Follies of God Read online

  “It is far beyond time for the son to leave that house,” Kazan told me. “It was so clearly the experience of Bill Inge and his mother: the clinging affection, the staying too long, the incongruity of a young man stuck at home with his mother, acting as a surrogate husband.” Kazan had been offered A Loss of Roses, but he rejected it, not merely because he was consumed with Tenn’s Sweet Bird of Youth and the film Wild River, but because he couldn’t imagine a coherent theatrical shape for the play, and he couldn’t conceive of coaxing Inge to tell the play’s whole truth. “He gave us this dinky, dime-store Oedipal story,” Kazan continued, “and it comes at you with the delicacy of a train. The real story—of the play Bill wanted to write, and of the life Bill had led—is that the boy is queer. This terrifies the mother and it intrigues Lila, the tent-show actress who has not only had her honor and her body sullied, but who is drawn to the only people in her circus world who have ever shown her any sensitivity—the queers, the freaks. I would have been interested in a play that had this boy—in the middle of a truly unique and intense circle—pulled and coddled from these two very different women, both of whom had raised him and were now trying to raise him up toward manhood. Instead, we get a horny little stud who, for reasons that no one can accept, is at home with Mommy, henpecked, docile, horny after dinner.”

  Inge set the play in the Depression, in Kansas, because that was the time he recalled with his mother, dreaming of finding riches, of escaping the dry, flat land and the corrosive attentions of “the father-husband monster,” the name Inge had applied to Luther Inge. Kenny tries to be both son and provider to his mother, and when he is feeling strongest, when he has begun to make sexual advances toward Lila, he presents his mother with an expensive watch, for which he has laboriously saved: it is a replacement for a watch given to her by her late husband, and the mother refuses it. “Bill never loved or understood his father,” according to Barbara, “and all he could ultimately give him was money, which he did. There was some rapprochement between the idea of his father and himself when he stepped in and began to care for Maude, when he metaphorically turned to his father and announced, ‘I’ll take it from here.’ Bill always loved The Glass Menagerie, but he hated that only Tom gets away, only Tom leaves the suffocating apartment and the mother’s past. Bill decided that in Roses, everyone finds their freedom. This does not mean they find happiness: Bill always maintained—as did Tenn—that it is a myth that freedom means happiness. It doesn’t. It usually means that you’re now free to make colossal mistakes, ruin your own life in your own style and on your own time—but you’re free. Bill was not going to leave Helen and Lila—as Tom had left Amanda and Laura—in the dark, literally and metaphorically.”

  At the conclusion of A Loss of Roses, Kenny realizes it is folly to pursue a life with Lila, but it is equally impossible to live in the house with his mother. He leaves to begin his own life, with whatever sexual roles he is most comfortable playing. Helen, free for the first time in her life of domestic obligations, may become a new person, or she may drift away entirely. Lila, offered employment that may include blue movies and stag shows, leaves the town and the sweet boy who made her feel like both a lady and an instrument of sexual pleasure. On her way out of the neighborhood where she once lived, she sees a young girl heading for the local school, with a bunch of roses in her hand, a gift for the teacher. Lila recalls that she had once taken roses to her grade-school teacher, and later in the day, sharing this experience with classmates, she had been punished and humiliated by the teacher. Hurt by this action, Lila had wanted her roses back: she felt the gift had been voided. “That was crafty,” Kazan said. “Roses are symbols of purity and innocence and romantic intention. If they are red, they can be symbols of womanhood, menstruation, fecundity. Rose also happens to be the name of Tennessee’s poor sister, who, when she expressed herself—wildly, crazily—was lobotomized. Lila gives of herself, gives the roses, and that is her purity and her innocence and her sweetness, but when she speaks out, when she is most herself, she is slapped down, silenced. Not lobotomized, but traumatized.”

  Barbara urged Bill to include some sort of homage, in any way he could manage, to Luther Inge, and so Kenny learns, as he is trying to replace and remove from memory the dead and distant father, that his father had died saving his life. “There was too much compressed in too little a space of time,” Kazan told me. “The boy learns he cannot have Lila or his mother; he decides he should get out on his own; his mother rejects and resents the boy’s attempts to push the father out of memory, and is told that he was actually something of a saint, saving the kid and losing his own life; and then they all bravely face their bleak futures. Great issues and great themes, but presented in an inferior way.”

  The inclusion of a subplot concerning the father—seen initially as unlovable, but actually the victim of a loving and risky act—was another effort on the part of William Inge to tackle something of which Tenn felt incapable: love for his father. “That was the hardest part of the play,” Barbara told me. “Bill always knew that Tenn had forced himself to love or to understand his mother in The Glass Menagerie, and Bill hoped to achieve the same dramatic and personal release with this tribute. It wasn’t fully realized in the play because Bill couldn’t fully deal with it.”

  Herbert Machiz, who had directed some of Tenn’s off-Broadway works, was approached and did not respond. Even Joshua Logan, with whom Inge had tense relations and for whom he had little respect, was approached. He, too, turned it down. Ultimately, Barbara suggested Daniel Mann, who had done well by Inge with both stage and screen versions of Come Back, Little Sheba, and by Tenn with The Rose Tattoo. There was no question of casting: Inge had written Lila for Barbara Baxley, and he had written Helen for Shirley Booth, with whom he had forged a tender, if not close, relationship during Sheba. For the role of Kenny, it was Kazan, through the urging of Stella Adler, who recommended a young actor named Warren Beatty. “I remember Stella’s words to this day,” Barbara told me. “ ‘He’s smart and he’s stunning and you’ll believe that these two women—along with all the women in the town—are fighting for some time with him.’ ”

  Mann, however, was a poor choice to direct, because, according to Kazan, “he wasn’t a terribly good director, which is a detriment to begin with, but he also could only build on something good. He had no ability at all to reshape a play, to shift focus, to talk to a playwright and coerce him to alter something that wasn’t working. He was a passive director: he showed up and followed the lead, generally a female star. You can’t go too terribly wrong when Shirley Booth or Anna Magnani [whom he directed in the film version of The Rose Tattoo] or Maureen Stapleton is the focus. Those women directed whatever had Danny Mann’s name plastered on it. He was a gofer with a DGA membership.”

  Daniel Mann also did not care for Barbara Baxley, and flatly refused to cast her as Lila, a part that had been written for her. “He had heard I was difficult,” Barbara said, “and I thought, ‘Well, okay, so much for my suggesting him for the job. We’ll just get another director.’ ” That did not happen. To everyone’s amazement, Bill Inge agreed with Mann and told Baxley that he “was going another way.”

  “I was devastated,” said Barbara, “and that ended my relationship with Bill for a number of years. I had been aware of his many weaknesses over the years, but I always believed—stupidly—that he would stand up for me, defend me.”

  Carol Haney, a singer and dancer who had won a Tony Award for her role in The Pajama Game, and who had begun a career as a director and choreographer, was chosen to play the role. “That was ludicrous,” Tenn told me, “because she became a cartoon. It was like when Imogene Coca on Your Show of Shows would play a femme fatale. You would fall out of your seat laughing, and that’s what happened with Haney. She was a sexless beanpole of a girl, and every line became a laugh line. There was no sexual tension, and I would have thought Warren Beatty could look at a credenza and force it to lubricate. There was nothing with Haney.”
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  Shirley Booth came to hate her part, which she realized, correctly, was a supporting role, and she quit when the play was rehearsing out of town. She was replaced with Betty Field, touted as a “William Inge actress” because of her roles in the film versions of Picnic and Bus Stop; but whatever allure or appeal Field had possessed in the days when her husband Elmer Rice had written Dream Girl for her were gone. Suitably fat and tired for the role of Helen, she was unfocused, inaudible, and unable to understand her character.

  A Loss of Roses closed in less than a month, but turned a profit nonetheless, thanks to a film sale. (The film, renamed The Stripper, would star Joanne Woodward and be released in 1963.) Warren Beatty earned a Tony nomination for his performance as Kenny—a triumph of “priapic appeal,” according to Tenn.

  Alone on opening night, Inge wrote a letter to Tenn, begging forgiveness (“For what I could never surmise,” said Tenn) and alluding to the prepared and examined death they had discussed so many years ago. Tenn offered no reply, in any form, to the letter.

  “Life is so odd,” Tenn told me. “I only came to be reconciled with Bill Inge through failure and tragedy. Failure and tragedy and friendship—our odd Holy Trinity.”

  Inge now lived in California, having renounced New York, where, he claimed, there was the scent of failure on every corner, and deception in the eyes of everyone he saw. California had brought him the success he thought he wanted: he earned an Oscar for his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, directed by Kazan, and he bragged to friends that young actors circled around him for advice, stories, affirmation. Inge lived at 1440 Oriole Drive, in the Hollywood Hills, what he called “the bird street,” a residential homage to Tenn, who was forever known as “Bird” or, to Inge, “the Glorious Bird.” The address might bring him luck, he thought, an amulet via address to tap into the greater talents of his friend; but his writing was torturous, and his drinking became, as Tenn put it, “Olympian, outrageous.” “He tried to dry out,” Baxley told me. “He went to fat farms and health clinics and took vitamins and tried to walk around California. He could always give a regimen about two weeks, and then he would go on a bender that was stronger than the last.”

  “There was a period of time,” Tenn explained to me, “when Bill and I compared battle scars, which is to say, we talked about our failures, and we came to a level of understanding and comfort that was close to what we had when we first met.”

  Inge would rethink and reshape A Loss of Roses, Natural Affection, and Where’s Daddy?, while Tenn would mount defenses for the quality inherent in The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Slapstick Tragedy, The Seven Descents of Myrtle, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. “What we had, I now see,” Tenn said, “was a Rosary of failures, and if we had had some beads to work, we certainly would have, expanding characters, hiring new directors, altering dialogue. In our phone calls and in meetings we had, we imagined our lives as successful writers and fully integrated people.”

  When Tenn and Inge got together, they would repair to the bedroom, lying “on bed” talking, holding each other. There was no longer even a pretense of romance, only of comfort, and there was a feeling, this time, that a final watch was in effect: they were no longer the young, dreaming writers with Mallarmé quotes on the wall or Harry Crosby’s fiery sun to look to for inspiration. “This was a sweet form of Extreme Unction,” Tenn said, “final rites for our talents and for our friendship, but we were back to the old days, and I told Barbara to do the same when she went to visit him. ‘Just hold him. Talk to him. Treat him like a writer. Tell him the failures were some sort of mistake, not his fault.’ This was, of course, what I was also telling people to say to me as well.”

  William Inge began to write novels: They were met with mixed reviews, and he attempted suicide. “If I can’t write any longer,” he told Tenn, “why do anything any longer, like live?” Inge’s sister, Helene, was sent for and moved into his house. Inge had turned to mysticism, religion, the occult. One spirit diviner contacted his long-dead and much-loved brother; another his mother, who told him she was appalled at the condition in which he was keeping his home. “Was that all she said?” Tenn asked. “Yes,” Inge replied. “Mother always told me I never took care of my things.”

  Inge threw some runes for Tenn to divine his own future. It was not good. “Somehow my future included an alphabet that was missing several vital letters,” Tenn said. “I never could figure out how Bill got this from a velvet bag of little blocks, but it felt as genuine as anything else I was consulting at the time.”

  Both writers investigated Catholicism at the same time, with Tenn ultimately converting to his own design of the Roman faith, while Bill found comfort in the prayers and the ritual. Ultimately, Inge would claim comfort from a faith that was described to him by Tenn after an encounter with Anne Sexton.

  Sexton, a poet of “sensitive and suicidal intent,” as Tenn put it, had come to his attention through Robert Lowell, who told Tenn that she was a strong but dangerous talent. “He added that I was such a thing myself,” Tenn told me, “so I felt compelled to read her work, which I found fascinating. She had managed to tap into the same fears and self-hatreds I understood so well. We both loved music, and we both hated to be too close to anyone. She loved me, or said she did, so something of a relationship was established.”

  In 1969 Sexton was working on her first—and only—play, Mercy Street. She sent Tenn the script, asking for his advice on any revisions he thought necessary. Tenn read the play and admired it, envied what he called its “epic scope and chilling fatality.” Tenn made no notes, even though Sexton had requested them: all she got was his praise, both for the text and for the decision to cast Marian Seldes (“my wise and tender servant”) in the role based on Sexton. Told by Tenn to adhere to Seldes, Sexton did so, wearing a pair of shoes given to her by the actress, which cushioned her feet against the Manhattan sidewalks, watching her every move, even imitating her speech patterns. Tenn even told her they looked like sisters: tall, raven-haired, pale, like “a duo of seers from medieval vaudeville.”

  Tenn became obsessed with Sexton’s poetry, and he called the poet at her home in Massachusetts several times, telling her he was looking for peace or God or some comfort. Sexton told him he would be better off taking the advice of her therapist, who said that God, whatever that was, was deep in her typewriter. “And so,” Tenn told me, “I went to my machine, my deus ex machina every day, looking for God. I was typing toward God.” Tenn urged Bill Inge to search for the same God in the same way.

  Tenn took copies of Sexton’s books to Inge and read them to him on his cluttered bed, the drapes drawn, traffic on Sunset Boulevard sounding as if it were hundreds of miles away. The central air-conditioning hummed. Bill Inge survived on soft food and televised sermons. “I wanted to tell him stories when there had been a future for us,” Tenn said, “because we both wanted to know if we still had a future, if we still could dream and write and matter.” The stories were told in the language of Anne Sexton, “severe and strained and seared into the mind and on the page.” Although the room was dark and no reflections were available, Tenn asked his friend to imagine bouncing lights on the ceiling, and to each one he should attach a thought, drop a memory. ‘Look upward and latch on to whatever happy memory or need arises.’ This activity lulled Bill Inge into sleep. The next day, according to Tenn, Inge had scribbled some notes on a pad for a play that was based on their conversations of the previous evening. Tenn was enraged by the notes, and he destroyed them not long after he discovered them. He left abruptly and would never see William Inge again.

  Back in New York, Tenn began writing a play about his “shattered” friends Bill Inge and Anne Sexton. “For so many years, I had resented the competition that had been brought to me by Bill. I loved and wanted and needed the comfort he brought instead, and I failed to understand that the competition from his plays grew stronger and asked the same questions I had. I see now a large and golden bed—golden by the memories tha
t are happy and remind me that we were once young and time was an ally, and by the ministrations of a Jo Mielziner who is not dead but ready to cast one of his lemony sunsets on a bad memory—and Bill and I are there and songs of our time are playing on a radio that can’t be taken from us by our bad actions or our misguided erotic affections. We speak of plays and novels and paintings and stories told. We both understand that stories are what get us up in the morning and to sleep at night. Myth and fable and the simple story of a woman who has a breakdown making a grocery list; myth and legend and the image of a young man attempting to outrun an imagined team of athletes, hoping for a victory on the field. He’s trying to outrun the truth and the power of his feelings, and the only victory, he realizes, late in the game, is death or a life suspended in lies of action or of liquid. Alcohol builds for us an amber gel into which we can submerge our minds, but our minds fight the action, like the kittens the lady down the street used to place in burlap sacks, stuffing them into garbage pails of warm water, drowning them, keeping the yards and the streets clean, and the children screaming. The truth wants to win.

  “And a woman—Anne Sexton, tall and dark and serious—walks through that window with the billowing curtains, and on the street below, happier cats roam and mewl. She is fine with the image of two male lovers relaxing, and asks for a cigarette. She sits and smokes deeply. ‘Time is wasting,’ she reminds the men. ‘There won’t be much more time for nights like this.’

  “Anne Sexton walks into my dreams now, as she walked into my life in the late sixties, a dead decade, when my brain had been submerged in amber, my limbs on a course of action separate from that for which my brain had arranged an itinerary. Sexton never doubted my talent, never doubted the worth of what I might be trying to do. She only doubted the ability we had to stay on the job, to endure the rigors of our employment, to keep marshaling our puny endowments to keep providing the poems and the plays.