Follies of God Read online

  “I was changed by that performance,” Tenn remembered, “because here was a woman of a certain standing, who played by the rules, belonged to the guilds and the societies, but who had always wanted, and had never received, answers to some big questions, such as: What is love? Will I find it? She clearly had not had sufficient outlets for her passions; so when this man arrived, and for reasons known only to her unique heart and her unique eyes and her unique glands, she felt what she took to be love for him. And she leapt for it. She sought to possess it. She needed someone to tell her story to.”

  There was another prayer—or rather a portion of one—from the Book of Common Prayer that came to Tenn’s mind when he thought of Frannie in the Pinter play, and when he remembered maiden aunts and young, frightened women praying that they may find a companion, love, acceptance, desire. The line Tenn remembered was: “We commend to Thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body, or estate; that it may please Thee to comfort and relieve them, according to their several necessities.…”

  Those “several necessities” haunted Tenn from childhood until the day I met him, fresh into his eighth decade. What were the several necessities, and were they all worthy of comfort and relief and “prompt succor”? “I will never know,” Tenn admitted. “None of us will ever know, but in that performance, I thought, and I cried, and I spent some time in touch with my own necessities, and I prayed and hoped for comfort. I found some small measure of it in her performance, and I would have to say that is the highest praise I can offer. She put me in touch with my needs and partially filled them.”

  Tenn continued to follow Frannie’s career, asking questions of women who worked with her and whom he admired, like Colleen Dewhurst and Maureen Stapleton and Madeleine Sherwood. Who was this Frances Sternhagen? Tenn was delighted to discover that one of Frannie’s first professional assignments was playing Laura in The Glass Menagerie, in summer stock, when she was only eighteen. “So she truly is mine,” he said.

  “Bigger and better roles came to her in the 1970s, and that is when she came to me in corporeal form,” Tenn recounted. “I was being honored by the Drama Desk, a group of people who always seemed to know who I was, but I always found myself feigning recognition, even as they fed and feted me. I always felt like a man arriving in a foreign train station and being fulsomely greeted by strangers, and thinking that I must go ahead and go home with them and nod in agreement at their statements.

  “I am very bad about being disingenuous when I am praised,” Tenn confessed.

  It was at this Drama Desk “scene,” as Tenn characterized it, that he ultimately made fleshly contact with Frannie. By all accounts Tenn was miserable at the event, at which he was being rewarded for “surviving, apparently,” and Frannie was being honored for her featured performance in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Tenn admitted that he was both mildly drunk and solidly stoned that evening, and he remembered “gaudy colors and loud patterns and perfumes and Sterno,” and he was not happy. “I had not had a good time of it,” he recalled. His most recent plays had not succeeded, either by his own standards or by those of the critics or actors he admired. The Red Devil Battery Sign was having a difficult and painful birth, and the revivals of A Streetcar Named Desire produced in 1973 for a twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration he didn’t fully welcome or understand had been, in his estimation, abortive or unpleasant or amateurish. “I felt like an old failure,” he told me, “and the idea of being given a plaque or a medal for hanging on, muddling through, was not something I desired or wanted.”

  But?

  “Well,” he laughed, “I am very bad about being disingenuous when I am praised, and the praise was running erratically and in small spurts.”

  Tenn recalled that he was placed, for the duration of the event, on a large and uncomfortable wicker chair of vast proportions. “It proceeded to make a waffle out of my buttocks,” he remembered, “and each time I moved in it to achieve some sense of balance and comfort, it creaked and shifted, and as I was on a raised platform of sorts, displayed like a war criminal or an especially succulent duck in Chinatown, my shiftings drew attention.”

  Drunk, stoned, uncomfortable, his tongue darting about his parched lips like a startled chameleon, Tenn endured, watching people “largely unknown to me” receive their awards. “I creaked and shifted and swayed,” he recounted, “which is when I saw Frannie’s face, which exhibited so much sympathy toward my plight and my discomfort. She would smile at me as if to imply that my ordeal would soon be over, and I found myself pulling her toward me, literally and figuratively, and she got me through that night—with her kindness, yes; with her support, yes—as we stood with our awards, which we held as if they were dead babies, and my grace and gratitude were directed toward her. Not merely for that evening—awful and draining as it was—but for the memory of so many evenings I’d spent with her genius.”

  Tenn would continue to seek Frannie’s company within the confines of a theater, but he never attempted a personal relationship. “I thought of it,” he confessed, “but I wanted to enter a relationship that was based on work, and I could never find a woman—faked from the fog or of natural derivation—that could serve her.”

  Tenn claimed that he kept mental and actual notes on actresses he loved and admired, and he wondered how it might appear if these notes should ever be discovered. Tenn noted their physical characteristics, their age, his impressions. “In Frannie’s case,” Tenn told me, “I was making a case—to myself, to the universe, and on her behalf—that she should come to inhabit a play of mine, and to enter my life.”

  When Tenn had his encounter with Frannie at the Drama Desk Awards in the spring of 1975, Frannie was forty-five, but she appeared “buoyant, ageless,” and she was at an awkward age for the visions he was having of women on his mental proscenium. “She was too young for the victims I was imagining,” he said, “and she was much too vital to be a mother or an aggressor. I couldn’t place her.”

  Tenn imagined that Frannie was a rich and “polished” woman. He knew that she had been born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of a judge, “well-placed from all I can ascertain,” and she had attended the Madeira School and Vassar College, where she soon came to dominate the drama department. During the run of Equus, Frannie’s mother had died, necessitating a leave of absence during which she managed the estate. Anthony Perkins, who was playing the lead role in the play at the time (having succeeded Anthony Hopkins), marveled at this fact with Tenn. “Tony was quite obsessed with money and muscles and meat,” Tenn told me. “Any one of those three subjects was likely to set him off for some time, and he spoke at some length about Frannie’s alleged wealth, which might have embarrassed him, given that he was among the least generous of people.”

  Frannie then entered a special niche of actresses Tenn reserved in his notes—the rich and removed. Tenn placed Frannie next to Beatrice Straight, born to the fortunes of the Whitneys, and “so far removed from the cares and frictions of the world” that he adored and envied her greatly. Frannie, however, laughed when told of this perception Tenn had held of her. Her life was comfortable, but her education was provided by wealthy relatives who wanted her to do well. The settling of the estate was, like the acts of the women in all those guilds of Tenn’s childhood, a series of actions and rites that might help Frannie come to grips with the loss of her mother, and with the new direction her life was now likely to take.

  “What tends to make people think of Frannie as rich,” Marian Seldes told me, “is her generosity. She gives freely and fully, as if there was no want in her life. She gives richly.” Frannie also operates from what Tenn called a “rich heart,” which he imagined was routinely stocked by her devotion to the Catholic faith, to which she converted when she married her husband, the actor Thomas Carlin. “Frannie radiates goodness,” Tenn told me, and the knowledge that she was a member of the Roman Catholic Church played some part in Tenn’s own conversion. “I imagined if it passed
the exacting eyes and senses of Frannie Sternhagen,” he explained, “I could do something with it.”

  Frannie’s religious beliefs were not the only thing that helped her rise from the bonds of a cruel world, with its exacting God of no answers, its endless rites and passages and disorder: like Tenn, she was an ardent swimmer. “I wonder if her special sense of balance derives from her habit of swimming,” Tenn asked. “No one seems to know that I am never far from a body of water. I always urge my theatrical compatriots to swim—many in the hopes that they will drown, of course—but primarily to know the bliss that comes when you are freed from the heavy bonds of the earth, of being rooted in a particular time and place. It is often cruel that we find ourselves where we are, and with whom, but you can feel utterly insignificant and free, floating there in the water, gazing at the sky, thinking. You can feel wonderfully superior once you hit dry land, knowing, as others cannot, that you’ve been free for a minute and came back of your own volition. I think that Frannie knows the value of pulling away from this scene we work in. It isn’t always healthy.”

  In the memory book Tenn kept on Frances Sternhagen, there was no darkness or doubt: Frannie was perpetually sunny and balanced and ready to work. Frannie was representative of all that Tenn hoped he could become, and the pages of the memory book were all happy and full of rites free of superstition. It surprised Frannie that Tenn never mentioned the fact that she had six children with Thomas Carlin, that the family was raised in New Rochelle, and that Frannie’s life, both in and out of the theater, revolved around these seven people and the house they shared. “I always felt,” Frannie told me, “that everything I did, or wanted to do, was filtered first through what was needed at home, by the needs of the children and my husband. Maybe my superstition was that if I always thought fully and lovingly about my family, everything else would take care of itself. All would be well.”

  Frannie’s church attendance, her walk to a nearby body of water for a swim, her reading, her particular rites of life, were all to make herself a stronger and better mother, person, and, finally, actress. “Whatever I do in the day,” she told me, “goes into the mix and winds up on the stage, so I knew I had to watch what entered my head and my heart. I didn’t want to spoil. I only wanted to bring good into a situation.”

  Perpetually curious, Frannie continues to study other religions and philosophies, and while she treasures her daily Mass and the prayers that came to her as a new Catholic, she picks up bits and pieces that help her “get it going and get it together.” She is all about action, direct but polite, no flab, no fuss. One friend noted that when Frannie developed celiac disease, and could no longer consume gluten, it was probably only another attempt on her part to streamline and condense her life; there was now more time to focus on the things that mattered; fewer foods to worry about, more time at hand. Frannie is very much about getting on with things.

  The only thing about her life shared with me that caused her pain was the alcoholism of her husband, particularly when she realized that a letter he wrote to alcohol, on the advice of a counselor, was a passionate, unbridled love letter. “I don’t know if he ever felt as ardently for me as he did alcohol,” Frannie confessed, “and it hurt me; it embarrassed me. It was full and free and unashamed, and Tom was often shy and reserved, so this was a very concerted effort, a break from his normal means. I still wonder if there is a human being on earth who could inspire so much devotion and dependency. I guess I always will.”

  Thomas Carlin died, of a heart attack, at 11:11 a.m., a time and a numerical construction that continue to haunt and follow Frannie. Once when we were together, racing toward Grand Central Station, where she hoped to catch a train home to New Rochelle, she glanced at her watch. She stopped, stunned and shocked. Her watch read 11:11, and it gave her pause. November 11th is also a reminder, and, perhaps, a prayer, a rite of passage, something to help her begin to keep living, to keep going.

  “I think lies of a certain nature are better than truth,” Frannie said one day. She was thinking of a time when her presence in the hospital with her young son was forcing him to stay awake so he could be with her. Frannie didn’t want to leave him, but she recognized that he needed sleep, so she lied and told him it was better that she leave. He slept, but Frannie wept once she was away from the side of her child. This was, to her, the good lie. “There has never been a trying time that didn’t push me toward the good things that would help me and others get through them. Maybe it’s my German background, but when a challenge arises, I think to myself that it should be investigated, studied, pondered, conquered. I never come out the other end of it anything but better.”

  To watch Frannie was a distinct and intelligent pleasure for Tenn. He felt he could see her brain at work, that her intelligence—one he described as “astringent”—fueled her every action. “Her control of herself and her material,” Tenn told me, “is so firm—so rooted in theatrical correctness and her own sanity—that I immediately relax when she commands a stage, because I know that energy will be directed in the right places. No actress can elevate meretricious theater, but a good actress can elevate me, momentarily, from a meretricious theatrical experience. And Frannie has done this for me many times. What I always feel is that she focuses well and intelligently; she shares fully and freely; she laughs at the right things and the right people; she knows when to leave when a scene isn’t good.”

  Tenn paused for a moment and then laughed, solidly and loudly. “She also has,” he continued, “and this took me by surprise, a great ass. Watch her in Outland, a perfectly outré sci-fi thing with Sean Connery. She runs with great grace and alacrity through a labyrinth of hallways and hairy men, and in these white pants one glimpses a perfectly wonderful ass. I was looking at hers; not at Sean Connery’s.

  “So,” Tenn surmised, “Frannie is also an agent of change.”

  Tenn smiled at the thought, then remembered another prayer of his childhood, one he never heard from his grandfather, in the city of St. Louis. It was a prayer for those persons going to sea. Tenn thought of it for Frannie Sternhagen the swimmer. Tenn could only recall snatches of it, because he never heard it offered in a church, but only in explanation by his grandfather and from reading the Book of Common Prayer:

  We commend to Thy almighty protection, Thy servant, for whose preservation on the great deep our prayers are desired. Guard him, we beseech Thee, from the dangers of the sea, from sickness, from the violence of enemies, and from every evil to which he may be exposed. Conduct him in safety to the haven where he would be, with a grateful sense of Thy mercies.

  “I offered that prayer to the memory of Hart Crane,” Tenn told me, “wishing I had thought to utter it before he felt he needed to lose himself deep in the sea, to drown away whatever was pressing upon him. I offer it to Frances Sternhagen, who helps me to stay above the water, to place words, like stones, one on top of the other, to move forward, to begin again.”

  Tenn told me he would offer the prayer to no others.

  “That prayer is taken,” he told me. “My heart and its plea have done all they can.”

  Julie Harris was an actress who never worked with Tennessee Williams, save for a recording of The Glass Menagerie for which she took on the role of Laura. Tenn had few memories of it, as he exerted all of his energies and concerns toward Montgomery Clift, who, as Tom, sputtered and frayed and held everyone in the shaky palm of his hand. “I would look at him,” Tenn remembered, “and think to myself, ‘Not only can he not play this part, or any part, but he is worthless at living.’ And near him, almost always, would be Julie, a hand at his back, on his arm, smiling at him. She was serving a purpose for him similar to what Jessica had done for me: holding him up, helping him to see what he had been, nursing him through.”

  Harris had created pages in Tenn’s theatrical memory book almost from the onset of his own New York debut. A costume designer of “a malignant camp sensibility” told him of a marvelous and unformed young actress who was a m
ember of the company of Eva Le Gallienne’s Alice in Wonderland. That production appeared in 1947, and it was approximately one year later that Tenn had an audience with Le Gallienne. The two of them discussed Julie Harris.

  “What I told him then,” Le Gallienne remembered, “was that the intention was there, but the equipment was lacking. The voice was inadequate.” Tenn recalled that another “power” in the theater referred to Harris as “an unshelled peanut,” dry and perhaps void of a center or substance.

  Harris continued to work.

  One of the happiest times in Tenn’s life was his 1949 revision of Summer and Smoke, composed by typewriter and occasionally by longhand at one end of a dining table. At the other end sat Carson McCullers, who was laboriously adapting her novel The Member of the Wedding to the stage. Both plays were suffused with longing—of their playwrights as well as their protagonists—and both were, like the prayers and rites of Tenn’s childhood, progressive and fearful and full of stones laid, metaphorical linens folded and applied, flowers plunged through psychic Styrofoam.

  “If I reread Summer and Smoke,” Tenn remembered, “I can feel, and almost see, the writer that I was in that time and at that place. Alma moves fearfully and slowly but purposefully toward her desire. Alma comes to respect her need for love, for physical pleasure, for an acceptance of her gifts, no matter how niggardly or unnecessary they may appear. Alma is a woman who would have no problem finding a place on altar guilds or prayer councils, and her baked goods would always find a place at the tables of the best clubs, but her amatory gifts go begging, and her carnal desires, which she examines and recognizes in solitude, in darkness, grow stronger and hungrier as they find themselves attended to by only her own hands and ministrations. Alma moves slowly, each step a brick, perfectly shaped and sanded and placed in a wall that blocks what she finds unpleasant, and then, later in the play, each step a small scalpel that scoops away the plaster and the bricks of this wall, through which she hopes she can walk and find what she needs.”