Follies of God Read online

  “Tenn and I both needed those people, that education,” Maureen said. “And I needed him by my side. Tenn made me feel safe. We needed each other.”

  “Maureen talks of being this shy, fat girl from Troy,” Tenn remembered, “but I remember her as joyous, open, brave. She could talk to or seduce anyone; she tackled any role that was given to her—onstage or in a class—and soon she would be my Serafina, a part that was inspired to a great extent by my time in Italy and from my exposure to the fears of Maureen, as well as the warmth with which she covered and healed them.”

  “I think it was Tenn speaking to me, explaining Serafina to me, that made me feel so safe,” Maureen said. “Safer than I ever felt—onstage or in life. It was like being on that bed. What the hell is going on? I always ask. And Tenn calmed me. Tenn had that ability. He could just look at you and say ‘There is this woman, she lives in the Keys, and she takes in sewing on occasion. She doesn’t always get her work done on time, but she is exquisite in her detail. Any Parisian house would be honored to have her on its staff. She is a mess, however. Her hair, her posture, her diction—all loose and out of control. She only has control with pins and scissors and material. She only has a sense of control when she surrenders hers to the Madonna, who resides on a shelf in her little house full of mannequins and material and melancholy and the scent and memory of a man almost always gone.’ I was a mess,” she admitted. “I wasn’t doing very well. I didn’t understand the play or the woman or why a mick from Troy, New York, was playing this virago.”

  What is a virago? Clurman asked her. Before she could answer, he told her to forget what she thought it was and just play the woman. Maureen did not respond well to such direction, so she sought out Tenn and asked for his help.

  Stapleton and Tennessee (1975), happy and tipsy, and looking for an escape, where they could talk. “Even then,” Maureen said, “we felt we were just getting things right, learning how to cope.” (illustration credit 2.2)

  “Tenn was a seducer,” Maureen remembered. “He seduced with words, and he seduced by loving you so goddamned much. He just looked right through me and told me I could do it, but then he told me who and what I was playing and what I should be doing. He told me to stop thinking and to look into being. I was outside of myself, looking at Maureen playing this woman, rather than being this woman, and in that play—probably only in that play—I was fully alive and real and myself.”

  It wasn’t only on the stage that Maureen gave of herself fully, however. She was a very present friend, and confessed that that period of time that became known as “the Tattoo years” were her happiest and fullest—as an actress, a friend, a woman. “Maureen always appears at the ideal time, so she is the angel we dream of, pray for, pine for, wait to see,” Brando said. “People laugh at her and her ability—extraordinary ability—to find and secrete food on her person and that of her friends. Everyone knows that food is not safe around Maureen—it finds its way to her home. What no one seems to add to the stories, to the jokes, is that she shares her bounty, and the food often found its way to my home, to the homes of my friends. On the street once—we were walking and talking and arguing and laughing—a child was crying, and Maureen pulled a piece of cake, wrapped in foil, from her purse. ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked. ‘Jed Harris had an opening last night.’ And that was that. Jed Harris opened a play, had an abundance of cake, and a crying child was calmed on the street by Maureen’s gift. On that day, in that time, she was his angel.” In the Tattoo years, there were many examples of this kindness, and Tenn admitted to me that Maureen often fed him or found him food, even though he was what he called “a so-called successful adult.” “It wasn’t the food,” he told me. “It was Maureen. I wanted to see her and spend time with her. My hunger could get her to respond.”

  Brando was aware of the closeness that existed between Tenn and Maureen, and he was both perplexed by it and envious of it. “You tell me that Tennessee used to lie on a bed with her and talk things out. I can see that. It might be one of the wisest things Tennessee ever did—to have and to keep a friendship with Maureen. I never got on a bed with her to talk things out, but I have watched the sun rise many a morning as we were still trying to figure out life and work and our own battered hearts. Tennessee says he can believe in the world because there is a woman named Maureen Stapleton, and I can’t be completely defeated in a world in which she lives.”

  Both Brando and Tenn asked Maureen—repeatedly, she claims—why she was so sweet, so giving.

  Maureen waved away the question.

  Tenn believed that it was her attempt to create for herself the narrative that biology and geography had denied her. “We are all fantasists creating the journal of the life we want to live, to read about, to leave behind. Life is a long revision, and Maureen and I share a similar—and odd—version of revision.”

  Brando saw it differently, however, and believed that things appear most vividly and consistently to those who most want them, and Maureen, more than anything else, wanted everyone to be happy. “She grew up with abandoned women and sad hopes, but her job was to cheer everyone up, goad them into going to the movies, urge them to bake a cake and have a party. Atlas with an apron, you could call her: holding up the world with some confiscated food, a huge heart, and a shoulder on which so many people have leaned and wept.”

  When I told Maureen what Marlon Brando had said of her, she was silent and still for a time. “Well,” she quipped, “we must believe what Marlon tells us.”

  We sat in her kitchen for several more hours, talking and drinking Blue Nun. Every half hour or so she would ask me to reread what Marlon had told me on the telephone on a summer night in 1990. And I did. Over and over.

  I was determined to talk to Maureen about acting, if only because Tenn had told me she was one of our greatest talents—big in gifts and in their sharing. This enraged Maureen, and it was the only occasion on which I saw her angry. “I know that you—and probably Tenn—want me to talk about Strasberg,” Maureen said, “and I was betrayed by Strasberg; hurt by him. I don’t want to live it, pick it apart, dissect it again. I did all that. I’ve been through all that. I’d like to forget it. All that you need to know about that time and that place has been given to you—by Tenn.”

  I had given her several books of notes I had made in my time with Tenn, and she had been up several nights reading them. She found the proper notes and shoved them across a table toward me. “That’s why I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It” was the Actors Studio, which Maureen had needed and trusted, to which she had opened her heart and what she called her “wobbly talent,” and she had believed in Lee Strasberg. “I not only bought and read the Bible that was Lee Strasberg, but I copied and bound the damned thing,” she said. “And then everything collapsed. Or my eyes were opened. I don’t know which.”

  The notes she pinpointed dealt with Marilyn Monroe.

  Maureen looked me in the face and very flatly said: “I did not like what I saw there.”

  Here is what Tenn said about Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio:

  “Marilyn was an example of the weak children who seek a guru. Having no balance in her life, having no family, having no understanding of the give-and-take that is daily life, she was drawn toward Mary Baker Eddy, Buddha, Jung, Freud, and finally, the gnomish Lee Strasberg, who specialized in adopting sexually confused, physically abused women and becoming the seemingly gentle father figure they desired. Strasberg lied to her and told her she was the new Duse; he told her she should play Nina; he told her to investigate O’Neill and Shakespeare. This was all folly, because Marilyn had no talent and no understanding, and it was folly because Strasberg only wanted access to and withdrawal privileges from fame.

  “Only Strasberg got what he wanted.

  “In that awful church in the West Forties, Marilyn sat, face upturned, checkbook open, heart confused, and believed that she might become the great actress Strasberg told her she could and shou
ld be. It was an evil, extended con game, and there were many witnesses. You will, no doubt, speak to some of them. It was during Marilyn’s tenure at the Studio, and particularly after her death, that the exodus of the talented began from the Studio. The emperor had always been naked, but some of his adherents had finally invested in some spectacles and could see his puny endowments and the intentions he had for them.

  “I wanted to love Marilyn: I fall for myths, too. She was fragile and she was beautiful and she was silly. She was the lost kitten in the rain, or the kittens who were born on Carson McCullers’s bed in Nantucket—you wonder who will take care of them, because you know that she cannot, and you cry like the child you were who saw the dog run over and the town move on, uncaring and serious about getting their needs attended.

  “Marilyn was also annoying and cloying and demanding. She knew her power and she abused it, but in the demonstration of it she degraded herself and she knew this, so the spiral of destruction deepened and intensified. Do not think for a moment that I do not see this in my own behavior and that of others: I am only offering a sobering lesson.

  “When we can’t imagine understanding or loving a God or some other myth of support, we attach ourselves to artistic symbols: the lost soul; the waif; the abused artist. This is all utter nonsense. Get to work. Work hard and well. Your troubles are no one’s business but your own. Don’t be a Pharisee extolling yourself on the street—take it inside; use it; share it; overcome it.

  “I spoke to Arthur [Miller] only once about Marilyn, and it was during his exhumation of her [After the Fall, 1964]. I wondered if he was satisfied; I wondered if he had exorcised himself of her spirit and her toxins, and I wondered if he had expiated his own sins. He told me he thought he could help her, yes, but he wanted to buck the odds and be the homely, skinny, cerebral Jew who got the beauty queen; he wanted to be the bookish, pedantic, shy boy who introduced the beautiful and simple girl to books and plays and ideas and the act of thinking things out beyond the crotch and the nipples and the people with the cameras. Arthur wanted to be her savior, but he also wanted to be envied; he wanted attention; he wanted to be noticed; he wanted to expand his audience.

  “I think Arthur Miller got what he wanted.

  “It’s fine to cry for Marilyn Monroe. I did, and I still do. She was tragic, but she was also lucky. There are beautiful, sad, dumb girls all over the world who endure worse than she did, but they never get to live on the screen or bathe in perfume or populate the dreams of people who love beauty or who love pain or who wonder what it must be like to possess such sexual power.

  “Let her go. Look at the beauty, but move on. There is nothing else there. A pretty visage with a sad story.”

  Maureen was deeply affected by these words from Tenn, and she wanted to comment on them. “I love acting, and I needed it; but acting … no art on earth is a cure or a replacement. You have to have a life. You have to love and be betrayed and heal and move on and start all over again, and there is no church or book or slogan or some single person who can give you something that will make it all work for you. No one. But we all stupidly believed that we had found a secret, a way, a shortcut, to life or happiness or understanding.

  “Marilyn Monroe,” Maureen continued, “was a sweet girl. I know she was a woman, but I think of her as a girl. She had talent, but she was not the second coming. Lee and others at the Studio made her the second coming because they needed her to be this; they needed her to stay there and bring in the money and the attention. It was easy to be intimidated by Marilyn, and I was. She was so goddamned beautiful. Luscious. Sweet. But the intimidation disappeared fast, because she was so committed and so ready to get better. She listened like no one else, and she worked to the point of a migraine, and I would tell her to lighten up, go easy on yourself, but she couldn’t: she wanted to be taken seriously; she wanted to get it right. I bitch about my upbringing, and my sad mother and sad aunts and no men around and nothing but dead ends all around, but I had love and food and the space and the silence to dream. Marilyn didn’t have that. She told me once that she just wanted her own bedroom, her own bed, and a door she could close. And grass. Grass to run in. Trees to hug and flowers to pick. This was a girl who had nothing but the great gem that she was, and everyone got to hold and fondle that gem, and then put it back when they were done with it. She was happiest—for a time—when she married Arthur, and there was a country house and trees and fruit and flowers—and silence and doors.” Maureen paused, her voice thick and low. “I just wish,” she told me, “that we had spent more time helping her find the grass to run and the room with the door she could close. I wish more time had been spent helping her instead of pushing her. It can’t always be about the art or the play or the dream in the dark: sometimes it’s about the person who needs to be cared for. I felt that way about Marilyn, and I felt that way about Tennessee.

  “That’s how I feel about it all now,” Maureen told me. “The emperor has no clothes. Let it go. There is nothing else there. Maybe we all dreamed too much for too long.”

  By the time I met Tenn in 1982, he felt that the roles had been reversed for him and for Maureen: he now felt lost and confused and bereft while she was soaring—or so he thought. Maureen had won an Oscar in the spring for her performance in the Warren Beatty film Reds. One year earlier she had been much ogled during the theatrical and show-business extravaganza that was the revival of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, starring Elizabeth Taylor. Maureen was being offered many film and television roles. Tenn felt that she was now in a position to offer him aid and advice.

  “I could never explain to him that I was still the same mess I’d always been,” Maureen said, somewhat exasperated. “I was just getting paid a bit more; that’s it. The work wasn’t really any better. I certainly wasn’t functioning any better. But Tenn believed that I was now connected, and he wanted me to make calls for him, to help him get his plays produced. He even wanted me to call Warren and get him some film work.”

  Maureen made none of the calls, but she did stay on the phone with her friend and tried to calm him, reassure him, and get him back to the pale judgment.

  “His writing had become an ordeal,” Maureen remembered. “Writing for him was like walking into gunfire—he knew he was going to be injured or killed, and he couldn’t face it. He wanted someone to walk him through it. That’s why he liked you.”

  Maureen was the first person to explain to me why Tenn had found my presence reassuring or necessary.

  “I mean, you’re great,” she confessed, “and I like you, but you were gonna help him get the words on the page. Or so he thought.” Maureen was exasperated by her friend, by his creation of so many steps and rituals and activities he needed to try to write, to believe he could write, to get in the mood. Journals were bought, begun, discarded. Prayers were written or learned, then forgotten. Everything was done but the writing. “He drove me crazy,” Maureen told me. “What do you say to a friend who’s afraid? I couldn’t tell him he was driving me insane. I couldn’t hurt him. I wanted him to know he was a great writer; that he could do it. But he … had to do it! He kept aiming for the writing, but he wasn’t writing. He wasn’t—God forgive me—writing well.” Maureen would talk to Tenn deep into the night, in the measured and soothing tones he had reserved for her when he told her who Serafina was, where she lived, how she lived. Maureen offered to Tenn the hand she had offered that led him to Marlon Brando’s apartment, full of young artists, fervent and fearless.

  “I would say to him: ‘Tenn, you are a playwright, an American playwright, born to us on March 26, 1911. Your words are magical, because they came to you as an escape from a world you couldn’t handle, and while they are poetic and shot through with fantasy gold, they came to you through windows and across the fences of neighbors and overheard in offices of priests and around the kitchen tables of frustrated wives and mothers. The words in your plays are promises, and your plays are promises. We need you and we love you. Your wri
ting is glorious and—fuck you—it mattered.’ ”

  TENN AND I GOT UP from our table at the Court of Two Sisters. Lunch was over, and Tenn wanted me to join him at the Cathedral of St. Louis, which faces Jackson Square, the church in which Tennessee “received Christ.”

  The moment Tenn entered St. Louis Cathedral, he took a sharp left and slipped into its tiny, cluttered gift shop. “We are in the market for rosaries,” Tenn announced, and the wan acolyte in charge pointed us toward a shelf on which rested a series of bags and boxes, as well as stainless-steel implements upon which were draped a variety of rosaries, cast of wood, ivory, onyx, and plastic, all in various sizes, from a laughably tiny version meant, perhaps, for a very young child, to one so large it could have been a wall hanging. Tenn was drawn to a moderate-sized black model that hung on a Styrofoam bust. “I like this one,” he told the clerk, who then directed him to a lower shelf stacked with plastic bags. Tenn chose the first one that read “Holy Rosary/Black/Large,” and pulled it open. The rosary fell into his welcoming palm, and we realized that its cross bore no Christ.