Follies of God Read online

  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.”