Follies of God Read online

  “The search for the ‘click’ might have begun then,” Tenn said. “I spent my time in that city searching.”

  One of his worst experiences in the Havenhurst was the night he went to be with an older gentleman who had worked with Alla Nazimova and who agreed to introduce Tenn to Ruth Chatterton, who was then living in New York. He did not want to go, but ambition superseded desire that evening, a clear, pink night, as he recalled. His shoes clicked on the terrazzo floors; a fan hummed in the corner of the lobby; the garden was full of chattering ladies. Tenn had a sandwich in a brown paper bag, and he carried it with him into the man’s apartment.

  At work, at MGM, Tenn had found himself seated next to director Clarence Brown, who had eschewed the menu of the commissary and instead drew out from a leather satchel a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Tenn watched the director—who had been Garbo’s favorite—and was amazed to find that his lunch was that supreme Southern offering, pimiento cheese. Tenn struck up a conversation with Brown. Tenn’s mother prided herself on her pimiento-cheese “spread,” and the two men, one from Kentucky, the other deeply marinated in the ways of Mississippi and Louisiana, laughed over shared tastes. Ultimately, the director offered Tenn one half of his sandwich. Brown’s wife or maid or cook spiked his spread with a dash of vinegar, giving it a kick that Tenn’s remembered recipe lacked. Tenn praised the sandwich, and the men discussed films, actresses, and the theater.

  The following day, Brown found Tenn again in the commissary and pulled from the satchel a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “For later,” he said, “when you’re writing.”

  This was the sandwich Tenn took to the Havenhurst.

  After a grim session of wrestling and groping, ending in apologies and regrets, Tenn sat across from the man and, surrounded by an airless room full of musty books, a candelabra from a touring production, and a kitchenette that smelled of a moldy sponge and tuna fish, the man spied the bag and asked about it.

  Trapped, Tenn offered the man half of the sandwich, and they sat together, each eating, drinking lukewarm ginger ale, and discussing Chekhov.

  “It was one of the worst nights of my life,” Tenn remembered. “The glorious gesture of Clarence Brown coming into contact with my resentful gesture toward that man, whose use to me was Ruth Chatterton’s address.”

  Tenn remembered something of that night that had remained with him. “When I am most uncomfortable,” he remembered, “when I find myself caught in a situation entirely absent of desire or interest, when I feel deprived of air, and the room grows small and silent and the walls seem to move toward me, the person who is threatening or boring to me appears closer than they should, and I resort to rubbing coins, or the legs of my pants, or, in that particular case, the waxed paper of Clarence Brown, which I turned into a warm, worn prayer cloth, patting, turning, until it was creased and worthless, but I saved it, and I took it with me—a reminder of what not to do, of what not to remember.”

  The memory of that night sent Ruth Chatterton into retirement, at least from Tenn’s mental repertory. Tenn began to search for another actress to crowd his mind, inhabit his dreams, drop words.

  A happier memory for Tenn was his time with the young Italian he met at MGM, a carpenter or electrician (“in some technical capacity”), early twenties, handsome, terribly sweet. “I am never so weak,” he recalled, “than when I am in the presence of kind eyes. He had kind eyes.” They talked of movies, of literature, and Tenn learned that the young man dreamed of directing. Tenn shared memories of conversations with Clarence Brown, which included directorial advice that had been shared with him by William Wyler and George Stevens. Tenn explained to him that Wyler had consulted with his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, over maneuvers that would draw the viewers’—the camera’s—attention from the teeth and eyes of Patricia Collinge and the thespian limitations of Bette Davis in The Little Foxes. Collinge seemed to animate her teeth and eyes more fervently each day, and the oracular and dental exertions were driving Wyler to distraction. The solution was to consider Collinge primarily in two positions: when pathetic, she was to be shot from above, allowing her to look small and humble, defeated; when in reflection, thinking of past beauty and worth, she was to be shot in profile, as if dreaming, half a person, diminished.

  Clarence Brown, one of the most acclaimed and stylish directors at MGM, who encouraged Tennessee—with words and sandwiches—during his brief tenure at the studio (illustration credit 4.1)

  George Stevens told Brown that the surest, simplest way to indicate that a character, especially a woman, was in doubt, in trouble, in need of an audience’s sympathy, was to take the camera as high as it could go, and to slowly bring the lens to her level. The world was against her, but the audience had sought her out, found her, felt protective of her. Tenn remembered the visual of a woman as seen from above, and the young man also wrote it down, as he wrote down everything Tenn told him about his time on the set, his reading, his life. “Every woman I have ever met or known or loved,” Tenn told me, “and every woman I have ever created, I have seen from above, sought out, found, coddled, loved, protected.”

  The young man, whose name Tenn could not recall, although he could recall the contours of his physique and the décor of his apartment, lived off Hollywood Boulevard, in a multi-dwelling house on Vista. Tenn decided, in the retelling, to call the man Mangia, because he was a wonderful and generous cook, and because his memories of their times together revolved around discussion of movies, sex, and food. “A trinity I would willfully worship today,” Tenn quipped.

  The apartment on Vista was one of four, and the home in which they sat had a wholesome, Andy Hardy look about it. The directions were simple—Vista, between Hollywood and Hawthorn—and Mangia had friends on surrounding streets with names like Sierra Bonita and Poinsettia Place. Another friend, who had access to marijuana, lived on Yucca. Luckier friends had advanced to dwellings on De Longpre and Harper; another was having an affair with a famous cinematographer who lived in a glorious wedding cake of a building on Fountain and Sweetzer.

  The memory of these places became a Rosary for Tenn. Sierra Bonita. Poinsettia. Yucca. De Longpre. Harper. Sweetzer.

  There was a Rosary of names for the streets, and the prayer Tenn had in his mind was to find and locate and coddle Miriam Hopkins, who had moved into the prominent position once held by Ruth Chatterton. “I was loved and I was loving in that time,” Tenn said, “but my primary passion was to find Miriam Hopkins, an actress my mother and I loved, and for whom I felt I had dreamed a character.”

  I asked which character, but Tenn held up a hand and silenced me.

  Tenn did not feel comfortable staying in Mangia’s apartment when he left for work in the morning, making a call that was earlier than Tenn’s. Tenn would stay in bed while Mangia prepared breakfast, only arising when it was completed. With morning slipping away, there was kissing and laughter and no time for a leisurely breakfast. Mangia had prepared sweet rolls, and they were still warm. The aroma of coffee filled the apartment. Two sweet rolls were placed in a brown paper bag and coffee was poured into a mug. “I’ll bring it back after work,” Tenn promised. Mangia left, and Tenn, without a car, and a couple of hours early for work, walked along Hollywood Boulevard, stopping at St. Thomas the Apostle Episcopal Church, where he ate the sweet rolls and sipped the coffee while looking at the altar and sharing the space with a handful of other early risers. Tenn said a prayer: bring me, please, to Miriam Hopkins.

  Days later, on another walk, he discovered Camino Real, and the thought of walking that particular camino, in that particular time, gave him ideas. Walking that camino, he created a lady, a great lady, and her contours were growing more and more into those of Miriam Hopkins.

  “Did Miriam Hopkins always exist?” Tenn asked. “Or did I dream her into being? Certainly no one needed her more.”

  Tenn had an epiphany: he had found Amanda Wingfield on the soft shoulder of that high street overlooking downtown Hollywood, blue lights and
music and beautiful men and relaxed nerves and dreams of succeeding all around him, threatening and arousing him. “The album and the ice dropped,” he said, “and the words and the idea dropped. Amanda stands in her environment, and in the distance she sees expansion and hope and light, and behind her she hears youth and merriment and the hope of flesh and folly. And she’s right in the center, unable to move, unable to know where she’s headed. She lives in both of the worlds, both of the visions: her glorious past, which was what that house high in the Hollywood hills must have seemed to me, shiny and clean and full of things I wanted but was afraid to seek, and ahead was the glory that was unattainable. For me, it would have required understanding how the movies worked, knowing how to move in those circles. For Amanda it required moving Tom and Laura toward jobs or mates who could provide for her a safe, clean room, full of air, with walls that didn’t crowd, and space for her to remember.”

  Tenn fingered coins in his pocket, rubbed the waxed paper of Clarence Brown’s sandwich, and held the warm mug in that church on Hollywood Boulevard.

  Drop a memory. Drop a word. Words collect.

  You go to Hollywood for some distinct reason. Even those born there are descendants of desire—the desire to be rich in money or movies or experience. Proximity to success is as powerful an incentive to be there as success itself, and the ambition and the craving give the city a buzz, the intensity of a hive, swirling with passion and avarice and occasional artistry. It was, Tenn remembered, a city glazed like a beautiful and perfectly unnecessary dessert.

  Amanda Wingfield was Tenn’s mother, and also the young Tennessee, standing on that high hill, dreaming. The love and comfort Tenn felt in Mangia’s house, so different from the confusion he felt on the soundstages, where his work felt flat and forced, brought forth another version of himself, his mother, and an actress who had become an obsession. “Lady Torrance [in Battle of Angels and its later reworking as Orpheus Descending] was born in the intersections of my confusion,” Tenn told me. “She had had desire, and she remembered it. She wanted desire again, but didn’t know where to find it. She walked and she wandered and she prayed. She was in strange lands. There was silk but there was also the sun that could damage it, shrink it, destroy it. I had these thoughts and these desires, but I was searching for the female form onto which I could impress them all. And I found them. On a hill. On the Camino. In a prayer.”

  Tenn paused. “I could write then,” he said. “I could connect things.”

  He paused again.

  “I believe I can write again,” he told me. “Thank you for indulging me.”

  I then drove to the Marigny, where one of the city’s loveliest balconies beckoned to Tenn. “I believe that I can connect my memories, and reconstruct my life, my writing life,” he confessed, “through the balconies of New Orleans. Much as [John] Cheever reconstructed a man’s life through the connected swimming pools that held memories, that had access to the people and events that shaped his life.”

  Tenn turned to me as we continued to wait. “I’m thinking like a writer. Drop a memory, drop a word. Drop a memory, drop a word.” He repeated the words like a mantra all through our drive to the Marigny.

  Five

  AT THE CORNER of Elysian Fields and Royal, Tenn asked me to slow down as we looked up at a forbidding grey building festooned with yards of wrought iron—a wraparound balcony that seemed, to Tenn, to call out for an embrace, and on which he had been many times, many years ago.

  There had been parties, celebrations, parades, kisses, followed with walks back home made slow and fuzzy by liquor, to apartments on Royal and Dumaine, squatter pads on Governor Nicholls and Touro.

  “To be drunk and young,” Tenn told me, “your lips slightly chafed from the attentions of someone you like or love, and to walk home, where, waiting like a loved and lonely pet, is a piece of paper in the typewriter, slightly curled, half-completed, waiting for your next move. And”—he flexed his fingers and made a fist—“the move comes. You complete the sentence, drop a memory, spread the remembrance across time and words, and make a gift of it to someone else.

  “Take me down Royal,” he said.

  We moved well below ten miles per hour, but the day was lazy, there was no one on the sidewalks, only a few people on porches or crossing the streets that we navigated as if lost and confused; and while Tenn’s eyes were frequently closed, his mind was alive as he ticked off names and dates and times and places.

  Royal Street is populated by a series of houses amber or peach, cinnamon brown, slate grey, cerulean and turquoise, squat and stately—Necco wafers often shaded by trees that had burst through the mottled and cracked concrete of the sloped sidewalks. During several months in the forties, Tenn had walked this street, lived on this street, and his mind had been full of images of Miriam Hopkins.

  “Whatever I have learned of any value,” Tenn said, “has come to me from women and from photographs, and I consider films to be a form of photography. I need images of women to understand things.” Tenn shared movies and their actresses with his mother and sister: it was a form of communication that always worked in his childhood—no codes or hidden messages were needed. “I was freest,” Tenn said, “when I could live my life, understand my life, reorder my life, through the movies, and then through drama. And my mother was the same; my sister served us both.” It was not an exaggeration, he told me, to think of those three—in their various locations—as a repertory company, working themes out, seeking clarity. “Life only made sense to my mother through dreaming,” Tenn told me, “and I was the same, but I wanted to move on and out; I needed to see if the dreams had any value or traction: I needed to find some realization of a few dreams, and my motivation for some time was Miss Hopkins.”

  Miriam Hopkins was an idol to both Tennessee and his mother: a refined, intelligent, and talented Southern woman who was honest and comfortable with what Tennesse called “the finer things: she was surrounded by all the things I wanted.” (illustration credit 5.1)

  Tenn found a play—and a woman—in his mind. It would become Battle of Angels, and later it would turn into Orpheus Descending, but it began as a series of mental introductions he imagined between his mother and Hopkins. “I not only admired Hopkins for her work in films,” Tenn said, “and for what I had heard of her stage work: I admired and sought her because she represented so many things that my mother admired.” Hopkins had been born into comfortable circumstances in Georgia; her pedigree, Edwina often asserted, as she looked up from movie magazines she had cadged from the beauty parlor, was one of pristine Southern heritage. Hopkins was beautiful and funny and smart, and she filled her days with painting and cooking and golf and flying lessons and sewing and maintaining famous husbands and lovely homes. “This was the catechism I heard on Miss Hopkins,” Tenn told me, “and I bought it, and I loved her, and I wanted to stay close to my mother and to my sister, even as my dreams pulled me farther and farther away.”

  Near the houses on Royal that meant so much to Tenn there had been coffee shops and restaurants and candy counters—confectionaries, they were called, social centers for those with short attentions and sweet teeth. Tenn imagined Miriam Hopkins bumped from her pedestal of privilege and waiting on the motley band of hungry and lonely people who sat on pink stools and sipped pastel drinks. A character was born.

  “I adored Miriam Hopkins,” Tenn told me, “for no other reason than that she answered my letters: she responded. She met with me and she talked to me and she encouraged me.” Once at a Hollywood party, during Tenn’s Mangia days and walks on the Los Angeles Camino Real and morning prayers in Episcopal churches, he had seen Hopkins—in the flesh, not through letters or phone calls—and he recalled that she had “that rapid and gooey Southern charm—which meant that she kissed me and welcomed me as a relative or automatic friend. We had things in common, she said. She simply could tell. I promised her my friendship and I promised her my play; she returned the offer of friendship. I cannot stress enough how
important her vow would be.”

  Tenn held the image of Miriam Hopkins in his mind both during his writing hours and his “living, walking, surviving” hours. “She was an instrument of usefulness,” Tenn told me. “There were no wasted hours, no unused gifts. I wanted to be that sort of person. And I learned then, during that process, that I am incapable of writing without the supervision—real or supernatural; intended or accidental—of a woman. Women give me the characters and the ideas and the language, and it is women who have brought me the food and the drink and the bits of cash to keep me going. I am entirely possible—by physical and artistic birth—because of women.” Like so many of the women who influenced Tenn, Hopkins knew that it was her responsibility to expand her life and her options within it. Hopkins used her own talent and her own will—as well as her beauty and her charm—to reshape and conquer reality. Hopkins did not have Christian Science or an adherence to scholarship and tough professionalism to keep her moving and mattering, but she had all those hours in all those days, and she frequently told Tenn that life was his to shape.

  Not long after their meeting at that Hollywood party, Tenn was back in New York, poor and desperate to complete his work, a task made difficult by the fact that he had, once again, pawned his typewriter. “The Royal typewriter had fallen on hard times,” Tenn said. He had read in the newspapers that Miss Hopkins was in town, and he requested that they meet. Miss Hopkins cheerfully agreed, suggesting a chic restaurant. “There is no greater fear,” Tenn said, “than accepting an invitation that is beyond your means—financially, emotionally, socially. But I was desperate, and I went. There was a hole in one of my shoes and another in my heart. If I possessed two dollars at that time, I was flush. I saw Miss Hopkins on the sidewalk—lovely, smooth, perfectly attired. Miss Edwina’s eyes had trained me to look at a woman and to judge her character by her accessories, her deportment, her equipage, so to speak. I will never know if this was accidental or providential or what, but as I approached Miss Hopkins, as she turned and gave me her dazzling smile, I tripped and felt myself aiming for her feet. She caught me; there was a flurry of activity, patted shoulders, mother-hen cooings, and as I was being lifted up, I came face-to-face with Miss Hopkins and blurted out, ‘Could I possibly borrow five hundred dollars?’ I was shocked at my outburst, but she merely smiled, took my arm, and treated me to a feast of a lunch. Later in the day, she delivered to my sad apartment an envelope containing five hundred dollars, an amount that bought me several months of freedom, and released the Royal. Miriam Hopkins refused to call it a loan: it was, she said, a gift—for my gifts.” Tenn’s eyes misted at the memory, of seeking a woman who pleased his mother and who believed in him and who brought to life one of his women. “Is it a gift that I was lucky enough to bring into my life such women? If so, I accept it, and place it high in my estimation. Let no bad things be said about Miriam Hopkins.”