Follies of God Page 15

  Cronyn called Kazan after hearing Tandy’s estimation of the play, and even before he had read it himself, he wanted to produce it. “I didn’t fully understand that Portrait was growing into Streetcar,” Cronyn told me, “but Kazan informed me that Tennessee was working like a demon, and the play was growing greater by the day. I immediately realized that Jessie would be in Streetcar, but she would only have the opportunity if she was seen acting a part that was similar, so I mounted a production in Los Angeles of Portrait.”

  The production, financed and directed by Cronyn, played in a tiny theater to small but appreciative audiences. “The only audience member that mattered,” Tandy confessed, “was Elia Kazan. Hume told me that once he saw me in Portrait, he would see me in Streetcar. Now I still had not read Streetcar; it was, as I recall it, an unfinished play. But my faith in Tennessee’s talent and my faith in Hume, coupled with my incredible need for a part, led me strongly.”

  Kazan recalled the performance as “striking, and Jessica was clearly more of an actress than I had imagined. She was still far too reliant on effects—her voice was doing far too much to convey emotion or a change of moods, and her gestures were not entirely believable. But her ability to dissolve emotionally on the stage was phenomenal, and I knew that she could be our Blanche. I knew that she understood the lies we tell in order to survive, and that was an admission I was not getting from any other actress.”

  Kazan brought the news of Tandy’s performance to Tenn, and he did not find a receptive author. “Tenn thought she was a phony British actress,” Kazan recalled, “and he couldn’t imagine her as Blanche. Ironically, he thought of Jessica as ‘brittle,’ and she is the last person to whom I would attribute that description.”

  But Tenn agreed to the casting of Jessica Tandy as Blanche, relying entirely on the judgment of Kazan. Once she had the part, she realized that she had another role that she craved: “I wanted—and needed—desperately to become Tennessee’s friend,” Tandy told me. “I realized that I would have to have him with me and for me if I was going to succeed.”

  Tandy suggested that she and Tenn have dinner together, and Tenn accepted.

  “Big Lady and I formed an immediate mutual-admiration society,” Tenn told me, and he recalled the meeting with great affection. Tandy recalled that, in her life, she had had three meetings with men where she freely revealed her secrets, what she saw as her shameful self, and those men were Jack Hawkins, Hume Cronyn, and Tenn. “We were comfortable and intimate from the beginning,” Tandy told me, “although I was afraid of him, in the sense that his talent was, to me, so incredible, and yet I saw before me a boy, an overgrown child.”

  Tenn was in his self-imposed poverty, walking the streets of New York, and seeing life through the eyes of a person who would never survive without aid, who was perpetually changing masks to appear acceptable and to make life tenable, and it had given him a happiness he had not expected. While Tenn had Frank Merlo in his life, during this exercise in which he was delving into his own derelict past, he had made himself believe that he was completely alone.

  Then Jessica Tandy entered his life.

  “I was feeling even more confessional than I normally do,” Tenn said, “and so our first meeting was full of disclosures. She revealed herself to me as utterly afraid and utterly unrefined, and we laughed at our mutual charade. Suddenly, I had a sister, a soul mate, along for the adventure of Streetcar.” They each had the ability to make the other comfortable, to provide calmness. “Jessica could not imagine that she could ever pull off this role,” Tenn admitted, “and what hung her up was the sexuality of Blanche. Jessica was not comfortable at all with flirtation, and she ran strenuously from seduction. She found Kazan a very strong, sexual force, and she feared his direction of those scenes where Blanche needed to be seductive and, later, conquered. So I worked with her on those instead.”

  “I was torn, also, between two Stellas,” Jessica revealed. “Marlon was very much devoted to the teachings of Stella Adler, which were unknown to me, yet fascinating, and Kazan had begun an affair with Kim [Hunter, the play’s Stella], so I felt adrift as an actress and as a woman. Marlon was an extraordinary actor and a beautiful man. No acting was required to tremble before him, but I could not easily face the Blanche who could effortlessly flirt with him, and I could not convince anyone that I was the Blanche who indiscriminately entertained men.”

  “What Jessica could believe,” Tenn told me, “was that a woman—or anyone—can and will do anything to find surcease. ‘Surcease’ became our word. If Jessica could not play Blanche as a whore, she could play her as a woman who craved affirmation as a lovely, refined lady, and Jessica completely identified with that. When Jessica was nervous, she became terribly, terribly polite, she shook a bit, and she sought the nearest exit, and that is how I told her she should flirt with Stanley. Her Blanche might not have wanted Stanley in her bed—or any man—but she needed it. I told her to think ‘castor oil,’ not ‘cock,’ and as distasteful as both were, they ultimately did her a world of good.”

  When I repeated this to Tandy, she burst into her wonderful laugh and couldn’t believe that Tenn had told me that. “I had forgotten that wonderful mental trick I played on myself,” she giggled, “and only Tennessee could have given it to me in such a fashion and so freely.”

  Tenn invited Jessica to join him on his forays about the city, his “promenades of the poor,” and she found it wonderful. “Even though we were both going home to comfortable places,” she remembered, “and we had food and money, we fully fell into our fantasy of being unknown, unloved, unaware people, hopelessly wandering. We ate in greasy diners, allowing ourselves each sixty cents, and it brought back my entire life prior to Hume, who simply swept finances out of my head and my life. As we walked, Tenn would recite poems or talk about situations that might work in the play, and I could snatch, from the deepest parts of my mind, the sonnets I had loved so much, as well as long portions of Hamlet and Henry V. Tennessee reintroduced me to a vital part of my past, and a vital part of my person, and although we were both in our late thirties, on the cusp of an amazing experience, we were terribly, happily young. One of my fondest memories of that time with Tenn was going to his apartment and finding him flipping furiously through books. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, and he admitted he was looking for money. He had found money once in a book—a gift—and I often stashed money in books, one of my eccentric habits. We laughed ourselves silly over that, and I remember Tenn telling me, ‘Stay young, honey. It’s all that will save us.’ ”

  When A Streetcar Named Desire was published in hardcover, Tenn sent an inscribed copy to Jessica. Inside, he had slipped a crisp twenty-dollar bill onto which he had taped a small note. It read: “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Jessica took baby steps toward Blanche,” Kazan recalled, “but goddammit, she got there. She was luminous, not only due to the fairness of her complexion, but from this fervent belief she manifested in the fantasies of Blanche DuBois. She was otherworldly, she was wonderfully correct and precise, and so when she sank to the level of Stanley Kowalski, you truly felt a woman you cared for had been degraded. When she arched her back and walked off at the end of the play, your heart broke, because someone very similar to your mother or your aunts or a beloved teacher was lost to us forever, and who could fathom what we might have gained had she stayed, if we had only been a bit more eager to be kind?”

  Helping Jessica along in her baby steps were Tenn, Kazan—and Hume Cronyn. “I believe that Hume wanted a stronger role in the production,” Tenn revealed, “and his presence was not pleasant. He was very protective of Jessica, but he was also quite dismissive of everyone else in the company, and he had to be told several times by Kazan that his presence was not appreciated. I never felt that Hume thought much of me: I think he was grateful that I had written a play that would help his wife, but I always felt like the most flagrant queer around him, as if he were trying to conduct a conversation with an ar
madillo, so strange was the concept.”

  Cronyn began making staging suggestions, and ultimately Tenn left rehearsals. If Tenn was in the theater, Kazan, sitting behind him, would report “Good news” on the entrance of Tandy, then “Bad news” on the entrance of Cronyn. “Believe me, we were a happy company when nothing but good news came in that door,” Tenn said.

  Jessica knew that maneuvers and machinations by Cronyn had led her to this moment, to this opportunity, but she deeply resented the belief, now a part of theater myth, that Cronyn had served as a merciless puppet master to this pliant actress. “Listen,” she admonished me, in the presence of Cronyn, “you sit here talking to me because of Hume Cronyn and Tennessee Williams, but I was ready for anything—not only ready, but hungry. I can say now—after some success and a lifetime in the theater—that I cannot think of anything or anyone who could have stopped me from making a better life for myself in the theater. I was not going to be counting coins and opportunities in some council flat in my old age. Hume was simply the one who saw in me the potential to take on roles that no one else felt I deserved. I was not passive, however. I was an active participant in those things I pursued.”

  The most valuable lesson Jessica learned from Streetcar was to inhabit the mind of the playwright. “Because I became so close to Tennessee,” she admitted, “each and every night that I said those words, I imagined myself with him, saying and defending his words, and it made all the difference in the world. I wanted Tennessee Williams to believe in me again, even if I was in a play not written by him. I would imagine us walking the streets of New York, so young, our eyes so full of possibility and wonder and that longing we were so soon forgetting, and I could make any playwright’s work real to me.

  “And when he died,” Tandy said, her face crumbling, “and I had to say those words of Blanche’s at his memorial service, it finally hit me that he was gone, that there was no smiling face, no set of young eyes, receiving my words, judging my input, and so I was devastated. I have loved my life in the theater, but now, after all these years, I can think of perhaps three experiences in the theater that fulfilled me or drew upon half of what I had as an actress. Tennessee said that Streetcar utilized all of his skills as a writer, and its production filled him with great satisfaction. It was also my greatest experience, but it only drew upon some of my reserves.”

  Jessica and I shared a love of poetry, and when I told her that I was emulating the walks that she and Tenn had made across the city, and that I was keeping my eyes young and trying to forget my bare pantry, she wanted to know which poems I was using. (She also, against my wishes, and with incredible stealth, managed to have food sent to me.) One day, as I was reading a book of poems, I found something that appeared to have been written for and about the young Tennessee Williams. I was in Central Park, and I found a pay phone, called the Wyndham, and got Jessica on the phone, who promptly invited me up to her suite. The poem, by Czesław Miłosz, is called “Youth.”

  Your unhappy and silly youth.

  Your arrival from the provinces in the city.

  Misted-over windowpanes of streetcars,

  Restless misery of the crowd.

  Your dread when you entered a place too expensive.

  But everything was too expensive. Too high.

  Those people must have noticed your crude manners,

  Your outmoded clothes, and your awkwardness.

  There were none who would stand by you and say,

  You are a handsome boy,

  You are strong and healthy,

  Your misfortunes are imaginary.

  You would not have envied a tenor in an overcoat of camel hair

  Had you guessed his fear and known how he would die.

  She, the red-haired, because of whom you suffer tortures,

  So beautiful she seems to you, is a doll in fire.

  You don’t understand what she screams with her lips of a clown.

  The shapes of hats, the cut of robes, faces in the mirrors,

  You will remember all that unclearly, as something from long ago,

  Or as what remains from a dream.

  The house you approach trembling,

  The apartment that dazzles you—

  Look, on this spot the cranes clear the rubble.

  In your turn you will have, possess, secure,

  Able to be proud at last, when there is no reason.

  Your wishes will be fulfilled, you will gape then

  At the essence of time, woven of smoke and mist,

  An iridescent fabric of lives that last one day,

  Which rises and falls like an unchanging sea.

  Books you have read will be of use no more.

  You searched for an answer but lived without answer.

  You will walk in the streets of southern cities,

  Restored to your beginnings, seeing again in rapture

  The whiteness of a garden after the first night of snow.

  I read the poem aloud to Jessica, and she was devastated. She cried as one might upon hearing of a great tragedy or the death of a loved one. We sat in her living room, crying and thinking of Tennessee Williams, and, I think, the youth of Jessie Alice Tandy. “That poem is Tennessee Williams,” she whispered, and then she began to cry again. “Oh, Jim, was anyone ever there to help our friend? Did anyone ever reach out to hold him?”

  Kim Hunter left me with the most potent image of the relationship between Jessica Tandy and Tennessee Williams. After the opening night of Streetcar, with its rapturous curtain calls and ovations, with the cast amazed at its own skill and good fortune, Tenn stood in the alleyway of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre smoking a cigarette. Close to the street were Hunter, several other members of the company, members of the press—a small mob. Tandy exited the theater from the stage door, which was several feet ahead of where Tenn was smoking, and when she arrived at the mob, she was unable to move forward, and stood there, a smile frozen on her face. Suddenly, from behind her, Tenn’s voice boomed. “Step aside,” he bellowed, “there’s a great lady coming through.” Without looking behind her, Tandy’s face beamed, and as if choreographed, her hand slipped behind her back and fell into his, which he had stretched toward her at just the right moment. “In that moment,” Hunter recalled, “was consummation. They had done it, and they were acknowledging it.” All night long, through all the drinks and all the photos, Hunter kept looking over and seeing, too many times to recount, Jessica’s hand in Tenn’s.

  Eight

  I WAS UNFAMILIAR with the method of praying the Rosary, so Tenn purchased for me a small, blue booklet entitled “Pray the Rosary” and tried to explain, in his own way, the proper way to use this holy tool.

  “Ignore these pages,” he would say, dog-earing particular pages, and writing on others.

  The act of the Rosary, as Tenn put it, had become a meditation on qualities, a pursuit of desires. The history, semantics, and directions offered by the book were unnecessary, beyond the colorful, rich illustrations, along with the remedial instruction it offered to the uninitiated. “I need words,” Tenn said, “and I need visuals, and I need women. The beads are steps to walk; stones to build; women to inspire.” The essentials: There are fifty-nine beads that comprise the rosary, or garland of roses, or “flowers at the feet of the Lady,” as Tenn named it. Flores para los muertos. There is also a crucifix, on which is recited the Apostles’ Creed, and above that a large bead, on which is recited the Our Father.

  “You do what you want,” Tenn told me. “Nothing of much good came from the Our Father. Use a quote that means something to you. Find a woman who moves you. We do what we can. We make our walks alone, scared but stoic, but we have our support systems, and prayer; God, all myths, all ladders of hope. Fashion them to your fears. Fan your fog. Do what you can.”

  The mind of Tennessee Williams, as he put it, had always been full of female inspiration, feminine means of escape, salvation. “Women know where to look for the escapes we need,” he said. “I su
ggest you follow a woman.” Some of the women Tenn held in his thoughts as he tried to write were not close friends, but what he called teachers and examples. “They are of use to me in reminding me how I should act; how I should behave; how I should proceed.”

  When Tenn mentioned Lois Smith, he seemed to say, as if in prayer, “Ah, Lois Smith: lyric and rustic and pure; a grandmother’s feather bed, comfortable and easy to sink into, but also barbed, full of opinions. At first sight, a haven, soft and pliant, but really an old Recamier piece covered with a more comfortable material. Oh, Lois, where have you been?”

  Tennessee claimed that a still of Lois Smith from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) hung above his typewriter for a number of years. “She is an inspiration to me,” Tenn said.

  Lois Smith possessed a soul that Tenn had earmarked for subsuming. She would be, he insisted, the gentlest spirit in the cabal of women to whom he was sending me, a virginal handmaiden to all that is “fair and clean and morally uplifting.”

  Tenn first saw her when she was twenty-four years old; he was forty-four. It was 1955, a good year, a “sitting-on-the-fence” year, with good things behind him, and the hope of greater things ahead. Despite the difference in their ages and experiences, Tenn felt that he was her inferior in judgment and he envied her equanimity, the glow that surrounded her and kept her employed in roles that called for vulnerability and gossamer charms.

  “I liked her,” Tenn said, “because I like ethereal women, but I can’t really be friends with them because they really are not of the earth: they are Puck women, and their feet are nowhere where you need them—on the ground or on your back. What I truly admire are those women who are both ethereal and perfectly simple. I think Lois is this way. She’s worldly, but she is also a Shaker woman stranded on the isle of Manhattan.”