Follies of God Page 10

  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 t
ongues—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.”