Follies of God Read online

  Years later, as Tenn and Maureen, whom he came to call “the old shoe”—because he could always fit right into her rhythms, her schedule, her neuroses, and find understanding and comfort—began to realize that they had achieved, by happy accident, one of their goals: They had found an order to things, a means by which they could place what Tenn called a “black border of clarity” around events and emotions. They would find each other and submit to the ritual of holding each other in the dark, and analyze who they were and how they had gotten there. “I have never felt terribly comfortable with people,” Tenn told me, “but I feel comfortable with Mo.”

  In our conversations Tenn would speak of words by great writers collecting like bricks or gems or stones, rising ultimately in a play or a novel or a story that could make him believe in writing and living. Tenn spoke of prayers that relied on beads or a specific number of steps or rituals, and he came to believe that they could lead him to peace or industry. However, the steps leading to Maureen’s West Seventieth Street bedroom were also a ritual, a rite of “clearance and comfort,” and Tenn felt better with each step toward that unmade but welcoming bed. “Let me tell you,” Tenn told me, “Maureen did not keep an especially fit home, and the bed had seen its share of adventures, but in I went.”

  “We got into the bed,” Maureen remembered, “and we got a radio, a transistor radio that I cadged from one of my kids, and we looked and looked for a drama, for music that might remind us of our childhood, and there was nothing! Just rock and roll and weather and religious nuts. I said, ‘Honey, this ain’t happening.’ ”

  But Tenn had an idea: It was irrelevant what was on the radio. What mattered was what they did with what came on the radio. “After all,” he reasoned, “we never knew what would pop up on the radios of our youth. Why know now?”

  Tenn and Maureen lay in the bed for hours, speaking aloud when they saw or imagined another setting, another room, another reality. They would re-create this scenario, in various locales, with various radios, over the years.

  “We didn’t drink an ounce on those nights,” she would say, “not an ounce. We might have gone to the bed drunk, but we had nothing once we got there and started dreaming. Jesus Christ, were those the only times we were comfortable or felt safe?”

  “I tell you now,” Tenn told me, “that at an advanced age, knowing many things, I can live and go on and try and fall and try again because there is a woman named Maureen Stapleton in this world.”

  Tennessee had an idea for a play, created expressly for Maureen.

  He came to believe that he could complete a play—a play that mattered—if he could dictate it to me.

  “The ideas are here,” he would announce, pointing to his leaf-strewn cranium, ideas swirling out of control. “You and your young eyes, your eagerness, can help me get them there.” He would point to the blue books or a menu or a tablecloth, and I would take dictation.

  She lies in bed, fully dressed. Resplendently dressed, ready to receive. The room is plush, everything in its place, but the bed is a rumpled paradise of linens, undergarments, paperback novels, candy wrappers, handkerchiefs, pads of paper and pens, a multitude of pillows that will be used to prop her up when she is excited or to place over her head when she can’t bear another moment of stimulation or boredom or what we call life.

  She could be in Mississippi or Morocco; Nebraska or Nepal; Baltimore or Bangladesh.

  It does not matter. She has the capacity to be wherever she needs to be.

  Or did.

  Her powers are beginning to fail her.

  By her bedside are a phone and a large radio, very modern, with an enormous dial. If she turns it—and she does, with great skill and swiftness—she can tune into programs across the globe and across time. All of experience and extremity are within this radio.

  The radio sometimes fails her.

  She reaches for the phone on those occasions and calls several men from a list she has compiled over the years of the great fabulists, writers, and performers around the world.

  “Talk to me,” she’ll say into the phone, and their voices will fill the room, the lights will dim, and through the scrim of the wall behind her bed we will see whatever scene they create together.

  She lives in fear of satellite failures, program interruptions, inclement weather.

  Radios fail, phone lines are inoperable.

  She cannot bring herself to recall the hurricanes of the past, when all communication was lost and she was forced to dive deeply into her own reservoir of memory and painfully dredge up her entertainment, her arousal.

  One evening, after an unsatisfactory encounter with a young novelist, whose stories have grown increasingly pale, she takes a break for dinner and to make notes for future phone mates.

  There is a rumble of thunder.

  She looks out the window and sees ominous clouds.

  She quickly places calls to three of her best phone mates and asks them to be ready soon. A storm is approaching, and she has not gained surcease for the night.

  She begins writing notes and becomes increasingly giddy at the prospect of the upcoming call. Which of the three should she call? Which one of the men would best handle the scenarios she was considering?

  The room is plunged into darkness. The lights are out. The phones are dead.

  She rushes to the window and we see her silhouette, outlined with lightning.

  She rushes back to the phone, angrily jiggling the receiver.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  End of act 1.

  “I think we can do something with this,” Tenn told me. I kept the outline in my blue book, and we continued to talk.

  I did not make contact with Maureen until the fall of 1991. I sent several letters to the West Seventieth Street address: one was returned and others were never answered. Ultimately, an editor told me that Maureen no longer lived at that address—she had moved to Lenox, Massachusetts—and he recommended I write to her through the auspices of Chen Sam, the press agent she shared with Elizabeth Taylor. I took the name and address and sent the letter.

  However, my editor friend had butchered the name of the press agent, so that it read like the name of a Szechuan restaurant: the letter was sent in the care of Hang Cham, and this created such hysteria on the part of the press agent, and for Maureen, that my letter got a brisk reply.

  “I laughed until I peed,” Maureen told me, “so you can see that I’m easily amused. But you got my attention.”

  She was deeply disappointed to learn that mine was an honest gaffe, and not some bold and iconoclastic statement. Maureen had hoped to meet a twisted customer; instead she met a writer who wanted to talk about Tennessee.

  “Oh well,” she sighed, “you’re in the door; do your stuff.”

  In that fall of 1991, the country—and, more explicitly, Maureen—was totally enmeshed in the Clarence Thomas hearings, and any phone conversations I wished to have with her had to be carefully arranged around this television coverage, her allotted drinks for the day, and the ministrations of a friend who had been drafted to care for her after a serious back injury.

  “Hey,” she blurted on the phone one day, “this guy wants out. I’ve had him here too long. You wanna come up and see after me?”

  I had not yet met Maureen and did not feel sufficiently trained to care for her, with or without a back injury. I somehow knew that caring for Maureen required a very specific set of skills and strengths unknown to me. I could not imagine traveling to Lenox and serving as her masseur and provider of Blue Nun.

  Maureen grumbled into the phone and told me that she was growing increasingly disappointed in me. I did not seem the bold person Tenn had loved and spent time with, much less had sent into the world to meet the people who had mattered to him. And yet she stuck with me, because, as she always said, “any friend of Tenn’s is a friend of mine.”

  Maureen was tough and occasionally brutal in her assessments of herself and her peers. Like so many artists—and many co
nsidered her one, even if she did not—she had come to feel that she had wasted her life and her talents, and if she could look back on her career and find some good work, she immediately attributed it to Tennessee’s writing or Harold Clurman’s direction or a fluke or a newspaper strike or a diet she had been on or the fact that all of the other “cunts” (the term she insisted on using for her fellow actresses) had temporarily lost their senses and ceded the center of the stage to her.

  Maureen might have been a dreamer, and she might have admitted that her addiction to fantasy was greater than her addiction to alcohol, but she demanded the truth from her friends and those with whom she worked. “I hate a soft sell,” she told me. “Do not protect my feelings if I ask your opinion: I’m asking because I’m unsure; I’m asking because I know something’s wrong. Tell me the truth. Be brutal. Help me.”

  Tenn had sent a copy of his play—dictated to me in a mad rush—and she had chastised him for it, calling it furtive and sentimental, a childish plea for affirmation. I learned on that day in 1991, when I traveled to Lenox, that Maureen had been called late at night after I had met Tenn in New Orleans, and in the confusing, raucous conversation, she had assumed that my arrival at her doorstop was imminent. “I thought you were coming to see me—and soon,” she told me. “It wasn’t unlike Tenn to tell me someone was coming, and it wasn’t unlike me to agree to whatever he suggested. So I put away the Blue Nun and took a bath. What took you so long? I’d like to know. I took a fucking bath for you in 1982!”

  Maureen had read the play and hadn’t liked it, so Tenn read it to her, interrupting himself to explain the casting, the effect, the intention. Maureen hated the play—the “treatment,” she called it, “jagged ideas”—and told him he was gasping for air, reaching, hoping, failing. “You have a great desire to write,” she told him, “and nothing to write about yet. Strip it down.”

  “The play?” Tenn asked.

  “The desire,” she replied. “The play you can burn.”

  “I hated to hurt him,” Maureen said, “but I knew that as a friend, as someone he trusted and needed, as someone who dreamed and hoped with him, I needed to tell the truth. I also knew that I was dumping on a man who was already in deep trouble, scared, desperate. I tried to give him some positive criticism, some examples.”

  Maureen reminded Tenn of a conversation with Harold Clurman during rehearsals, in 1957, for Orpheus Descending. The play, Clurman had told Tenn, should be like your own hand. Clurman had held up his own firm, elegant, expansive hand, fingers flexed, the palm pink and healthy. Each finger, he recounted, was a memory, a snatch of time so real to you and utterly dear, whether sweet or evil, accidental or committed with intensive purpose. The fingers—the events—lead to the palm, which is the play, and those fingers have to—must—close over the palm. Clurman then curled his fingers over his palm into a tight fist. The events are tightly contained in the play; the play should be as tight as this fist, as powerful, as capable of restriction or damage. And at its conclusion, Clurman continued, the fingers unfurl, the angry redness recedes, the hand is open, a symbol of supplication. The effect has been achieved, and now there is release.

  “And your play—this play,” Clurman continued, “is like this.” At which point he stood and danced a manic jig, both hands spastically splayed, fingers wiggling, frequently clapping together.

  “Let me tell you,” Maureen told me, “the point was made, and we sat there fucking slack-jawed. I told Tenn that story; he remembered it. He laughed and said he was going to work on his fists and his fogs. I hoped that I helped.”

  In our time together, Tenn would often raise his fist—clenched, as if extolling Black Power—and announce loudly, “En avant!”

  It was impossible to engage Maureen on the topic of acting: it bored her senseless. While she had attended sessions at the Actors Studio for many years, she had, like so many others, turned mutinous toward its artistic director, Lee Strasberg, and had largely abandoned much of what she had once held true about its controversial Method.

  “I don’t think we need to know why we do things onstage,” she said, “I really don’t. I think we need to be trained to be ready for whatever comes up, and I fault the Studio for failing to adequately train us for a career of any variety or depth. We never worked on our voices or our bodies at the Studio, so when you get to be of a certain age, as certain assholes put it, you no longer have the muscles or the memory in your throat to get a sound for a period piece. I was never trained to move properly, to use my body as that ‘vessel’ so many speak of. So I think we spent too much time at the Studio delving into our brains and serving ourselves and not plays or audiences. And now,” she announced, “I don’t want to talk about the fucking Studio anymore. I spent way too much time there. We all did. We learned a lot and we grew, but it’s also true that we wasted our time, but we felt glorious, positively glorious, about ourselves.”

  Maureen was quick to admit that she had little patience with what she called “ordinary, run-of-the-mill” analysis, of either one’s art or one’s psyche. “Granted, I’m a mess,” she said, “and the messes are probably less likely to want to go into the crevices of the brain and see what’s wiggling around in there, but I just think it’s bullshit. I think I drink because I’m scared and bored most of the time, and booze livens things up for me. I don’t think I have the courage to do the things I should do—like face responsibility, or become a full-fledged, grown-up woman—so I delay the taking of that responsibility with a drink or with a pill or with an act of amazingly stupid carnal courage. Is it important why I do it?”

  Admitting that it was perhaps a form of folly, Maureen believed that her times alone, dreaming, or with Tennessee, dreaming in “tipsy tandem,” were her only consistent and effective forms of self-improvement. “I may be a mess,” she said, “and I may be crazy, but I had a great friend—Tennessee—and he had a great friend in me. For a long, long time. And that means something. Or it should.”

  In the summer of 1990, I had a series of telephone conversations with Marlon Brando. In those days before caller ID, when I simply picked up a ringing phone and took my chances, I heard the voice of Marlon Brando on the other end of the receiver.

  “I want to talk about Tennessee,” he told me.

  I had several calls from Marlon over a period of several weeks. Brando was in what he called a catastrophic state at that time: his son was facing trial for the murder of his sister’s boyfriend, and he was also taking on the process of writing his autobiography, and he wanted to talk about people and events that had been important to him. “Or should have been,” he stressed repeatedly. “Or should have been.” Brando called to talk about Tennessee Williams—and he did—but he also could not stop talking about Maureen Stapleton.

  Maureen Stapleton and Marlon Brando, on the set of Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind (1959), based on Tennessee’s Orpheus Descending. “I think we were trying to stay sane during the shoot,” Maureen said upon seeing this image. (illustration credit 2.1)

  Marlon adored Maureen and compared her to a large box of Cracker Jacks: sweet, sticky, messy, simple, and, in its way, perfect. Both Tenn and Maureen remembered happy times with the mercurial and beautiful Brando, cluttered and loud and joyous, at the apartment he and Wally Cox shared on West Fifty-second Street. If Tenn and Maureen needed to regularly repair to a bed with a radio and some imaginative memory work, they could also find what Maureen called “a kind of joy and understanding” in Brando’s apartment.

  “We were young and alive and stupid and generous,” Brando told me, “and we believed that anything could happen: Opportunities and new friends were all around us. There was no fear—for our talents or for our persons—and we were, all of us, committed to something big.” Brando’s apartment was always open, there was food, some wine, perpetual music (both from a phonograph and from the many clubs along the street, from which jazz wafted up to the skies), and everyone spoke of their music or their art or the scene on which th
ey were working—or the passionate life they were seeking. The apartment had a unique open-admissions policy: all were allowed entrance a first time, but a return visit depended on your commitment to life in general and the life of the party within the apartment. “It was rampant,” Tenn remembered. “And wonderful.” “It was insane,” Maureen remembered. “And glorious.”

  Tenn had known success by the time the parties were attended in the Brando apartment, but he wanted to be with the people he called “the strivers,” and he marveled at their energy, their sense of community, their sense of freedom. “I wanted to remain a striver,” Tenn told me. “I wanted to be creatively young, even if my flesh would not accommodate me. That apartment and those people helped me to keep dreaming the ‘what if’ and ‘what else’ scenarios I needed. I was so afraid and so timid for so long, and these people seemed to have no fears: they were loose and comfortable with their ideas and their minds and their food and their affection.” Brando and his friends fascinated Tenn, but they also intimidated him. “They were all beautiful and young and unafraid to touch, to go for what they wanted,” Tenn told me, “and I’ve never been able to accept that, to flow with that. I felt safe with Maureen—safe enough to look at the young strivers and follow their dreams, which were as fervent as mine, but which were not so much in the darkness; not so much the fragile dreams of a queer kid locked in his room, safe from enemies. These were active dreamers, fervent, angry—but joyously angry. They believed that they would make good work, make a difference, matter. Watching these people, I realized that God makes an artist. Face this now and hold the fact dear. There is nothing else to do about the equipment you had installed celestially, and there is absolutely not one single thing you can do about the equipment that your family, your place of birth and culturation, your surroundings, your history implant in you. You can tweak and lie and warp and weave, but you’ve got what you’ve got. But the art can come from the tweaking and the weaving. You can’t change yourself, but you can change what you produce. He [Brando] was the most exquisite man I think I’ve ever seen. He smelled of activity and musk and wheat fields. His body was perfectly and powerfully developed, a specimen not often seen in those postwar years. He was built like a stevedore, but he had the most beautiful and fragile of faces—smooth, flawless skin; a full and sensuous mouth; luxuriant eyelashes; a sweet smile. I thought of murky fairy tales my mother had read to me as a child, in which unwary people wandered into forests and discovered magical creatures who combined human traits with animal, with flora, with elements.”