Follies of God Page 11

  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 beli
eve 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 pu
shed 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.”