Follies of God Page 18

  When Lois Smith took on the role of Laura, she understood that her character was a performer as well. Amanda essays roles on the telephone, for the grocer, for the neighbors. Laura tackles the role of the victim, and searches for the love that we can often easily bestow on the sad and the abandoned. “Laura is the freak occurrence against which we pray,” Tenn told me. “When you do your Rosary and pray for humility or a happy death, or zeal, you’ll also pray to be delivered from flood, fire, or famine. You will also love, in a very peculiar and hateful way, all of those who have been visited by these things. Guilt, along with a sense that money invested toward the sad prevents tragedy from visiting our doorstep, also creates a fulsome affection toward the gimpy and the fat and the unprepossessing. Laura knows this—Lois Smith as Laura knew this—and so she perfects her daily performance of limitation and struggle, dusts her little symbols of beauty and imprisonment, and begs to be given a shelf on which she and her mother can live out their days, Amanda free of reality; Laura free of social intercourse with others. Surcease and silence.

  “And so,” Tenn continued, “what I learned from Laurette Taylor, from my mother, from Menagerie is that we—writers, people—only conquer when we love, because when we love, we see clearly what is in front of us, and what was our past, and what we own. So love your characters, and by doing so you may ultimately come to love yourself. Laurette told me she loved my mother for me while playing Amanda, and also expressed her love for her own mother through the performance. There was a lot of love in that play, and if an audience can’t identify with these sad outcasts of Dixie, they can identify with those loves that destroyed them and those loves that liberated them.

  “And as you can probably imagine, my love for my mother and sister defined and destroyed me, and my love for Laurette, and for my play, liberated me, and …”

  And? I asked.

  “I never realized that—truly realized that—until this moment, when I said it.”

  Tenn excused himself from the table at which we sat and was absent for more than half an hour.

  On another page of the notes about Menagerie, I wrote, “What is at stake?” and I remember that Tenn had told me that the characters are racing against time, against which illusions are useless. Each character pursues a singular desire—security, acceptance, sexual pleasure, social standing—and each, as Tenn stated “with a clock ticking in their ears.” Taylor explained her motivation in portraying Amanda as similar to a time when her daughter, Marguerite, was crying, and in her attempts to calm her child, Taylor made faces, bobbed balloons, found candy, and finally held the baby tightly and begged her to please stop crying. “She never forgot this manic desire,” Tenn told me, “this spinning of many plates to calm and control someone she loved, and any mother or child could recognize her actions.”

  One afternoon, when Tenn was especially worried about his play, about many things, Taylor called out, “Light be the earth upon you, lightly rest,” and Tenn recognized it as a line from Euripides. He also remembered his image of his mother, asleep and vulnerable and sweet, waiting for her errant son to return home. He shared this image with Taylor, who promptly decided that Amanda never falters in her impeccable performance, her affront to reality, when anyone can see her, but when reality makes its presence and its power known to her, when Tom goes to his assignations, when the Gentleman Caller falls from reach, when the attempt to sell subscriptions seem to be failing, her performance, her posture, and her face all momentarily—and frighteningly—would sag. “Every actress who ever saw Laurette in Menagerie wants to talk about that performance,” Tenn boasted, “and every one of them remembered the shock of seeing her seem to come undone at the seams in those moments in the play. It was as if they were seeing a horrible mistake, the onset of illness or pain, perhaps, in the middle of an otherwise flawless performance.”

  The last notes about The Glass Menagerie are an exotic list, but I remember that it was a list of things that reminded Tenn of his mother and of Laurette Taylor, and included Judy Holliday, Giulietta Masina, and Maureen Stapleton, but also Bellodgia perfume, the scent of starched linen, a particular brand of scented face powder, and movies, late at night, when Tenn realized he wanted to discuss what he was watching, but his favorite partner in such things was gone, silent.

  “Memory is what cures us of a loss,” Tenn told me. “I was stupidly afraid of my memories for so long, because I was afraid to feel, but memories are the ultimate illusion—perhaps the final one—in that they allow us to believe that those we love are forever with us, within us, and now I no longer grasp for greatness, merely for feeling.”

  Tenn gave me Lois Smith—in the form of a rosary bead—because he believed in her purity and in her young eyes, both of which he felt I possessed but might lose. Tenn also adored her for her working habits on the two plays they worked on together, and whenever he saw her in films, on television, or onstage, he had the sense that a beloved relative had been spotted in a large crowd of strangers. He felt safe. “She has the effect on me similar to those coins in my pocket,” Tenn told me, “or that damned piece of waxed paper I rubbed into oblivion in that musty apartment. She centers me.”

  Nine

  AFTER TENN GAVE ME the name of Marian Seldes, he paused and tried to remember a poem, “a very old and haunting French poem.” He could not recall much of it, but he described it in great detail, as well as the feeling it brought over him. It was a poem, he said, that reminded him of the dream state he required to write and to generate the fog. I found the poem years later.

  You are distant, alien—you are

  The night of fog,

  Foul drizzle over the faubourgs

  Where life is the earth’s cold color,

  Where men have died untouched by passion.

  We have met already, you will recall,

  Yes, long since and unfortunately

  In some region of vellum and toccatas

  In the blue twilight of a quiet house,

  Windows of lassitude.

  —O. V. DE L. MILOSZ, “L’ETRANGÈRE”

  “That poem,” Tenn told me, “helps me to write and helps me to think of Marian Seldes.”

  The career of Marian Seldes began when she was a child, in her bedroom, late at night. It is appropriate that an actress of whom Tenn once said, “She came to me from a fog, as so many did, seemed unreal, unmoored, floating free from reality, the Duse of Fogs,” should have come to the realization of her destiny within nocturnal reveries that involved delusion and a mirror.

  During these night visits to another reality, Marian glimpsed herself—clad in a long, white nightgown—in a full-length mirror that threw back a reflection of someone far more glamorous and interesting. As she grew older, and began taking dance instruction, she would go to the roof of her parents’ apartment building and reconstruct the day’s steps, throwing her long arms heavenward, drawing down the moon, begging Providence for aid in the pursuit of purpose and beauty, lost in the ecstasy of being someone else, of being free from time.

  All that Marian Seldes was during these activities—during the 1930s and 1940s—she still is today. She is someone free of time’s grasp and calamity. She is still the obedient, whispering, hesitant daughter who grew up in comfort (physically, intellectually, spiritually) and was impatient for the night vapors to begin. She is, Tenn noted, lost to us forever. She is enslaved by fantasy.

  Marian Seldes was born on August 23, 1928, in Manhattan. She once wrote that “a longing to move from my own time to my father’s, to share in lives before my life … pulled me toward the theater.” Her father’s life was marked by glamour, erudition, and controversy. Gilbert Seldes was a writer of plays, novels, and irate letters to editors, corporations, and boards; an educator; a provocateur; a man who goaded F. Scott Fitzgerald to write, who evoked rapture in Marianne Moore, and with whom Tenn was frankly obsessed.

  “I don’t blame Marian for being besotted with her father,” Tenn told me. “I am, too. Hers was the fanta
sy upbringing on the isle of Manhattan that all Dixiecrats dream of.” Gilbert Seldes lent his keen eyes and generous wit to such publications as The Dial, Esquire, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker. The work for which he will most likely be remembered is The Seven Lively Arts, a book whose theme, according to Seldes, is that “entertainment of a high order existed in places not usually associated with Art, that the place where an object was to be seen or heard had no bearing on its merits, that some of Jerome Kern’s songs in the Princess shows were lovelier than any number of operatic airs and that a comic strip printed on news pulp which would tatter and rumple in a day might be as worthy of a second look as a considerable number of canvasses at most of our museums.”

  Gilbert Seldes was married to a woman whose name—Alice—he despised, so he renamed her Amanda, and she is, by photographic account, the parent who bequeathed to Marian her height, her dark, thick hair, her alabaster coloring, and her expressive brows, which usually tell the whole story of her inner being. One friend advised, “Just look at her brows: they don’t lie.” Her mother, who was, in Marian’s words, “lethargic and listless,” also passed on to her daughter an almost neurotic obsession with time, which has exhibited itself most alarmingly in a tendency to scrutinize dictionaries to find especially comforting and useful definitions for the very word. Time is ruthless, and to be within a hairbreadth from opportunity is to spend one’s entire life as a supernumerary when stardom may have been offered. There is about Marian’s life a certain quality that reminds one of a distaff version of Appointment in Samarra, with her persistent fears of appointments missed, time not adequately used, changes not fully recognized and utilized. She walks about town with typed itineraries in her purse, each minute of every day accounted for, every thought recorded. She recoils at the thought that her absences from grade school and performances of Peter Shaffer’s Equus are recorded, and she dreams of finding the books in which the damaging evidence is located, and blotting it out. She fears that incipient sloth will result in lost time or, worse, in its turning against her, having its way with her, leaving her without energy and plopped against pillows (like her mother), watching the rest of the world create and prosper. She says, “Life goes by. There does not seem to be enough time to accomplish in daily living, much less in a career, all that you want to. Your use of time defines the kind of person you are off the stage—and on. When you are in charge of that time—the time of your life—you are happy.”

  Tenn shared this obsession with Marian, even if he failed to possess or harness her discipline in reshaping it. “Time has—is having—its way with me,” he said, “and I want to alter this trajectory. I don’t know how, so I reflect on Marian; I think of her moving about the city—a vision in purple or blue—checking clocks, her watch, the location of the sun, and getting things done, sharing herself. I think I can do this.”

  Marian’s prestidigitation with time has not only served her in terms of productivity and efficiency; it has also kept her firmly where both she and Tenn would like to be: in her father’s time. When she walks about Manhattan, she is surrounded by wafts of a time gone by. She is apt to inspire one to think of elegant, elliptical short stories, Aubusson rugs, lunch in the ladies’ section of Schrafft’s, and an afternoon assignation beneath the Biltmore clock. This is no accident, no trick of the mind: it is an affect deliberately chosen by Marian, and held to with affection. Her demeanor will bring to mind (if you are lucky and have a long memory) Katharine Cornell, the actress who became so vast an influence on Marian—as did her husband and director, Guthrie McClintic—that Marian consumed portions of the actress’s character as her own and bestowed her name on her only daughter.

  Control of time can also keep you busy—hence there is no time for idle thoughts or reflection to intrude. By preventing such an invasion on her happiness, which is stringently created each day, Marian can use ruses and defenses to distract her from the fact that the dream she began in that mirror so long ago was a lie: the theater she dreamed of does not exist.

  Tall, dark, moody, “almost inordinately polite,” Marian Seldes fascinated Tennessee, and he thought of her often when he sought a “lost but resolute” female character. Seldes, seen here in Ring Around Rosy, a 1960 television drama. (illustration credit 9.1)

  And never did.

  Every actress, Tenn repeatedly told me, has within her a mental theater, similar to the one he managed in his own mind. This theater is complete with a repertory company and a costume shop, as well as a dreamed audience: the perfect recipients of what one dreams to create and share. The interesting assignment for me, as Tenn saw it, was to discover how many of these actresses have come face-to-face with a theater life that in any way resembles the existence concocted by their inner fabulist, an entity Tenn claimed required perpetual stoking.

  Of all the other actresses to whom Tenn sent me, none has had a longing to match that of Marian Seldes, and none has displayed so servile an attendance to and affection for the workings and workers of the theater arts. No description of Marian can be accused of smacking of hyperbole. She is truly a handmaiden in the temple of Art; she is the slave to her craft; she has made the theater her church and its peripheral activities her religion, the primary tenet being extracted from the writings of Robert Edmond Jones, who wrote:

  An artist must bring into the immediate life of the theater … images of a larger life.… Here is the secret of the flame that burns in the work of the great artists of the theater. They seem so much more aware than we are, and so much more awake, and so much more alive that they make us feel that what we call living is not living at all, but a kind of sleep. Their knowledge, their wealth of emotion, their wonder, their elation, their swift clear seeing surrounds every occasion with a crowd of values that enriches it beyond anything which we, in our happy satisfaction, had ever imagined. In their hands it becomes not only a thing of beauty, but a thing of power. And we see it all—beauty and power alike—as a part of the life of the theater.

  It was Tenn’s belief that an actress was forever frozen in that time when she had the epiphany, when she found a safe harbor in the theater. For Marian there was the Christmas pageant at the Dalton School, in which she was employed as one of the three angels whose task it was to remain immobile in an alcove, their faces and bodies testaments of supplication and bliss. Swathed in royal blue and swatches of gold oilcloth, Marian felt upon her a light that was “brighter than the sun,” as well as hundreds of eyes. She kept her own eyes steadfastly forward, her hands pressed together in adoration for a Christ in which she did not believe—except as a fellow player in this pageant. She says of that time, “I knew there was no heaven and thought there was no God, but there was loveliness and safety and a secret excitement in that time and place.”

  In keeping with her religious fervor, Marian discovered upon changing her costume that she had even been visited by stigmata, red marks searing her flesh as proof of her theatrical bondage, making her, as such, the Padre Pio of grade-school pageants. She says, “My religious training took place in a theater. It became the church of my life; existence there was as magical as what I dreamed of in the room with the mirror. It was the dream made real.”

  Life for Marian from that time on was a relentless pursuit of the theater, and it was through theatrical experience that she chose to view things, using drama as a sieve through which she ran each and every event of her life. As she became a young woman, grew attractive, and received attention from young men, she wondered if she, like women in plays and films, would ever be happy. She was perpetually making lists, charts, heartfelt pleas to become important in the theater. She feared that she would become stagestruck, and she did, looking upon the participants of the theater with a soft focus, imagining them superior, horrified that they might fail or have faults. Her comments about guests met at Katharine Cornell’s home on Martha’s Vineyard swoon with delirium (and with reason, since the guest lists included everyone from Billie Burke to the Lunts to Margot Fonteyn t
o Mainbocher to Marlene Dietrich), and she took each of the people she met as assignments, as challenges to amplify her character and her life, to take from them what would make her better and more valuable—to the world, to the theater, to herself.

  “I want to love as fully as she does,” Tenn told me, “and I want to have her young and loving eyes.”

  Marian’s abilities to tell time—and therefore to control and manipulate it—to make love, and learn a part are the three things that alert her to the fact that she is no longer the awkward, shy child keeping scrapbooks full of glowing items about her idols. As the years passed and opportunities for stardom and full creative expression did not come to her, she did not become bitter; instead, she substituted earnest—some would say dogged—work for the parts that would tap into the vast, dark recesses of her talent. The positive addiction she has adopted to assuage disappointment is to become the ideal worker, so she will make the record books by appearing in a play for over four years, never missing a performance (in Ira Levin’s Deathtrap, from 1978 to 1982), when she would have preferred that the same books note her talent. Her utilitarian spirit has taken dominance over the intelligent actress who sees the lack of challenge in the theater she has pursued.

  Robert Edmond Jones (who agreed to see the young Marian in his large, dark, imposing apartment, where he served her wisdom along with brandy cake and a glass of B&B) wrote, at precisely the time Marian was graduating from her theater studies at the Neighborhood Playhouse, that

  we all have our hopes and our dreams of a theater which is to be. But when we attempt to discuss the theater of the present day with any seriousness we discover at once that we have very little to discuss. What we are practicing today in the name of theater has almost nothing to do with the theater. It is so unrelated to real theater that sometimes it actually seems as if you would have to grow a new set of faculties to create theater with. This thing that I am saying is not a whim, nor a beef, nor a gripe. It is a fact. What we are taught to call theater today isn’t theater at all. True theater isn’t, with the rarest exceptions, to be found in our playhouses. It has gone out of the window. It has hidden itself bitterly away.