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) (129 page)

“Tennessee Williams’ theme
in
The Night of the Iguana
is perhaps the most pervasive in American literature, where people lose greatly in the very shadow of the mountain from whose peak they have had a clear view of God. It is the romance of the lost yet sacred misfits, who exist in order to remind us of our trampled instincts, our forsaken tenderness, the holiness of the spirit of man.”

—Arthur Miller

Bette Davis had lost out on the chance to play Amanda Wingfield in
The Glass Menagerie
, Blanche DuBois in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and Violet Venable in
Suddenly Last Summer
. However, wearing a Hallowe’en-colored orange wig in Tennessee’s 1962 Broadway play,
The Night of the Iguana
, She had her chance to star in a role by the playwright whose work had so far eluded her.

Tennessee was thrilled when she’d agreed to star in the play. Along with Tallulah Bankhead, he’d long had a fascination with the temperamental star. Even if his play had flaws—and he suspected that it did—he knew that legions of Davis’ fans, especially gay ones, would flock to see her perform in it on Broadway.

Tennessee based the setting of
Iguana
on time he’d spent in 1940 at a Pacific coast Mexican backwater, at a small, seedy hotel. “That summer, much of Mexico was overrun with Nazi Germans,” he wrote. “A party of them arrived at my hotel, jubilant over the fire-bombing of London. There was an attractive girl in the party, and I said ‘hello’ to her. She glared at me and growled, ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Yiddish.’ Apparently, she assumed that all Yankees were Jewish.”

Bette met her co-star, Margaret Leighton, who was suffering through the final months of her turbulent marriage to the English actor, Laurence Harvey. The director, Frank Corsaro, introduced Bette to Leighton. “We don’t have to be friends, do we?” Bette asked. “When I made
All About Eve
with Celeste Holm, I never spoke to her except on camera.”

Ever the lady, Leighton chose not to be drawn into an early catfight with the volatile Hollywood movie star.

Up to then, Bette had been shown only pages of her own dialogue, given to her directly by Tennessee, who was frantically rewriting them every day. However, when she saw Leighton run through her scenes, she realized that the more experienced stage actress was the production’s star, the one with a role calling for depth and sensitivity. Leighton was cast as Hannah Jelkes, a Nantucket spinster and portrait artist who traveled around with her aging grandfather, Nonnon
[played in the production by Alan Webb]
, “the world’s oldest living and practicing poet.” Jelkes
[as played by Leighton]
earned a meager living painting portraits of tourists in the local town square, while Nonno recites poetry.

Fanatically jealous of Leighton, Bette became her provocative self: “I understand you’re still married to that cocksucker, Laurence Harvey,” she said to Leighton one afternoon. “I noticed he hasn’t come backstage to visit you during rehearsal. Where is he? Busy cruising the men’s toilets in the subway?”

Leighton chose not to answer.

Bette began to have arguments with Tennessee, urging him to cut much of Leighton’s dialogue and enlarge her own part in the play. “The public will be coming to see me, not Margaret Leighton. The role should have gone to Katharine Hepburn, not this relative unknown. Davis and Hepburn—a sure fire Broadway hit.”

“Actually, I did offer the role of Hannah to Hepburn, but she turned it down,” Tennessee said.

From the beginning, Bette had conflicts with her director, Frank Corsaro. “He’s not a director. I hear he’s a libretto writer for operas. Also, he’s from that moronic Actors Studio in New York, which gave us Mumbles
[a disparaging reference to Marlon Brando]
. I can’t stand Method acting.”

Her most volatile relationship would be with the male star of
Iguana
, Patrick O’Neal. The reason it quickly turned sour began with a very flirtatious Bette.

O’Neal, too, had studied at the Actors Studio. Born in Florida, he had directed training films for the U.S. Army during World War II. Beginning in the 1950s, he was seen mostly as a guest star on television programs.
Iguana
would be his first big role on Broadway.

At first, Bette pursued O’Neal, as she had done previously with a host of other co-stars who had included George Brent, Henry Fonda, and Franchot Tone; and directors such as Anatole Litvak, Vincent Sherman, and William Wyler. Every afternoon, she invited O’Neal for drinks in her dressing room, where she made romantic overtures to him. Disinclined to such a liaison, he somehow managed to flee from her clutches.

She confided to Tennessee, “I am seriously thinking of making Patrick my next husband in lieu of my failed marriage to Gary Merrill.”

Twenty years Bette’s junior, O’Neal was eventually invited to her townhouse on Manhattan’s East 78
^th
Street. Finally, he made it clear that whereas he respected her as an actress, his feelings for her were not romantically inclined. She immediately denounced him as a homosexual.

The next day during rehearsals, she turned on him, accusing him of trying to be a “dimestore Marlon Brando, mumbling incoherently like a babbling fool.”

Her abuse continued on a daily basis, although O’Neal at the time was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as was Tennessee.

Both of them were making almost daily visits to the office of Dr. Max Jacobson, where they were being injected with a murky blend of vitamins, hormones, glandular secretions, and amphetamines.

Sometimes, Jacobson was not available because of his frequent excursions to Washington, D.C., where he was injecting his “miracle” drugs into then-President John F. Kennedy and, unknown to the president, into Jackie. Celebrated by dozens of prominent clients from the world of media, show-biz, and politics, with very little supervision of medical practices later defined as both destructive and addictive, Jacobson was dubbed “Miracle Man” or “Dr. Feelgood.”

One day, O’Neal and Tennessee encountered Truman Capote in Jacobson’s waiting room. The gossipy author said, “Guess who was in here last week? Marlene Dietrich with Eddie Fisher. Mickey Mantle was here the week before. And need I identify a certain rock ’n roll star? Max flew to Memphis to shoot him up. He’s also visited the home of Nelson Rockefeller.”

O’Neal constantly complained to Tennessee about Bette, accusing her of being “a psychotic bitch. She’s crazy. She accuses Maggie and me of sabotaging her performance, whatever that means. She rants at us and curses us. Listen, I’m not too steady on my feet, and at times, I don’t think I can take it.”

As he had (accurately) predicted, O’Neal eventually “Lost it.” One afternoon, he lunged toward Bette to choke her. Corsaro restrained him. O’Neal later confessed to Tennessee. “As you know, Max
[Jacobson]
is out of town, and I need a shot.”

“So do I,” Tennessee responded.

After O’Neal’s aborted assault, Bette fled to the home of a friend in Westport, Connecticut. There, she remained in seclusion in a tiny bedroom upstairs, refusing to accept Corsaro’s calls.

Charles Bowden, the producer of
Iguana
, did not like Corsaro and blamed him for not getting along with Bette. “She is a highly complex woman, a major actress who even managed to stand up to Warners during that studio’s heyday. She earned her position by fighting like a tigress for good roles. She’s like a cackling mother protecting her chicks. In the theater, you must learn to work with temperamental actresses. You should know that from your opera background, dealing with divas.”

Tennessee and Corsaro drove together to Westport to plead with Bette to come downstairs to the living room to meet with them. Finally, she agreed to a confrontation, during which she made a series of demands, including that both Leighton and O’Neal should be replaced. Once again, she demanded that Tennessee enlarge her part and cut down certain scenes focusing around Leighton.

Those scenes just happened to be vital to the structure of the play, and also Leighton’s best dialogue. Tennessee agreed to work on that, although he had no intention of acquiescing to Davis’ demands. Corsaro explained that O’Neal and Leighton had contracts that could not be broken.

Finally, and very reluctantly, Bette agreed to open the play in a tryout in Rochester. “No one has ever heard of Rochester, and it is far, far away from the critics of New York City,” Bette said. “If we bomb there, you can get Bowden to shut down the play and not bring it to Broadway.”