Follies of God Page 23
During the day scenes the sky should be a pure and intense blue (like the sky of Italy as it is so faithfully represented in the religious paintings of the Renaissance) and costumes should be selected to form dramatic color contrasts to this intense blue which the figures stand against. (Color harmonies and other visual effects are tremendously important.)
In the night scenes, the more familiar constellations, such as Orion and the Great Bear and the Pleiades, are clearly projected on the night sky, and above them, splashed across the top of the cyclorama, is the nebulous radiance of the Milky Way. Fleecy cloud forms may also be projected on this cyclorama and made to drift across it.
So much for The Sky.
Now we descend to the so-called interior sets of the play. There are two of these “interior” sets, one being the parlor of an Episcopal Rectory and the other the home of a doctor next door to the Rectory. The architecture of these houses is barely suggested but is of an American Gothic design of the Victorian era. There are no actual doors or windows or walls. Doors and windows are represented by delicate frameworks of Gothic design. These frames have strings of ivy clinging to them, the leaves of emerald and amber.… There should be a fragment of wall in back of the Rectory sofa, supporting a romantic landscape in a gilt frame. In the doctor’s house there should be a section of wall to support the chart of anatomy. Chirico has used fragmentary walls and interiors in a very evocative way in his painting called Conversation Among the Ruins.
Now we come to the main exterior set which is a promontory in a park or public square in the town of Glorious Hill. Situated on this promontory is a fountain in the form of a stone angel, in a gracefully crouching position with wings lifted and her hands held together to form a cup from which water flows, a public drinking fountain. The stone angel of the fountain should probably be elevated so that it appears in the background of the interior scenes as a symbolic figure (Eternity) brooding over the course of the play. This entire exterior set may be on an upper level, above that of the two fragmentary interiors. I would like all three units to form an harmonious whole like one complete picture rather than three separate ones.…
Everything possible should be done to give an unbroken fluid quality to the sequence of scenes.
Finally, the matter of music. One basic theme should recur and the points of recurrence have been indicated here and there in the stage directions.
The notes are marked “Rome, 1948,” but Quintero recalls those directions being expanded for the revival in 1952. In New Orleans, in 1982, Tenn recalled those stage notes, and told me it was one of his most autobiographical pieces of writing.
The rectory described in the stage notes is the one in which he spent those formative years of his childhood, haunting the dark, oiled hallways, hiding beneath Gothic eaves, eavesdropping on adults and watching the actions of the ladies of the church.
The sky, that oppressive sky “as large and as unyielding and unfeeling as the back of an absentminded God,” was an image he claimed he cadged from McCullers. “All those green, dizzying summers that Carson wrote of,” he recounted, “all those slanting rays of the sun, were held against and fueled from an expansive sky, and the sky is a judgment, an eternal witness to all of our struggles. I came to feel that Frankie Addams looked at the sky and saw it as proof that the world was large—it stretched for millions of miles, perhaps even back in time. There had to be places and people to which she could escape and find friendship and acceptance and membership in a club or a society, and the friends you did have didn’t die suddenly, and people weren’t betrayed and people didn’t lie. I always felt that Carson’s people were always in the longest line of all time—like something from a George Tooker painting—and the window would slam shut when they finally had their number called. Horribly hopeful and naïve, you just held your breath for the disappointment that was to come.
“My Alma, on the other hand,” he continued, “sees the sky above Glorious Hill as a rebuke. Look at this tiny toy town of perfect lawns and manicured women and order and balance applied to all of those things for which there can never be order and balance. The body is dead and now lies in a room attended to by people who cover it in linen and bathe its limbs and mutter prayers for its proper deliverance. The body is still dead, and its survivors still devastated, but the prayers continue. Food is delivered, comfort murmured, backs and hands patted. Casseroles and cards and comforting words. A beautifully handwritten note at the top of which a hole has been punched, a piece of pink ribbon pulled through it: a prayer for healing you can hang from a wall. All of this comfort, all of this attention comes down upon you and smothers you and ties you closer to the town; your roots sink ever deeper into its soil, even though you never felt loved or welcomed here. And there is the huge sky, laughingly reminding you that there is so much out there in the world beyond Glorious Hill, places to go, people to meet, passions to be plumbed, and here you are, a ribboned prayer on the wall, a corset to be tied, a church social to be attended, at which you will serve sandwiches without crust or complaint, and you die some more, your soul constricted beneath that girdle and beneath that sky.
“And that is Alma,” Tenn told me, “and that is me.”
Carson McCullers gave him that image, and Tenn claimed that Julie Harris magnified it, first with her performance in The Member of the Wedding, and then through other transformational appearances that made him think of her as an emotional pilgrim, completely lost until she is able to inhabit a character, a person utterly real to her, and to whom she is in complete service.
Tenn imagined that Julie Harris, like Frances Sternhagen, came from wealth and the protections it offered. He envied her Grosse Pointe, Michigan, upbringing, her attendance at Yale, her ability to appear unaffected by the mundane practicalities of daily life—bills, meetings, meals, frayed furniture, appliances. “I think that she rises above it all,” Tenn believed, “and casts aside what she can’t—or shouldn’t—use in her work.”
It is true that Harris was born in Grosse Pointe and attended the Yale School of Drama, but she laughed when I told her that Tenn imagined her untouched by life. “I happily live,” she told me, in a suite at the Hotel Wyndham, where she resided during the short run, in 1991, of Lucifer’s Child, a one-woman show about Isak Dinesen, “and I also happily bear the scars for having done so.”
Tenn had purchased a gift for Julie in the French Quarter. In a voodoo shop, he passed up a number of amulets, skulls, animal skins, beads, and candles to find a tiny and lovely photograph of a dark-skinned girl encased in bright material. It was clearly handmade, and Tenn asked the proprietor about its provenance. “It’s from Milagro,” he was told. “What does that mean?” Tenn asked. “It means it’s powerful,” was the response, so Tenn bought it for Julie, and I held it for almost nine years before giving it to her.
She wept and told me that she had recently attended church services for the Easter season. “In one church,” she remembered, “the cross had been made bare, the Christ figure removed. This was not a time for sadness, for he had arisen and was in his place. He will be back on that cross in time, of course, for us to look upon and grimace and love and try to understand, but for now he’s away and all is well. I look at this,” she said, looking down at the icon, “and I know that Tennessee Williams is dead, and I know that this is devastating to me, but he’s on no cross at all—he is arisen, and he arises every time a play of his is read in a bedroom or a classroom or a library; every time it is produced in a basement or a high school or a theater. They can’t hurt my friend anymore. He’s gone from all of this.”
TO FULLY APPRECIATE a Julie Harris or a Frances Sternhagen, Tenn explained to me, one must have in one’s company a Kim Hunter. “I adore Kim,” Tenn told me, “and there is about her a rudimentary quality that is very appealing—and very necessary at times. But there has never been a sense of liftoff with Kim. She is very dutiful and very intelligent, but there is nothing within her that wants to push at the confines of a character
or the wall of the theater. She is very pliant, and I learned a lot about life and women and the theater working with her, but it has never occurred to me to seek to inhabit her skin or mind to find a woman to speak to me.”
It requires a certain bravery—or recklessness—to read the above directly to the woman about whom it was said, but I did so, in the summer of 1989, in Hunter’s apartment at 42 Commerce Street, at the top of an incredibly steep staircase, where she stood, smiling, radiant, asking, “Is this intimidating or what? I think it would be rude to not wait for you here, but it is very off-putting.” Hunter and her husband, Robert Emmett, welcomed me and talked about Tennessee Williams and everything else that came up in a seven-hour conversation. Hunter, who was an avid cook, had prepared a lovely meal, which she claims was inspired entirely by Paul Bocuse. (Hunter had also written an autobiographical cookbook called Loose in the Kitchen, a copy of which she gave me before I left.) I liked her instantly, as Tenn told me I would. Theirs had been a short but intense time spent together—the production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she created the part of Stella—but they were always able to pick up quickly and intimately, usually through a late-night phone call, when Tenn would call and confess that he felt lost. (Tenn may have never inhabited Hunter’s skin or mind, but he frequently inhabited her ear and her apartment, where he was cared for, listened to, loved.) Tenn had explained to me that he found her “loving and rational and calm,” but Hunter scoffed at that and said that she thought that Tenn called her because she represented a happy and productive time.
“The time of Streetcar,” she remembered, “was blazing with life and work, good work, and success and fulfillment, and he could call me and we could remember that time. If it got him back to a place where he could work or think or feel good about himself, I’m happy about that, but I’m not a pillar of sanity or balance. I was a memory of a happy time, and I don’t think he felt comfortable picking up a phone and calling Jessie or Karl [Malden] or Marlon—and even before Vivien Leigh died, Tenn didn’t have a rapport with her. He thought she was a bit of a machine, an acting machine, and she didn’t have time for his doubts or concerns. She had her own problems; she didn’t have time for Tennessee Williams’s problems. I didn’t, either, but I loved him.”
When Kim Hunter came into the life of Tennessee Williams, she was known as a film actress who had been signed to a contract with David O. Selznick, and who had appeared in The Seventh Victim, which Tenn loved as a camp horror film, and the Michael Powell–Emeric Pressburger film Stairway to Heaven, with its Art Deco ethereality of the afterlife. Both films amused Tenn, but he couldn’t quite see how the comely, slightly round young actress featured in them could be his Stella Kowalski.
“Kazan was mad for her,” Tenn told me. “I don’t know how they met or when, but she was presented to me as a virtual fait accompli.” Irene Mayer Selznick, who produced Streetcar, claims that Hunter was a “property” much bragged about by her ex-husband, David O. Selznick, and that is how she came to meet her and have her read for the role. “Elia Kazan,” Irene Selznick told me forcibly, “took what was presented to him, and I was the very active producer of that play.”
Hunter herself couldn’t recall how she came to be cast in the play, but she was very open about the fact that she and Kazan conducted an affair—not terribly discreetly—during the time of Streetcar, and the fact embarrassed her. “It was foolish and very dramatic,” she remembered. “I was a very young twenty-five, with one marriage collapsing, and my career seemed to be without focus. Kazan was all about focus, and he passed it on to me. He pasted it on me, and he got me into the Actors Studio, where he and Robert Lewis really taught me what acting was about. They opened my mind; they told me what I should read and see and hear. All of that was good. I should have left it at that, but I also fell madly for Kazan, which was easy to do. He shaped me on the stage, and he shaped me in the bedroom. That experience—that experience of A Streetcar Named Desire—completely changed me in every way, artistically, sexually, intellectually.”
Kim Hunter was a young mother overseeing a hectic household, but she always made time and space for Tennessee, inviting him for meals and holding him up when he doubted his talent. “She was, I guess, a sort of sister,” Tennessee said. (illustration credit 10.5)
Both Tenn and Hunter conceded that her performance grew incredibly under Kazan’s tutelage. “There was an unabashed amateurishness to Kim’s performance in the early days,” Tenn remembered. “She had it in her head that Stella was nervous, jumpy, and so she remained—one note and one dimension—for the length of the play. I admired her tenacity and her ability to concentrate on that one aspect, but the performance was abrasive and thin. Whatever Kazan did, it worked.”
“He spoke to me as an adult,” Hunter revealed. “He sat me down and explained the full text of the play, and he compared the four [major] characters in the play to people we knew in common. Kazan believed that there were a limited number of people, or archetypes, in the world, and our individual personalities determined how we lived and how our personalities were revealed. He allowed me to see that I shared a great deal in common with Stella. I also came to see some similarities I shared with Blanche. He led me to realize that no one, and no action, could or should be alien to me.”
The conversations I had with Hunter were very much like the phone calls Tenn shared with her when he called “deep in the blues” and needed some balance. “He wanted to hear that he was a good writer,” Hunter said, “and he wanted me to know that I had meant something to him, that he meant something to me. He wanted to talk about our human bond, the world being connected by our similarities, our shared fears and dreams. I think he called me when he had gotten a bad review or he had been rejected by a lover. He needed to hear from someone who looked up to him, who wouldn’t judge him. He needed to hear from someone who had grown up—grown in every way—right in front of him, and because of one of his plays.”
Kim Hunter openly addressed the issue of her not having a sense of liftoff, in Tenn’s eyes. “I would have to agree with him,” she confessed, “but let’s look at the facts.” After the Broadway production of Streetcar, Hunter gave a praised performance in Darkness at Noon, Sidney Kingsley’s adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s novel, and another in the film version of Streetcar, for which she won the Oscar as Best Supporting Actress. “There was a good and clear line going,” Hunter recalled. “And then the bottom fell out of everything.”
The event to which she referred was the blacklist: Hunter’s name appeared in Red Channels, and film producers were urged to reconsider casting her. In 1953 alone, she knew of seven film roles for which she was wanted (including the one ultimately played by Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity) and about which she received polite but evasive calls changing the dates and times. Soon the calls ended altogether. Hunter found work in the theater, but films and television were almost completely blocked to her. Her role in the 1956 film Storm Center was given to her solely because Bette Davis (an actress who admired Hunter and who had accepted her Oscar) demanded her inclusion. “Bette Davis told the producers and the studio that I was in or she was out,” Hunter told me. “She thought that the blacklist would only be broken if the stars, the people with power, stood up and refused to be bullied any longer. That is what ultimately happened, and Bette was among the first, at least in my experience, to go to bat for actors.” Davis also wrote letters—and checks—on Hunter’s behalf in the hopes of getting her back on track. When I spoke to Bette Davis by phone—about Hunter and about other things—she agreed with Tenn’s assessment of her friend’s career, but she was quick to point out the circumstances. “You have to think of Kim’s career as having suffered a sort of amputation,” Davis told me. “We will never know what she might have done if that ludicrous blacklist hadn’t happened. Those were years where she would have grown in film roles, elevated to starring roles on the stage, but she was pushed to the side, was a bit scared. Stunted! That’s what I mean to say
. She was an injured actress.”
One other person sent checks and notes of encouragement to Hunter during the time of the blacklist: Tennessee Williams. Hunter recalled that a recurring line from all of the notes was “I need you; hold on.”
Hunter did not wish to reveal too much about herself to me, or to anyone else. When she looked at notes I had made of my time with other actresses, she admitted that she would never be as forthcoming. “If I wanted to tell as much as those women,” she told me, “I would write my own book. I’ll tell you some things, and that’s it.”
Those areas she was willing to discuss—her affair with Kazan, her phone calls with Tenn, and the spotty but loving relationship they had—led to free and full conversations, but she was far more comfortable talking about books and plays and food, and I was invited back many times to the apartment. And on one occasion, when a play she especially liked, called The Sum of Us, was playing at the Cherry Lane Theatre—which was housed in the building next to Hunter’s—she invited me into her bedroom. “Come and lie down,” she said. “Don’t be nervous.”
There was nothing romantic about the request: she wanted me to listen to the play, which reverberated through the wall above her bed. On several occasions, we would lie there and listen to the muffled second act, and occasionally Robert Emmett would join us; but before the conclusion and the curtain calls, he would repair to the kitchen. When the play was over, and Hunter and I would leave the bedroom, we would find dessert and a New York Times at our places on the table, waiting for us. I loved being in their company, and I trusted everything she told me about the theater, even as I regretted that she didn’t want to say anything more about her life.
We were talking one evening over dinner when I mentioned my bizarre living arrangements. I was still in my early months of living in New York, and was staying with Dorothy Hart Drew. When I mentioned the artist’s name, Hunter literally gasped, then looked in disbelief at her husband. It had been Dorothy Hart Drew, under the direction of Congressman George Dondero, who had written a letter to Hunter in 1952, urging her to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, as well as to “repent” her ways. In time a call came to Hunter’s apartment: it was Drew, castigating her for taking her “God-given talent” and allowing it to be misused by Communists. Hunter told the woman on the phone, “a certifiable loon,” to go immediately to hell.