Follies of God Read online

  BARBARA MET INGE accidentally, and in fact she couldn’t remember exactly where the first encounter took place, but she thought that it had been at a party thrown by Lee Strasberg during the run of Come Back, Little Sheba. Barbara admired Inge and wanted to meet him, because she had liked his play, and wanted to be “in his world, his theatrical world, which I understood. I came from country people, prairie people, who used few words, worked hard, and hid a lot of secrets. Those secrets would often explode, but more often than not, they were swept under rugs of denial or alcohol or sexual outbursts. Life always returned to the pillars of the community: family, work, church. All was forgotten, or all was attempted to be forgotten.”

  Barbara Baxley, seen here in the 1960 film The Savage Eye, entered into a strange triangle with Tennessee and William Inge. She was a true friend, a brilliant actress, and a woman almost diabolically driven to destroy her career and herself. (illustration credit 12.1)

  Barbara also found Inge attractive, as Tenn had, and she was surprised to learn that he was a homosexual. “He looked at a woman,” Barbara remembered, “or rather, he looked at me, with so much affection and understanding. I felt a sexual attraction for him—and from him—that very first time.” Baxley and Inge began seeing each other socially and sporadically, and in 1953, after Baxley had had success replacing Jean Arthur in Peter Pan and Julie Harris in I Am a Camera, she was deemed “appropriate escort material” for Inge to openings of plays, museum outings, and, finally, his bed. “I was not frightened,” Barbara told me. “I am not someone who is shy or afraid of a challenge, and I believed that the affection I felt for Bill, which soon developed into love, would transform both of us, and everything we did together.” Baxley also imagined a fruitful partnership between playwright and actress. “I wanted us to be together for everything,” she told me. “All the way down the line. Heart. Home. Bed. Theater. Film. Death.”

  Tenn noticed the pairing and gave his blessing. The awkward man and lover Tenn had known in Bill Inge would profit from finding creative and spiritual solace from a woman (as Tenn always did) along with sexual and domestic comforts (which Tenn understood were lost to him).

  Inge approved Barbara as Kim Stanley’s understudy as Cherie in Bus Stop, a role she would assume many times, as Stanley had alerted both Inge and the play’s director, Harold Clurman, that she had no intention of playing the part for very long. As Barbara put it, “She would start to feel all stretched out from a part, and she was afraid of becoming ‘Little Miss Xerox,’ so she never stayed very long. Thank God for me.” Inge came to feel that Barbara brought things to the role that had been unexamined by the brilliant but mercurial Stanley. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Barbara would later say of her time in that production, “but I’d really walked into an alley that was completely blind, littered with all sorts of shit. I thought I was taking on a role that would change my career, and it did: I was immediately seen as a leading actress, not just a gifted supporting character actress or a replacement. But it came with a price, and the price was Bill.”

  BARBARA BAXLEY’S FINGERPRINTS are all over The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. I was told this by Elia Kazan, who directed the play, and who saw Baxley at many of the readings and the rehearsals, and it was confirmed by Barbara, who told me that the play was “jointly autobiographical,” blending elements of both her life and those of Inge and some of his childhood neighbors. Barbara was turned down for the leading role of Cora, a hybrid of herself and her mother, because her name was not considered sufficient to sell the play: the part went to Teresa Wright. Barbara would play the role in the national tour, however, and the revisions to the play continued on the road.

  “Truth is very powerful,” Barbara told me, “but it is also very elusive: It slips away, changes form. Bill and I kept feeling the truth move around and alter, and we kept getting ahead of it and improving the play. That may have been the most creative and intense time I’d ever known in the theater.”

  Barbara’s immersion into the world of Bill Inge created a rift between her and Tenn, one that would continue until their collaboration on Period of Adjustment. “Tenn never liked for me to be with Bill,” Barbara said. “Tenn was very possessive with almost anyone, but he always felt that Bill had sidled into the theater not only on his coattails, but by way of his bed, his immediate sexual needs.” Inge served for Tenn several clearly delineated purposes—sexual comfort, conversation with a passionate reader and writer, the devotion of an acolyte. Tenn never imagined that Inge would become a successful playwright, and he never fully accepted it when it became a reality. “Tenn thought Bill was a dreamer,” Barbara said. “Although he was only a couple of years younger than Tenn, he was always seen as a kid, a yahoo, someone definitely beneath Tenn’s station in life and the theater.”

  While Tenn had encouraged the relationship between Baxley and Inge, he was not happy when he saw that it was “taking hold.” When Tenn was told of the solidity of the affair—during the many meetings he had with Inge over the proper final act of Picnic—he was livid, then quickly became dismissive. “He thought it was a Method-actor sort of thing,” according to Barbara. “I was trying something out, and Bill was ready for someone else to lie in bed with him and listen to music and smoke and talk about literature. But I see now that Tenn felt that Bill was taking one more thing from him. I had, after all, been in Tenn’s life first.” Tenn came to resent the gift he felt he made to Inge of Barbara Baxley.

  There would soon be—briefly—a Williams-Inge-Baxley triangle, as Tenn, during a brutal rehearsal period of Camino Real, again sought the comfort of his “carnal collaborator.” Tenn would visit Inge at his apartment, and Baxley on several occasions had the “horrible, bizarre” experience of leaving Tenn at the National Theatre, where she was tackling the role of Esmeralda in Camino, only to arrive at Inge’s apartment to see Tenn, in a bathrobe, sitting in the kitchen, smoking and laughing with Inge. “I was trying to be good and true in my performance as Esmeralda,” Barbara told me, “and then I was trying to be good in my performance as Bill’s lover. Both parts were impossible, unplayable, but I kept showing up, kept trying, kept getting caught up in it all.”

  The meetings between Tenn and Inge came to an end, but not because of any ultimatum issued by Baxley. A pivotal and poisonous moment occurred not long after the opening night of Camino Real, a night that included not only poor reviews, but vitriolic arguments that flared between Tenn and Kazan, Tenn and Cheryl Crawford, the play’s producer, and Tenn and Baxley, who had the temerity to remind him—the playwright of a failed play—that he had sought the advice of Bill Inge for help in making his play more accessible to audiences. “Tenn had asked Bill for help,” Barbara told me. “Camino is wonderful, and I loved it. I love it still. But it was not always clear in its intentions, and it was not like anything Broadway had seen before. It was very dense, very rich. It required some knowledge of its characters. It isn’t a play you can walk into, plop down, and start watching. You have to think. Bill kept telling Tenn to put a spine in the play, some bones on which to hang the lovely pictures he had made, and Tenn took his advice and tried to make his play stronger, to give it a stronger foundation.”

  Tenn took as much of Inge’s advice as he could, applied it where he thought it worked, but the play failed nonetheless. Kazan remembers a trying time with the play, but he assigned himself a great deal of its failure. “I wasn’t as present as I should have been,” he confessed. “I had a lot on my mind, and my life was as shattered and fragmented and full of hallucinatory images as Camino. I did what I could, but it was halfhearted at best. I sat in the theater on opening night, and my mind suddenly expanded with ideas on how to improve the production and the play. Too late.”

  The “poisonous” moment that ended the interactions among Tenn, Inge, and Baxley was when Inge attempted to comfort Tenn. “Bill only wanted to console Tenn,” Baxley told me. “He put his arm around Tenn, and that was very bold for Bill, very unlike him, as he was n
ot easily demonstrative. He told Tenn that things would be okay, that he was sorry it hadn’t gone well, and Tenn responded as if Bill had wrapped a serpent around his neck.” Tenn pushed Inge away

  “They didn’t speak, except in brief, social occasions, for years,” Barbara told me. “And I did not try to patch things up, because, without Tenn around, Bill was a bit stronger, a bit sweeter: he was all mine. And without Bill around, Tenn could spend all of his time with Frank, as he should, because Frank loved him, wanted nothing, took nothing.”

  Speaking of that time, Tenn told me that the experience of Camino Real was a “slap in the face, a comeuppance, evidence of an angry and stingy God,” who was alerting the writer to the fact that resources were limited, talent waned, and time was running out. “That was one of the first times,” Tenn confessed, “that I began to think that a trip to visit Hart Crane, deep in the Gulf, might be a pleasant vacation to book. As a writer I was perfectly dry, and I wanted to take to the waters, the permanent waters.”

  “I needed William Inge very strongly after so much time with Tennessee Williams,” Barbara told me. Camino Real had made her not only hungry for, but appreciative of, “straight, clean, propulsive narrative. It is true that Bill’s work had fewer layers than Tenn’s, but it’s also true that there is immediate engagement with Bill’s work: you get it. You may hate it; you may look down on it, but you get it. You understand it. Camino was lovely and haunting, but it was like a literary vortex: you got lost; you got confused. People would tell me they were moved at scenes, and then they were abandoned and had to fight to return to the feeling they had had.”

  Alone with Bill Inge, Baxley sought to give him the greatest gifts she felt she could bestow: she would give her lover herself—her entire biography and history and heart—and she would urge Bill Inge to place in it the heart, the domestic heart, of Tennessee Williams, a former lover whose affection and attention he had lost. This is how The Dark at the Top of the Stairs came to be written.

  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs is the story of the Flood family, who are, according to Baxley, a “nice, middle-class midwestern family who are figurines, not of glass, as Tenn created, but sturdier bisque, frozen in one appropriate expression, resting on little doilies in what would seem a perfect environment, but the tables on which they rest are scarred, eaten by termites, ready to fall. Bill was really channeling Tenn, or trying to channel him. He used a spare and strong line of narrative—the one he had tried to throw out to Tenn during Camino—and he inserted it into a tender portrait of his family and mine.”

  The father of the family, Rubin, loses his job as a salesman, one that provided the family with security, and which kept him on the road, jovial and grandiose and unfaithful. Rubin Flood was the absent and feared father that had dominated the lives of both Tenn and Inge, and his returns, with hugs and occasional gifts, are dreaded by the sensitive, sissy son, who is bullied by his classmates and neighbors, and welcomed by the daughter, who is coming into her own sexually and socially and loves her father, whom she sees as strong and attractive, “a force of nature,” as Barbara put it, “a literal flood, of words and emotions and feelings.” The mother of the family, Cora, is thin of emotion, voice, patience. She runs a house with efficiency but no warmth. Affection has perpetually disappointed her, either because it was never reciprocated or because it led to the children, who need her fulsomely and give her no sense of satisfaction. Cora has wealthy family members who remind her of what she could have had and could have been. Although Rubin has provided a home for his family, and always addresses their needs, if not their desires, Cora views his inability to give them “things that shine and change a person, pretty things and happy times,” as especially niggardly, a withholding of affections. Cora and Rubin no longer attempt anything but rudimentary physical contact, and their discussions are all about busted appliances, frayed rugs, and the dress their daughter will need for her first school dance. They worry about their sissy son: “Billy Inge, in every way,” Barbara pointed out, “who runs to his mother and asks for help, who would love to have the town visited by a tornado, if only to prevent the torture of Monday mornings at school, when the bullying began again.”

  The Flood house, loveless, joyless, and airless, pushes the father and daughter outside of its walls for some comfort and diversion. Rubin reacquaints himself with Mavis, the town’s beautician and an alleged women of promiscuous gifts, with whom he can be “gentle and open and served”; and the daughter finds a new friend, a young Jewish boy whose mother, a famous actress, has plunked him, alone and wild with imagination, in this dry little town for his education.

  Barbara Baxley was Cora Flood in that she retreated when most hurt and withdrew sex when she couldn’t face a man, but she was more fully Mavis, an open, nonjudgmental, sexually free woman who felt most comfortable affirming the prowess and the promise of her man. “You were my Mavis,” Bill Inge told Barbara, and he went to her for approval of every line the character uttered, and he tried in vain to earn the role for her in the 1960 film version. (It went, instead, to Angela Lansbury.)

  The Flood home is a mortuary of memories and resentment, and it was modeled on the St. Louis apartment of Tenn’s Glass Menagerie. “It wasn’t supposed to look like the Wingfield home,” Barbara said, “but it was the same in nature, in its feel. People twirled fruitlessly in the home, dreaming, plotting to leave or to grow or to feel. The flood of emotions that are headed toward that house, to drown everyone in it, led to the family surname, and Bill wondered if ‘Wingfield’ was an ironic statement on Tom’s ability to fly away from the home, while the wingless birds—those without a dream—remain on the ground, flapping and flailing and dying.”

  The writing of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was a contest for William Inge. As a boy his head had become lodged in the banister of the family staircase, and the boy and his mother and sister became panicked; the young Billy Inge screamed in terror. Rubbing his back and neck, Inge’s mother gently talked him out of his trap, all along praising him for being a “big and good boy, a little man.” “Bill always remembered that,” Barbara told me, “the day his mother told him to grow up, and let him know he could rescue himself—but only, it seems, if a woman was there to rub and console and praise him.”

  Once freed, the embarrassed Inge ran up the stairs to his room. He was left undisturbed, but he remained embarrassed by the event. The play was his announcement to the world that he was no longer afraid, he no longer needed his mother to rub his head and neck and tell him he was a big boy. Like Tom Wingfield, who had to flee his mother to grow and to be himself, Bill Inge, through the writing of Dark, let his mother, Maude, go, let her return to her own dreams and plots, and he got himself out of his troubles. “He had me,” Barbara said, “so he could let go of his mother.”

  As was often the case, Inge soared while Tenn fumbled. As Dark was succeeding on Broadway, Tenn had a small success off-Broadway with Garden District, an evening of two one-act plays—a smaller score. “Bill Inge was perpetually plundering my toy box,” Tenn told me, “and I was against a wall on which I could not imagine a mural and against which I could not imagine an escape.”

  When the script of The Dark at the Top of the Stairs was published, William Inge dedicated it to Tennessee Williams.

  Tenn was not amused.

  The Dark at the Top of the Stairs would be William Inge’s last successful play, as well as the last one his mother would ever see or read: Maude Inge died in 1958. “The attack by Brustein, and then the death of his mother, unhinged him,” Barbara told me, “but then he grew very calm and began thinking of ways to remember her, to love her again.” Inge had lost his mother, and eternally. Tenn, however, was still alive, still in the corners of Inge’s mind. The “final act of love” Inge constructed for both Maude Inge and Tennessee Williams was A Loss of Roses.

  The story of the play: It is Depression-era Kansas, where Helen and Kenny, a widowed mother and her twenty-one-year-old son, cobble together a m
odest living with minor jobs and major sacrifices. Kenny is attractive and hungry for sexual and intellectual adventure, seeking the former with the town’s randiest girls. Into this home arrives Lila, a former neighbor who had once done household work for Helen and Kenny, babysitting the boy, and who now visits the town with the touring company of actors she has joined. Brassy and free and funny, Lila deeply arouses Kenny, who wants to hear of her travels and who would like to sample the experience she has gained with a variety of men across the country. “This was Bill’s fantasy,” Barbara told me. “When he knew that I had slept with Marlon Brando, or any other men he found attractive, he had a greater interest in sleeping with me. He wanted to gain access to men he found attractive in whatever way he could, and that was often through me.” Kenny presented himself to the world as heterosexual, but Inge wrote him with the knowledge that he was most aroused at getting from Lila not what she offered physically but what she had experienced physically with others. “That was Bill’s religion, if you will,” Barbara told me. “He didn’t want to get God through Jesus Christ, or to be entered by Jesus, or to give his soul to something above: he wanted to be consumed by a furtively sought, fantasized sex, one that had been prayed for, hoped for, imagined.”

  Kenny aggressively moves on Lila, his former babysitter, and she resists him, to a point. “Like Bill, Kenny arouses the women around him,” Barbara told me. “It’s the classic pity fuck: ‘I can help this confused man, and I do find my saving him sexually to be attractive, even if I know that it will bring me nothing but grief.’ ” As Kenny moves toward the desired Lila, he fashions a means of leaving his mother, who wants him to be independent, stand on his own, move along, but who is horrified that he has made inappropriate advances toward Lila, even as she is relieved to discover that her son has “normal” male urges.