Follies of God Read online

  For nearly a decade, from 1950, when Come Back, Little Sheba opened on Broadway, until 1957, when The Dark at the Top of the Stairs premiered, becoming the fourth play to be included in a volume of his collected plays, William Inge enjoyed a series of what Tenn called “seamless successes.” Tenn resented the failure of so many critics to ask tough questions of Inge, while he felt he was routinely held to a higher standard.

  The film version of Sheba earned Shirley Booth both an Oscar and the Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival. As Tenn was suffering both the failure of Camino Real and what he felt was the dismissive attitude of its director, Elia Kazan, Inge’s Picnic, which Tenn claimed to have read more than five times, offering revisions and advice—most of it unheeded—earned Inge the Pulitzer Prize and was sold to Columbia’s Harry Cohn for more than a quarter of a million dollars. The film version of the play, released in 1955, and starring William Holden and Kim Novak, was a box-office success and earned two Oscars. Bus Stop, which opened on Broadway as Picnic was still in movie theaters, was pitted against Tenn’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for most of the season’s prizes; and in 1957 Elia Kazan (“My director!” Tenn exclaimed to me) agreed to direct The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, a play that Tenn, in a meeting in 1956, had told Inge to discard. (Tenn recounted all of this information as seriously as he did the mysteries of the Rosary: they were ingrained in his memory.) “That play never worked for me,” Tenn told me, “in any form at all, and I told him so. His response was to find and use Kazan, to plaster over the holes and pockmarks in the foundation and walls of that particular house he had constructed, and make it work one way or the other. I was not amused.”

  When I broached this subject with Kazan, he remembered how amazed he had been at Tenn’s pettiness. “Tennessee never should have possessed for a moment any fear that any other playwright, any other writer, might have presented to him,” Kazan told me. “He felt very threatened by Inge, and I could never understand it. Bill Inge literally trembled at the thought and the presence of Tennessee. ‘Idolatry’ is the word I am most apt to use as a description, and Tennessee was very dismissive of him. He went through the script of Dark, ridiculing virtually every line and scene and pressuring me to remove myself from the production, allegedly for the sake of my reputation, but really, I think, because he saw Bill as intruding, once again, as always, on his turf.”

  Elia Kazan and William Inge on the set of Splendor in the Grass (1961). Tennessee introduced the playwright to Kazan, and later envied the success the two of them shared. “I was not yet comfortable in the role of mentor,” Tennessee confessed. (illustration credit 11.2)

  An article written by Robert Brustein for Harper’s magazine served as a cruel and oddly fortuitous wish fulfillment for Tenn. “It was a barbaric piece,” Tenn remembered, “and I was soon enough to suffer my own injuries by virtue of Mr. Brustein’s malicious pen, but it was the first, the only, piece that asked the questions of Bill that I had raised in our conversations. Brustein’s was the only critical piece that pointed out precisely what Bill was up to play after play, scene after scene.”

  Titled “The Men-Taming Women of William Inge,” the piece opened with this salvo: “Considering the modesty—one is tempted to say the mediocrity—of his work, it is clear that the excitement over Inge has been inspired by something other than the intrinsic value of his plays.” After disemboweling Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Brustein presents his thesis: “Specifically, Inge’s basic plot line revolves around a heroine threatened either with violence or sexual aggression by a rambunctious male. Both terrified and attracted by him, she tries to escape his influence until she learns that, despite his apparent confidence, he is riddled with doubts, loneliness, and need. Once he has confessed this, he loses his ogre quality and the woman is able to domesticate him without difficulty.”

  “Exactly!” Tenn said he exclaimed upon reading the piece. “Bill Inge neuters his men through the offices and the orifices of his wan women, and peace reigns in the house. The oilcloth-covered table groans with pies and roasts and the husband squeezes the waist of his good wife, soaking dishes and his truss in the kitchen slop.” Tenn boasted that his men were emasculated in a more “realistic” way, as Val Xavier in Orpheus Descending and Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth can attest, and that, as in life, the “strong and the sure, the brutal and the willful” prevail. Inge’s view, Tenn believed, was dishonest, an attempt on the part of Inge to bear witness to what had escaped him all his life: domestic harmony, a home in which he was loved, a planet, like the sun of Harry Crosby, to which he could ascend and rule, while Tenn was blunt enough to know and to reveal that what we often must face instead is the cold ocean floor of Hart Crane to find any level of release. “At all other times,” Tenn insisted, “we submit, we forbear. We do not walk lovingly into arms that fail to excite, that pin us down, that serve as fleshly straitjackets.”

  As Brustein wrote of Inge, “Marriage demands, in return for its spiritual consolations, a sacrifice of the hero’s image (which is the American folk image) of maleness. He must give up his aggressiveness, his promiscuity, his bravado, his contempt for soft virtues, and his narcissistic pride in his body and attainments, and admit that he is lost in the world and needs help.”

  This portion of the article was particularly apt, a deeply personal and sharp observation of how Maude Inge had raised her son to adapt and behave, “holding down her son and asking him to relinquish all of the things about a man that he either desires or is proud to possess or has earned,” Tenn explained. “His goal should be to submit to the particular insane and feminine notion of the ‘good man,’ absent any sexual pleasure or curiosity, any desire to question his place in the world or his rights among his family or his peers. I found—and I find—this repellent in his work.”

  Tenn admitted that he found guilty satisfaction in the Brustein article, and in reports that Inge broke down on the phone with the critic and with friends, for whom he asked advice. “I have never sought advice when I failed,” Tenn boasted. “I have asked, as I have asked you, to find out if my work ever mattered, if what I have written ever possessed any level of importance among the people I’m sending you to look over and learn from. Never, however, has it occurred to me—nor would it—to call someone, dry-eyed or not, and ask them how I should write, ask them if I could write.”

  All of the pain that William Inge experienced in the last fifteen years of his life, from the publication of the Brustein article in 1958 until his suicide in 1973, could have been avoided, Tenn believed, if only he had listened to his inner voice—and to Tenn—and written the play that Picnic was supposed to be, and deserved to be.

  Originally called Front Porch, the play that came to be known as Picnic began as what Tenn described as “postcards of despair, sepia-toned, seemingly gentle, but depicting harsh realities in the so-called gentle heartland.” The women of the play, even Madge, the town’s beauty, find disappointment in their pursuits of companionship, with both men and women. “As I remember it,” Tenn told me, “you could not trust anyone, whether you were looking for a dance, a necking session, a look at last week’s homework or a cobbler recipe.” Lives of desperation were being lived in this town, and activity—butter-churning, church socials, PTA meetings, picnics, dress fittings—all served, vainly, to fill the horrible void that resided in the center of each character. The women had their pies and their gossip, their days ending in exhaustion when the radio transmission concluded and only a pop and a hiss emanated, and sleep, another diversion, came to end their day. The men boasted of financial or sexual conquests, fish caught, marriages avoided, touchdowns remembered. Bragging or charming their way through a day, the town’s frayed schedules are shattered when Hal, a “priapic construction,” enters the town. Hal’s rampant sexuality, “hovering like heat rising from asphalt,” unmoors the women, who had long forgotten the joys of a “good rutting,” and the men are threatened, their bodies turn
ed to fat, their jowls expanded, and their hairlines in swift retreat. Madge, who shares her home with her mother—“another of Bill’s dry, tired domestic slaves”—her tomboyish sister, Millie, and a series of plump, mother-hen women who amble in and out discussing sewing patterns and the weather and the upcoming picnic and the crowning of the “Neewollah Queen” (the Halloween Queen), the pivotal social event of the town, and the event that will serve to bring the play’s characters toward their emotional conclusions. The play that Tenn read, at some point in 1952 as he remembered it, had all of the characters “missing the romantic and sexual trains they had hoped to board.” Madge and Hal do not run off together, as the town’s women help the young girl realize that he is a loser and a drifter, and nothing good would come from congress with him; Rosemary, the town’s spinster schoolteacher, fails to convince Howard, the unprepossessing salesman, to settle down with her and give her an identity different from that of old maid. The original play ended with the women scattered across the stage, one at a clothesline, another tending a garden, and Madge and her mother, deep in despair, simply looking ahead—at nothing—as the lights dimmed.

  “It was brutal,” Tenn said, “but it was true, and Bill vowed that it would be the conclusion that would appear on a New York stage.” Almost immediately Inge was encouraged to give the play a happier conclusion. He had hoped to retain Harold Clurman as the play’s director, but he proved to be unavailable or uninterested. Elia Kazan was involved in a film and had already committed to Tenn’s Camino Real. Joshua Logan was then suggested, and Tenn was immediately against it. “I was never impressed with Josh Logan the man or Josh Logan the director,” Tenn told me. “He operated under the delusional notion that we were similar in nature, being Southern and queer and all, but I found his taste deplorable, and I urged Bill to find another director, even if it meant postponing the play.”

  But Bill Inge did not believe in or understand postponement, and he imagined, not without some veracity, that Tenn might not have his interests at heart. Inge was not excited about Logan, whose reputation rested on musicals like Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific (which he also co-wrote and for which he won a Pulitzer Prize) and light entertainments like Mister Roberts, but he was available and was quick to move ahead with the play, even as he told Inge that it had to be rewritten. “Logan told him,” Tenn told me, “that the original ending would have the audience in an uproar. They would storm the stage! The audience must have romance, they must believe the myth that hopes are rewarded and every season brings, along with death and the rotation of crops, a new batch of love and sex to brighten the soul and the complexion.” Logan fought for the revision, and Tenn visited rehearsals at one point to see how things were faring.

  And he saw Elizabeth Wilson. Cast as the town’s newest schoolteacher, Christine Schoenwalder, Wilson had a small part, but she was a “tall, shiny woman, with coal-black hair, perfect posture, and a look on her face that conveyed that she was patient with the shenanigans, but she recognized their foolishness.” As arguments raged all around her, Wilson would repair to the sidelines, taking no part in the discussions, refusing to engage with the other actors in conversations about the direction of the play.

  “Bill,” Tenn said to Inge one day, “take as your role model that young actress over there,” pointing to Wilson. “Imagine yourself committed but distant; passionate but professional. Do what is right.”

  Tenn offered the greatest gift he could imagine: a woman to shape and inspire Bill Inge. “I pushed a woman, a teacher, toward him, as I would have wished someone would do for me. A gift, a rope to pull me from the waters.”

  Exhausted by phone calls and visits from Logan, Audrey Wood, and various producers and friends, Inge ultimately relented and had Madge follow Hal out of town, but he managed to make it a Pyrrhic victory: what would Madge gain in the company of this man? And look at the women on the porches, alone and back to canning peaches, headed for another night of restless sleep. There was the whistle of dry air across the stage as the curtain descended, but most audiences cheered that Madge “found love and release.”

  “I thought the play was now silly,” Tenn said, “which of course meant it had to succeed mightily, which it did.” Tenn suffered the power of his own honesty about love and myth when his Camino Real was met with puzzlement and empty seats, while Picnic satisfied audiences for nearly five hundred performances.

  Elia Kazan disagrees, however. “I think the girl has to leave town,” he said, “even if she dries up and dies in some other awful town: she has at least taken ownership of her life, has driven a stake in the ground and told the world, ‘Here I am. Let’s see what I can do.’ And in her own way, she has shaken up the town, reminding them of what love and lust can look like and accomplish. She has devastated her mother, who now has the younger daughter, who is probably destined to join the other gentle midwestern lesbians, teaching civics and gym, and whose hands and knees will ultimately give out, so that sewing is no longer possible. Hell, Madge and Hal may have to come back to the town, full of strip malls, and care for the old lady. The play is a tragedy no matter how you revise it, but I don’t know that it worked any better with the bleaker ending. But it worked. I saw it. I don’t respect it, but it worked. It was a Valentine that had fallen from a girl’s purse and been stepped on, and you could see the dusty, insensitive footprint across its lacy contours.”

  Tenn’s jealousy and vehement judgments against Picnic perplexed Kazan, given that two years later, with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tenn would make changes to his own play that made those Inge made to his pale in comparison. “Tenn speaks of honest emasculation,” Kazan laughed, “but Jesus, what he did to Cat! It’s what I wanted, and I think I was right, but he acquiesced far more than Inge did. Far more.”

  Bill Inge’s emasculation, both personal and professional, was a play, Tenn said, “of multiple acts and multiple attempts at mutilation,” and it required a number of instruments: alcohol, a lack of faith in himself and his talents, and a woman who would make Hart Crane’s Christian Science mother look like the girl on the Art Nouveau candy box Madge Owens was meant to be.

  “Oh, Lord,” Tenn said, “I kept telling Bill to look at Elizabeth Wilson and learn from her balance and her calm, and instead he flew right into a toxic cyclone, sat himself right down on a fence of barbed wire, and waited for … I don’t know what he was waiting for, but what came couldn’t have been what anybody wanted.”

  Twelve

  HER NAME WAS Barbara Baxley.

  It is impossible to write of her without spraying an inordinate number of literary bullets, because in the telling and the living of her life she was wild and disparate and spread about in many places. Her mind was like those cluttered desks owned by people who can nonetheless find any item you might request. Barbara’s mind was populated by years of memories, regrets, ambitions, and encounters, and they were related without regard to chronology or relevance. In the telling of her stories, Barbara would glow with happiness or rage or enlightenment. It was this quality that led Tenn to liken Barbara to the “firefly, because it flits about so mercilessly, and you’re amazed by its phosphorescence, and you wonder if the flight can be sustained.” When I asked Tenn if this reference was to Barbara’s stage work, he said that it wasn’t, for while he had the highest regard for the work she had done for him and for William Inge, he felt that her greatest performance was the one she pulled off in life.

  “Barbara doesn’t want to be here, you know,” Tenn told me. “I think she turned off to life in 1973, when Bill killed himself. I think Bill took a huge piece of her with him, and I’ll never be able to let him get away with that; I’ll have a hatred for him forever because of the destruction he caused her. I know that she never loved a man as she loved Bill, and she gave herself to him indiscriminately, and he abused that. He had an intelligent, captive acolyte in Barbara, and he threw her to the ground with great force, first with his actions against her—like refusing to cast her in his plays, then r
efusing to marry her—and then by killing himself, which was his way of saying, ‘All your efforts were in vain. You weren’t enough to make my life worth living.’ He sought affection, not arousal, so he could ‘function’ with Barbara. He wanted to be wanted, and if he found that acceptance, he felt he was done. There was very little revision applied toward Bill’s sexual activities; he offered no rewrites or improvements or deletions. Once he felt you wanted him, he was no longer present. I think that with me he found comfort, acceptance, but it was two writers holding each other—holding each other up and holding each other in bed, music on the radio and plots coursing through our heads. Bill used to say that he hoped he’d get his resistances weakened when he was older or richer or better-known, and I finally told him that if he was really smart, he’d learn that you either have a healthy approach to sex or you don’t. I do not believe in analysis and I do not believe in miracles of the libido. Bill was career-driven, and he should have learned to love and depend on his friends more. And besides, few marriages are based on sex, anyway. The strongest ones are usually between two people who act as if they were good friends away at summer camp, sharing pocket change and suntan lotion. Barbara offered him that, as well as freedom to write and read and spend time alone, which is vital for a writer, and was mandatory for Bill. The biggest mistake of his life was in abandoning her.”

  When I broached the subject of Inge with Barbara, she was surprisingly unemotional and uninvolved. She spoke candidly and unhesitatingly. When I remarked on this, she said, “Well, all the deeper feelings were buried with Bill. Now the retelling is just trivia; it’s not information about anyone I know.”