Follies of God Read online

  Tenn had said to me, “Here is your life lesson. You should know that there are people in the theater for whom the stage is all. They have not allowed the real, functioning part of their souls and hearts to develop, so all they can be is a thespian. Away from greasepaint and an excuse to emote, they are masks waiting for a human touch to allow them movement, a reason for being.

  “This is what happened to Marian,” he continued. “She got lost in a childhood mirror in which she could be someone else, in whose reflection she was an actress, something grand. And what we are left with is the prepubescent girl who only wants to extinguish the very real, very wonderful person she is, for she feels that, au naturel, she can never please anyone. Believing that she is ugly and knowing that she will never be the star of the theater she hoped to be, she allows herself to be abused by the theater, by its practitioners, by men, by friends.

  “But,” Tenn offered, smiling, “there is a fantasy Marian, who is erudite, glamorous, beautiful, and I have seen her become consumed by this fantasy at rehearsals and parties, but it truly thrives on the stage. The stage is her narcotic, which she needs to keep herself alive. The stage no longer functions as a means of communication, but a means of fulfilling some craven desire, gorging some inner lacuna that can never be filled. I think I have this in common with Marian. I’m dreaming as I live.”

  Because I had already met Marian (in the fall of 1978, on a theater trip to New York with my high-school drama club, during which I went backstage at the Music Box Theatre, where Marian was appearing in Deathtrap, and we became friends), Tenn armed me with special items for my visit with her. The first was a prayer to St. Joseph, which we had found stuck in a discarded and well-worn missal in St. Louis Cathedral. It was typed on a piece of onionskin paper, and read:

  O glorious St. Joseph, model of those who are devoted to labor, obtain for me the grace to work in a spirit of penance for the expiation of my many sins; to work conscientiously, putting the call of duty above my inclinations; to work with thankfulness and joy, considering it an honor to employ and develop by means of labor the gifts received from God; to work with order, peace, moderation, and patience, never shrinking from weariness and trials; to work, above all, with purity of intention and with detachment from self, keeping unceasingly before my eyes death and the account I must give of time lost, talents unused, good omitted, and vain complacency in success, so fatal to the work of God. All for Jesus, all through Mary, all after your example, O patriarch Joseph; such shall be my watchword in life in death. Amen.

  “I think this is perfect for Marian,” Tenn had said.

  Tenn purchased for Marian, in a gift shop on Magazine Street, an old rosary of wooden beads that had been made in Jerusalem, and when he gave it to me, he wrapped around it a piece of paper he had found in the cathedral: a tiny calling card that had been wedged against one of the statues and which was worn from penitential homage, a sign of wear that impressed Tenn. The card read: “Devote yourself to Marian Worship.” On the opposite side, Tenn wrote: “I am no longer surprised by what karma does to me.”

  Marian Seldes was cast in the 1964 revival of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, as Blackie, the secretary to Flora Goforth, the flamboyant center of the play, who is transcribing the memoirs of her rich and shattered life, when she is not being seduced and recruited by the Angel of Death, who arrives in the form of a man—“lovely and fertile and fleshly accessible”—named Christopher Flanders. A friend of opulent and devious qualities, called the Witch of Capri, visits and shares the psychic components of Flora. Blackie is the character who maintains, and can still recognize, what Tenn called “intercourse with the real world, with real people, seeking real results.” Blackie is not a fabulist or a fraud: She needs a job and Flora needs a screen onto which she can project her image, the events of her life that, once collected, may tell her who and what she is before she is consigned to the “bone gallery.” Blackie is that screen. Blackie is also Tenn. So is Flora. “I am almost everyone in that play,” Tenn said. “Lost, confused, hungry, messy, mean.”

  Marian also became the screen for the production of Milk Train, which was being revived only a year after its original production, which had featured Hermione Baddeley, an actress of “enormous talent and ingenuity” lost in a cloud of “farts and Fracas,” and Mildred Dunnock, one of Tenn’s greatest friends, who had said, throughout rehearsals and the brief run, that “we were drowning, and instead of life preservers, we kept being thrown words that held nothing: no truth, no beauty, no meaning.” A faint whiff of creativity arose from the script of Milk Train, like the fog of dry ice, but the production was a mess. Tenn, convinced that his play—and the story it told—had merit, began to revise it even as it was being performed. The British director Tony Richardson, fresh from directing the film Tom Jones, and much lauded for his stage work with John Osborne, decided, for reasons never made clear to anyone, to revive and to salvage this play, which, he told Tenn, held more meaning than any he had read in some time.

  “He wanted to be my savior,” Tenn told me, “or rather, the savior of Milk Train, and I cannot tell you why. He spoke eloquently and at great length about what he hoped to do with the play, about what the play meant to him, but I could never discern any of his intentions or desires in the completed production. As a director, he was like the flirt who talks sweet and rubs fast on the dance floor, but who takes you home and consummates nothing. In fact, pants never hit the floor.”

  Hermione Baddeley and Mildred Dunnock in the first Broadway production of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, in 1963, a nightmare that the revival—and Marian Seldes—helped to exorcise for Tennessee in 1964. “The play never worked,” Tennessee said, “but at least Marian threw some good dirt on it.” (illustration credit 9.2)

  A great impetus for reviving Milk Train was the opportunity to cast Tallulah Bankhead in the role of Flora Goforth. “Tony loved the idea—the very camp idea—of directing Tallulah in this part, which he believed to have been based on her. It is true that there are elements of Tallulah in Flora, but there are elements of people like Tallulah in many of my plays, because people like Tallulah—hothouse flowers bred in the garden of Narcissus—grow all across the world. I have known many. There is a great deal of my mother in Flora, but also Ruth Ford [who played the Witch of Capri in the revival] and Miriam Hopkins and Ina Claire and Ruth Chatterton. Uta Hagen and Elaine Stritch and Judith Anderson and Elizabeth Ashley. And Tallulah. And any number of aunts and grand ladies I listened to and learned from in St. Louis and Louisiana.”

  People like Flora Goforth do not fear death by organ failure; they do not fear the actual act of death and whatever judgment awaits: they fear that failure will visit the production of life that they have written, produced, directed, and star in, frequently above the title, the fray, and the law. These women tend to be very “rich-blooded,” as Tenn put it, aware of the station they have designed and to which they have assigned themselves. There is a great deal of effort in maintaining the “ruse of living” when you are one of these grand creatures, people who cannot actually create or understand art—literature, music, painting, sculpture—but who can sculpt and enhance their persons to become ambulatory, dilatory works of art. “They have a richness of voice,” Tenn said, “cultivated by repetition. They have a way of moving their heads and bodies, cultivated by time spent in front of a mirror. They are hesitant in their beliefs, because they have no real soul or sense of self. Well, they have no self to speak of! They have to wait to see what others think of something, then they weigh in. They must be outré in their desires and allegiances, but they also must align themselves with bourgeois loves, because that is where the traffic is, and the traffic holds people—an audience.

  “These are very tiring women,” Tenn continued, “but fascinating. The role they have created for themselves has been cast and is played continuously. Christopher Flanders and Blackie are paid audience members to Flora. We all need an audience, even as we approa
ch our final curtain. And every fabulist like Flora needs to be surrounded by people who are not yet bold enough to create an identity, a life, a self through the machinations of imagination. Blackie admires Flora, even as she grows impatient with her and doesn’t understand her at all times. Blackie, you see, is very much like Marian Seldes. This is no facile statement. Marian Seldes makes herself a better person so that everyone can benefit. Marian needs a Flora Goforth—and, I might add, a Tallulah Bankhead—to learn what one should and should not do. She needs a Tallulah to serve and to honor, and she did.” Marian loved Tallulah for what she had been and for her stardom and her glamour and her daring. Marian also feared Tallulah as if she were an infectious agent: the drinking, the drugs, the nakedness, the lost memory, the lack of discipline were dangerous elements that Marian came to believe might be catching. Marian also had her young daughter around during out-of-town tryouts, and she must have wondered what the girl thought of the marcescent diva.

  Tenn believed that Marian gave the only legitimate performance in the revival of Milk Train, seeking to play a real person rather than a construct or a symbol or a camp icon. The original production had been designed as a Kabuki nightmare by Jo Mielziner, but everyone, especially Richardson, wanted a simpler, starker production, so Rouben Ter-Arutunian, a handsome, manic designer, kept some elements of Kabuki but stuck them within a set that Tenn believed bore elements of German expressionist, Art Deco, and WPA “mentalities.”

  “The original production had possessed an ornate and absurd set,” Tenn related, “and the revival possessed an ornate and absurd cast. Whatever had been extreme and silly about the original had been contained, for the most part, within inanimate objects—sets, costumes, lighting effects. Now the extreme and silly had been thrust front and center with the cast.”

  In addition to Bankhead, Seldes, and Ford, Richardson completed the primary cast with Tab Hunter, the handsome blond star of such films as Battle Cry (1955), Lafayette Escadrille (1957), and the Hollywood version of the Broadway musical Damn Yankees (1958). “He was mobile cotton candy,” Tenn remembered, “pretty and weightless and dumb. Beware the pretty idol in career rehabilitation.” Richardson was mad for Hunter, flirted with him outrageously, marveled at his beauty. Tenn was distressed by the relationships that developed through that brief production. Richardson and Bankhead never understood each other and gave each other no more than perfunctory notice. The relationship that fascinated Tenn was that between Marian Seldes and his play. “She taught me how to love what was flawed and frightening,” Tenn said, “and she taught me how to remain calm and caring in a time of confusion. I did not write Milk Train as an avant-garde exercise. That play, like all of my plays, was a very real manifestation of my present thoughts, and they took a turn toward the grotesque, toward the Grand Guignol, because that is where my mind was, my thoughts, my feelings. I think I speak for a great many people when I say that we were in confusing times then. Kennedy was murdered during our rehearsal period [of the revival]. I would run out for a sandwich and coffee and blacks had commandeered the luncheon counters and the cash registers. I was over fifty and afraid that my powers, always capricious, were waning. All around me my compatriots were floundering, wondering if we had a theater to which we could report for work. Bill Inge was falling apart in some house above the Hollywood Hills. Arthur Miller was drinking some bitter cup of forgiveness with Kazan at Lincoln Center and producing tracts [After the Fall, Incident at Vichy] disguised as plays, given a sense of importance, attention paid, because he came from a gilded age and had a dead movie star on his résumé and within his inventory.”

  Tenn was also addicted to a series of pills and was “taking them in, my murderous Eucharist,” with a variety of alcoholic concoctions. “I needed to feel something to write,” Tenn said, “but I had reached a point where I could no longer feel anything too strongly with any comfort. It was a numb age, but I wrote truthfully from within and about that numb age, and while Herbert Machiz [the director of the 1963 Milk Train] sought to emulate my garish and frightening turn of mind with costumes and sets that he thought complemented it, Richardson subverted the entire play into a big, camp joke. He thought we should laugh at Flora, I suppose, because he laughed at Tallulah, who he thought was outrageous and idiotic and some relic from another time. Well, Flora—and Tallulah—are you and me. Tony Richardson, I would imagine, is having his Flora Goforth times right about now and is probably feeling some sense of identification with her. But at that time, bright with his own brilliance, he simply saw an excuse to throw some glitter in the air and entertain the boys.”

  Richardson was not alone in his sabotage, however. Tallulah Bankhead was soiling the stage as ferociously—and far more openly—than its director.

  Born in Alabama finery in 1902, Tallulah Bankhead had been one of the voices he had heard on radios cradled in the dark—in bedrooms, cubbyholes at the YMCA, in hotel suites. Bankhead epitomized for Tenn the stylish New York, and he imagined that she would be as crisp and scintillating as the person he had assembled from memories and sounds over the years. Tenn adored Bankhead, saw her talent, wanted it—like his—to be revived, to be noticed.

  Bankhead’s theatrical successes were firmly behind her when she tackled the role of Blanche, in 1956. Her Regina in The Little Foxes and her Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth were performances Tenn recalled as incandescent. “Even her voice on the radio, as she repeated the role of Regina,” he remembered, “was the work of a real actress.” But as Tenn would later learn, Herman Shumlin, the director of Foxes, and Kazan, her director for Skin of Our Teeth, were perpetually atop the actress, giving her line readings, herding her into rehearsals and into constricted places on the stage.

  Tennessee’s mother kept photographs of Tallulah Bankhead in scrapbooks and folded into books—including the Bible—because the Alabama-born actress epitomized Southern finery and Broadway glamour. Tennessee was elated to meet her and work with her—initially. (illustration credit 9.3)

  “If you told her what to do and where to do it,” Kazan remembered, “she was effective, but it was persistent, backbreaking work.”

  As Tenn would sadly learn, however, Bankhead could no longer sustain a performance throughout an evening, and she was incapable of investing any veracity into a character. “I think an important point is often forgotten,” Tenn told me, “and that is that Tallulah was a great actress—was capable of being a great actress. She certainly was a great theatrical personality, and the cult—the frenzy—that surrounded her cannot truly be understood by those who didn’t know of, hear of, or attend to that phenomenon.”

  All Bankhead had, and trusted, by the time of Milk Train was faith in her public, who dutifully attended her performances and enjoyed a relationship, “a persistent conversation,” with her as she struggled. “Toward the end,” Tenn remembered, “no intelligent playwright ever trusted her, because her pact was with the public—that slavering, fanatical public. It is inconceivable to us now to realize that there was an actress, a theater actress, who had throngs of fans lined up to watch her eat, shop, and walk down a street. And the theaters! They throbbed and pounded like sports arenas, and there was always that glorious moment—and I use the term facetiously—in Coward, Barry, and, God help us, Williams—when she broke character and beamed out at the audience. ‘It’s all for you, darlings,’ she transmitted. Maddening but fascinating, and so exciting for the boys. No one cut a figure across a stage like she did. She could upstage a crucifixion with the right dress, and she would gladly do so, if the pay was sufficient.”

  Milk Train was a mess. Actors did not bother to bring too many personal effects into their dressing rooms; one brought a sample-size box of soap flakes and a travel-size tube of toothpaste. Everyone knew they would not be employed—in what Mildred Dunnock called “the sad salvation of Tennessee Williams”—for very long.

  “Tennessee wanted his play produced,” Seldes told me, “and he wanted us to do our best, and so I did, and so, I think,
did everyone else in the play, to the best of their ability. I loved Tennessee; I loved Tallulah; I loved everyone in that play, and I’m happy if I gave Tennessee some happiness or balance during that time.”

  “My mistake with so many of the plays of that time,” Tenn told me, “and it really began with Milk Train, was in presenting my new plays along the same lines, with some of the same people, as the earlier ones. So everyone came and expected Menagerie or Streetcar or Cat, and when these gilded gorgons came on, spouting dark humor and beating back time with all the tools in their arsenals, audiences were perplexed.

  “I disliked Alan Schneider,” he continued, “when he directed Slapstick Tragedy [in 1966]. He claimed he understood most of my humor, but he cast the play with brilliant actresses”—Margaret Leighton, Kate Reid, Zoe Caldwell—“and then proceeded to direct them in a play of an entirely different tone. Slapstick is an absurd play; so is Milk Train. You may openly and perhaps correctly identify them as products of a diseased mind, but I wrote truthfully about what I saw and felt. The plays, however, were directed as if they were naturalistic, kitchen-sink dramas, and this baffled me in the matter of Schneider, who had so shrewdly cast Buster Keaton in the work of Beckett. That was terribly subversive and effective, but in our work together, he cast actresses from whom audiences were expecting something altogether different, and they sat there dumbstruck and angry. If I agreed to a production today, I would insist on a cast of true clowns,” he told me, and rattled off the names of a number of actresses who would amuse and discomfit an audience: Carol Burnett, Jo Anne Worley, Ruth Buzzi, Joan Rivers. “Let them think they’re in for a few laughs,” he told me, “then show them what is really beneath the clown-white makeup. That is what life is. That is what life was for me at that time, and that is what I wrote.”