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) (46 page)

Established in 1933, The Flagship was the most popular restaurant in P-town, having been patronized in the past by Gertrude Stein and Anaïs Nin. Tennessee that summer was a regular patron. He appeared almost nightly with his lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez, a strikingly handsome young desk clerk he’d first met at La Fonda de Taos in New Mexico, and with whom he later lived with in New Orleans.

That night, Brando was invited to join Tennessee’s table by James Bidwell, an acquaintance of the playwright’s. Tennessee’s
The Glass Menagerie
had opened in New York around Easter of 1945. Brando had seen the play and had high praise for both Laurette Taylor’s performance as Amanda and for Tennessee’s writing.

At the time of this historic meeting, Tennessee was struggling with a play he called
The Poker Night. [Its title was later changed to
A Streetcar Named Desire
.]

Before the meal ended, Brando presented a drunken, cackling Tennessee with a piece of silver jewelry handmade by his lover (Wally Cox) in New York. Tennessee slipped the silver bracelet onto his wrist and dangled it in front of the other diners at his table. “Then he moved in on Marlon with the inner radar he seemed to possess,” said Bidwell. “For Tennessee, it was love at first sight.”

“Does that mean we’re engaged?” Tennessee said flirtatiously to Brando.

Seated beside Tennessee, Pancho stared at the new boy in town with a barely controlled fury. He had refused to speak to Brando when introduced by Bidwell.

“Oh, that blonde hair,” Tennessee proclaimed not only to Brando but to the table at large, as he took in the actor’s sensitive, poetic face, devoting equal attention to the muscles encased like sausage in a white T-shirt. Referring to Brando, he said, rapturously. “They sent a Viking god directly from the shores of Valhalla.”

“Marlon Brando,” he repeated the words, dangling his bracelet. “Soon, all the world will know of you. As I told John van Druten after sitting through his
I Remember Mama
, I didn’t remember Mama at all. But who could forget Marlon Brando and that fabulous erection you were showing on stage?”

Much to Pancho’s rage and regret, Brando continued to show up at The Flagship, where he would “bum meals off Tennessee,” according to Pancho. Increasingly isolated, Pancho would sit beside his lover nightly, being virtually ignored, as Tennessee amused Brando with stories of the theater.

Occasionally, Tennessee would look over at Pancho and make some comment as if he weren’t there. “Pancho fears he will lose me to the seductions that fame will bring. When one becomes famous, one must share oneself with the world, like it or not. When you become famous, Marlon, and I’m sure you will, you will understand the great burden that fame imposes on a life. Your own life will never be yours again.”

Pancho here prefers a one-to-one relationship,” Tennessee said to Brando. “But at night, my heart is a lonely hunter. I have never endorsed the idea of sexual exclusivity. One must venture forth each night onto the lonely beaches to find greater tenderness and a rawer and immediate emotion that one can encounter in more stable relationships.”

At that point, according to Steele, Pancho “stormed out of the café. Then, when Tennessee suggested that I, too, should leave him alone to talk theater with Marlon, I made my exit like Lynn Fontanne at her final curtain call.”

On other nights in front of Brando, Steele, and other members of Provincetown’s gay colony, Tennessee amused his listeners. “It was important to him that everybody be an audience,” Steele said. “Most of us had already heard his stories, everyone except Brando. He took in every word that Tennessee said, viewing it as Holy Writ.”

Neither Steele nor anyone else knew on what night Tennessee invited Brando for a walk along a deserted beach. It probably occurred the weekend that Pancho traveled alone to Boston, Tennessee refusing to go with him. The playwright invited Brando for a moonlit walk to one of the Peaked Hill “dune shacks,” informing him that Eugene O’Neill had once occupied one of those shanties.

Years later, in Key West, over “pillow talk” with his long-time lover, Frank Merlo, Tennessee revealed details of that long-ago experience with Brando.

“I think you and I might find a bit of comfort with each other,” Tennessee said to Brando. “perhaps you can find solace for your pain by suckling on my breasts.”

Brando erroneously told Tennessee that he was straight.

“Yes,” Tennessee said, “don’t you find that the land here, especially the weather at night, all gray and foggy with strange lights, evokes a stage setting? As for being heterosexual, that is a lofty ambition not achieved by all of us. On many a dark night, when the heart feels desolate, you might need my nurturing. All you have to do is lie back on the warm sands, perhaps with the ocean water cleansing your feet. I’ll transport you to a sublime shore in a far and distant land. Your heterosexuality will not be compromised in any way, and I’ll even pay you. I know you’re short of money, and I’ll give you five dollars, and that’s my highest price ever.”

“I don’t do it for the money,” Brando said. He rejected Tennessee’s offer of fellatio, at least on that night, but, according to Merlo, “Tenn got his man about two weeks later.” To Merlo, Tennessee remembered seducing a slightly drunken Brando as “the tide lapped under the wharf and the hungry seagulls screeched overhead.”

“I managed to extract two offerings from that magnificent tool before I would remove that treasure from my mouth,” Tennessee said. “By the time Marlon’s cannon shot off for the final time, the early streaks of dawn were in the sky.”

Tennessee told Darwin Porter, “Briefly, at least, I entertained a vision of myself becoming Mrs. Marlon Brando, living in some rose-covered cottage with him on the Cape. There, in our cozy nest by the sea, we’d settle in and enjoy everlasting happiness until the end of time. Although Marlon that summer temporarily turned his splendid body over to me, it was a vessel I was to possess only briefly. He was destined to share his magnificence with others.
So many others.”

***

Deep within the “blonde bombshell” period of her life, Shelley Winters met Marlon Brando at the Actors Studio in Manhattan, where he was taking acting classes with Elia Kazan.

From the first day he met her, Brando was drawn to this actress, who Frank Sinatra once defined as “this bowlegged bitch of a Brooklyn blonde.”

Brando began to meet her backstage after her nightly appearance in the hit musical
Oklahoma!
at Broadway’s St. James Theatre, where she’d replaced Vivian Allen as Ado Annie.

One night, he invited her back to his apartment during one of the worst blizzards to hit New York during the 1940s. In her beaver coat and felt-lined galoshes, she braved the chill to climb five flights of stars to the rundown apartment the actor shared with his lover, Wally Cox.

In the apartment, he introduced her to his pet raccoon, which she’d accuse of releasing eighteen separate farts during her time there. After an awful dinner, he took her to his bed, which was in the kitchen, where he shared some body heat, and a lot more. She later gave him a good review, calling him “sexual lightning.”

In her beaver coat, over breakfast, she casually mentioned that Mary Martin, the reigning musical star of Broadway, had visited the cast backstage after attending a performance of
Oklahoma!

“She told me she’d heard of this play by Tennessee Williams called
A Streetcar Named Desire
, and she thinks it’ll be bigger than
The Glass Menagerie
. She wants to play the lead role of Blanche DuBois against a brutish character, Stanley Kowalski. From what I hear, it’s a part with your name on it.”

“I don’t do musicals,” he answered.

“It’s heavy drama, baby,” Shelley said. “Martin wants to show the world she’s also a great dramatic actress. Bette Davis has even threatened to star in it and put some life back into a stalled career. I know Pauline Lord and Fay Bainter want it. But for my money, I’m voting for that steel magnolia, Margaret Sullavan.”

“Who’s up for the Kowalski part?” he asked.

“Kazan is going to direct it, and I hear he wants a real big name like John Garfield, He told me the role calls for ‘a quintessential semi-Simian actor of undiluted virility.’”

“Fancy words for ‘a brute.’”

“Burt Lancaster has also been suggested,” she said. “But I hear it for a fact that Irene Mayer Selznick, who’s producing the show, doesn’t want either Garfield or Lancaster. She’s after Monty Clift.” The remark about Monty was not true. Shelley tossed in his name just to provoke Brando into a jealous fury. “Fuck that!” was his response. From that moment, she knew he was going to pursue the role. He told her that when he’d first encountered Tennessee, “That must have been the play he was working on in Provincetown. Perhaps he’s written me into the role of Kowalski.”

From the stairwell, as she was leaving, Shelley called back to Brando. “You passed the kitchen bed audition last night. I’m ready for a repeat tonight. Meet me backstage tonight at
Oklahoma!
I think this is going to be the beginning of a big love affair. But you’ve got to get rid of that goddamn stinking raccoon first!”

Even before
Streetcar
went into rehearsal, rumor was rampant on Broadway that it would become the hit of 1947, the second in the till-then brief career of Tennessee.

In its simplest form,
Streetcar
was the story of a neurotic and aristocratic Southern belle, Blanche DuBois. She’s lost Belle Reve, her family’s estate, and with her illusions still fragile but intact, arrives in New Orleans, having been run out of her hometown because of her profligate ways. She seeks refuge with her sister, Stella, and her brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

From her sixteen million dollar fortune, producer Irene Selznick invested only $25,000 to launch
Streetcar
on Broadway. For the rest of the $100,000 budget, she got Cary Grant and Jock Whitney to invest.

She did not ask her father, Louis B. Mayer, to invest “because Dad likes only happy endings.” Also ignored as a potential “angel” was her estranged husband, David O. Selznick, who was carrying on a torrid affair at the time with the beautiful actress, Jennifer Jones, whom he would eventually marry.

As various actresses were being considered for the role of Blanche, a call came in from the Canadian actor, Hume Cronyn. He had been married to the British actress, Jessica Tandy, since 1942. He was only too aware that her career in Hollywood was going nowhere. He invited both Kazan and Tennessee to see a one-act play,
Portrait of a Madonna
, at the Actors Lab in Los Angeles. The protagonist of this play was an early version of Blanche DuBois. Irene joined them to see the production.

Whereas Tennessee and Kazan were immediately enthusiastic about Tandy’s performance, Irene wasn’t so sure. She was still holding out for a bigger name star. “We need a Vivien Leigh type, but I bet we can’t get her. Margaret Sullavan can do it.”