Follies of God Page 17
“A dream with humor and music,” Tenn told me, “and I usually get a set out of Odets and an acting style from the Philco Playhouse. I wrote a personal play in which I first gained a voice, and it has been tossed about like a whore at a frat party.”
Lois Smith served as the soul and the vital center of the 1955 revival of Menagerie, making it a satisfactory experience for Tenn, as well as, he believed, an opportunity for people to reevaluate his play, whose reputation had suffered from the 1950 film version, which had featured a cast he called woefully inadequate: Gertrude Lawrence, Jane Wyman, Arthur Kennedy, Kirk Douglas. “All of them suitable for some purposes,” Tenn admitted, “but not one of them appropriate for my play.”
A play, Tenn told me, is extraordinarily delicate, a psychic heirloom delivered by its writer to audiences and actors with blind trust. “ ‘How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken,’ ” Tenn said, utilizing a quote from Menagerie, a play that is an attempt, through words cast upon the pale judgment, to enjoy some sense of atonement with his mother, his sister, and that “wayward, silly queer” known as Thomas Lanier Williams. “What you love you become,” Tenn told me. “Of course we are also identified by those things and those people we hate. Our identities are as fragile as the things we write, spoors of our psyche, if you will. We can’t batter ourselves any longer with hatreds and wayward thoughts and wasted energies.”
Laurette Taylor, a mother on the stage in The Glass Menagerie and in life for Tennessee. “She understood me,” Tenn said, “and was not repulsed.” (illustration credit 8.2)
Tenn was aware again of the time knot, that ruthless and enormous serpent that had him firmly in its grip, crushing out time and energy and will. “I always believed I had lots of time,” he told me, “and I also believed I had lots of patience. I believed myself grateful when anyone read or produced one of my plays, but I’m now unable to see productions that fail to understand what I sought to do. What I needed to do. I came to love—was required to come to love—my mother through the writing of Menagerie. You’ll hear of prayers and vigils and excursions that allegedly open the mind and cleanse the soul, and that is what that play was for me. The walk along the Camino; the dip into holy waters at Lourdes; the agony in my own mental garden, and the weeds and the brambles were hatreds and anxieties and grudges collected. To make oneself capable of forgiveness and acceptance, one must be made terribly vulnerable, and I came to think of myself as crafted of glass: fragile, yes, but transparent. Here I am, flaws and all, but utterly clear and open. I have sinned. I have made mistakes. I have tricks in my pocket. I am human.”
Lois Smith can make a person think of himself in this way, Tenn told me. So, too, could Laurette Taylor. The two actresses of two entirely different generations merged in Tenn’s mind, and Smith became a “talisman” for him at a time when he felt he needed to defend his theatrical confession to his mother. “There is gentleness and there is greatness in Lois,” Tenn told me. “I was fascinated by her, watching her. I began to train myself to write in the same manner as she moved through the world: gently, calmly, fully aware, unafraid to be bewildered, detailed to the point of obsession.”
In the upper-right-hand corner of one page during our talks on Lois Smith and The Glass Menagerie, I wrote, “Napoleon House. First Sazerac cocktail,” and I had placed a large star next to this quote from Tenn: “We lie in order to live, and in time our lives become the lie. The writer can see and understand the lies. He does so without judgment. Everything else emanates from this.” I remember that Tenn watched me write his words in the book, then looked at me for a long time. “I’m going to make it as clear for you as I can,” he promised, “but nothing will prove these points in the way experience will.”
The primary point Tenn wished to make on that day, at that time, was that Lois Smith was his link—his only living link—to Laurette Taylor and to his mother. To focus on Lois, an actress and a woman he loved and admired, was to trick himself into believing that his mother was still with him, still loving him, protecting him, appreciating what he had been able to give her. “Lois is the lie, I suppose, that allows me and my mother to live together,” Tenn said.
WHEN TENN BEGAN making notes for The Glass Menagerie in 1943, when he was thirty-two, he was utterly undistinguished, as he saw himself, spending most of his days in the movie theaters of whatever city in which he found himself, waking up in beds “of compromise and incessant farting, a constant morning-after of regret and failed promises.” Within him was something—a poem, a story, a play—but he could not bring it toward him, and in all of our discussions about this play, he always spoke of it as bobbing toward him as if on water, floating toward him like a mist, coming at him like a dream, or fading in and out like a scene from one of his beloved black-and-white films. “I could lose myself in the cinema,” he confessed, as we walked through New Orleans and witnessed cineplexes and ugly, boxlike theaters that couldn’t “possibly hold a dream or one’s attention for an afternoon or day.” No matter his age or the number of spirits imbibed or pills swallowed, Tenn had an extraordinary memory for the films he watched in those years, and a remarkable facility for imitation of the stars, both male and female. “You have to realize that the cinema was my entire life for so long,” he confessed, “so you mustn’t feel ashamed at your young age to be lost and to wonder where or when inspiration will strike. It will strike if you let it. It will strike if you understand and accept that it may come from the most unexpected of places. There I was, more than a decade older than you are now, utterly lost, angry, frightened, and sitting in theaters, growing progressively drunker and happier, at whatever was playing at the time.”
Two films seen repeatedly by Tennessee in 1943 altered the shape of The Glass Menagerie: Ida Lupino (seen here with Joan Leslie), in The Hard Way, influenced his portrait of Amanda Wingfield, and Jennifer Jones, in The Song of Bernadette, “threw a shade” on Laura. (illustration credit 8.3)
Those movie outings were not simply inspiration or entertainment: the theaters were very often meeting places. “My social life was also rooted in those theaters,” he admitted, “for I wasn’t likely to meet similarly afflicted persons in ordinary circumstances. I could not find people who shared my fascinations in the usual social snares, but there was a very heady underworld that lived its life in the dark, smoky, salty-smelling environment of the cinema, all of us as pale as the images on the screen, and the artists among us suddenly seeing in the most remarkable of circumstances the inspiration for that one great poem or the solution to that maddening second act. I am fully convinced that the image—the spectral, hobbling image—of Laura Wingfield came to me from numerous viewings of Jennifer Jones in The Song of Bernadette. I seriously doubt that I could watch that film today without a boisterous round of hootings,” he laughed, “but in that year, in that time, in my mind, it served to present me with the shadings of a character.” Tenn also found some important elements of Amanda Wingfield in the performance of Ida Lupino in The Hard Way, in which the actress “brilliantly played a woman hell-bent on finding stardom through the more easily accepted trappings of another, all the while knowing that her own cunning had made it happen. While she had none of the canny and utterly artificial charm that Amanda—that my mother—used to such heady affect, that woman completely entranced me.”
Even more potent than the characters were the images themselves, those many slow fades and wipes and calendar pages flipping by; split screens that compressed decades and multiple emotions into seconds. “Getting the damn thing on the page is what always kills me,” Tenn admitted. “I may live with the characters, the plot, the entire play in my head and heart, but until I can find a way to make it live on paper, I’m lost, and filmic images, which I applied to the page, helped me to get Menagerie from the psyche to the page.” Tenn’s intense relationship with cinema coincided with his employment at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which provided him with needed funds, but which depressed him, because “I never saw the magic, only the i
ndustry, and I needed the magic.”
Tenn also wanted to please his mother; to impress her. “I began to think of gifts I could give to my mother,” he told me. “I knew that my mother saved things—odd things—that helped her to remember what she was and what she could have been.” The home of Edwina Williams had held paper and linen napkins on which had been written sentiments and phone numbers and poems; rose petals had been pressed into books; bottles of perfume—often never used—lined tables and shelves, and they were perpetually dusted and touched and fussed over. Each had a story and each had a place in her home until she died.
“Totems,” Tenn told me. “I wanted to give to my mother something she could place on a shelf and love, something as fragile and as transparent as those perfume bottles. Something as beloved and fraught with meaning as those rose petals and those napkins.”
Tenn’s memory of the initial script of The Glass Menagerie is one of “heated but half-hearted intentions, overdirection by the playwright through pages of hoped-for effects, but through it all, a great deal of emotion, which I feel led to its being produced.” While Audrey Wood found much to admire in The Glass Menagerie, and while Tenn felt it could finally allow him to be recognized as a writer, the play was “wobbly, unfelt,” a vital and hungry animal looking for “a friendly lap and an unpunishing hand.”
“Let me tell you my memory of St. Louis,” Tenn said to me after many cocktails. “I think of a jar of snakes wrapped in lace and scented with vanilla. I despised my father, and every cruel act imagined in my plays emanates from his necrotic soul. I hated my mother for blandly accepting the mediocrity that was our life, and until I jumped on her train of outward-bound dreams, I hated her for moving out of the real world, where I felt she might have offered me some aid. I came to realize that my mother could only function in this world of illusions, could only survive if she could believe that one, that any, of these illusions might one day manifest itself. The writing of Menagerie taught me something very important about myself and about others. I believe, as I told you, that we lie in order to live, and in time, our lives become the lie. Our destiny depends on our lie: Is it benign and beneficial, or is it corrosive, bearing a cost none can bear?”
My blue book bore examples Tenn gave me of the lies we need to live, and he summed them up in his belief that “God will not come and save us. Life will not treat us fairly if we dutifully follow the rules. Our friends, the true ones who can be counted on one hand, might come to our aid, unless they are dressed and perfumed and waiting for their own gentleman caller to arrive. We are utterly, completely alone, and when I have been my most fragile, my most shattered, that has been when I have fully realized how vulnerable I am. Far more frightening is the realization that those on whom I often need to lean are equally fragile, and can be—and have been—plucked from my life with sickening swiftness. To face this, brutally and openly, would be for me to die, so I found my solace, my lie, in the illusion of writing, in which I could create alternate worlds with alternate people, and rule them beneficently. I was saved by writing, and later, when I was no longer able to love fully and clearly, and therefore could no longer write, I found solace, and still find it, in alcohol, drugs, in a multifaceted God who does as I choose. We are not created by God; our God is created by us. You cannot find salvation or solace anywhere until you find it in yourself, and it is there,” he said, pointing to his heart, “that you then create your God.
“My mother found her happiness in her past,” Tenn continued, “and it was one we all might covet—a past in which she was pretty and cosseted and appeared to hold promise. Perhaps that was her gift, her one niggardly ornament in life: a beginning in life that held promise. And suddenly the promise is gone, and reality has taken residence in her heart and head, and it is too much.” So Tenn’s mother retreated to sticky summer dances at Moon Lake, furtive kisses from men overwhelmed by her face in the moonlight, gardenia corsages rotting in the icebox, their lives as brief and fragile as the infatuations that warranted them. “And she drug us all with her to those places”—Tenn laughed—“and I knew her conquests as other boys might know baseball scores or the itinerary of Lindbergh. I could not know then, because I hated her, that my mother was allowing me into her heart, was giving me all she felt worthwhile about herself, wanted both to elevate herself in my eyes, in everyone’s eyes, but also because she needed me to see her as she saw herself. She wanted to be loved.”
When Tenn spoke of his mother, he would often stop, literally shake himself, laugh, and either change the subject or resume it with greater animation. “There’s an old Southern saying, common among Negroes, in which they talk of their mothers after they’ve passed away. If you hear a song you associate with your mother; if you smell a scent that was distinctly hers; if you overhear a voice that reminds you of hers—you experience a pain deep within you, at your very core. They call it Mama Bones, and I felt it for the first time sitting in those theaters, watching those movies, and thinking ‘I must tell Mama how outrageous Miriam Hopkins is,’ or ‘Bette Davis has totally incorporated the druggist’s wife’s mannerisms,’ and I would feel this pain, and suddenly realize that the person with whom I wished to share these reactions, these observations, was someone I believed I hated. The person I thought I hated, and felt I didn’t understand, had made me someone who could appreciate these images, these illusions, and who had probably made me a writer.”
Tenn stood on a soft shoulder on a street high above Hollywood, heard the laughter of pretty boys and the repeated playing of “Little Brown Jug,” and juggled coins in his pocket and thought of his mother. Tenn thought of her in the house on Vista with his lover, who cooked and cared for him and sent him off to work with hot coffee; he thought of her and the affection she had either misplaced or he no longer trusted.
Tenn walked the streets of Hollywood and wished he could have his mother with him. Tenn wished he could discuss Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown and Ruth Chatterton with her. “Thank God for the ability to think of characters, real or imagined,” Tenn said, “when we are utterly trapped and are praying for a better scene.”
Tenn began to cry as he related these memories of his mother. “I will tell you how I was able to begin to realize my love for my mother,” he confessed, “how I came to understand her illusions. I could remember her falling asleep on the sofa, waiting for me to return home. Her exhaustion, or her submission to her dreams, was so severe that she would not hear me approach her, and I could look at her without the animating force of her stories, her performance, her illusions. I would then see the face of a child, the face of the girl dancing away her youth with her beaux. Pushing, pushing. Pushing away the reality she felt had cheated her of her due, and pushing me toward a better illusion for myself. I saw, most clearly, however, myself. And then she would wake up and begin talking, and she was in control, and she was masterly. But I recall the sweet, still face of a girl, and I came to love her with that image in my mind, and that image carried me to Amanda Wingfield.”
I asked Tenn if he still thought of his mother, if he still experienced the sensation of Mama Bones. Tenn laughed and admitted that “everything has diminished with age, my darling, but my feelings for my mother and my sister pierce me daily, and it is no illusion that they center me and let me know who I am, and let me know that I have loved and have been loved, no matter how badly or clumsily.”
In 1943 Tenn applied this love, clumsily, he admitted, to paper. Two years later, in the company of Laurette Taylor, the actress who would assume the role of his mother in The Glass Menagerie, he would experience the most profound and immediate and intimate love he had yet encountered.
He was not ready for it.
According to Tenn, The Glass Menagerie came to be, and still exists, is read, performed, and loved, because of Laurette Taylor, whose candor and “unfinished, uncensored” honesty elicited from those around her remarkable achievements, and because a writer named Tennessee Williams “wrote something quite remarkable and
personal and sweet, if I may say so.”
When Tenn talked about Laurette Taylor and the initial production of The Glass Menagerie, he frequently flipped the surnames, referring to “Taylor” in one anecdote and “Smith” in another. When I pointed this out, Tenn realized that he now conflated the two actresses because they had “inhabited and owned” this play, and had become imprinted, infinitely, upon his memories of his mother.
“Taylor immediately wanted to know who these people were,” Tenn recalled, “and her demands were kind and intelligent, so that I trusted her and could share with her, but they were also supported by an uncanny and unyielding sense of her own talent and technique and place in the theater. Absolutely nothing escaped her attention or her merciless sense of detail, and she never hesitated to point out a discrepancy or an untruth in my work or in the work of the others.
“After all the talk and all the analysis, what ultimately matters is whether or not you reach the hearts of the audience,” Tenn said, “and this Laurette taught me. That love that I spoke of—that is so important to the crafting of a play—extends in its production and must be carried through every performance. With Amanda I was purging myself of the hatred I had felt toward my mother and was left only with the very strong love I knew was there. So I loved her through the play. The strong, strange love—that for my sister, Rose—I poured into Laura, whose love for her brother is what truly hobbled her. I even found I could love Tom—myself—by showing him in constant turmoil in that lacy imprisonment. A prison is a prison. And the Gentleman Caller is every promise held out to those who seek one, who believe that there is one around the corner. The Gentleman Caller is religion and its God; the newspaper page that holds the horoscope and the society page. The Gentleman Caller tells us that we can be here right now, but the there, the glistening over there is possible and imminent and near. It’s one novena, one afternoon reverie, one cocktail, one rubbing of the Clarence Brown waxed paper away.”