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) (12 page)

Chapter Four

In time, Hollywood
would turn out some memorable films based on the plays of Tennessee Williams. But fame, riches, and glory did not come for him overnight.

When he first moved to Los Angeles in 1939, Tennessee was desperate for money. The only job he could find was as a feather picker on a squab ranch outside the city limits.

“My time of dread was when a group of young men, most of them boys, actually, came over three times a week to commit mayhem in a place known as ‘The Killing Shed.’ Here, they would murder the squabs by slitting their throats with sharp knives. The poor birds would frantically twitch as these killers would hold them by their legs over a bucket to bleed them.”

The slain squabs were then delivered to the feather pickers, who included Tennessee among a group of mostly Mexican co-workers. Tennessee said that after he picked the feathers off a dead squab, he would then drop a feather in a milk bottle with his name on it. He would be paid—“very very little money it was”—based on the number of squabs he’d picked that hot, sweaty, smelly day.

In the future, if his host ever served him squab, he’d leave the table.

When he plucked the last feathers of his last squab, he returned to New York. The only job open was a $16-a-week position as an usher at the old Strand Theater on Broadway. “They did nothing but show
Casablanca
day and night. I learned all of Bogie’s dialogue, then Bergman’s role. I never tired of Dooley Wilson playing that oldie, ‘As Time Goes By.’”

“Then it came like an electric shock or else a bolt of lightning,” he recalled. “Audrey Wood got in touch to inform me that she’d just ‘sold’ me to MGM in Hollywood. I’d get 250 big ones a month, or so I thought, until she informed me that the $250 was per week. I was overjoyed. Never in my life had I been paid that kind of dough.”

As the job was originally described to him in New York, he’d been assigned the task of reading a romantic novel,
The Sun Is My Undoing
. He was to write a scenario for its adaptation to the screen.

He arrived by train in Los Angeles, getting off at Union Station with David Greggory, a friend of his from New York. Both of them set out to look for a place to live, finding a cheap two-room apartment in the “honky tonk” section of Santa Monica, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

“The wallpaper was stained, and the decoration consisted of a plaster model of Mae West—nude, of course,” Tennessee said.

His half-gypsy landlady, “Jezebel” Ringo, became a literary inspiration for him. In the morning, she fed him red tomatoes from her garden patch outside and also fed him Red propaganda from
The Daily Worker
. In the afternoon, she lolled about on a raggedy old mattress in the garden beside her tomato patch.

At night, she was visited by a series of military young men, often two at a time, whom she serviced in her apartment. Her nocturnal pastimes inspired Tennessee later in life to use as the basis for his character of Maxine Faulk in
The Night of the Iguana
. The role was interpreted on Broadway by a red-wigged Bette Davis and later, on the big screen, by Ava Gardner. The Maxine character first appeared in Tennessee’s writing in a short story “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch.”

The other apartments were filled with women of a rather dubious character,” Tennessee said. “Jezebel offered me a reduction in rent if I’d inspect the halls right before dawn and remove all the used condoms,” Tennessee said. “Because of the wartime blackout, the halls were very active at night with enough sailors to man a warship. The bedrooms were often occupied, so much of the work went on in the hallways.”

Sometimes, when there were a lot of ships in port, Jezebel or the working girls in the apartments could not service all the young men.

Opportunistic Tennessee invested his first paycheck and bought plenty of liquor. The “overflow” in the hallways were invited inside his apartment for plenty of liquor and sex.

“As one sailor told me, ‘I’m so horny, I could fuck a snake.’ That was the attitude of most of these soldiers and sailors. They didn’t care what legs opened for them at night. It was a heady time during the blackout in Los Angeles. I dreaded when the lights would be turned on again.”

On some nights, Tennessee trolled the plateau of the Pacific Palisades of Santa Monica, that high promontory that overlooked the ocean. He pedaled a bike along “a route of little arbors and bosky retreats in a park planted with royal palms. The sounds of sex in various combinations filled the night air.”

“Everything was blacked out in fear of an air raid on Los Angeles from Japan,” said Tennessee. “The Palisades were infested with young sailors, soldiers, and marines, each of them looking for a good time, and not caring too much where they got it.”

He couldn’t always see clearly the man of his desire, so he developed a technique. He’d approach a young man who looked promising and would offer him a cigarette. As he lit a match, he would check out the man’s looks. He recalled many memorable encounters, particularly one with a gay marine. In his journal, he made the claim that “I screwed him seven times in one night.” But on most occasions, Tennessee was “the fuckee, not the fucker.”

The first Monday after his arrival in Los Angeles, when he reported for the first time to the MGM factory, he learned that one of its chief honchos, Pandro S. Berman, had reassigned him. His new job was to adapt a novel by Judith Kelly,
Marriage Is a Private Affair
, into a vehicle for Lana Turner’s comeback after an eighteen-month absence from the screen.

At the time, he had no respect for her talent—in fact, he claimed “she couldn’t act her way out of her form-fitting cashmeres.” He wrote to friends that he had been assigned “to embroider a celluloid brassiere for Lana Turner.”

He was told that it had not been decided by Louis B. Mayer, but if the lead male role was strong enough, it might be a star vehicle for Clark Gable, if he could be temporarily relieved of his duties to the U.S. military. To Tennessee, that seemed like a remote possibility.

He was to fashion a story about an impulsive wartime marriage between a handsome pilot and a glamorous society girl, and the adjustments they had to make. A dazzling wardrobe of 20 gowns, including a fantasy satin wedding dress, was being created by the designer, Irene. When Tennessee heard that, he said, “MGM doesn’t want a movie script. They’re putting on a fashion show starring Lana as the model.”

For the third lead, Tennessee was instructed to write a non-dancing role for Gene Kelly, who wanted to try his luck performing in a drama instead of a musical.

There was pressure on MGM to get
Marriage Is a Private Affair
before the cameras. Surpassed only by Betty Grable, Lana was the second most popular pinup girl for G.I.’s. Letters were pouring in to MGM asking when Lana would be appearing in her next picture. Louis B. Mayer announced that
Marriage
would be shown in “all the theaters of war around the world.”

Tennessee was also asked to write a small prologue that Lana would deliver at the beginning of the film, a sort of morale booster for the troops. He jokingly told friends, “In it, I’m going to suggest that both Lana and I will be waiting to service the returning troops. I’ll meet them on the piers of San Francisco.”

Each day Tennessee struggled with the script, not finding it “my kind of story.” He grew so frustrated trying to write it that he once said, “I can
almost
hope that Lana will die in childbirth.”
[The star was pregnant at the time.]

Late one morning, the lesbian film editor, Jane Loring, showed up unannounced at his little office. She told him that she was assisting Berman in producing
Marriage
. She’d come to check on the script to see if he were progressing properly. “Pandro wants me to help you invent some sexy situations that will pass the blue-nosed censors of the Hays audience.”

Loring wore white flannel pants, a beret, and large sunglasses—very mannish attire. “She did not conceal the fact that she was a lesbian, but didn’t hide it either,” Tennessee later said. “I’d heard rumors that she was the lover of Katharine Hepburn. My suspicion was confirmed when she invited me to lunch in the commissary with Hepburn herself.”

In the commissary, Hepburn arrived thirty minutes late and was introduced to Tennessee. “Back then I think she regarded me as a little minnow in a fast-flowing stream. They spent most of the luncheon talking to each other about difficult plights of women in film.”