near they might be, and what might be going on around them, creating a story. Imagining himself walking one block, two blocks, one mile, four miles to get to the dog or the baby or the river. Remembering the houses he might find on the way, the trees, the scent of the flowers at particular intersections.

His earliest acts of navigation all held the same motive: to calm down his home and his mother. “I wanted to make everything safe and calm for my mother,” he told me. “For me as well, of course, but I knew that I was with her, bound to her, made of her, belonging to her. I felt I had to be prepared for some imminent and immediate departure from those homes and those cities. I needed to know the streets and the means of escape. I needed to be funny and wise and strong and quick.”

And yet the escape, when it was needed, was provided by his mother. Tenn had an early memory, from when he was very young, of his father striking him across the face, leaving him red and burning, and sending him to bed to cry and rage and listen. But the night air brought no sounds, and his interior map was out of sorts that night: he could not foresee how he might get out of the house and down the street and reach the train or the river. There were loud arguments between his mother and his father until he fell into a defensive sleep … only to be awakened by his frantic mother. “She pulled me close to her,” he remembered, “and I could smell her perfume and her hair spray and I could feel the softness of her cheek. My head rested perfectly on her shoulder, and we were heading out of the house.”

Tenn could not remember where they were headed or where they wound up, but he could remember his mother’s quick steps and her perfume and her cheek and her manic wobble down the sidewalk and her words, repeated over and over like a prayer in his ear: “You’re safe, baby. You’re safe, baby.” A lie, surely—there was no safety in that house or on those streets or in the arms of that woman—but that was the story and that was a means to be calmed and they were on the move.

“We were navigating,” he told me, “but it was precarious. I loved her and I knew she was trying to protect me, to get me away from anything that might harm me, but I wanted, and I needed, a stable woman, a stable person.” Tenn had searched for years for that person, had come close to finding such a person, and he believed that it might be Katharine Hepburn. “So I brought all of this baggage, all of this drama, all of this pain right to her,” he told me, “and I asked her to help me sort it out, to make some sense of it. It was ludicrous, but it was what I needed and wanted, and it brought me some of the same comfort as that run in the night with my mother.”

Katharine Hepburn cried easily—and strenuously. When I had finished reading her these notes, she was waving her hands across her face, embarrassed. She asked me to stop and to give her some time. “I had no idea,” she told me, quietly. “I wish I had known that he wanted me to help him. I wish I could have.”

In a matter of minutes, Hepburn had concluded our first visit, with a promise for another, at which time she would tell me her side of the events concerning her and Tennessee Williams. I was aware that I was being rushed out of her home.

Several days later I received a letter from Hepburn in which she wrote: “Too bad Tennessee never told me that—I thought he was—is and always will be remarkable—”

I assumed that the letter might be the end of our relationship, but two days later, I received a call from her.

She had thought a great deal about this project of mine, and she had some things to say.

I noticed that Katharine Hepburn was at her freest when a dessert was served and consumed: a large bowl of ice cream delighted and released her, and she barely noticed or spoke to the woman who brought the trays into the room; she waved her away peremptorily and offered me a bowl. I noted that the bowls were like those at Brennan’s in New Orleans, one of the restaurants to which Tenn and I had gone one day, where the bowls of bread pudding were the size of a German shepherd’s head.

Katharine Hepburn was easily moved—a fact she tried very hard to hide. After my first visit to her home, when she cried upon hearing how Tennessee felt about her, she sent me this note. (illustration credit 18.2)

“I would like that restaurant,” Hepburn said, snorting and enjoying the ice cream. I resented the eating times with Hepburn because I felt that we weren’t talking, but it was during these times that she shared her sharpest opinions of some of the people Tenn had admired.

“I had no idea that Tennessee was so enamored of Ruth Chatterton,” she told me one evening. “She was a good actress, very stylish, but there was something about her that led me to believe she would just disappear.”

“From?”

“From the stage, from the screen, from memory,” Hepburn replied. “She liked to be married, I think. She liked clothes and travel, and she started to write. I think she wanted a type of life that wasn’t the type of life an actress needs to live, has to live.”

I asked her what type of life that would be.

“Look,” she said, “nothing happens by accident or fate or luck. Everything happens by design, and most of those women on your list—on Tennessee’s list—made very conscious decisions about their lives and about their actions in their careers to become good and to become some sort of inspiration to people. It is a struggle—a perpetual struggle—to do anything worthwhile, to earn anything from what you do. Nothing happens. Effort is made and it is rewarded. No gift falls upon anyone. It’s dug out of someone, worked on, tried out, reworked, toned. It takes a lot of strength and determination to be ready to keep doing good work. This is what I remember Tennessee writing about me, right?”

I told her that Tenn had envied her upbringing, and had often dreamed of having the New England childhood she must have had. Some of the photos Tenn had clipped, and some of the homes he imagined moving about and living in, had been in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont—names that seemed to him exotic, superior.

“Doesn’t everyone feel that way?” Hepburn replied. “I loved my family and my childhood, and I still love New England, but I sometimes wonder how things might have been—what I might have become—if I’d been born in some exotic place like New Orleans, or a flat, dry place like Texas or Oklahoma. I would have been odd and determined wherever I had happened to live.”

“No dreams when you were growing up?” I asked.

“Well, what the hell does that mean?” she retorted. “Do you mean while sleeping? Or looking up in the sky? No, I’m not much of a dreamer.”

“No cutting of pictures or journal keeping?”

“God, no,” she shot back. “I don’t believe in there being too much time between the realization of what you want to do and doing it. Tennessee talks of threads, tying us to people and to things. Short threads are best, I think. You think it and you do it. You dream it and you do it. You love someone, you keep them close.” Hepburn leaned forward, placing both hands on her knees, and shot me a stern look. “I’m so tired of the term ‘victim,’ ” she said. “Everybody’s a victim. I’m not talking about the tragedies of the world, in which people truly are victimized: I’m talking about everyday activities in which people enjoy crying out about their status as a victim. Everybody has been abused or betrayed or deliberately set out on a course of failure. This is such bullshit, I don’t even know what to say. Our failures emanate from within us; my failures are my own damned fault. I can’t look at a man or a woman or a studio or the mores of a certain time and say, ‘Well, I was a victim of that person or that time.’ No, I might have allowed them to lead me to believe that I was unsuitable or unattractive or untalented. And I never let them, so I was never a victim. And this is not because I’m so smart—anyone can adopt this philosophy and do quite well in life. Refuse to be a victim. Learn from the unfortunate incident—failed audition, being fired, losing at love, being born in the wrong place or at the wrong time—and do something about it, and then succeed at the next go-round. I can’t even turn on the television or look at a newsstand now without seeing the latest victim. I find people horribly boring, I must say. I think they must enjoy their acute ability to enjoy and promote their failure.”

Her conversations with me, slightly argumentative and always pushing away too much curiosity, generally continued in this way; but on that one evening, sated by ice cream, I again brought up the meeting between Tenn and Hepburn, when he felt so tired and heavy and wanted her advice on how to live and how to come to grips with one’s history.

“I wanted Tenn—I wanted everybody—to simplify things and just get on with their work, do what they were meant to do. I needed to understand that part and that director and those other actors, and Tennessee needed to write and sort out his life. In the notes Tennessee gave you, you mention the single bar of soap. Well, that came from my father, who taught me well. You keep asking questions and posing situations—just as Tennessee did—and I keep thinking of my father: A man whose sink had on it one big bar of durable, good soap. And that bar of soap was used for cleaning, shaving, and brushing his teeth. It worked fine; it was fast; it was economical. He could then get on with his day. I think we clutter our minds and our lives in a way people would have liked for my father to clutter his toilet. There is too much clutter and too much thinking and too much devising. I think you need to be true to your work and your friends—these should be small circles. People who have too many friends tend to have too few ideas, I find, and they cover up their disappointment with parties and chatter and movement. Focus on working well and being there for you, your work, and your friends. One bar of soap. Taught me a lot.”

A pause.

“Tennessee worried too much,” she continued, “and he felt that the answer to his problem was somewhere outside of himself, outside of his friends. He loved women, and that is wise, but we could only do so much. He wanted an example, but he never realized that he was an example to me—so brilliant and sharp and funny. I’m not any of those things. I’d like to be. I pretend to be. He was so extraordinary by birth and by effort, but he was a victim, or chose to see himself as one. He foolishly believed that I had escaped any sort of doubt in my life, and that my flawless past, as he saw it, could rub off on him.

“You sit down and you begin to think about your past and all that you’ve done with it,” Hepburn admitted, “and you are going deep and close to the experiences, but to see it properly, you need a greater perspective, so you pull away and you take your life in sections. You think of yourself in your twenties. Later you think of yourself in terms of relationships, and you think ‘the Cukor years’ or the ‘Spencer Tracy years’ or ‘the MGM years.’ From that great distance, looking at yourself moving among all those other people and doing whatever you were doing, you find that it has a line—a time line—but to understand it, to fully understand it, you need to move in closer, and so you think—I had to think—about particular experiences or events or emotions. I had to chop it up, or edit it. No one wanted the entire time line, least of all me.

“You know,” she continued, “I think what I wanted to tell you—what I’ve been meaning to tell you—and probably what I told Tennessee all those years ago—is that it’s perfectly acceptable to take that long view and study your life and your actions, but I think it’s a bit foolish to study it too much. Tennessee used the term ‘navigation’ to describe it for you, and one doesn’t move too much or too far if you spend a lot of time analyzing everything you see along the way. You see some things and you use them or you don’t, you like them or you don’t, but the point, I think, is to get where you’re going, and to spend the time getting there preparing for what you’ll find, for what you’ll need to do. Tennessee was so caught up in finding the meaning of things that I think he stopped moving, he stopped advancing, to use the term he kept talking about.

“There really isn’t as much mystery to the world and the people in it,” she continued. She smiled and she got up and began walking around the room. I thought the interview might be over, but she was only stretching her legs, after which she called down the stairs for a drink. She asked if I wanted one, but I declined. “Smart move, I guess,” she quipped.

Katharine Hepburn, on the set of Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959. Tennessee sought her out for advice and to use as an example of living well and right, but she was not eager to be a teacher to him. “So talented and so needy,” she said. “I could never understand why he didn’t see how much he was loved.” (illustration credit 18.3)

She sat back down and continued.

“Whatever is complicated about people, in my opinion, is entirely self-created,” she said. “Life is often difficult, it certainly calls for some crafty navigation, but I don’t find it at all mysterious or needing support systems or myths to get through it. Life is work, so you do your work and you do it well. This will require study and hard work and attention and stamina. That is all. Life is friendship, so you care for your friends and look after them and keep in touch. Some of them fall away; you find you have nothing in common with them any longer. Some of them die. You miss them and you remember them. That is all. I don’t know why Tennessee needed to know what the plan was. I never looked for a plan, I can assure you. I looked for a way: a way to act, to do what I wanted, to live as I pleased. I didn’t make lists or scatter notes about. I just did it.

“I also think that Tennessee thought his talent would save him. Well, it’s not enough to be talented. There’s a lot of talent out there, but it’s owned by lazy, stupid, or essentially boring people. You can’t just be talented: You have to be terribly smart and energetic and ruthless. You also have to become necessary to people, by working hard and well and bringing more than your bones and your skin to the project. Don’t just show up. Transform the work, yourself, and everybody around you. Be needed. Be interesting. Be something no one else can be—and consistently.”

She became a bit more animated as she continued. “Perhaps it is different for a writer. I’d have to admit that I have no concept of how they gather their ideas and get them into a script. I don’t, but I was aggravated—I’m still aggravated, as you can see—that Tennessee was so caught up in the meaning of things, the getting through things, the remembering of all the things, big and small, that had happened to him and to those he liked and cared about.”

I realized that the interview was over, but she merely stared at me, and I began to put my papers together, but she stopped me and asked me to read a particular portion of Tenn’s notes that I had not sent to her, but which had been described to her by Marian Seldes. The notes dealt with Tenn’s devotion to and need for women in his life, which he found baffling. “Why did he find it baffling?” Hepburn asked. I read her the notes.

So here we are—here I am—perpetually seeking the amatory affections and affirmations of men, while my heart, the very core of my soul, responds to, needs, reaches out for female company, friendship, communion. You know, I have never been betrayed by a woman. I can see now that my mother lied to protect both of us. Sins of creativity and escape, I suppose. Her anger was something she believed might construct a cocoon that could protect both of us. But betrayal? Never.

Now the men in my life—the men in the lives of all inverted men—will betray you and look away if your jacket is the wrong shade in the wrong material. They’ll cast you aside if a single curd of fat graces your body, a wrinkle creases the fabric from which they hope to make a shawl of prayer and possession.

Perhaps because I want the best from women—soul and love and warmth and friendship and loyalty—it is what I receive. The life and desirability of the physical attributes are placed on our bodies with clocks ticking and gravity pulling with a mighty vengeance. But the heart and the soul—if surrounded by women—grow, swell, reach out perpetually for surcease and sharing.

A desirable man is the one who subsumes what he has been given by women, witnessed of women.

And here I am—here we are—looking at the legs and the smiles of those who don’t care what we think or write or can do with a bundle of words and a couple of women. And when they reject and hurt us, we run back to the circle of women who surround us, prop us up, lead us back to the pale judgment, the blank page, the surface to which we apply our souls.

This is called irony, honey. Look into it.

Hepburn laughed as I finished the notes, raised her eyebrows, and quipped that “a lot of that is true,” but then she was off on another thought. “I refuse to believe that love or affection can be defined,” she said, “because we may feel and think differently in a year or two or after a bad experience next Thursday. And then someone walks into your life and you feel great affection for them. How do you define that? Why should you? Just feel it! Just enjoy it! Just express it! But people want to define it; they want to define everything. Tennessee had to have everything mapped out, understood. If I had known that about him—if he had brought those concerns in those notes to me—I would have told him that the plan belongs to him; the plan is waiting for your hand to write it and your heart to believe it. Our lives cannot be dictated by the feelings of others, no matter how painful those feelings may be, or how much harm they may inflict upon us. I can’t understand why Tennessee—why so many people—don’t have the faith in themselves or what they do or what they believe. Why are they always weakened by others?

“I will respect you till the day you die if you believe in things and stand up for them, but if you move into my space and try to tell me how I should feel, how I should love, how I should believe, well, I’ll cut you down like lumber. And I wish I could have told Tennessee Williams to just cut down those people—and those thoughts—that kept him so frozen, so heavy, so afraid.”

Hepburn walked me out of the house and strongly patted my shoulder. She thanked me for coming, for including her in the book, and asked that I stay in touch. But she was clearly done with the entire project.

“Love the man,” she told me, “but study the work. Work cures everything, and work explains everything.” Had I met Hepburn in time to take a message to Tenn, she would have told him, “To work is all. You were put here to work.” “Tennessee only wanted to be loved,” she said, “and he was: He just looked toward the wrong places, at the wrong things.” She paused, smiled, then added, “He had terrific taste in friends.”

Several days later I received another letter from Hepburn. Enclosed in it, on a small card, was her recipe for brownies.

“I HAD WAYS of getting to my room,” Tenn told me. “I might become sick, or terribly tired, or consumed with the studies required of me the next day in school. I would banish myself to my room, and my mother, allied with my anxiety, might bring my dinner to me, a cool hand to the forehead, strength for the night.” Strength was needed, because Tenn’s father was addicted to the experience of criticizing his son. “He needed to diminish me so that his own stature would improve,” Tenn remembered. “His own silhouette had been diminished and distorted by so many humiliations and exertions that I was his only means of affirmation, the only human to whom he could submit himself for comparison and feel both superior and abusive.”

From the earliest age, the deepest memory, Tenn recalled that his father considered him a burden, a drain on the family’s emotions and finances, an embarrassment. His father hated his attempts at writing, his “gallivanting” in backyards with Rose, putting on plays or imitating neighbors or film stars; the images that Tenn painstakingly clipped and saved and pasted into notebooks or on cardboard would periodically disappear, thrown away by his disapproving father, who castigated the sissy for wasting his time and making a mess of things. Before he had entered grade school, Tenn knew, from his father’s insistence, that he must eventually obtain a good job with benefits and good people and the opportunity to “advance.”

A lover of words, Tenn looked up the word “advance” in the dictionary. He could recall snatches of what he had read: “to rise beyond the elementary or introductory.” Clearly, he recalled, this was the phase of development in which he was trapped with his family, a limbo not unlike that awaiting unsaved babies, an uncomfortable, unknowing state of being, devoid of sight and sound and touch. “That was home,” Tenn told me.

Another definition: “to be developed beyond the initial stage or process.” This was clearly the young Thomas Lanier Williams, born into a family of simpletons and savages, aware of things either beyond the imagination or beneath the contempt of his relations or peers, and hoping to escape.

Yet another definition: “to be much evolved from an early ancestral archetype.” This is what Tenn wanted to be more than anything else. It was what he felt his father could never be. “He arrived at his own home,” Tenn remembered, “and anywhere he went, I would imagine, intent on despoiling what was pleasant or calm or moving forward. He thrived on fear and power; he relished the barbaric. He enjoyed shouting at the radio when fights or other gladiatorial events were broadcast, praying for blood or injury or aborted careers. Limbs and lives destroyed. Adventure! Excitement! All at the expense of others. Drinking and demanding things of my mother and my sister. Judging the attempts—the pitiful but heartfelt attempts—my mother made around the house, to make it more appealing, as best she could on his niggardly contributions.”

There was a regular dance in the household, Edwina and Cornelius Williams circling each other warily, angrily, words and décor thrown at each other in some attempt at communication. At some point the energy would be directed at Tenn, who waited, poised over a pad of paper or a book, or clutching his radio. Depending on the anger his father possessed, the item to which Tenn devoted himself would be destroyed or criticized or hidden away from him until he “improved.”

“And here I am,” Tenn told me. “I am seventy-one years old, and I am still trying to understand what my father wanted me to improve, what he wanted me to become. I realize now that he simply didn’t understand me, couldn’t believe that I was his son, that I was somehow created to honor or care for him.” The earliest statement Tenn could remember coming to him from his father—and uttered to others in his presence—was that he was not right. There was something odd about the boy. Something off. Something within him needed to be slapped off or away, or the same unseemly something could be remedied by something better, more appropriate being pounded into him.

In order to function at all, Tenn believed, all people, not merely those who wished to write or act or paint or sing, must develop for themselves a support system comprised of myths tested by them and found to be effective. Most find comfort and a sense of purpose and a level of care under the supervision of a God or gods who have inspired or personally delivered to the mere mortals below a plan of action, a means of advancement, via canonical texts or visions or through the agency of fellow humans who are imbued with the spirit or propelled by the example of their chosen leader. As a child Tenn had roamed the halls of rectories and had overheard the means of atonement and acceptance and advancement and had found them lacking. “I turned to clipped photographs and radio dramas,” he told me. “I preferred the morals and the lineaments of whatever story I could project into that imagined situation, those rooms of my dreaming. I know that I lifted characters and dialogue and contours from my ‘real’ life, and then placed them within what became my actual and my preferred life, and it was here.” With the final statement, Tenn again poked a finger into my forehead.

“There is no salvation,” he said. “There is no being saved. There is no ‘Eureka!’ moment. There is no Cassandra in the closet who will appear and ask the probing questions. There is within your mind all that you will ever be and all that you will ever need. I always felt this way, but I was never brave enough to face this fact and live entirely by my own counsel. I needed and I sought out the myths of my choosing.”

Tenn had also come to believe that all of us are caught on that train he had mentioned to me, the train mistakenly jumped upon in haste, with badly marked directions, and we looked out the windows and realized we were headed in the wrong direction, or that people we would rather emulate or love or study were on the opposite track, better appointed, prepared, armed with itineraries that had a stated destination and the accommodations that would provide comfort and safe delivery. “I felt that way as I pursued my life in the theater,” Tenn told me, “but my mother felt the same way, ironing doilies or cutting crusts off sandwiches or entertaining her friends in the front room. There was a present person; there was conversation. Deep in her mind, however, she was young and pretty and destined for a good and envied life, a life of purpose and demands that her creativity and humor could fill. She dreamed her way through her life. I am dreaming my way through my own. I talk to you now, but I keep seeing pages filling up with my handwriting or the words I’ve typed, in pica. Plays, essays, descriptions. On one track I’m dreaming of working again and being happy and being productive, and on another I’m at the task of writing, and I can make myself believe that I’m working. My mother did this: washing dishes but also dancing at the beautiful lake, with lights sparkling on the dappled water. Warding off the blows of my father, but actually taking on the final scenes of Medea and waiting for the applause. Living alone with her three wayward, badly wired, and confused children, stretching every nerve and every penny, but actually awaiting the attentions of the best men in town, who would deliver her from her penury and her pinched heart.”

Two trains. Juggling of the gods.

“I left the God of my childhood,” Tenn continued, “and I offered my soul and my allegiance to a variety of gods. There was the god of beauty and order, which I found in photographs of interiors designed by Dorothy Draper and Cedric Gibbons. There was no oilcloth or soiled damask or venetian blinds in those settings, and I believed that there was peace there. I would only later learn that the bright sheen of lacquer and marble could also house hatred and anger and abuse. I did not know that then, so I transported myself to those places and saw my mother and my sister in those chairs and in those doors and looking out those windows, happy and advancing in the right direction.

“That god fell by the wayside when I began to love the sound and the shape of words and sentences. I heard words first, over the radio and from the movie screen, and I always wondered where they came from and how they looked. After I learned to read, I imagined them, black on a white background, sometimes in the typefaces of the screen credits, bold and orderly, offering shape and style to every situation. Even in situations with those people who populated my life, I listened to what they said and could see the words, which I then paginated and indented to my satisfaction. When I began to write, I liked the length and the weight of sentences, the way a word looked or sounded or felt to me in particular placement. Then words went above and within the pictures I’d clipped. I had demoted my earlier god, who was now, with me, in service to the word.

“I talk to you about all of these women because they are like ambulatory, fleshly emblems of my beliefs. Think of them, if it helps, as if they were a human gallery of examples of a truly catholic—use the small c—Stations of the Cross. I gain nothing at all by focusing on the pains and betrayals of Jesus Christ, a fiction comprised of any number of myths that man, from the first and darkest of caves, fashioned for himself, a savior, a father, a buddy out there in the wild maneuverings of life, smoothing the rough edges, looking out for his well-being, furnishing a place in some Edenic hostel, comfortable and safe and eternal. However, I can imagine myself walking through a cathedral, designed by my desire and my imagination and my memory, and on the walls I might find Lillian Gish or Marian Seldes or Katharine Cornell. Ruth Chatterton or Pola Negri or Gloria Swanson. Ida Lupino or Barbara Stanwyck or Laurette Taylor. Examples. The sweetness and the devotion—the dogged persistence, cloaked in kindness—that Lillian and Marian and Katharine exhibited to me. The toughness and the carnal gaits of Stanwyck and Lupino. The scrubbed and sparse aestheticism of Katharine Hepburn and Frances Sternhagen. The brutal intelligence and fiery will of Estelle Parsons and Madeleine Sherwood. The flamboyant denial of fact and colorful poses of Elaine Stritch and Ruth Gordon. The earthly worthlessness but artistic supremacy of ethereal monsters like Geraldine Page and Kim Stanley. The judicious and frighteningly bright allegiance and intelligence of Maria Tucci, perpetually supplicating so that others might shine around her, so that life can flourish, even if her art suffers. Bring me saints who can compare with these lives! Bring me examples that would better suit my life, or any life!”

Tenn asked me if I had the rosary. I handed it to him.

“This thing, this series of beads,” he said, holding it above his head, “has no meaning for me, serves as no sacrament, until I invest these beads with those women and men and events that give some foundation, some bones, to the fleshly man that I am. The bones and the beads prop me up, keep me upright and ambulatory, and give me some sense of what I’m doing. What I should be doing.”

To one of the beads he added two names: Frank Merlo and Yasujiro Ozu.

TENN TOLD ME that in that “awful year of 1963,” as Frank Merlo died of lung cancer in the apartment they shared, which now smelled of sour spit and sweat and the bursts of Mitsouko that a well-meaning maid insisted on spraying over the rooms, he was notified of the death of the Japanese film director Yasujiro Ozu. Dead at the age of sixty, dead in fact on his birthday, from cancer, Tenn found himself thinking of the man, whom he did not know, but whose films he had loved, and about whom he had argued with the writer Yukio Mishima, who had deplored Ozu’s films and who had forced Tenn to defend them. Mishima did not care for the severity and the simplicity of the films: he wanted color and boldness in his art and in his life, and he found the films of Ozu to be tight and dry and airless. Tenn agreed with Mishima that life is colorful and bold and messy, and art should express that; but life is also almost always impossible to handle, and those simple tasks in the films of Ozu—tea, an orderly home, silent moments on a hill with a child—are the moments we all need to apply contours to the events the day presents to us. From the films of Ozu Tenn learned that everything, every solitary thing that comes into our life and our consciousness, is all that we will ever have, and it is the only inventory in which we can search for supplies. Our memories can only be built from the things and the people and the places that we see and hear and smell and love and discard or save, and in this ceaseless rush of stimulus we often need the vase of flowers to arrange, the pet to stroke, the tea to boil, the scented bath, as well as time to stop and think and attach to that memory whatever we might need to hold it and use it and share it.

Mishima agreed, and said he would reconsider the man who was Yasujiro Ozu. It was Mishima who contacted Tenn to let him know that Ozu’s grave bore the inscription mu, a Japanese word meaning nothingness. This disturbed Tenn until Mishima explained that in the many obituaries and tributes that had been written for Ozu, it was revealed that the director believed, most strongly, in mono no aware, or an awareness of the impermanence of things. Life, Mishima told Tenn, truly is swift and unforgiving, and beauty and meaning are ours only if we can recognize them and snatch them and pass them along to others.

Tenn took this conversation with Mishima and “subsumed it, held it deep within me,” and it would help him to write and think about Frank Merlo and what the man had meant to him and done for him. He remembered a day, during rehearsals of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, when tempers flared, scenes sagged, and actors failed to make eye contact with the playwright. Elia Kazan and Roger Stevens, one of the play’s producers, wanted substantial changes made to the text, and Tenn was unsure and unhappy about the direction the play was taking. Whenever Kazan brought up the deletions and the changes he had requested, Tenn would turn to Frank, who sat deep in the theater.

On this particular day that Tenn was remembering, voices were raised and an ultimatum was delivered: Tenn would make the changes to the play or the play would not open in New York. Angry and exhausted, he said nothing and looked out into the theater: Frank was not in his seat. Tenn calmly told Kazan and Stevens that he was leaving for the day, and with their voices yelling after him, he left, hailed a cab, and went to his apartment, where Frank sat.

“I yelled at him brutally,” Tenn remembered. “I told him that I needed him, and never more than at that time, in that theater. I went straight to his deeply Italian, deeply Catholic core and reminded him that Jesus Christ Himself, at his lowest moment, had chastised his disciples for leaving him, asking if they could not spare him one hour. Well, I needed Frank at that hour.”

Tenn told me that he needed me at this particular hour of his life, for a very particular purpose. He asked me to stay with him and be there for him and his dream, his “crazy dream”: to have one more hour with his father.

TENN’S FATHER BECAME a character that he imagined placing in rooms of his own invention, moving about in stories that were as manic and angry as the ones he could remember, but in others that were tinged with some of the memories of happier times in younger days that his mother shared with friends or at Tenn’s bedside when he was sick. The man in those stories was ambitious and romantic, and Tenn came to see that a life with Edwina and three decidedly odd and curious children had sapped him of anything but the incentive to perpetually provide and forbear. “All the sermons of my childhood,” Tenn told me, “all the pamphlets and all the books that told you how to buck up and get on and survive, talked of the need to bear and forbear. Acceptance, they insisted, led to advancement. But my father and my mother found themselves immobile and growing heavy and going nowhere, and that nest of anger must have been impossible to bear for him.” Tenn imagined that his father came into that house and was aware of the scattering of children who did not welcome him, did not want him, who resented the allocation of air and space given to him, and he could imagine his rage. Tenn’s father often complained of being a salesman on the road, going to cities so rustic and removed that the telephone poles and the wires didn’t even reach them, back-country people with no interest in him or his wares; but he went on, coming home to rest and have his clothes laundered, the scents of liquor and sweat removed, and he faced only resentment from everyone around him.

“And one day he was gone,” Tenn said, “and I hated him for that, too. I hated him for hitting me and hating me and forcing me to become something other than what I was, but I came, in time, to see that he was absolutely my father, just as only Edwina could be my mother. I am their son in every way, and my father is the dreamer, the inconsistent, impossible, wandering poet that I have become. I dream as my mother did, but my mother had no movement in her. There was no advancement within her—her dreams were internal and suppressed by rage, fueled by denial. My father, however, took action, and his dreams were in his feet, and he moved away from a situation he could no longer handle. I took my thoughts and my dreams and put them into words that made their way to paper, and he took to the streets. He got away. He navigated in the truest sense of the word, and I came, in my way, to understand him and love him.”

Tenn did not study his own plays, although he confessed that every year or so, he tried to reread The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, the two plays that he felt came to him most clearly, and which are most clearly based on his parents and the “dance” they held with each other for so long. “I think that there may be elements of me in Tom and Blanche,” he told me, “but I look at those plays now and I see my mother as Amanda and my father as Tom. I look at Streetcar and I see my mother and my father, having their dance and simultaneously upholding and destroying illusions.”

Stella Adler fascinated Tennessee from the time he first saw her photograph in a magazine during her years with the Group Theatre. “Her intellect arose from the page,” he told me, and later in life her intellect helped him, somewhat, to gather strength and write again—“to keep at it,” he said. (illustration credit 18.4)

Stella Adler, a strong influence on Tenn’s life, was, like Hepburn, not terribly interested in the lives of artists she admired: her admonition to Tenn was always to show her the work, and she would then know all she needed to know—all she cared to know—about the person who created it. Adler believed she could study and deconstruct and direct and perform the plays of writers like Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw and Shakespeare and keep unearthing new things, and she exhorted Tenn to do the same. Tenn’s decline as a writer, in Adler’s opinion (one she personally expressed to Tenn), came when he lost his interest in the works of other writers, in the actions of the theater—when he submitted to the devices, alcohol and drugs, that he believed helped him to survive. When Adler was heard to exclaim, “Who will take care of Tennessee now?” he was not hurt or angered: he wanted it to be Adler who took care of him.

“That would be the day,” Maureen Stapleton quipped. “Stella Adler was not going to lie in a bed with Tenn and talk things out. She would never do as I did, and let him drink and keep talking about demons and overhead camera shots—she would have put him to work.” The ministrations of Stella Adler came with an ultimatum, and it was repeatedly given to Tenn: clean yourself up and get back to work. She promised to stand by him and look at whatever he wrote and offer whatever help he might need.

“But I couldn’t do it,” Tenn admitted. “I had the meetings with her, but my condition was not acceptable to her—or rather, it was not acceptable to what I knew she expected. Whatever condition I might have been in when I went to Hepburn for her aid, it was far worse when I went to Stella. The heaviness was extreme, and my head, and the dreams within it, were scary and gelatinous. Words and thoughts made no sense as I wrote them. It was through sheer will and massive editing that I was able to get anything out at all, and no one, least of all Stella, should have seen what that encompassed.”

The meetings with Adler did have an effect on Tenn, and it was noticed by Elia Kazan. “Tennessee was reading so many different playwrights,” he remembered, “and when he would bump into me, and several times when he called me, he would be full of questions about plays, particularly those I might have directed or acted in. He became terribly obsessed with Clifford Odets, and asked me so many questions about him, about his working habits, his methods.”

Tenn had become obsessed—in a fashion that would have pleased Hepburn—with work, with what he called “the architecture of artistic desire.” Tenn explained to me why the architecture of Clifford Odets had been so important to him.

“It is imperative that one should never begin to write anything,” he told me, “for anyone, or for any venue, until something both monumental and rudimentary is at stake, and what is more monumental and rudimentary—and fragile and temporary and capricious—than our very existence? Our very reality? Our purpose, our worth, our identity?

“I am always asking my characters, and they are always asking themselves, who they are,” Tenn continued, “and this is absolutely necessary for day-to-day survival, because we cannot perform any functions until we answer that essential question. Who will ultimately care what happens to a particular character until we know who and what they are?

“Clifford Odets taught me a great deal about identity,” Tenn continued, “because his characters are so vividly examined and understood and loved by their creator. Intensely realized. Odets will not simply indicate, for example, that a character is male and poor and desperate; he will extrapolate until we see that this character is male and poor and desperate and unloved and trapped and American. His characters unfold before you as if you were watching an onion peeled away layer by layer, and all around him you suddenly see that there are still other layers—home, country, family, society—that must either be shed or used as protection from the onslaughts that life inevitably and without mercy presents to us.

“Amazingly,” Tenn said, smiling, “he is to me a positive writer, no matter how tragic the circumstances, because no matter how pitiful the circumstances of his children—which is how we must see our characters—I am always left with the very vivid idea—the hope—that within us all, within the most horrific of circumstances, we will find, within or about one of our layers, the means to communicate, to defend, to love, to persevere.

“It is easy and acceptable to dismiss his works as proletarian,” Tenn told me, “and I might have done so myself at some point, but I am proud to realize that, no matter my trappings, I am very much an Odets character—male, poor, and desperate, American, and yet, amazingly, positive. Positive and fighting and—this is the loveliest of his qualities, and, I would hope, mine—perpetually able to share, no matter how puny my treasures become or remain.”

In his earliest years in New York, Tenn would not only spend time in movie theaters; he also snuck into theaters to watch other plays coming to life, and he persistently pursued Odets. “I was terribly attracted to him,” Tenn confessed. “To his talent, and to him. He had the most wonderful hands, and I became, for a time, convinced that the quality of one’s writings was proportional to the hands of the writer. Odets also had a beautiful mouth and a quick laugh and an intense gaze. I came to feel that he knew quite well what I was up to.”

The ease with which Odets painted his characters, their passions, and Tenn’s memories of the writer’s personal magnetism and intensity inspired his play Stairs to the Roof, which owed, in his estimation, a great deal to Awake and Sing! “I had had a failure,” Tenn remembered, “and I felt that I was a failure at that point as a writer and a man. Odets had had success as a writer and as a man, and he, more than any other young playwright at that time, spoke to me and excited me. His aesthetic fingerprints are all over Menagerie, and when it is properly directed and performed, I think you can hear the fast and urgent humor, the desperation, the airless rooms, and the sad hope of those two women, growing, at the play’s curtain, as dim as the apartment.”

An original thought and an original voice had come to Tenn when he began to write Streetcar, Summer and Smoke, and Camino Real, a sort of fever-dream narrative that came to him as he kept following the characters that had visited him, or as he looked at works of art that had inspired him. “I wrote those plays as if perpetually on a final deadline,” he told me, “always acting as if I needed money to get a loved one out of jail, or money to get me out of an unfriendly country. I worked a lot in that time under the belief that I would be dead or incapacitated at any moment, and it brings a certain texture to the work, but it can wreak havoc on your soul and your body. I now believe it’s better not to write in a state of anger. I think it works to be angry about something, a condition or the treatment given to someone, a character you come to love; but a general anger, which is what I operated beneath for so long in my fifties and early sixties—as I fought against the declivity in my talents and my health—was not good for the writing.”

He paused for a moment, then looked at me. “I would like to rewrite a great many of those plays now,” he said. “To get them right. And I think I can do it now.”

TENN STOOD and looked at the notes on the bed. “We don’t have much more time,” he told me. “I need to read and study more plays, from all times and from all types of writers, and find out how they work, how they’re built. I may soon be in a position, in a condition, to ask Stella for her help, to really place a play, and all its parts, in front of me cleanly and plainly.”

There were two playwrights that Tenn was studying most intently, the two he loved the most, personally and artistically: John Guare and Edward Albee, both of whom he termed “terminal and magical.” In the notes on that bed, I found comments about both men, and I copied some of them, those that could be deciphered. Of Guare, Tenn had written, “I want to work and to walk about with Guare eyes. Wonder and urgency. I think I always had in common with John my terminal vision, seeing everything as if for both the first and the last time, which allows one to invest anything with powerful, mystical, deeply emotional power.”

Every walk past a particular building, Tenn instructed, could be the last. That pond over there—what if fate or blindness or relocation made it unavailable to you? “Items of subjective beauty,” Tenn called them, and our pasts are full of them; our present life is crowded with them as well, but we are generally unaware of their existence, much less their worth, until they gain entrance into what he called an “amber-hued past, that closet of psychic bric-a-brac” to which we repair when we want to remember, or to lick or bind wounds, or, as Tenn insisted, “to find out what you are.”

“Own all of what you see this day,” Tenn had told me on one of our earlier walks around New Orleans, “and it will be of worth to you some other day.” He had pointed to a woman in a vivid green coat and told me that I would have that color as a marker, a directional device back to this moment, this memory, this time we were having. There were smells and sounds all around us that were being placed in our inventories, our creative DNA, that would serve as levers to the feelings that would lead us to write. “This,” Tenn demonstrated, opening his arms to encompass our surroundings, “is living, and it is writing, the present act of accumulating the material we are compelled, required, to use in our work. And life is the inventory of everything we’ve felt and seen and heard: our inventory of subjective beauty; items that have traveled with and alongside this act of living, of surviving, questioning, and coping, and which we reflect upon and fondle and remember and honor with our work.

“And John Guare seems to be alongside and with me as I live, as I gather and hoard my inventory, and I think it is because he taps into something I don’t have in my amber-hued closet, but which I have sought and misplaced, sought and abused, sought and misunderstood, sought and overlooked with stupidity and fleshly misallocation. He has had a family,” Tenn continued, “and he has shared it with us. The pond we pass, the color that serves as marker, these become our property. What we own, we carry, and whether we marry and have children, or write symphonies or plays, we deliver our property, our inventory, to those with whom we live and work and love and abuse. I have always wanted a family, a group of people—Christ, one person!—who might say to me, ‘Stop crying, you fool, and come home to the people who love you. Come crouch in safety in our collective amber-hued closet. It’s ours; it’s here to be shared.’

“Our experiences, our families, our fears, our items of beauty—all locked in our DNA, which we splatter over our actions and our work. I now have membership in that Guare family. I can feel I’ve walked past his ponds and buildings, and I can feel, as he did, that I loved them too long, I didn’t want to leave, and I don’t want to leave.”

Tenn paused, inhaled deeply, then laughed. “But,” he said, “I live with his family, because mine only gave me a history, but they failed to offer me any shelter or comfort. That is something John has given me—that and an idea of where to begin and how to do it again.”

BOTH EDWARD ALBEE and John Guare were “mountains, mighty cliffs of talent one sees in awe and climbs with some trepidation.” Tenn felt more comfort with Guare because his mountain was covered with welcoming and soft greenery, while Albee had built with his words a jagged, wounding, vertiginous challenge. “You take on Albee,” Tenn warned me, “with equipment of survival, to keep you alert and alive on your journey, but Guare’s journey is like one you take while drunk: you laugh, you feel invincible, you feel elated, giddy. And then, at some point, you become aware of the heights you’ve reached, or you gain some sobriety in the fresh airs of his intellect and imagination, and you come awake, shattered, horrified … and stranded alone in a high, lonely place.”

John Guare’s talent was one that came to Tenn as if it were an over-exuberant puppy, out of control, full of affection, and utterly dependent on the reaction of the lap he’s landed on. “I don’t mean to imply that Guare, the writer, is out of control,” Tenn added, “only that his talent is presented with full force. It hits me in a way that fills me with glee and also with an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness, as if it were unearned affection, or loving attention that calls attention to your double chin or the zit you’ve been hoping no one will notice.”

Guare’s plays appeared to Tenn in retrospect as if they were mammoth boxes designed by Joseph Cornell, with each compartment detailing a life in full development or disintegration. “Lives, you will learn,” Tenn advised, “are perpetually in varying degrees of growth and decay, as are the people who have been cast in them, and I’ve come to see that a grab bag of myths is necessary for either providing the strength to grow or to stanch the wounds and cloak the odor of decay.” Guare’s characters may harbor cancer or mental illness or a staggering lack of self-worth, all of which they conceal or contain with particular myths that are in the arsenals of everyone, whether in Sunnyside, Queens; the Upper East Side of Manhattan; Hollywood; Mississippi; or an African veldt. “The human condition is maddeningly uniform,” Tenn told me, laughing, “and no one escapes it. One of our most potent—our most visceral—myths is that some or all of the human experience is avoided, softened, abridged, or transferred by means of beauty, money, faith, good works, or chemical alchemy.”

The Joseph Cornell artifact that Tenn imagined Guare’s work to be was lacquered with liberal doses of the many myths that propel the characters trapped in its compartments, or “niches,” as Tenn called them. “I prefer the idea of a niche,” he admitted, “because I think of a niche as self-created, self-invented, a sinecure necessary for survival, and Guare’s characters are all singularly diligent in their delusion, their survival, their self-destruction.” Guare’s plays are constructed with a merciless eye and a masterly sense of proportion and pacing. Within Tenn’s memories were the uncomfortable sensations of feeling his soul rotting along with Kate Reid’s breast in Bosoms and Neglect, his brain “oozing out of my head both from the batterings of life and the frustration of using that organ to no good effect” in tandem with Katherine Helmond, as Bananas, in the original production of The House of Blue Leaves. His most amazing and alarming reaction to a Guare play came with the original production, in 1977, of Landscape of the Body, a viewing that dramatically altered his concept of both theater and his role as an artist within it. It was within this play that he faced a sense of identity that was both an epiphany and a judgment, and with those characters, all of whom were on a journey toward “understanding what mattered and if they were part of that scene,” Tenn came to re-evaluate himself, personally and professionally, and he realized that the many notes and index cards on which he had scribbled his characters and his intentions, his goals and his dreams, his “moral inventory built by magpie,” were misguided and false. Landscape of the Body had led Tenn to try to figure out his identity, his “person” and to go to the most frightening place he could imagine.

What is that place?

“Never go there without a very strong sense of identity,” Tenn told me.

Where?

“That most frightening of all places,” Tenn continued, “the one I mentioned to you earlier today: the intersection of desire and aptitude.”

That place. That corner which, like so many corners in Tenn’s past, held what he needed. In Tenn’s mind, and on his mental map, this corner housed Guare and Albee.

“The love that I feel for Edward Albee extends far beyond his work,” Tenn told me, returning to the bed and leaning against a small pile of pillows. “I think that his is the most extraordinary talent to emerge in the last thirty years. I have admired other plays, and other writers, but his work is emotionally dangerous and stunningly beautiful. I can’t think of any other writer who has managed to combine the lean and the lapidary. He understands to a shocking degree the ravages both of love and of love denied. His command of the language is far beyond me. My words come from some instinctual dictionary that responds to fear and rage, but he has a full command of the language and can therefore achieve more with less effort.

“You can see that I feel it is important that his work be studied. His is work from which you can learn, but the love of which I spoke derives from the fact that Edward remains the only playwright who truly acknowledged me and my work, and that is a great honor, especially considering his greater abilities. That I should have been noticed by this man, that I should have been of some aid, means a great deal to me. While others write my obituary and perpetually recalculate my worth and my gifts, he has always been loyal in his respect, and he has waved at me across some rocky seas.”

Edward Albee came to Tenn’s attention in the late fifties, when Tenn was urged to see a production of The Zoo Story, and what he loved about that one-act play (“danger and beauty and sexuality welded together as tightly as a fist”) was further displayed three years later, in 1962, when Tenn saw, by his own estimation five times, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “The dance of people caught in a nest of poor choices and unfulfilled needs, a dance I know all too well, was on that stage,” Tenn remembered. “I felt invaded by that play, purloined. I felt that someone had gotten into my head and my heart and my notes and had written the play I would have liked to have written. Bill Inge had the ability to write plays or scenes of plays that appeared to have been influenced by our conversations or by dreams I had had or by ideas I had entertained, but Virginia Woolf was the first play I ever sat through shivering, because someone had rushed ahead of me and done something I would have liked to have done, but had neither the talent nor the courage to do so.”

Tenn endured Albee’s adaptations of Carson McCullers’s Ballad of the Sad Café, which was difficult because he felt the playwright was veering away from that intersection he was meant to dominate and devoting his time and his gifts to the work of another writer, one Tenn had known and loved. “I knew the shape of that novel,” he told me. “I knew what she had intended and I knew what she felt she had failed to provide in that novel, so the play—the experience of watching that play—was odd and unpleasant, even though it was skillfully done.” Tiny Alice and A Delicate Balance both devastated him, because both were, to him, plays about shattered families: the one to which we submit our souls in hope of salvation (the church) and the one into which we are born and in which we hope to find safety.

“Edward and I both exist now in a lacuna that is reserved for the writers the world feels no use for,” Tenn said, “but I feel confident that we will again be heard and understood, and I have no doubt that should I again have a place of respect in the theater, it will be because Edward’s hand was offered in helping me from this lacuna. Elia Kazan once told me that perhaps writers are abandoned because, through our work, readers are educated, they become wise to things they never considered before, and now they feel entirely beyond us, or utterly afraid of us. I want you to know that I believe that the corruption of the artist begins when he fails to acknowledge the work of his brethren,” Tenn told me. “I now understand that the theater is so much greater than all of us, still so capable of so much, that we are all needed not only to ensure its survival, but to ensure its relevance.”

Tenn sat up and looked through the notes at the foot of the bed. He failed to find what he was searching for, so he walked, none too steadily, to the desk, where he flipped through some pages that he had fastened with a paper clip. Eventually, he found what he was looking for, and read it to me with the paper clip clenched in his teeth. “I always feel that Edward has placed upon his stage these gorgeously buffed suits of armor—our fellow men, encased in defense and delusion, and they gleam before us, objects of awe and art, but they are, to our surprise, empty. Utterly empty. And baby, to array such beauty before our eyes, shining and lovely and … empty? Well, that is tragedy in my book. Beautiful tragedy.” He cast his eyes farther down the page and read on.

Irene Worth was one of Tennessee’s “spiritual saviors,” a great actress but also a woman who shared with him poetry, quotations that might help ease his mental strain, and a deliciously witty, almost “evil,” imagination. Here, she is about forty years old. (illustration credit 18.5)

“Irene Worth had a beautiful analogy, as she should. Beautiful woman, beautiful actress, beautiful analogy. She heard me out on my description of Edward’s plays, but she thought I was wrong. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I see Edward’s plays as lovely mirrors,’ ” she told Tenn, and to me she elaborated. “Baroque, perhaps, rarely rococo, but lovely. Ornate, heavy, of a craftsmanship we no longer see. We are lured by the frame of this mirror, but our eyes eventually graze toward the subject, which is ourselves, and the reflection is distorted, ugly, frightening. The frame is gorgeous, but the glass bows and distends, until you move the subject at its center, physically and emotionally and dramatically, and the reflection is sometimes perfect and clear, sometimes lovely, with a little deception of placement and lighting, sometimes cruelly exposing.”

“It is not a mirror for the weak of spirit,” Tenn said, “but I have been happy to step in front of it, to step into it, and I hold on to that frame not only for its beauty, of promises of what might be, but for balance, for strength.”

The sun was rising, and we could see it through the curtains. Our time was over.

“Baby, I need to get to sleep,” Tenn said. I stood and immediately wondered if I would be able to walk out of the room, much less drive to Baton Rouge. I was exhausted, dizzy. I began to collect my papers.

“You’ll gather your strength,” Tenn said, “and I’ll gather mine, and we’ll begin the journey. We’ll go to these women and begin our work together.”

He gave me a hug, strong and lingering, and whispered in my ear, “You’ll be fine. Everything will turn out perfectly.”

Tenn walked me to the door, smiled, and then closed me out of the room. I was in a hall that was utterly silent.

I walked several blocks to where I had parked my car. The sun was rising, but it was an overcast day: it looked more like dusk than dawn. I drove out of the city and found that I had the type of exhaustion that rendered me hyperalert: every bird that flew overhead led me to jerk my head toward it, and every car horn left me lurching. At a diner in the small town of LaPlace, I pulled over and went in. The diner was old and well-known in Louisiana and offered gumbo and a vast array of pies. I sat in the diner drinking coffee and reading over the notes I had taken, collating and ordering them. I became transfixed by a rotating display of desserts and lost track of time.

One week before Thanksgiving of 1982, Tenn called me at home. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and I answered the phone.

“Dixie!”

We had not seen each other for nearly two months, and I had not known how or where to reach him. I had begun to think that our “assignment” might never happen.

“When will you be coming to New York?” he asked. I did not know. I was taking classes and looking for ways to earn the money to make a trip to see him.

“I can get you up here,” he told me. “That’s not a problem.”

I did not want to take his money, and there was no discussion of what, exactly, we would do once I got to New York, but he remained excited about looking up the people whose names he had given me, of deciphering his notes, and revisiting plays he and others had written. To “figure things out,” he kept saying.

He wanted to know if I still had the rosary and if I used it. I told him I had and I thought about the people whose names were assigned to the beads. He asked me to consider calling some of those “beaded” people and asking them to offer their own prayers. I wrote this down, followed by three exclamation points.

“Call me when you have a chance,” he said. He gave me the phone number of his apartment at Manhattan Plaza, as well as the number of the Hotel Elysée. “You can almost always find me at those places. And let me know when you can get here.”

I did not call Tenn, but I began a letter to him, asking what it was he wanted me to do. I needed to know precisely what this assignment was, and how I might possibly find these people and approach them with Tenn’s questions and comments. I read and reread the letter, and I did not like the tone of it: I was dismissive, dubious. I did not send the letter.

Tenn called my home a week before Christmas, but I did not know about the call until he called me again in the final week of January. My father had a habit—infuriating to me and my mother—of not writing down phone messages. We would come home and he would tell us that we had been called by several people, and when we asked who, he always replied, cheerily, that he didn’t remember. “Name some names,” he would say, and we would have to run through the names of those who might have called. On that particular day, my father only mentioned that “a man” had called, very friendly, and wanted to know how we all were doing and to have me call.

When Tenn phoned me in January, he told me about the call and that my father sounded “perfectly nice.” He reminded me that mothers provide dreams but fathers provide “feet and energy: the engine to leave.” Tenn asked me if I had tried to reach any of the people on the rosary beads. I told him I had not. Tenn reminded me that he could provide me with phone numbers and addresses, introductions, but he wanted to get started, he wanted to reach out to those people. He wanted to find out if he had mattered, and to see if he could write again.

I told him I would get to work on it.

I shared my notes with Marian Seldes. She was astounded by what she found within them, and she told me I should get to New York; I should get to Tenn. I told her of Tenn’s drinking and drug use, the fears I had of being in New York City, where I knew few people, and being on this odd assignment with a man I admired but did not trust. In New Orleans, no matter how strange or frightening things might have become, I knew that my car was parked nearby. I could escape.

“There will be a right time,” she told me.

On February 11, 1983, I came home from school and my job. My father told me there had been messages, and he proudly pointed to a pad he had placed by the telephone. There were five names on the pad, one of them reading “10.”

“Who is that?” my father asked.

“A friend,” I told him.

I had never told my mother or my father about the days spent with Tennessee Williams. As far as they knew, I had been with friends, carousing in New Orleans. I still did not feel comfortable telling them about my desire for a writing life and about my time with Tenn.

“What does the message mean?” my father asked.

I looked at the pad and under the “10,” in my father’s neat and distinctive handwriting, were the words “Be my witness.”

“What does it mean?” my father asked again.

I told my father about Tennessee and our time together, about our assignment, about the rosary, and about the people he wanted me to meet, about the people he wanted to affirm him as a writer and as a man and as a friend.

“You have to call him,” my father told me. “You have to do this.”

“I know,” I told him. “I know.”

BY THE END of the month, Tennessee Williams was dead. I was told of his passing by my father, who greeted me when I came home for dinner. My father wanted to know if I had ever returned his phone call; if I had ever made plans to go to him and help him. Yes, I lied, we were in the midst of those plans. I lied to my father out of shame and guilt—both for my failure to respond to Tenn and for my inability to share with my father my dream of being a writer, of becoming someone who mattered, of providing to Tenn—to any friend—one sacred hour. For the rest of his life, my father and I could share our regret at my not being present for Tennessee Williams, and it may have been the one subject on which we agreed.

“When all of this is over,” Tennessee told me as our visits came to an end, “I want you to remember that I am a writer. Above all else, I’m a writer, and writing is all I really care about.” (illustration credit 18.6)

I began to think that there was now a way I could provide this sacred hour to Tenn. Tenn understood boundaries, safe places, what he called “the right mood for the right outcomes.” He always sought out new notebooks and pads and clean pieces of paper to get started, and he needed music in the background to get the fog rolling. “Nothing like the drama of a clean slate, a fresh start,” he had said. “Remember Pavese,” he always said. “ ‘The only joy in the world is to begin.’ One day it will happen,” he told me. “A place that is safe and strong and right for the fog. All of us,” he told me, “are seeking a home, and I don’t mean where we were born, or where we now live and have things, but where we can do the big things, the right things. Where we belong, where we fit, where we’re loved.”

IN THE FALL of 1988, my father told me, with nothing to prompt him but the belief that I needed to leave Baton Rouge and begin my own life, that it was not too late to be a witness to Tennessee Williams; it was not too late to honor his request and to repay the time he had spent with me. I had let down a man who might not have considered me a friend, but who needed one. “Nothing will be right,” my father told me, “until you do this. You’re honor-bound to do this.” Attached to a small mirror in my bedroom was a portion of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that Tenn had quoted to me, and which contained a dream of his—of finding meaning and a home:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment …

Tennessee Williams wanted to get home, my father reminded me, and I could honor his wish by capturing “burning moments” with those people who had mattered to him, who had gotten him up in the morning and in front of the pale judgment.

“Be his witness,” my father told me.

My father provided the money for me to move to New York in March of 1989, to begin what he called “getting the man home.” He made the time right, safe, and sound: his great gift to me, and one for which, I now realize, I never thanked him.

Acknowledgments

Follies of God exists because Tennessee Williams took the time to read and answer a letter sent to him from a twenty-year-old rube in Louisiana. I was that rube. For reasons we will never know or understand, Tenn chose to arrive in the French Quarter and offer me an astonishing assignment. It took nearly three decades and a great deal of patience on the part of more than a hundred people to complete this assignment, but I must admit that I would do it all over again. The subjects in this book have my eternal gratitude for braving the vast no-man’s-land of my good intentions.

I have compiled a list of people who were generous with their time and their memories—about Tennessee Williams, of course, but so much more, and what they gave to me infused the book, and I am thankful to them: Yuki Abe, Ellen Adler, Karen Akers, Eileen Atkins, Sylvia Connie Atkins, Kaye Ballard, Anne Bancroft, Barbara Barrie, Barbara Bel Geddes, Betsy Blair, Ronee Blakley, Chris Boneau, Marlon Brando, Dave Brubeck, Iola Brubeck, Betty Buckley, Ellen Burstyn, Zoe Caldwell, Dixie Carter, Florence Chaney, Stockard Channing, Candy Clark, Patricia Clarkson, Tandy Cronyn, Mart Crowley, Agnes de Mille, Sandy Dennis, Colleen Dewhurst, Fernanda Eberstadt, Patricia Elliott, Robert Emmett, Andy Ensor, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Fionnula Flanagan, Ruth Ford, John Gielgud, Anita Gillette, Joanna Gleason, Martha Graham, Lee Grant, Ruth Gordon, John Guare, Tammy Grimes, Alec Guinness, Christina Haag, Uta Hagen, Julie Harris, Roy Harris, Fayette Hauser, Polly Holliday, Dennis Hopper, Janis Ian, Albert Innaurato, Carmen Irizarry, Anne Jackson, Carol Kane, Garson Kanin, Frances Kazan, Anne Kaufman, Lila Kedrova, Thomas Keith, Deborah Kerr, Richard Kilbourne, Shirley Knight, Carole Laskey, Judith Light, Sidney Lumet, Norris Mailer, Marsha Mason, Marlane Gomard Meyer, Duane Michals, Don Millington, Rosemary Murphy, Peg Murray, Vivian Nathan, Paul Newman, Carrie Nye, Jack O’Brien, Tom Oppenheim, Angelica Page, Betsy Palmer, Estelle Parsons, Arthur Penn, Alice Playten, Sian Phillips, Harold Pinter, Ellis Rabb, Lynn Redgrave, Beah Richards, Doris Roberts, David Rothenberg, Sam Rudy, Katherine Sands, Joan Micklin Silver, Anna Sokolow, Maria St. Just, Louise Sorel, Beatrice Straight, Elaine Stritch, Elizabeth Taylor, Sada Thompson, Maria Tucci, Susan Tyrrell, Joan Vaill Thorne, Nanette Varian, Eli Wallach, Nicholas Fox Weber, Elizabeth Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Donald Windham, Joanne Woodward, Irene Worth. Special mention belongs to Ron and Howard Mandelbaum of Photofest, not only for bringing forth an abundance of images, but for not batting an eye when I requested a Kir Royale when asked if I wanted something to drink. They are clearly invaluable and rare people.

Tennessee spoke a lot about Dopp kits one needs on the road, and I had mine, as well as the people who helped me to stock them: Winnie Grissom, Sue Grissom, Robert Grissom, Wanda Smith, Kim Criswell, Molly Haskell, Andrew Sarris, Phyllis Nagy, Sally Kirkland, Edith Soloway, Allie Mulholland, Ron Raines, David Pittu, Alec Burnham, and Rose Byrnes. The principal source of sanity and sustenance was, always will be, and is Dr. Dale Atkins. There were survival jobs along the way, but I was luckier than most. I was employed by women wise and generous and understanding and inspiring: Evelina Emmi Rector of Ecce Panis, Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread, and Daryl Roth, a producer and lover of theater and people beyond compare. Three of the subjects in this book became cherished friends: Marian Seldes, Lois Smith, and Frances Sternhagen. Without their generosity and belief in me and my work, all those subjects might never have shown up and started talking … and talking. There were women in Baton Rouge, Louisiana—actresses—who prepared me for the two decades of talking: Barbara Chaney Molstedt, Lenore Evans Banks, and Patricia Snow. I will never forget another belle of the South who taught me how to think in a new way: Patricia White Hardee. I am also grateful for two remarkable teachers who taught me about the art of reading and writing: Barbara O’Rourk and Patricia Geary.

Two talented men believed in this book when it was a pile of notes and dreams, and their help was invaluable. Thank you so much Donald Wiese and David Ebershoff for the guidance, the insight, and the company.

Edward Hibbert of Donadio & Olson believed in the book and brought it to Victoria Wilson at Alfred A. Knopf, and it all came together, in all the best ways. With or without a contract, I am going to insist that I have Wilson’s eye for the rest of my life. I am also grateful to the help offered by Victoria’s staff: Carmen Johnson, Daniel Schwartz, and Audrey Silverman, publishing tyros from Central Casting—if I ran Central Casting.

I hope that I have been a sufficient witness to Tennessee Williams and to the women he truly believed were among the greatest inventions of God. I do remember, however, that Tenn warned me that trying to understand and fully appreciate the gifts of women was a vast and eternal undertaking, and I remain on the job. I also have a dream similar to one Tenn shared with me: “If I should make it to Heaven—and I’m working on it—I will do as I always do: I will look for a woman to explain it to me, experience it with me. And then I’ll find my mother and tell her what I’ve learned. And we’ll laugh. And I’ll be home—again.”