Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (107 page)

“I think you invented sex,” Frank chimed in, gallantly.

“You might be terrific in the part,” Tennessee said. “Barbara is a cool, somewhat cold-looking blonde. But I conceived of Maggie as a sizzler on stage.”

“Well, if Marilyn can do anything, she can sizzle,” Frank said.

“I’ll try to lobby for you,” Tennessee promised. “As for the man, I was considering Marlon Brando, but he told someone that he will never appear again on Broadway in a Tennessee Williams play. Why, I don’t know. Maybe he’ll do it on the screen, but I hear he’s going to turn it down. I also hear Paul Newman wants to do it, but I think he looks too pretty-boy Jewish to portray the son of a plantation aristocrat in the Deep South.”

“Ben Gazzara might want to repeat his stage role in front of the camera,” she said. “That reminds me. I’ll call him up and audition him at the Waldorf Towers to see if he and I have any chemistry. Regardless of who plays Brick, the one thing I know is that I am Maggie the Cat. Can’t you just hear me saying, ‘
SKIPPER IS DEAD. I’M ALIVE. MAGGIE THE CAT IS ALIVE
!’”

“You’d be electric in the role,” Tennessee said.

“Don’t give it to Elizabeth Taylor. She can’t act.”

“I’m considering playing Big Daddy myself,” Tennessee said.

“You’d be wonderful.”

***

After sitting impatiently through the screen version of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, Marilyn wrote a note to Tennessee at his home in Key West. “I could have played Maggie so much better,” she said. “I hate to say this, but Elizabeth just doesn’t have the sex appeal the role calls for, and I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Months later, Marilyn lamented to Brando. “I thought Tennessee adored me. So what happens? The role of Maggie the Cat goes to that damn Elizabeth Taylor. You and I should have done it.”

“I hear she’s also going to film Tennessee’s
Suddenly Last Summer
with Monty,” he said.

“Just my luck. I get the dumb blonde comedies, and Taylor gets the meaty dramas.
Hollywood!”

—Tennessee

Based on what she’d heard, Marilyn felt that the star role in Tennessee’s
Baby Doll—
scheduled to be shot in the state of Mississippi—would be ideal for her. But its playwright
[Tennessee]
and its director
[Kazan]
had other ideas.

First, Marilyn called Marlon Brando, her sometimes lover, and arranged a date. She’d heard that Warner Brothers had already signed him for the film’s male lead of Silva Vaccaro.

At his home, she found Brando rather vague about any commitment. “Let’s talk movies tomorrow,” he told her. “In the meantime, how about a good old fashioned fuck from my noble tool?”

[Brando turned down the role, the movie part eventually going to Eli Wallach, with Karl Malden cast in the second male lead, with support from character actress Mildred Dunnock playing Aunt Rose Comfort.]

Dunnock had originated the role of Big Mama in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, losing the movie part to Judith Anderson. Dunnock’s most famous scene has remained her role as the wheelchair victim in
Kiss of Death
(1947). The film’s psychotic villain, Tommy Udo (played by Richard Widmark), pushed the woman in her wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her death.

Not getting anywhere with Brando, Marilyn, the next day, read that Kazan, Tennessee, and Tennessee’s agent, Audrey Wood, had checked into the Bel Air Hotel. She immediately called Kazan to arrange a late-night rendezvous.

When she confronted him, she found he had more on his mind than the production woes associated with
Baby Doll
. He had been summoned to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which had revealed his youthful affiliations with the Communist Party. To save his career, he had been forced to name names of former colleagues who also had been communists. To the horror of his left wing friends, including Brando, he named such associates as Clifford Odets and Paula Strasberg.

Many in Hollywood turned against him, except Tennessee, who did not approve of what he did, but was at least empathetic. He said, “It’s a sad commentary on our times. Human venality is something we must not only expect, but forgive.”

Marilyn later claimed to her best friend, Jeanne Carmen, “Elia was one depressed man, but at least before the night ended, he rose to the occasion. He didn’t offer me the role of Baby Doll, but neither did he turn me down. I think it’s mine.”

In a call to Tennessee, Kazan told him of Marilyn’s obsessive desire to play Baby Doll. “She’s nearly thirty, and Baby Doll, as you’ve written her, is a teenage virgin. Marilyn’s a good
comedienne
, but not much more. And she comes with baggage. Not only is she completely neurotic, but she’s got Paula Strasberg tagging along to direct the picture for her.”

As expected, a call from Marilyn rang in Tennessee’s hotel suite that afternoon.

“What could be better box office than a movie starring Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando, directed by Elia Kazan and written by the great Tennessee Williams?” she asked.

“I don’t like the billing,” he said.

“
Baby Doll
can transform my career and send me off in a new direction,” she told him. “Maybe I’ll be taken seriously as an actress.”

He explained to her that he did not have the right to cast the movie, but would give her bid serious consideration.

In several biographies, the claim is made that Marilyn was Tennessee’s first choice for the role of Baby Doll, and that she lost the role because of Kazan’s objections. One night at his home in Key West, Tennessee told Darwin Porter that he, too, thought Marilyn was not only too old, but inappropriate for the role of the thumb-sucking nymphet. “Not one movie-goer would believe that the on-screen Marilyn had not been fucked,” Tennessee said. “She was not that good an actress and certainly no virgin. I heard she’d lost that to Howard Keel when she was thirteen.”

Bypassing Marilyn, Kazan was fascinated by the icy blond sex symbol, Carroll Baker, having watched her in the rushes of
Giant
(1956), starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor. Kazan envisioned her as perfect for the role of the child-like wife (in name only) of the character played by Karl Malden.

Kazan invited Tennessee to the Actors Studio in Manhattan to witness a scene between Malden and Baker. Lee Strasberg tipped Marilyn off about this audition, and unexpectedly, she showed up to witness the scene as it unfolded with her young rival for the role.

Before her audition for Kazan and Tennessee, Baker had experienced what she described as a terrifying nightmare, in which Tennessee became “a gigantic, white, round balloon with a pig’s head. His face was stark white and bloated with two round rouged spots on his puffed-out cheeks. He tells Kazan, ‘We’ll have to fatten her up. Her breasts will have to be globular.’”

In Carroll’s nightmare, Kazan had protested, “But you’ve already created a bizarre character, and I want to use a normal girl to bring her to life.”

In response, Tennessee said, “But this girl is dull, dreary, and titless. I want a sexy ‘piglette.’”

Before her tryout scene at the Actors Studio, Baker learned that Marilyn, who was conspicuously in the audience, was a contender for the part. “I wish my breasts were as big as hers,” Carroll lamented.

Baker’s husband, director Jack Garfein, had more or less been left with the impression that if Baker did well in the tryout, the part would be hers, unless Kazan decided to go for the box office draw of Marilyn herself. Even so, it was a surprise when Marilyn walked into the Actors Studio as a prominent member of the audience.

Baker remembered the blonde goddess wearing a patterned scarf, a pink angora sweater, and oversized sunglasses. “Her thin cotton pants might have been grafted to her flesh,” Baker later said.

All eyes focused on Marilyn, as she pursed her lips and lisped, “Hello, Jack,” to Baker’s new husband.

“I was so jealous, I could have killed her,” Baker wrote in her memoirs. “She made the word “Jack” sound positively obscene.”

Baker remembered Marilyn’s approach toward her: “She was like a perpetual-motion gel. If her hips weren’t gyrating, she was winching her shoulders, or swinging her pink fuzzy tits, or making that sucking fish-pucker mouth. Everything about her stated: ‘I’m yours. Take me. Use me.’ I thought I smelled the fruity aroma of sex.”

After watching Baker and Malden emote onstage, Tennessee jumped to his feet. “That’s it! Carroll, you are it!” He rushed up onto the stage and embraced her. “Baby, you’re our
Baby Doll
,” he sang out.

Seated in the third row of the audience, Marilyn, too, jumped up from her seat. In tears, she made her way to the exit.

***

Barbara Leaming, one of Marilyn’s many biographers, speculated about what would have happened if Marilyn had starred in
Baby Doll:

“Had she been directed by Kazan at that stage in her career, she probably would not have become as dependent on the Strasbergs. What need would there have been for Lee Strasberg if it had been Kazan who enabled Marilyn to do her first important dramatic role? What need would there have been for Paula Strasberg, her acting coach? Had Marilyn done well in a film written by Tennessee Williams, quite possibly she would have been treated differently by the public, and even by the industry. And who could say what would have happened to Marilyn’s relationship with Arthur Miller had she gone to Mississippi in November of 1955 with Kazan?”

Baby Doll
was released throughout the United States on December 18, 1956 to immediate controversy. The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency, guardian of movie-goers’ morality, condemned it.

Variety
noted that this was the first time in years that Legion censors condemned a major American film that had already received the approval of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Time
magazine defined
Baby Doll
as “just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited.”

Hellfire and dragon flames came with particular force from Cardinal Francis Spellman, who functioned as the sixth Catholic Archbishop of New York City from 1939 to 1967, and who was described by journalist Michelangelo Signorile as “one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history.” He had not seen the movie, but denounced its “immoral and corrupting influence.”

“In the Vatican,” Kazan privately claimed, “they call him Cardinal Nellie Spellman because they know he’s as gay as a Christmas goose. He and his fellow cross-dresser, J. Edgar Hoover, should put on their gowns and their pumps and actually see the picture. I’d call Nellie the Sammy Glick of the Catholic church.”

In public, Kazan defended the movie, claiming, “I like it better than
A Streetcar Named Desire. Baby Doll
is more ambivalent. It combines comedy and social significance, passion, and farce.”

Tennessee issued a statement to the press. “I can’t believe that an ancient and august branch of the Christian faith is not larger in heart and mind than those who set themselves up as censors.”

In defiance, Warners plastered Times Square with a block-long billboard depicting Baker sucking her thumb. She had eighty-foot legs and ten-foot eyebrows.

The Catholic Church forbade Catholics from seeing
Baby Doll
, which evoked howls of protest from the American Civil Liberties Union as a violation of the First Amendment.

James A. Pike of New York City’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine countered Spellman’s assault, asserting that there was more sensuality in
The Ten Commandments, [the 1956 religious and historical epic produced and directed by Cecil B. DeMille]
than in
Baby Doll
.

As stated by Pike, “It is not the church’s duty to prevent adults from having the experience of this picture, but to give them a wholesome basis for interpretation and serious answers to questions that were asked with seriousness.”

At Oscar time, Carroll Baker vied for Best Actress, losing to Ingrid Bergman for
Anastasia
. Mildred Dunnock, up for Best Supporting Actress, lost to Dorothy Malone for
Written on the Wind
. Tennessee was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, although he should have shared that recognition with Kazan.

In later years, Eli Wallach, the film’s co-star, defined
Baby Doll
as “one of the most exciting, daring movies ever made. People see it today and ask, ‘What the hell was all the fuss about suppressing it?’”

Chapter Thirty-Two