Follies of God Page 14

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.
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  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 unde
rstand 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.”