Follies of God Page 16

  On a morning that had turned hot, Tenn and I were setting out for Decatur Street. We began our jaunt from the Café du Monde, and along the way stopped for pounds of coffee, items of negrobilia, chunks of pralines, a glance at a drugstore window that featured both vintage advertising and bold examples of soft-core pornography (“Medicine for some, I suppose,” Tenn quipped), and, desiring a brief respite, a stop in the Central Grocery, where Tenn had a beer and one of the city’s cherished muffuletta sandwiches, which he cut into four wedges and ate as carefully as he chose his words, which came forth at a slow, painful pace.

  Tennessee claimed that a still of Lois Smith from Elia Kazan’s East of Eden hung above his typewriter for years. “She is an inspiration to me,” Tenn said. (illustration credit 8.1)

  “I have begun a portion of our story that has me concerned,” he said. “I don’t know where to take it.”

  Tenn showed me the passage of a story inspired by Lois Smith. He allowed me to copy his attempt in my notebook. It read: “She had known from the time her childhood priest had told her so, that she carried within her a private altar, completely arrayed with all that was sacrosanct to her. Her daily duty, as well as her decision, was to polish the implements that lay on this altar, or to allow them to sit in dust and neglect, lonely, disabused, unserving in her quest for perfection.”

  “What I feel I am trying to say,” Tenn admitted, “is that our redemption begins within, which is certainly not a new idea, but it’s one that I, on a personal level, have faced myself. So I’m feeling a little punk tackling it on paper.” He dismissed the problem of the story—not to say of redemption—and we continued our walk toward Decatur, which eventually led us to a fenced-in market that trafficked in terra-cotta ducks, fountains, Blessed Mothers, and a myriad of angels in earth tones, which hung on chain-link fences, their faces a bewildered judgment of their resting place. “This would be a great backdrop for Sebastian Venable,” Tenn cracked, imagining his character from Suddenly, Last Summer, clad in tight-fitting white silk, his sinewy arms crossed, waiting, beneath the angels, for his prey. Tenn joked with the proprietor for a moment about the angels, then about the man’s not having the remotest idea who he was. Tenn grew silent and picked up a cherub as white as a piece of divinity fudge and held it away from him, observing it as if it were some noble ruin recently uncovered, or as if he were the father of a particularly odd newborn.

  “The rustic cherub,” he mused. “A personality I’ve often searched for in my women, real and imagined. Anna Magnani was one. Maureen Stapleton is another. The most complex one—in my opinion—is Lois Smith. Let me tell you about her.”

  Before he began his description, Tenn purchased the rustic cherub, which the proprietor wrapped in cerulean paper. Tenn gave it to me, and I kept it above my desk for nearly ten years, until I gave it to Lois Smith, who had inspired its purchase.

  Like so many of the women who inspired Tenn, Lois Smith’s first exposure to theater was through a church, a fact that was vital to Tenn’s understanding of her. “As I understand it,” Tenn told me, “she is a Nazarene! Isn’t that wonderful? Lois Smith, Nazarene.” In notes Tenn made for what he called the Lois Smith story that he wanted us to write together, he made the following notes about Lois to help in the creation of a character.

  She felt that she was always in that church in which she first felt happiness, and through the years, she has built within and around herself sanctuaries that promote peace and harmony, and [she] has made the theater something of a professed house of worship. It was not in her nature to find the ugly in life or situations, but she was not weak or restrained by ancient mores: she would, if she must, say what she felt.

  She resides in a brilliantly white cocoon in which she placed herself gently, surrounded only by what was deemed absolutely necessary, which more often than not was merely her person.

  There is within a lavish, hidden altar that everyone would be surprised she owned and loved and kept private to all but one other. With others she is apt to erect those pillars that announce her dismissal of a thought or a person who harbors thoughts that might disturb what she has fought to attain.

  She wondered about people who lied. While she wouldn’t let them into her life, she often thought about them, their motivations, their final, secret thoughts as they lay in bed in the dark, plotting their next move. What propelled them? Why did they choose to immerse themselves in the dank waters of deception when she herself longed for the clear creek of purity?

  One day she hoped to find within herself that special something that would allow all other events to click, to move into some meaning that might explain her desires, her perpetual moving toward what she couldn’t know, but was obsessed with.

  In the margin of the last passage, Tenn had written some lines from a poem by the French poet Valery Larbaud, whose death had occurred during preparations for the premiere of Orpheus Descending, in which Lois played Carol Cutrere. Larbaud was an elegant man, fastidious, sickly, addicted to spas and arcane treatments. Tenn could imagine becoming this type of person, gulping supplements, surrendering to mud baths and enemas and the ministrations of muscular therapists. From this frail man came images that haunted Tenn, but all he could remember of his work was “My reader, my brother, place a heavy kiss on my forehead and my cheek and press upon my face, hollow and perfumed.” These are the actual lines:

  Oh, that some reader, my brother, to whom I speak

  Through this pale and shining mask,

  Might come and place a slow and heavy kiss

  On this low forehead and cheek so pale,

  All the more to press upon my face

  That other face, hollow and perfumed.

  “All of our faces,” Tenn said, “need the attention and the affection of some observer, some lover. We—as men, as people, as writers—do not exist or matter until someone believes enough to come closer, to examine, to praise, to hate, to let us know we have been observed. We can then fill the mask with our reactions.”

  I possessed all of these words, all of this information, for eight years, until I finally met Lois Smith myself, and sought to find out about her hidden altars and her masks. When I told her of my intention, she laughed heartily and said, “Oh, you brave and foolish young man! Well, come on!”

  Tenn believed that Lois possessed a deep commitment to spiritual and physical well-being, and this became her shell, her armor. When I shared this observation with Lois, she quickly agreed. Yes, she admitted, the theater is a cruel place, occasionally populated by good people and great teachers, but for the most part unforgiving and harsh and “precipitate and foolish.” What she has chosen to do is to remove herself from the utilitarian aspects of the theater—fund-raising, backstage gossip, tales of its imminent disintegration—and focus on the work, devote herself to the pursuit and the praise of what she finds worthy. Her opinions are true and often harsh, but they are brief. She moves on.

  “I like to think of myself always as a rube, or a neophyte,” she told me. “It keeps the experience as special and as wonderful as it was when I started, before I had my eyes opened—or my skin thickened.”

  Tenn had watched her during the production of Orpheus Descending, adored by its director, Harold Clurman, respected by the company, and absent from the turmoil surrounding the quality of the production. “I was so touched,” Tenn told me, “by the manner in which she held the script: like a newly ordained priest holding his first host, or a young lover caressing the breast of a lover.”

  The production of that play was not a happy time, and the year in which it took place—1957—was one that Tenn relegated to a pile of memories he referred to as “bad times.”

  “It was not a good time,” he remembered. “I was not well, and I did not feel that I contributed very much to Harold’s direction, which is something he wanted very much. He was a collaborator, a loud, screaming inspirer of people, from the stagehands to the set designer to the playwright, and I was utterly mute in the face of his ex
hortations. I failed the play and I failed Harold. I failed everybody.”

  When Tenn recounted the times of Orpheus, he remembered manic discussions over coffee with the “wild-eyed, warmhearted Clurman” and an increasingly bemused Maureen Stapleton, who, as Lady Torrance, felt adrift in what Tenn called his “murky sea of words.” In the midst of this confusion was the implacable Lois Smith.

  “It takes years to gain that resolve, if one ever does,” Tenn marveled, “and here she had it while in her twenties. I was not a little impressed. Such iron beneath so flawless an exterior; her silk had steel underpinnings.”

  Tenn claimed that he had brought about Lois’s hiring in Orpheus by virtue of his constant ravings about her talent in two previous productions: The Young and Beautiful, an adaptation of the stories of Sally Benson, in which she played what Tenn called a “Middle American, middle-class Gigi coming of age,” and a revival of The Glass Menagerie, in which she played Laura opposite the redoubtable but miscast Helen Hayes. In that production, mounted at New York’s City Center, which Tenn likened to a cross between the New York Port Authority bus terminal and an offshoot of the Federal Theatre Project, Lois dispelled the myth that Laura was an unplayable part, a symbol with no substance, a device.

  “She understood the part perfectly,” Tenn said. “She revealed the anger that rests beneath so fragile an exterior: the rage at one’s imprisonment; the rage at the dissonance between what we see of a person and what a person actually is, actually feels, actually wants. She proved that Laura’s fragility is as much a ruse as a defense. ‘Take care of me; rescue me. Pity me; dominate me. Remove me from my current station. Take me—along with my crystal counterparts—off this shelf. Break me if you must, but set me free.’

  “Lois works in tiny movements,” Tenn remembered. “Hers are not the bold strides of a dancer, but the mincing, delicate steps of the geisha, and with each rehearsal she brought a new strength, a new dimension.” If Lois Smith works in small spaces with tiny gestures, it is only appropriate that another artist who worked in a similar fashion should have offered an homage to her abilities. Joseph Cornell, whose intricate shadow boxes held tiny objects that captured the essence of its subject, saw Lois in The Young and Beautiful, then went home to create a tribute. Lois at the time was pale, luminous, “supremely supple,” as Tenn recalled. She seemed to be the epitome of burgeoning womanhood, and the Cornell piece, deep blue, painfully fragile, and bringing to mind a delicately mended Christmas ornament, captures the performance Lois gave in the play.

  The box was given to Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell, friends of Cornell’s and Lois’s—and of Tenn’s—with the stipulation that it be left in an open place. If Lois saw it and liked it, it was to be hers. It now resides in Lois’s apartment.

  “I used to wonder how Lois survived the theater and life,” Tenn told me. “Then I remembered a lovely piece by Kierkegaard called ‘Love Abides,’ and it reminds me of Lois. She doesn’t rely on anything but her own reserves for well-being. She doesn’t need—like mother’s milk or unguent—the affirmation of others. What keeps her going, as if it were blood, is love.”

  I found the Kierkegaard piece. It reads in part.

  “Love never faileth”—it abides.

  When a child has been away all day among strangers and now considers that it ought to go home, but is afraid to go alone, and yet really wants to stay as long as possible, it says to the older children, who perhaps wished to leave earlier, “Wait for me”; and so the older ones do as the child asks. When of two equals one is more advanced than the other, the latter says to the first, “Wait for me”; and so the second does what the first asks.

  I had not read the above passage when Tenn recommended it, and I was unable to locate it during our brief time together. I asked him why this piece made him think of Lois. “It makes me think of her,” Tenn said, “because Lois, every time I see her, and every time I think of her, brings to mind the face I saw and the feeling when I was forgiven, when I was given help, when I was safe. When there was love in the room.

  “Kazan told me about her,” Tenn told me. “He loved her work at the Studio, and he cast her in East of Eden, and I sought her out, and I got her, in every sense of the word.” Kazan warned me to not stress her sweetness so much. “I think of her as fair,” he said, “as opposed to sweet. There is no willfulness within her that makes her see the sweet. That’s what I think sweet people are—willful, in denial, lacquering their true feelings with some notion of kindness or fairness. Lois is fair. Lois seeks all information, and she has a gift that I particularly envy: she is patient.”

  A case in point: the set of East of Eden, dominated by the talented but mercurial James Dean; the diabolically unbalanced Jo Van Fleet; the histrionic and challenging Barbara Baxley; the grand and indifferent Raymond Massey. Serving as the peacemakers on the film were Julie Harris and Lois Smith. “Think of the lions outside the [New York] Public Library,” Kazan told me. “What are their names?” “Patience and Fortitude,” I answered. “That’s who they were. Lionesses determined to keep the peace, see the good, do the great. She [Lois] believes, she projects, and she receives.” When Kazan learned that The Glass Menagerie was being revived for Helen Hayes, “I cringed,” he told me. “As I might cringe if I heard that Danny Kaye was cast in a production of Death of a Salesman. There are people who have gifts insufficient to great works, and I place Hayes in that category. I hated to think of her as Amanda Wingfield. Yes, she was of value—her name on marquees drew in hordes, but the wrong hordes. I knew that she would distort that play. She distorted all plays, and subverted all of them to the contours of her own personality and intelligence. She shrank plays and opportunities and fellow players, and some saw this as intimacy or an ability to ‘connect,’ whatever that means. I thought if Helen Hayes was going to be Amanda, a role at which she had already failed [in London], it was imperative that Tennessee have a real actress, an actress capable of portraying a real person, in the play. I suggested Lois.”

  During that production of The Glass Menagerie, Tenn began to study Lois Smith, to imagine future possibilities.

  Tenn wrote in the notes to the short story he was considering: “She was never burdened by the reserves she held within her, because they carried no weight. They rested right beneath her skin, alerted by her senses, her nerves, into action. Her reserves were instantly active when aroused, but they were never a burden because they were never lightly used, never abused, never ignored. They were husbanded and shared perfectly, and they were offered selflessly. There was never a possibility of burden.”

  In the margin, Tenn had written: “Light heart, light feet.”

  The Glass Menagerie is the play of Tenn’s that was most often abused, badly directed, misunderstood. This baffled him, because his stage directions are lengthy and precise—and frequently ignored.

  As Tenn explained to me, paragraph 3 of scene 1 reads: “The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.”

  Offered this description of the scene—what Tenn called the “emotional lighting and design” of the piece—most directors ignore it; most actors in the piece fail to adapt their acting to fit the space in which they are working.

  Kazan offered an explanation. “I think most directors resent a playwright directing from the page,” he told me. “I might have reacted strongly, if I had been given the play when it was new. I might have pressured Tennessee to explain to me his descriptions, to make them clearer. I think that he would have done so, but [being] handed a script that is as precise as his is, down to the timing of ascending scenery, might have unleashed in me a resistance that would have harmed the play.”

  Tenn took the brunt of the blame for the original production of Menagerie, a bastard child of a production that had, in fact,
four directors, none of them, in Tenn’s estimation, up to the task. They were Eddie Dowling, who also produced and appeared as Tom; Margo Jones, the peripatetic director who founded a theater in Dallas, Texas, and became a strong supporter of Tenn’s work; Tenn himself, who, when frustrated, would alter or remove the “fillips of failure” that Dowling and Jones had inserted into his play; and Laurette Taylor, the actress who was cast as Amanda Wingfield.

  “Everyone remembers and reveres Taylor,” Kazan told me, “but what no one talks about is what a mess the production was. If you focused on Laurette Taylor, you were transported. If you listened to the words of the play, if you allowed yourself to be moved by the extraordinary power and beauty of the play, you were altered forever. But if you went back time after time, as I did, and looked at the overall production, it was amateurish and forced and set, I think, a standard, a low standard, for that play for all time.”

  “Could I have been any clearer?” Tenn asked me, in reference to the opening lines of the play, in which Tom states, “Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion. To begin with, I turn back time.”

  “I reverse time,” Tenn continued, “and that is what all dreamers do. It is our earliest drug, don’t you think? Clutching that radio in the dark, in the night. Praying your Rosary. A reverie in the night in your bed, held by someone who understands you. Light and time and space are altered. You are in control, if only for a fleeting speck of time. That is a mood to be sought, to be admired, and no one—I mean no one—gets it.

  “Do not be fooled,” he warned me. “The theater is not populated by dreamers.”

  Tom speaks again, a few moments later. “The play is memory. Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic. In memory everything seems to happen to music. That explains the fiddle in the wings.”