Follies of God Page 9

  AT ROYAL AND FRENCHMEN, Tenn asked that I stop and park, so that we could walk through Washington Square, a lush block that was blissfully empty, and there were faint wafts of music from the Quarter, snatches of radio and television transmission from the houses surrounding it. Frenchmen and Touro Streets held memories for Tenn of rent parties during the war years and beyond, happy neighbors eating and dancing and gratefully accepting crisp bills in return for a plate of food or a po’ boy. The revelers were straight and gay, young and old, and Tenn could not remember being afraid; he felt open to express happiness and desire on a sunny street that smelled of crab boil and patchouli.

  At Royal and Kerlerec, one can see the city downtown, one is closer to the Quarter and can hear it. At Royal and Esplanade stands a house much loved by Tenn, pristine and, as he put it, “glistening like a just-licked glans.”

  We walked Royal for a bit, looking at balconies beautiful and blighted, but we ultimately came to Royal and Marigny and its simple but elegant balcony, swirling around a faded, pea-green house that had once been home to people who had invited Tenn up to that elevated porch, where he sat and caught what breeze there might be, and talked, and dreamed.

  In the time when he was on that balcony at Royal and Marigny, Tenn was happy. He had, as he put it, “ideas and a record player and a little money.” Over and over, in the cooler months, he threw open the windows, and the air caught the linen curtains and they danced about—the animated arms, as he imagined, of the woman who was dominating his thoughts and his work. Tenn could smell coffee and night-blooming jasmine, and his record player repeatedly played “You Won’t Be Satisfied (Until You Break My Heart)” by Doris Day and “Do I Worry?” by Tommy Dorsey, which asked in its lyrics

  When evening shadows creep,

  Do I lose any sleep?

  To the record, crackling and popping from overuse, Tenn would yell, “Hell, no!” and continue typing, on the Royal typewriter on Royal Street. All seemed well. The work was good. Miriam Hopkins was still much loved, and she had served Tenn well in the creation of one role, Lady Torrance, with whom he was already growing impatient. “My mental repertory rotates swiftly,” Tenn said, “and when I could dream and write, things moved quickly.” Tenn now had another actress—and another character—in his sights, and he had written to her, telling her he was interested in luring her talents into his world. “I had a world,” he told me, “that I had dreamed, and then I had made it happen, in the mental theater, on the pale judgment, and it was now alive and real and felt right. Ready for the unveiling.”

  The actress was Lillian Gish, and from several calls to his agent, Tenn ascertained that she could be found on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles, high above Benedict Canyon, in a French country house with a wishing well. To that address—10050 Cielo Drive—Tenn sent a play called, at that time, as he remembered, The Moon and the Royal Balconies.

  My introduction to Lillian Gish was made in 1989, by a portrait painter, then nearing eighty, named Dorothy Hart Drew. Drew lived in a penthouse triplex within the Beaux-Arts Building at West Fortieth Street and Sixth Avenue, directly across from the worst perimeter of Bryant Park, where assault and crack cocaine were both on ample display.

  Dorothy Hart Drew was the woman with whom I first lived when I moved to New York City to finally meet the people Tenn had told me I should. The arrangement had been made by a friend, a Baton Rouge native who had once lived in New York, made a name and a small fortune as a model and TV personality (she was the Pirate Girl opposite Jan Murray on the game show Treasure Hunt), then, after divorcing her husband, had returned to her hometown and settled into comfort and the persistent study of Christian Science. Her practitioner was also the practitioner for Drew (mental mind and its maladies knowing nothing of distance or time, one can be healed by a healer anytime, anywhere), and she told my friend’s practitioner that an aged friend needed a companion who would live with her—rent-free—and help with shopping and cooking.

  Lillian Gish at her home on Cielo Drive, above Benedict Canyon, in the 1940s, at the time Tennessee imagined her as Blanche DuBois, and mailed her a copy of the young, unformed play that would be A Streetcar Named Desire (illustration credit 5.2)

  I wanted to get to New York, had a small amount of money to do so, and felt I could not turn down the opportunity.

  For two months I stayed in the apartment, a wonder of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass and bathrooms rimmed with gold-plated abalone shells, during which time I learned that my host had been a well-regarded sculptor and painter, had been close friends with the sculptors Anna Hyatt Huntington and Paul Manship, the latter having family in my hometown. Drew took news of this relationship, such as it was, as a good sign, and invited me to move in. All of this was done by phone—me in Baton Rouge; Drew in New York.

  Once in this apartment, I learned a few other things: Drew and her sister, Lorna, had been great friends with Lillian and Dorothy Gish; Drew possessed only seven teeth in her head, necessitating a number of changes in the recipes I had brought along in my capacity as house chef; and she was a rabid anticommunist and virulent conservative, whose life, once her artwork had subsided, was consumed by ferreting out those people she was convinced were red or subversive, or who had grown successful through nefarious political means.

  In my first few days in the apartment in the Beaux-Arts, I cleaned and began reworking recipes to make them softer, and in the evenings I read to Drew from Science and Health or from books like T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings’s Mona Lisa’s Mustache, which eviscerated the modern-art movement, along with all of the attendant mystical and political insanity he believed was threatening the world’s health and the survival of “good” art. I frequently had to stop what I was reading because his observations were so loony, and the book’s margins were littered with notes from Drew.

  I had the master bedroom in the apartment, a large suite that included a dressing room and the gold-plated bathroom. The second floor of the apartment was the split-level studio in which Drew now slept on a small bed wedged behind a grand piano, and which featured an enormous skylight through which one could look up Sixth Avenue all the way to Central Park; the first level consisted of three small rooms: an anteroom holding a small bed covered with a purple velvet coverlet and several large cardboard boxes, a tiny kitchen and bathroom with a slop sink in which Drew took her daily cleaning, and a large dining room with an enormous and burnished table on which were stacked hundreds of books, magazines, and boxes. It was at this table that Drew sat for up to twelve hours a day, listening to talk radio, smoking (an activity that prevented her from seeking membership in the mother church), and talking to her sister, Lorna, who had died at least a decade before. Drew occasionally interrupted her schedule to call radio programs and yell at the liberals.

  On the wall by the bed in which she slept, Drew had written, boldly and neatly, the names and numbers of those she might need to reach quickly: her practitioner, her relatives, her Christian Science nurse, and the AM radio stations that carried her favorite programs. Above all of this information was written—also boldly and neatly—the following:

  Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.

  Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth.

  Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule.

  Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane.

  Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms.

  Surrealism aims to destroy by denial of reason.

  When I asked Drew about the lines written above her bed (they formed a sort of halo above her head when she slept), she told me that they were taken from a statement made in 1949 by her good friend Congressman George Dondero, before the House of Representatives. Drew had helped him write it. “We both knew that art was a weapon, the strongest weapon, used by Communists to undermine America. He, along with Joseph McCarthy, was my greatest friend and hero.”

  That night in my journal, I wrote “May you live in interesting times and inte
resting apartments.”

  Drew led me to the many dusty boxes in the anteroom and invited me to look through them. Inside I found many copies of Red Channels, the booklet that informed advertisers and network officials of those suspected of being under Communist influence or enjoying its support. There were many other magazines and books, but there were also hundreds of letters, all of them pertaining to the diligent removal from the “shores of this great country” of reds and pinks in the artistic community. Drew’s letters were primarily a dance, a suggestive tango, between her and Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, who had first been elected to the House in 1932, and who admitted in one letter that the advent of Roosevelt and his New Deal had plunged him deeply into his “patriotic mission.”

  One of the letters, marked COPY, was dated 1956, and had been sent to Drew to illustrate Dondero’s consistent commitment to stamping out modern art. The letter deals with the Republican’s distaste for Eisenhower’s weakness toward this menace, epitomized by his visit to the Museum of Modern Art on its twenty-fifth anniversary, at which he had “given them a slap on the back” and told them they should paint anything they felt like. Dondero wrote: “Frankly, I do not understand some of the statements made by the President regarding the Museum of Modern Art. Modern art is a term that is nauseating to me. We are in complete accord in our thinking regarding this subject and its connection with communism. No one is attempting to stifle self-expression, but we are attempting to protect and preserve legitimate art as we have always known it in the United States.”

  Dondero’s statement before Congress, parts of which Drew had memorized, read in part:

  Mr. Speaker, quite a few individuals in art, who are sincere in purpose, honest in intent, but with only a superficial knowledge of the complicated influences that surge in the art world of today, have written me—or otherwise expressed their opinions—that so-called modern or contemporary art cannot be Communist because art in Russia today is realistic and objective.

  Drew stopped me as I read this aloud to her to tell me that she was one of the “friends” referenced by Dondero, and she would later share with me the piles of correspondence in which she revealed suspicious and unacceptable artistic Americans.

  “This glib disavowal,” Dondero’s address continued,

  of any relationship between Communism and so-called modern art is so pat and so spontaneous a reply by advocates of the “isms” in art, from deep, Red Stalinist to pale-pink publicist, as to identify it readily to the observant as the same old party-line practice. It is the party line of the left-wingers, who are now in the big money, and who want above all to remain in the big money, voiced to confuse the legitimate artist, to disarm the arousing academician, and to fool the public.

  As I have previously stated, art is considered a weapon of Communism, and the Communist doctrinaire names the artist as a soldier of the revolution. It is a weapon in the hands of a soldier in the revolution against our form of government, and against any government or system other than Communism.

  Drew interrupted to tell me that she had worked—and hoped to continue to work—to enlist soldiers of her own revolution, right-leaning “true” Americans who could cleanse and enhance “authentic” art in all media.

  One of the most ardent soldiers of this revolution was Lillian Gish.

  “Lillian,” Drew told me, “is one of the greatest soldiers in the good revolution.”

  I asked Drew if Lillian Gish believed as she did about the influence of communism in the arts. “Well,” she demurred, “I’m often disappointed in Lillian. She’s very naïve, as you are. She can’t believe that anyone who can produce art she likes could be someone she ought to hate, could be someone she ought to destroy.” Nonetheless, Gish donated money and verbal support to both Dondero and Drew in their pursuits.

  Drew was upset, however, that Gish respected Pablo Picasso, “a demented and diseased Communist and murderer and thief.” Drew quoted again from Dondero:

  The artists of the “isms” change their designations as often and as readily as the Communist front organizations. Picasso, who is also a dadaist, an abstractionist, or a surrealist, as unstable fancy dictates, is the hero of all the crackpots in so-called modern art.

  Léger and Duchamp are now in the United States to aid in the destruction of our standards and traditions. The former has been a contributor to the Communist cause in America; the latter is now fancied by the neurotics as a surrealist.

  The gist of Dondero’s and Drew’s mission, the “pearl of great price,” as Drew described it, was in the following paragraph:

  It makes little difference where one studies the record, whether of surrealism, dadaism, abstractionism, cubism, expressionism, or futurism. The evidence of evil design is everywhere, only the roll call of the art contortionists is different. The question is, what have we, the plain American people, done to deserve this sore affliction that has been visited upon us so direly; who has brought down this curse upon us; who has let into our homeland this horde of germ-carrying art vermin?

  Drew was moist-eyed as she claimed that she was one of the purest of the plain American people, as was Gish, as had been Dondero, and the mission continued. “I want you to talk to Lillian,” she told me, “but not about the degenerate writer you knew, and who probably spoiled your brain about art and the world. I want you to talk to her about purity and the truth, about the way America was meant to be.”

  And that is how it was arranged that I should meet Lillian Gish.

  DREW’S APARTMENT in the Beaux-Arts Building was grand but filthy, and at night, when the commercial tenants had left for the day, mice rushed up to the penthouse and executed a St. Vitus’s dance across the wood floors, their claws clattering. In the morning there would be hundreds of droppings, and the pantry shelves would be askew.

  Drew did not want Lillian Gish to see what had become of the apartment on West Fortieth Street—or its primary tenant, whose refusal to frequent the offices of doctors had led to the loss of her teeth and most of her hair. Drew would tie old blouses over her head, creating striking turbans, but she could not fashion new teeth, and she could not stop smoking, so she refused Lillian’s suggestion of a visit to Fortieth Street, and sent me, alone, to East Fifty-seventh Street to meet the actress.

  The apartment of Lillian Gish was as orderly as Drew’s was chaotic—beautiful and quiet and controlled. Nothing was out of place in any of the rooms, on any of the shelves, on any of the tables, or, for that matter, in the mind of Miss Gish. She had planned for our visit by rereading my letters to her and the comments Tenn had made about her, about our trips up and down Royal Street, and about the original version of A Streetcar Named Desire, called The Moon and the Royal Balconies, in which she was to have played the lead character, a woman who eventually became Blanche DuBois.

  “Oh, listen,” Gish told me, “I don’t believe in guilt or regret. I believe that they exist, that people are almost always struggling through one or the other, or both, but I don’t see any value in honoring those emotions. However,” she laughed, “I think Tennessee felt guilty that I didn’t play that part, and I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I often wonder about my life—my professional life—if I had had the opportunity to be Blanche. Could I have done it? Could I have done it well? What or who would I be today if I had taken on that challenge?”

  Gish was frail and tiny, and she showed difficulty in using her hands. She did not move from the chair in which she sat except to let me into the apartment and to see me off. Our first visit lasted about an hour, and my understanding is that it had been scheduled by Drew with James Frasher, Gish’s manager, who was normally present for all of Gish’s interviews, but who on this day had been called away. I sensed that Gish missed his presence, and that she might have been stronger had he been there. When Gish and I later had several phone conversations, she seemed more secure and comfortable—and opinionated—and I wonder if it might have been because Frasher was nearby, or because she didn’t
have to present herself in the composed and attractive manner she did when she met people face-to-face, with full makeup, Fortuny gown, and rigid focus.

  “I hope,” Gish told me, “that you don’t think I am entirely in league with Dorothy on her views on art and politics. I am conservative by nature, but I think Dorothy became a bit unsettled early in her life. There was promise, but there was not the attention she felt she deserved. It was easier to imagine a conspiracy, a plan for which she was not suited or invited, than to face the fact that the work and the acclaim she felt she deserved had passed her by. This is very common in the arts; I’ve seen it often. Bitterness is horrible, and we can never know why things happen as they do. Faith is an enormous challenge, but it’s all we have to keep going, and my faith is in God and the art I know and believe He has sanctioned for us, and in the role that art has in our life. I think art improves us, I think that it … Oh, what am I trying to say? It enlarges us and can act as a mirror, and that is valuable, and no one is a better example than Tennessee.”