Follies of God Page 30

Tenn crafted a statement (as he titled it) for me to present to Page, in the hopes that she would read or hear it and then call on Tenn to write for her, or she might call to recommend some means of improving himself. This is what Tenn wrote:

  She has the mind of a writer, which is, I assure you, the highest compliment I could pay her. She was also unafraid of honesty or silence, two things I always think of when I think of her. She didn’t need approval or find comfort in silly talk or empty conversations that bond people together: She came to work and to work well. She wore herself out. Shaw writes something in his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma, I think, that always makes me think of Gerry: “Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.” Gerry used everything, and she was not afraid to ask everyone around her to use everything as well. She had an understanding of why we were all gathered together to create theater that I have only found in perhaps two or three other people. She did not take a lot of things seriously, but she certainly took her work seriously, and she took herself seriously in the ruthless pursuit of getting her work to the highest level of accomplishment.

  Geraldine Page is a great actress. That is not a statement one makes freely. It wasn’t that she simply had talent—everyone has some bit of talent, a speck of something sparkly—she had a genius, a maddening intellect that came with a supernatural vision—of people and things. She pushed me. We argued. We worked it out. She made me a better writer and she made my plays better plays. Friendship? I wouldn’t say so: I don’t think of leaning on Gerry’s shoulder or calling her up in the middle of the night for comfort and a few laughs. But I would call her—and I have called her—to remind me of why we do this, why we matter, why we have to get it right.

  Geraldine Page is all about getting it right, and just above that goal is getting it brilliant, which she does. A solitary genius.

  When Page read the notes, she snorted, look stunned, smiled softly at me. “I tried to be a friend to Tennessee,” she told me. “I really did, but there was always a thick wall around him, defenses and artifice and deflections. Maybe that’s what I also have; maybe that’s what he’s talking about. I will say that I thought I was being a friend when he called me, when he sought me out, but I was never enough: I could never give him what he needed, and what he needed was ludicrous, because he wanted a simple answer or a simple method to get himself together and to work and to mean something to people. And there is no simple way. There is no one way!”

  Page noticed a quote from Oscar Wilde in the upper-right-hand corner of his notes: “She lives the poetry she cannot write.” “Why is that here?” she asked.

  I told her that Tennessee had struggled to recall this quote as he spoke of her, an actress he certainly adored, but a woman he never came to understand. “I’m a dreamer,” he told me. “I anticipate events, emotions, outcomes, and I am always disappointed. Gerry does not dream until a task is at hand, and she dreams with the assistance of a writer and a director and a design crew, so her dreams find manifestation, even if she is never satisfied with the final presentation. I could learn so much from her. I haven’t learned yet to not dream of or for anything unless it is directly related to work, to survival, to getting by. The people in our daily midst are not deserving of our dreams. We must be like Gerry and walk and move and take care of daily events, but we must not commit to these activities our priceless ability to transform through a dream.”

  “I have no idea what he means,” Page confessed. “I think that we dream precisely to work and to survive, but I also think we dream too much. Tennessee dreamed too much. The dreams took over. It is, I suppose, what we must do initially: dream. We dream our way into a fantasy and we dream our way out of whatever town or situation or identity we found at birth, and we craft a new one. When we craft a way out and a way forward, the dreamer is replaced, I guess, by the worker, the craftsman.

  Geraldine Page in the 1961 film version of Summer and Smoke, much as she first appeared to Tennessee a decade earlier in the off-Broadway production of the play. Page was intense, driven, and, in Tennessee’s words, “obsessive about working and observing.” (illustration credit 13.1)

  “When I get a script, the dreams of the writer are a gift to me, to open and unravel and play with. I don’t dream when I act—I guess I expect a lot, I work toward a lot, but I do not imagine or dream an outcome or a reaction. What I try to do instead is take the writer’s dream—like with Tennessee’s work—and meld it with images and feelings I’ve noticed throughout my life. Maybe I’m melding the dreams of the writer with the waking, walking dream of life to create a part. Who knows what people are thinking about when they walk around or do their daily chores? Is that dreaming? Hoping? Expecting?

  “But you see, dreaming is a negative thing, in a way, and I think Tennessee’s dreaming—that lifelong plunge into darkness—was a negative thing. Dreams come when we’re asleep or unconscious or drugged or near death. We see white light and dead friends and relatives in a sort of dream when the brain recedes. It’s very poetic, but it’s not a state in which I care to work. I need all of my senses when I’m working. I need to remember and to be alive and afraid and able to edit and censor and evaluate. There’s an age to dream, and I’m past that. So was Tennessee. So are you. The dreams are the first act, I guess. The overture. And the work begins. One should always be beginning to work. And then you allow others to dream.”

  Page came to Tenn through the ministrations of José Quintero, who had been assigned to direct the revival of Summer and Smoke, a reclamation of Tenn’s play, a rebuke to the failure that had been presented on Broadway by Margo Jones, whose affections Tenn now rejected, and who had been pushed to the mental sidelines. “Tennessee had a particularly sharp ability to remove from his line of vision, and from his thoughts, anyone who had, in his opinion, failed to serve his theatrical aspirations,” Quintero told me. “The revival of Summer and Smoke had a cloud over it, of revenge and of settling scores. Tennessee was determined to show audiences and critics that it was a play that worked, that it was a fine piece of literature, that it could move people. These were points he reiterated over and over, after which he would tell me—in clear terms—that these wonderful attributes had been degraded by the limitations and prejudices of the director. I had very little trust handed to me by Tennessee during our time on Summer and Smoke. I don’t think that he appreciated—and certainly never acknowledged—my contributions to the play until the reviews were in and the play was well-received, and this is, of course, ludicrous. Tennessee could trust an actress, a designer, a composer simply on the basis of how their contributions made him feel. He would point to his heart and tell me that the primary critic—that bruised and knowing heart—had passed the crucial judgment. He did not extend the same courtesy, by way of his heart, to his directors—certainly not to me, not at that time.”

  Given that he did not trust Quintero, whose work was largely unknown to him, Tenn did not approve initially of his casting choice for the role of Alma, a woman who, more than Blanche DuBois, was a reflection of the playwright’s “errant and hungry heart.”

  “It has become a sort of concrete truth that I am Blanche,” Tenn said, “but I am much more like Alma, peeking through actual and metaphysical curtains, spying on the things I want to love and to feel and to have, but afraid to get much farther than the porch. My porch is the stage, I suppose, or the pale judgment, where I can place stage directions and characters and move them about in a fashion that is more to my liking than those presented by my limitations and my fears. Blanche, I suppose, is Alma after years of denial and needs unfurnished. Blanche is Alma beyond that porch, the lacy curtains through which she has peered now tied about her head, a mantilla she will tell people came from some nobleman from Barcelona who had hoped to marry her. We lie when we cannot love, when we are not loved. Alma has learned only to lie to herself, to keep believing that she is worthy of love, that she may one day
possess it. Her delusions have not taken root in the land beneath her feet.”

  Tenn wanted an actress of great strength who could also convey the ethereal and “spiritual nobility” of Alma Winemiller, and Geraldine Page, an actress who had spent most of her professional time on stages outside of New York, did not seem ideal for this purpose. “Geraldine burned with intelligence, with concentration,” Quintero remembered. “This is a quality that she had even at that age, at that stage of her development, and it was very disconcerting when it was not in the service of a character. It could create the appearance of arrogance or coldness. I came to know and to love her very much, so I could see what she was actually thinking or doing, but I think that when I presented her to Tennessee, he looked at her as a temporary diversion before we got back to seriously casting the part.”

  Tenn recalled the first meeting with Page as one in which she interviewed him; she dominated the conversation. Quintero confirmed this, but added that Tenn’s passivity may have been born out of his conviction that she would never play the part, and that he was simply briefly entertaining the curiosity of a rube. “She was very sharp, of mind and of feature,” Tenn told me. “She was almost violently scrubbed, very pale, almost bleached looking.” Page arrived wearing no makeup, not because she had begun to imagine the physical characteristics of Alma Winemiller, but because it was simply not her style to dress up and powder down. As she told me, “I wanted to come to Tennessee as a blank slate. I wanted him to look at me and ask me to become whatever he wanted, and I would have, and I could have. I can glow or show any particular emotion you might need, but I had no interest, and still have no interest, in smearing on makeup and scent and certain clothes to show you a character. That’s not character; that’s costuming. I walked in there as an actress, ready to work.”

  Geraldine Page had only recently celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday when she met with Tennessee Williams, but he recalled that she could have been fifteen or she could have been forty. She arrived with her hair pulled back from her face and fastened into a bun, which was appropriate for Tenn’s concept of Alma, but as the conversation progressed, Page’s hair, shiny and brown and abundant, fell to her shoulders and she ran her fingers through it, both nervously and flirtatiously; she lashed it about like a whip; put strands of it in her mouth and chewed; she draped a shank of it over her eyes as if in embarrassment. “She seemed to orchestrate her oddness,” Tenn told me. “She did not present herself to me as an attractive woman, but as she spoke and as she explained herself and her understanding of the play, her features changed, the color rose in her cheeks, her mouth might shift from a sneer to a ravishing smile.”

  Page possessed hands that never sat in her lap or stood still. They flew like speed-injected doves across her face, up in the air, over her mouth, which seemed to be the orifice from which some truth was always likely to emerge. “I focused on her mouth and her chin,” Tenn told me. “She seemed to be terribly self-conscious of her mouth, but her teeth were fine—she was not hiding some dental catastrophe. Her smile could be lovely or it could be too strong, almost demented in its demonstration. Her hands were lovely. They reminded me of a porcelain box that had once rested on my mother’s dressing table: a jewelry box on top of which rested these lovely porcelain hands, clasped together in resignation or prayer or death—I never knew. Geraldine Page had those hands, and she kept them in flight, all about her, energy and diversion.”

  Quintero laughed at the description of Page’s hands. “Someone somewhere is writing a dissertation at some wonderful drama school on Geraldine Page’s hands,” he quipped. “I know from directing her and from being her friend that her hands were the instruments that she felt kept her from pursuing things both good and bad. If she was harboring some negative thought about something, you would find her pressing her fingers into her forehead or her temples, to suppress or push away the thoughts. If she sat on the edge of an opinion she might regret expressing, she would place her hand over her mouth, to keep it housed where it couldn’t hurt anyone.”

  Page also became embarrassed when praised or aroused or exhilarated, and she grew flushed and would bring her hands over her face, to hide her delight and to defuse any criticism or examination that her joy might invite. “I never felt comfortable showing my pleasure,” Page told me. “I thought it unseemly, and I thought I would be criticized.”

  Both José Quintero and Lee Strasberg, with whom Page studied at the Actors Studio, would instruct her to control her hands, with Strasberg going so far as to tie them, with rope, to either her sides or a chair. (The story varies, and when I met Page she refused to discuss Lee Strasberg at all.) “I wanted her face and her intentions to show,” Quintero told me. “The story was always in Geraldine’s face. It was also in her hands, but I wanted her to combine all of her methods of storytelling, all of her limbs, to become the great actress I knew, even then, that she was.”

  But on that day when Geraldine Page first met Tennessee Williams, she had no control over her body or her hair or her hands, and as the meeting progressed, and Page’s hair and blouse and demeanor altered and loosened and moved about, Tenn came to see that she could be Alma. “She asked the right questions,” Tenn remembered. “There was no waste of time, or energy, or intelligence. She cut right to the point. She begged for nothing.”

  When I read those words to Page, more than three years after Tenn had given them to me, she cut me off and said, forcefully, “I never begged for anything, except piano lessons, which my parents couldn’t afford. I got the lessons and I loved them, but I did not become a pianist; I never conquered that instrument or the world of music. I learned not to beg. Never beg for anything. Earn it. Demand it. Seek it. Never beg for it. You see, I knew I was meant to be Alma. I knew I was meant to play those parts. I knew that it was my time. I had to trust that people would see that. But I didn’t beg. I never, ever begged. What I’m trying to say is that nothing was ever given to me, and nothing that really matters in the world ever is. You earn it in that special time of your life when everything combines to make you prove yourself.”

  That day in 1952, when Geraldine Page met Tennessee Williams, was that special time of her life, and she admitted that she was not terribly shy or polite about making it work out to her satisfaction.

  From the notes in Tenn’s shopping bag:

  There is a place to which I once had swift and easy access. This is not a geographical location, but a psychic one, I suppose. It swirls with memory and a generous if not always healthy need to share these memories. I do not understand how I came to possess so much extraneous thought and fear, but it drags me away from this place to which I would like to return.

  Several lines were crossed out, to the point that I couldn’t read them, and then the thread continued.

  Just jump, my brain tells me. Take the thought, take the intention, and place it on the page, share it, see what happens. But my heart is full of fear, and I hold back. What if? What if? Years ago this was the question in classes, and actors asked “What if?” and imagined things “as if” and found new dimensions to their work and to themselves. Here I am, old and stiff and afraid, and I need that flexibility and forcefulness that I envy in so many others. I need to develop an intolerance for fear. I need to stop wasting my time on the edge of writing and caring and simply do both of those things. I had no fear once about testing the tolerance of others with what I had witnessed, and now I’m afraid to even discuss my hopes with an aspirant with whom I walk and talk and write in circles. We dream and we hope and we bring nothing to the page or to the point.

  This was the first time I had seen myself mentioned in the notes Tenn made during our time together. Later in the notes, after stating his desire to return to discipline and intention, Tenn writes of his phone call with Elia Kazan:

  He was right, of course. It is time to get back to work and back to the point. I was brought back to the memories and the examples of the people who had made me want to write, and I held them as b
eads in prayer, but Gadg was right to note that I had earned the beads, and I had them and I could use them, but I had also acquired a barnacle on my boat, and travel was now impossible. I’m weighed down by many things, and some of them may be permanent impositions, but some I can cast off quickly and painlessly and get back to the pale judgment.

  It is in my best interests now to leave New Orleans.

  I never said anything to Tenn about these particular notes, and I chose to believe that there was no malice or regret in what he wrote. I returned the notes to him and we resumed our conversations. Our talks now were focused and frenzied. Tenn was very clearly on a deadline.

  “Do you remember when we discussed the stage directions to Summer and Smoke?” Tenn asked me. We were in a room at the Royal Orleans, one that had clearly not been housing him for very long: there were no clothes in the closet; the soaps in the bathroom were still wrapped; other than a pile of folders on the television set, every surface was pristine. A portable typewriter, installed by a bellman, sat on a folding table, which Tenn immediately moved within inches of the television set. The day was hot and the room was air-conditioned to an Arctic degree and the room service was swift and obsequious. I found the notes and read them back to Tenn.

  “I was really trying to bring Geraldine back into my consciousness,” he explained. “The stage directions were important, and they clarified my intention, but I really wanted Gerry in the room, in my mind, moving me toward the work.”

  Tenn thought of Geraldine Page as the finest, sharpest needle, capable of piercing any fabric and creating any number of patterns. I thought I had heard him say this of another actress in another context, but I took the notes and I listened.

  “The play is a pattern,” he continued, “a pattern by Simplicity or McCall’s, and the actress cuts and shapes the crisp paper of the pattern and attaches it to the fabrics, and the fabric is all that she brings to the part. It is her life and her experience and her unique take on all that passes before her. Read that back to me.”