Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (15 page)

MAE:

That
woman isn't
pregnant!

GOOPER:

Who said she was?

MAE:

She
did.

GOOPER:

The doctor didn't. Doc Baugh didn't.

MARGARET:

I haven't gone to Doc Baugh.

GOOPER:

Then who'd you go to, Maggie?

MARGARET:

One of the best gynecologists in the South.

GOOPER:

Uh huh, uh huh!—I see. . . .

[
He takes out pencil and
notebook.
]

—May we have his name, please?

MARGARET:

No, you may not, Mister Prosecuting Attorney!

MAE:

He doesn't have any name, he doesn't exist!

MARGARET:

Oh, he exists all right, and so does my child, Brick's baby!

MAE:

You can't conceive a child by a man that won't sleep with you unless
you think you're—

[
Brick has turned on the phonograph. A scat
song cuts Mae's speech.
]

GOOPER:

Turn that off!

MAE:

We know it's a lie because we hear you in here; he won't sleep with
you, we hear you! So don't imagine you're going to put a trick
over on us, to fool a dying man with a—

[
A long drawn cry of agony and rage fills
the house. Margaret turns phonograph down to a whisper.

[
!The cry is
repeated.
]

MAE
[
awed
]:

Did you hear that, Gooper, did you hear that?

GOOPER:

Sounds like the pain has struck.

MAE:

Go see, Gooper!

GOOPER:

Come along and leave these lovebirds together in their nest!

[
He goes out first. Mae follows but turns at
the door, contorting her face and hissing at Margaret.
]

MAE:

Liar!

[
She slams the door.

[
Margaret exhales with relief and moves a
little unsteadily to catch hold of Brick's arm.
]

MARGARET:

Thank you for—keeping still . . .

BRICK:

OK, Maggie.

MARGARET:

It was gallant of you to save my face!

BRICK:

—It hasn't happened yet.

MARGARET:

What?

BRICK:

The click. . . .

MARGARET:

—the click in your head that makes you peaceful, honey?

BRICK:

Uh-huh. It hasn't happened. . . . I've got to make it happen
before I can sleep. . . .

MARGARET:

—I—know what you—mean. . . .

BRICK:

Give me that pillow in the big chair, Maggie.

MARGARET:

I'll put it on the bed for you.

BRICK:

No, put it on the sofa, where I sleep.

MARGARET:

Not tonight, Brick.

BRICK:

I want it on the sofa. That's where I sleep.

[
He has hobbled to the liquor cabinet. He
now pours down three shots in quick succession and stands waiting, silent. All
at once he turns with a smile and says:
]

There!

MARGARET:

What?

BRICK:

The
click. . . .

[
His gratitude seems almost infinite as he
hobbles out on the gallery with a drink. We hear his crutch as he swings, out of
sight. Then, at some distance, he begins singing to himself a peaceful
song.

[
Margaret holds the big pillow forlornly as
if it were her only companion, for a few moments, then throws it on the bed. She
rushes to the liquor cabinet, gathers all the bottles in her arms, turns about
undecidedly, then runs out of the room with them, leaving the door ajar on the
dim yellow hall. Brick is heard hobbling back along the gallery, singing his
peaceful song. He comes back in, sees the pillow on the bed, laughs lightly,
sadly, picks it up. He has it under his arm as Margaret returns to the room.
Margaret softly shuts the door and leans against it, smiling softly at
Brick.
]

MARGARET:

Brick, I used to think that you were stronger than me and I
didn't want to be overpowered by you. But now, since you've taken to
liquor—you know what?—I guess it's bad, but now
I'm stronger than you and I can love you more truly!

Don't move that pillow. I'll move it right back if you
do!

—Brick?

[
She turns out all the lamps but a single
rose-silk-shaded one by the bed.
]

I really have been to a doctor and I know what to do
and—Brick?—this is my time by the calendar to
conceive!

BRICK:

Yes, I understand, Maggie. But how are you going to conceive a child by a man in love
with his liquor?

MARGARET:

By locking his liquor up and making him satisfy my desire before I unlock
it!

BRICK:

Is that what you've done, Maggie?

MARGARET:

Look and see. That cabinet's mighty empty compared to before!

BRICK:

Well, I'll be a son of a—

[
He reaches for his crutch but she beats him
to it and rushes out on the gallery, hurls the crutch over the rail and comes
back in, panting.

[
There are running footsteps. Big Mama
bursts into the room, her face all awry, gasping, stammering.
]

BIG MAMA:

Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, where is it?

MARGARET:

Is this what you want, Big Mama?

[
Margaret hands her the package left by the
doctor.
]

BIG MAMA:

I can't bear it, oh, God! Oh, Brick! Brick, baby!

[
She rushes at him. He averts his face from
her sobbing kisses. Margaret watches with a tight smile.
]

My son, Big Daddy's boy! Little Father!

[
The groaning cry is heard again. She runs
out, sobbing.
]

MARGARET:

And so tonight we're going to make the lie true, and when that's done,
I'll bring the liquor back here and we'll get drunk together, here,
tonight, in this place that death has come into. . . .

—What do you say?

BRICK:

I don't say anything. I guess there's nothing to say.

MARGARET:

Oh, you weak people, you weak, beautiful people!—who give
up.—What you want is someone to—

[
She turns out the rose-silk
lamp.
]

—take hold of you.—Gently, gently, with love!
And—

[
The curtain begins to fall
slowly.
]
I
do
love
you, Brick, I
do!

BRICK
[
smiling
with charming sadness
]:

Wouldn't it be funny if that was true?

THE CURTAIN COMES DOWN

THE END

SWINGING A CAT

by Bryan Parker

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
was a favorite with Fidel Castro who greeted Tennessee
Williams at their first meeting with “Oh, that Cat!” And according to his
Memoirs
,
it was also Williams’ own favorite among his plays, for two reasons: he was proud of its
tight classical unity, with continuous action in a single location occupying only the same
time as its staging, and also of what he calls “a kind of crude eloquence of expression in
Big Daddy that I have managed to give no other character of my creation.”

After try-outs in Philadelphia,
Cat
opened on Broadway on March 24,
1955 with Elia Kazan directing, Jo Mielziner designing, Ben Gazzara as Brick, Barbara Bel
Geddes as Maggie (to Williams’ annoyance—he thought her voice too unmusical for the role),
Burl Ives as an unforgettable Big Daddy, and Mildred Dunnock as Big Mama. It ran for 694
performances, and won a Donaldson Award, the Drama Critics Circle Award, and Williams’
second Pulitzer Prize; and three years later it was made into a commercially successful film
for MGM by Richard Brooks, with Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat and Paul Newman as Brick.
Since then it has been continuously revived, with its most recent incarnation—literally as I
write these words—at the Kennedy Center in Washington under the direction of Mark Lamos.

Like all imaginative writers, Tennessee Williams synthesized details from
his personal experience to create fictional characters, so biographical commentators have
found many real-life “models” for people in the play. Williams’ friend Maria St. Just, for
instance, claimed that she was the prototype for Maggie (“no-neck monsters” was certainly
one of her jokes), but the nickname “Maggie the Cat,” according to Williams’ biographer Lyle
Leverich, derives from Margaret Lewis Powell, an acquaintance made in Macon, Georgia, in the
summer of 1942. And that same summer Williams also met Jordan Massie Sr., the father of one
of his Macon friends, who was called “Big Daddy” because of his size (though the title is
common in the South), used the phrase “nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof,” and told stories
about plantation life “on the richest land this side of the Valley Nile.” On the other hand,
Big Daddy also has resemblances to Williams’ rambunctious father; and one of the early
manuscripts of the play includes a clipping from a 1921 newspaper about a Williams neighbor
G.D. Perry, his substantial wife, and their nine bulky children. Like Big Daddy, Perry rose
from manager to owner of a 7,500-acre plantation close to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where
Williams was raised, and was a friend of the playwright’s grandfather, the Reverend Walter
Dakin.

Real life models remain problematic, then, but the main literary source for
Cat
was undoubtedly the short story called
Three Players of a Summer
Game
written by Williams in 1952. In this story an alcoholic ex-athlete called Brick
Pollitt, estranged from his bossy wife, has an affair with the widow of a young doctor whose
musical voice is mocked by bratty children, drunkenly falls over while playing croquet with
her and her plump, foolish little daughter, and is eventually repossessed by his wife and
driven around town like the captive in a Roman triumph. Some of the manuscript drafts of
this story have “background material” that fills in even more details of the play, including
the names “Gooper,” Big Mama,” and “Little Mama,” and the phrase “eight thousand acres of
the richest, darkest soil this side of the valley of the Nile.” There is no Skipper
character this early, however (though in one draft Brick makes advances to his mulatto
chauffeur).

Williams’ friend Donald Windham claims that some of
Cat
’s
denunciations of “mendacity” were inserted into his own play
The Starless Air
, when
Williams directed it as early as May 1953, and Williams apparently began drafting the
full-length
Cat
in Rome that summer but was depressed because he could not find a shape for
it. In March 1954 he sent a letter to his agent, Audrey Wood, informing her that he was
putting together a “short-long play based on the characters in ‘Three Players’ which I
started last summer in Rome, but don’t expect that till you see it as I might not like it
when I read it aloud.” This was almost certainly a revision subtitled “
A Place of
Stone
” that has an epigraph from a poem by W.B. Yeats (emphasizing Maggie’s
tenacity), which Williams later replaced with lines from Dylan Thomas’s famous poem to his
dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The
Place of Stone
revision
has whole sections dealing with the doctor dying from cancer and his desperate wife, derived
from the short story.

In two fragmentary copies of this
Place of Stone
version (one at
the University of Texas, the other at Harvard) there are green ink annotations by Elia
Kazan, deleting the Yeats epigraph, suggesting “Dylan Thomas reading” as a stylistic model,
advising that Big Daddy speak directly to the audience, and sketching a set angled into the
auditorium to encourage such direct addresses—thus emphasizing the non-realistic almost
musical structure of the play, in which Maggie dominates Act One with what is practically an
aria, Act Two focuses on a duet between Brick and Big Daddy, and Act Three is finally an
ensemble. This sketch is very unlike Williams’ own set description but is the one that Jo
Mielziner would eventually follow in the first production. Kazan also repeatedly stresses
his admiration for Maggie and follows Williams’ emending pencil in deleting all passages
dealing with the dying doctor and his wife. However, the removal of these passages left the
text too short for a full-length play, so Audrey Wood pressed Williams to add another act,
while he repeatedly insisted that its three-part arrangement was “the tightest structure of
anything I have done” and suggested that one of his one-acts might be used as a curtain
raiser instead.

Since there is a complete lack of data about
Cat
in the Kazan
archives at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, it is not clear exactly when Kazan became
involved in the production. Williams had the habit of sending work-in-progress to Kazan for
comment (and in hopes of interesting him enough to direct) and the annotations to the
Place of Stone
version suggest quite an early input. Kazan did not come
officially onboard, however, till October 1954, and immediately began to press for rewrites
that Williams wrote Maria St. Just were keeping him as busy as a “cat on a hot tin roof.”
After the disappointing box-office of his two previous plays,
The Rose Tattoo
and
Camino Real
, Williams desperately needed another success and was anxious to
obtain Kazan as director; so the changes were made (mostly in Act Three) but were resented
by the author. And this was to cause trouble and confusion in the future.

When New Directions first published
Cat
in 1955, shortly after its Broadway
opening, the volume included two versions of Act Three—one which Williams referred to as
“
Cat
Number One” (which first reached the stage in 1958 in London), the other the “Broadway
Version”—with a “Note of Explanation” by Williams between them, describing the major changes
Kazan had asked for and his own attitude toward them. (
The Theatre of Tennessee Williams,
Volume III
includes both versions and Williams’ “Note.”) The changes were three in number.
According to Williams, Kazan “felt that Big Daddy was too vivid and important a character to
disappear from the play except as an offstage cry after the second act curtain.” Secondly,
Kazan felt that the character of Brick should undergo a change after his altercation with
his father in Act Two. And, thirdly, Kazan wanted the character of Maggie to be “more
clearly sympathetic to the audience.” Williams had no difficulty with the last of these
suggestions, but did not want Big Daddy to reappear in Act Three and felt that “the moral
paralysis of Brick was a root thing in his tragedy, and to show a dramatic progression would
obscure the meaning of the tragedy in him and because I don’t believe that a conversion,
however revelatory, ever effects so immediate a change in the heart or even conduct of a
person in Brick’s state of spiritual disrepair.” A recurrent disagreement between Williams
and Kazan, in fact, was that Kazan, true to what Williams calls his “lefty” training in the
Group Theatre, considered that events should be shown to alter character, whereas Williams
believed that they could only reveal what was basic and unchanging in a personality.

Kazan’s response to this edition was that he had merely made suggestions,
not delivered ultimatums, and that Williams’ changes had be made for box-office reasons—an
argument that Williams had already partly conceded at the end of his “Note”: “The reception
of the playing-script has more than justified, in my opinion, the adjustments made [in
response to Kazan’s] influence. A failure reaches fewer people, and touches fewer, than does
a play that succeeds.” In his autobiography,
Elia Kazan: A Life
, however, Kazan also admits
that by this stage of his career he had decided no longer to serve the playwrights he
directed but to make them contributors to his own artistic vision. When newspapers tried to
exploit this disagreement, both men hastened to reassert their admiration and affection for
each other, which were real enough despite their very different temperaments.

As his “Note of Explanation” suggests, Williams had no difficulty in making
Maggie more attractive for the “Broadway Version.” He dropped some of her catty exchanges
with her sister-in-law, Mae; had her support and show warm physical affection for Big Mama,
emphasizing their parallel situations; and also established a strong attraction between
Maggie and Big Daddy. With Brick, however, and particularly with Big Daddy, Williams found
himself in difficulties.

Brick was shown to be changed by his encounter with Big Daddy by having him
encourage his father’s mildy smutty elephant story (though this was changed during the run);
by having him defend Maggie against Mae’s sneer that she cannot possibly be pregnant because
Brick won’t sleep with her anymore (instead of remaining noncommittally silent); and by
having him respond to Maggie’s destruction of his liquor cache by saying, “Maggie, I admire
you” and surrendering without further protest to her invitation to bed, instead of replying
to her avowals of love by repeating his father’s indifferent response earlier to Big Mama,
“Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” This supported Williams’ insistence that Brick was
heterosexual, not a closeted gay man; but it removed the aura of ambiguity that had been
created by his passivity and stubborn silences—that core of mystery that Williams thought
indispensable for full characterization. He also feared the denouement might be
sentimentally interpreted as comparable to the end of Robert Anderson’s
Tea and Sympathy
,
with which Kazan had just had a Broadway success. The guilt for which Brick is punishing
both himself and Maggie is not necessarily homosexual repression nor even homophobia, but
the lack of compassion that made him hang up on Skipper’s drunken confession (like Blanche’s
similar “cruelty” to Allan Grey in
Streetcar
): “
You
! —dug the grave of your friend and
kicked him into it!” accuses Big Daddy, “before you’d face the truth with him.” The click of
that disconnection is echoed in the self-annihilating “click” that Brick drinks for, killing
himself with liquor like his friend.

The return of Big Daddy presented even more problems. “I had to violate my
own intuition by having Big Daddy reenter the stage in Act Three,” writes Williams in his
Memoirs
; “I saw nothing for him to do in the act when he reentered and I did not think it
was dramatically proper that he should reenter.” Influenced probably by the line “And you,
my father, there on the sad height” of the Dylan Thomas epigraph, Williams at first wrote
drafts in which Big Daddy mounts to a belvedere on the roof to oversee and comment on the
family struggle below, before succumbing to the pain of cancer just as Maggie turns out her
bedroom light—and in one strange fragment he even shoots arrows from the belvedere with
Maggie’s prize-winning bow at anyone venturing onto the balconies below. The final paragraph
of this belvedere draft sums up what Williams saw to be his problem:

I don’t think a soft, or sentimental ending, can do anything but injury
to the play which says only one affirmative thing about “Man’s Fate”: that he has it still
in his power not to squeal like a pig but to keep a tight mouth about it…and also that love
is possible: not
proven
or
disproven
, but possible. (Williams’ own ellipsis and
italics.)

Eventually Williams had Big Daddy come back on stage to tell his mildly
smutty joke about the old bull elephant with an erection. And immediately after, when Maggie
kneeling before him lies that she is pregnant, this story was dramatized by having Big Daddy
raise her and lubriciously stroke the silk pajamas over her belly before affirming “This
girl has life in her body, that’s no lie.” Though photographs survive of this business in
the Philadelphia tryout, it was cut before the New York opening (Burl Ives’ acting script
even has a note reminding himself only to stare), which left the elephant story irrelevantly
freestanding and, as Audrey Wood complained, a very unlikely joke to occur to a man who has
just learned painfully that he is dying of cancer. Williams claimed never to have liked the
elephant joke anyway, and took advantage of an early visit from the New York Licensing
Commission (and Kazan’s absence in Europe) to remove it, replacing it with an exchange
between Big Daddy and Brick about the “odor of mendacity” that reprises the beginning of
their conversation in Act Two.