Follies of God Page 20
Milk Train might have worked with a comedienne in the lead role, Tenn believed, and it might have worked if there had not been so much effort placed on forcing a camp sensibility into it. “It’s a morbid play,” Tenn told me, “and its humor arises from the attempts we all understand to keep death at bay. We are all spinning around, trying to stay alive, and that is as funny as it is sad as it is futile. That’s the play. He [Richardson] didn’t get it.”
“Oh, my!” Seldes said. “I don’t think anyone got it. I tried to get it, but it was like holding mercury in your hand or making a suit out of meringue. There were so many problems: a lack of trust between Tallulah and Tony, and Tennessee’s inability to be there all the time, ready to work, ready to trust. He gave away so much of his work to everyone, and never fought to make his work the best it could be. He gave up, so why shouldn’t Tony? What could he do?”
Prepare to be misunderstood, Tenn told me repeatedly. The production of Milk Train set off two decades of his not being understood or properly respected, of his placing his hopes in the wrong people at the wrong times. Upon the closing of Milk Train (after four days), Tenn immediately began to revise it again. He tinkered with it for years, and kept recasting it in his mind. He joked that our relationship, such as it was, resembled that between Flora Goforth and Blackie.
“Blanche told us she depended upon the kindness of strangers,” Tenn said, “but in fact she had never in her life ever met a kind stranger. She dreamed she might, and she hoped that such flattery might convince her captor to be the kind stranger of her dreams. I came to depend, in that time, upon the kindness and the example of sane women, balancing women: Marian, of course; Lois Smith, of course; and three others.”
I pressed Tenn for more information on Marian Seldes and Lois Smith. With both actresses there was much admiration and affection, but no stories of lunches or talks or evenings discussing the future of the world; dreams; means of escape.
Tenn paused, then asked what I was looking for.
“What, ultimately, was the lesson taught to you by these two women?” I asked.
Tenn paused; his face grew red. He calmed down and leaned closer to my face, ready to tell me not so much what these two women had taught him, but of what they had reminded him.
“Let me explain something to you: no one owes any of us anything other than respect, some courtesy, and the amount of time they deem necessary to hear our story, see our dance, judge our gifts. That is all. I operated for many years under the common delusion that artists are sensitive creatures who require husbanding, cosseting, extreme care to function in the brutal world. This is utter bullshit: all human beings thrust into the act of living require the same amounts of love and kindness and patience, and I came to see that when I adopted the pose of the walking wounded, when I referred to myself as an open scab walking the mean streets, I was asking for forgiveness for the multitude of sins for which I was guilty: ugliness, laziness, a lack of discipline, the inability to make the words and the women that came to me work fully.
“I was asking for a break I did not deserve at all. You either are a good person or a good writer or a good actor or you are not. You cannot then apply a collage of sickness and neuroses to your person and ask for exemptions. It is unfair; it is dishonest. Make this decision today: Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.”
That lesson, Tenn told me, came from Smith and Seldes.
Ten
“THE ONLY JOY in the world is to begin,” wrote Cesare Pavese, one of Tenn’s favorite writers, an Italian poet and a suicide, whose poems and diary entries Tenn recalled from a forced but fervent memory. Long before Tenn had read this Pavese sentiment, he had overheard his grandfather and other church elders and members offer the same advice, in different forms, to a variety of grieving, curious, or confused parishioners. “I like balance and order,” Tenn told me, “and my first memory of seeking it was in the act of beginning again, after an event had made solid footing and thinking an impossibility.”
Unimportant and virtually invisible (or so he believed), Tenn moved about the rectory and the church property with freedom and easy access. The church always smelled of polishing oil—touches of lemon and verbena—and the flowers that were tended daily by the women of a flower guild. The church—as well as refined St. Louis life—operated through a series of guilds, clubs, organizations, and societies, and each had its leaders, its rules, and its methods of “mattering and ordering.” Tenn eavesdropped on the women of the flower guild, each flower thrust into Styrofoam or water accompanied by a judgment, an aphorism, or a sentiment served with a sign. “They had the world in the crosshairs and by the short hairs,” Tenn remembered. “They had the answer to everything.” The women came to their functions dressed formally and with frills, their faces caked with powder, which flaked and smeared in the summer months, and the reapplication of powder and rouge and lipstick rendered them cartoonish by the time afternoon refreshments were served. Tenn could remember that the air smelled of their perfumes—flowery, musky, heavy—their starched apparel, their lavender-scented underthings. Their cups and napkins were smeared with stains of crimson, amber, blood orange, Chinese red, brick red: they had left their mark by dint of opinion, perfume, cosmetics, and influence. The flower arrangements grew higher and bigger the more fervent their demeanor or their resolve. Their primary complaint? Things were moving too fast. The world was simply too confusing. “These were my first female characters,” Tenn said. “They had invented their own stages—church, society, the home, my imagination—and they fascinated me.”
When death visited a parishioner, calls were made and these women appeared. Some were sent to comfort the widowed spouse; others were dispatched to divert the attentions of children, the weak, the simple, or older survivors who might not be able to handle the news, and so were given information in tiny installments, like drops of sugar water to hummingbirds. Tenn could remember cries and screams beginning in the parlor of a home, followed by howls from the backyard swing, and then sniffles in driveways and along sidewalks circling the home that death had now visited.
“Death has come to our community,” Tenn’s grandfather would always state, in sermons and bulletins and conversations meant to comfort. The term always horrified Tenn, and he passed on this fear to many of his characters, most of whom recognized that death, like a wayward misfit with a gun and a grudge, was prowling the neighborhoods—of real estate and psyche—and waited for the open door, the unlatched window, the friendly gesture to gain entrance and make his visit permanent.
Death propelled the community into action. Those who had been sent to inform and to console were now joined by those who sought to explain, to bring order and balance to the unsettled. Another group brought food, trying in vain to get the grieving to eat, to store up their strength “for what lay ahead.” Tenn remembered their sunken chests and vacant eyes at the mention of this event or the destination known as “what lies ahead.” There was never any answer provided to their questions as to what this would be, but it was a requirement that they have faith, and that they bring to the tasks strength that would serve them and their family well.
“We wait and we have faith that whatever He may bring to us, He will also bring us the aid we need”: so said Tenn’s grandfather. The vagueness infuriated Tenn. “I began to see the cruelty in the casseroles and the confessions; the refreshments and the sweet hugs and aphorisms,” he told me. “There was no clarity, no concrete answers, just a vague cloud of words and phrases and prayers that we were to cling to and hope would serve as armor when ‘the time’ came, when ‘what lies ahead’ knocked at the door still resounding from the kn
ock that had brought death or disease or doubt.”
There had been a woman, normally composed and in control of her senses and her wardrobe and her mind, who had been brought into the office of his grandfather to be told her husband had been killed in an automobile accident. Tenn could remember her screams, the smeared lipstick, the hat that fell to the floor, its veil pointing upward, as if in confusion at the disorder and discord that had erupted. Her screams demanded answers, cried out for revenge or clarification, damned the automobile (progress, the world changing), repeatedly asked if her informants were sure of what they spoke.
All that was given to her were muttered Scriptures, affirmations that His way is greater than ours, that there is an answer and a blessing in all things. An obscenity flew from the fine woman’s mouth—one of the first Tenn could remember hearing, although he knew immediately that its utterance was verboten—and the group moved in closer, a constricting circle of censorship and comfort.
“They pressed that lady down,” Tenn remembered, “and I realized right then, as a child, that no amount of service to a flower guild, no award for hymns sung or cookies baked or casseroles scooped or sick parishioners visited, was enough to prepare you for what life has waiting for you. We seek order and answers in the rituals, in the order, in belonging—strength in numbers. We behave well and we take care of things. We seek and then we follow the natural and proper order of things in our homes, our communities, and our churches, and when ‘what lies ahead’ now lies before you, walls and floors melt into nothingness, people become obstructions that prevent you from running toward—what?”
Tenn turned to me and asked me to write down, once, “We are in this alone,” and then, three times:
How to begin
How to begin
How to begin
The woman who had lost her husband in that accident, who had demanded answers and had shouted an obscenity in the offices of an Episcopalian rectory (a mighty and pregnant sin), never recuperated, and Tenn could never look at her in the same way. “She’s gone from us,” Tenn’s mother said. “She just broke apart, and lost her faith.” Tenn’s grandfather would ascribe this loss of faith to the fact that the woman had loved her husband—and all that he represented—more than she had loved the Lord. “Her relationship with her husband was too strong and too dependent,” he explained at dinner one evening. “Perhaps God took him away because he was lonely for her. Now she’ll develop the relationship with God that had suffered in the past. We ignore God at our own peril.”
Tenn remembered the woman as formidable, a “Big Lady,” proper and well-dressed and assured of her place in all communities, societies, guilds. She was the type of woman he would describe to Jessica Tandy and Geraldine Page, to help them become this woman, to be assured, to know who she was. This woman had dressed impeccably. “Shiny buttons,” Tenn remembered, “and silky skin and every hair in place. A large, proud bosom. A flash of gold.” The woman had lovely handwriting, and Tenn had loved to read her letters to his mother, and had once asked her to write something, anything, so he could admire the swoops and the flows of her penmanship. She made mints in her kitchen, pouring the fondant onto a large, oval piece of marble, forming perfect rounds onto which she placed a flower of pink icing, a bit of green for a stem. She had told Tenn that each flower, each bit of icing that dripped from the bag, was a prayer, perhaps a kiss, to the person who would enjoy the candy.
Order and control: “Whatever I have learned of life and order and the method of coping,” Tenn told me, “has come from women, and from the earliest days of my life.” In order for him to understand things, Tenn felt he had to “walk into a woman’s mind, and see what could be done, what could be fashioned.”
Tenn watched the woman shrink from lack of interest in food, her body lost in the fabrics that had once proudly enclosed her body. It was never believed that she was lost in grief, shattered at losing a husband of nearly four decades. She had merely lost her faith, and she drifted away. Her eyes never met another’s. Her appearances at the flower guild ended.
“This is why you need faith,” Tenn’s mother told him, and that is when Tenn remembered that he began to pray, to beg for order, to be buffeted for “what lay ahead.”
On some occasions of death, the body of the deceased would be brought to the church and prepared for presentation at the funeral service. Tenn’s grandfather would, of course, officiate, but he was attended by yet another guild of ladies, who sought to bring order and comfort to this awful occurrence. There were candles to be lit and particular linens, starched and perfect and blindingly white, to be placed in a certain way at a certain time. Each act, timed and holy, announced to the bewildered that there was control and understanding in this house, in this act, in this world.
Tenn remembered all of the prayers, and his childhood was full of times when he was led to pray for the Increase of the Military, for Fruitful Seasons, for Congress and Courts of Justice, for Fair Weather, and always In Time of Calamity, a prayer he remembered as a title, emblazoned as if in neon, calamity a particular time set aside like the flower guild meetings or a bridge lesson or a beauty-parlor appointment.
O God, merciful and compassionate, who are ever ready to hear the prayers of those who put their trust in Thee; Graciously hearken to us who call upon Thee, and grant us Thy help in this our need; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
So much grievous suffering, so much fear and doubt, all of it remembered by Tenn as being surrounded by the smell of perfumes and flowers and candle wax and lemon and verbena and starched linen, and all of it failing to answer even the simple questions of this wandering child, listening to adults in moments of emotional extremity and “horrible human strain,” as he stole cookies from the church kitchen and looked at the stained-glass windows for some sign that there really was a God to whom everyone was reaching.
“This is what I came to realize,” Tenn told me. “We spend too much time throwing our prayers up in the air and hoping that an answer, a miracle, will fall from above and explain everything. The lessons, the prayers answered, are right here. They are in front of us and we can learn from them.” They rest, Tenn told me, within women. All of life’s lessons hold a feminine form. Men may carry out what has been learned from the lessons, but the instructions—“like life itself”—came from a woman.
Tenn wanted me to go to these life lessons, these “ambulatory answered prayers,” and learn from them not only for my own sake, but for him as well. Tenn wanted me to ask them if he had mattered to them; he wanted their advice, their strength, their order and balance. “They say God is in the details,” Tenn said, “and these particular women are those details. Use the beads if you wish, but by all means use the examples I’m about to give you. Women who help me to reach balance and order, and who allow me to believe I can begin again.”
Frances Sternhagen first came to Tenn’s attention in the 1950s, when she began to be praised for a series of sharp, intelligent, and stylish performances that were offered primarily in off-Broadway theaters that Tenn compared to “well-meaning closets.” Sternhagen, who typically asks everyone to immediately call her Frannie, was a blonde of average height who, onstage and in character, gave Tenn the appearance of height, of great bones holding up skin that knew care and breeding, and she cut through characters and their lines, as well as the stages on which she acted, like a piercing and jeweled scimitar. “I loved her immediately,” Tenn told me. “She was like some heavily buffed apple, shiny and good for you, that had been placed on the stage as if it were the teacher’s desk, and everything around her became immediately superfluous.”
As Tenn explained it to me, “I believe she came to particular fruition as an actress when she began to get better parts and greater challenges. She was remarkable in a double bill of Harold Pinter plays that were gorgeously produced, delicately and frighteningly performed, and which made absolutely no sense whatsoever: in other words, quintessential Pinter. If you should ever meet Ms. Sternhagen,
long before you ask her any questions about life, love, and the literature that is theater, ask her for me what the hell The Room was supposed to be about. I would like to know. She played it like she did, but she is quite nefarious.”
The radiant, positive face of Frances Sternhagen was one that Tennessee sought on the stage and at most theatrical events and openings. Tennessee and Sternhagen were both avid swimmers and converts to Catholicism. “I think we are on to some good things,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.1)
When I met and came to know Frances Sternhagen, she did not claim to know what Pinter’s Room was about, even though the playwright was present for rehearsals. “He just told us to play it as we felt it,” she told me. “Your truth is the play’s truth. So … I don’t know what it is about, I really don’t, but I played the woman as if she were present in a very real situation and something was terribly urgent for her. I suppose it worked, but I don’t feel that I am necessarily nefarious. I’m just an actress working. We look for the truth as the character sees it. I don’t find this extraordinary.”
The evening’s second play was A Slight Ache, in which Frannie played Flora, who, along with her husband, observes a stranger in their garden. They bring him into their perfectly lit and appointed home, and he sits, silent and passive, as they share their stories with him. There is discussion of lawns and the ideal marmalade and lives of order and balance; but Flora is decidedly off-balance, and she comes to love, to the best understanding she possesses, this stranger, and her devotion to and need for him unnerved Tenn. At one point, Flora throws her arms around this man and exclaims, “I’m going to keep you!”