Follies of God Read online

  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 soft
en 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.”

  Seve
n

  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.”