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) (65 page)

“It was our first real discussion of the character of Blanche,” Tennessee recalled. “I told her that Blanche was a demonic creature, the size of her feeling too great for her to continue to live without the escape to madness.”

“I fear you have given me the blueprint to my own life,” she told the playwright.

She appeared shocked when Tennessee told her, “You were not my first choice for Blanche. I actually took the script to Garbo and asked her to return to the screen as Blanche.”

“I could never play such an involved and complicated person,” Garbo had informed him. “I am too direct and masculine. I couldn’t bear to tell lies and see things around corners like that girl.”

“Garbo told you the truth,” Vivien said. “If you want to bring the best Blanche DuBois on the planet to the screen, you’re looking at her.”

After a weekend at Notley, Tennessee returned to Key West where he told Truman Capote, “Larry Olivier is a great actor in that he preserves the myth of his long-faded romance with Vivien and brilliantly conceals his private unhappiness. Their romance died a long time ago, and only the ghosts of a love lost remains.”

When a journalist once asked Tennessee his opinion of Vivien, he responded: “There may have been, in her time, as beautiful a lady, but if there was, I never encountered her. Her social behavior was a bit unpredictable owing to the nervous torment that I am afraid she always had to live with. She realized that I lived with the same nervous torment. When she was not tormented, she was capable of the most discreet and exquisite kindness.”

Privately, Irene Mayer Selznick met with Olivier. She didn’t want either Vivien or Tennessee to attend their meeting. “I have an idea I want you to incorporate into the British version of
Streetcar
. Gadge absolutely rejected it for Broadway.” She was referring, of course, to Elia Kazan.

“I’m all ears,” he said.

“To help goad Blanche into madness, I want Stanley Kowalski to rape her . . . by suggestion of course. After resisting him, I want her to begin to respond and dig her fingers into his back. He gets to her and she welcomes his love-making. But at a brutal moment, I want him to pull away from her and leave her gasping for breath and unsatisfied. I want him to stand up, with his cock put away, naturally, and laugh at her savagely, a final humiliation that will tip her over the top into pure madness.”

He looked at her strangely, his face paralyzed with agony and dread. “Oh, dear, dear woman, I can’t do that. It would destroy me and destroy Vivien. You see, once, in a rage, I did the very same thing to her. I can’t live that moment again . . . ever!”

Although Irene had relinquished her rights to Binkie to move ahead with the London production of
Streetcar
, she continued to interfere as he prepared to open the play in the West End.

The big question involved who would be able to follow in the footsteps of Marlon Brando, who had been an international sensation, in the casting of Stanley Kowalski. “You must find an actor who is lustful and animal-like, yet needy,” Irene lectured Olivier.

His choice surprised her. Seemingly from out of nowhere, Olivier plucked Bonar Colleano, who had been born in New York to a circus family traveling with Ringling Brothers. Near the end of World War II, Colleano had moved to England to become a resident.

When Vivien introduced Tennessee to Colleano, he whispered to her, “I could go for him. He’s just my type.”

“Too late, darling,” she warned him. “I think my Larry has already engaged him for both on-stage acting and off-screen diversion.”

He was somewhat surprised of her open acceptance of homosexuality, but then, he reminded himself that she’d grown up in the British theater.

Sitting in on the first rehearsal, Tennessee realized that Colleano had been woefully miscast as Stanley. He had begged Brando to come to England and repeat his role, but the actor had refused.

Even though Tennessee was not impressed with Colleano as an actor, he was saddened to learn of his accidental death on August 18, 1958. At the age of 34, he crashed his sports car in Birkenhead shortly after exiting from the Queensway Tunnel. He had just returned from Liverpool’s New Shakespeare Theatre, where he’d starred in
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
His close friend and fellow actor, Michael Balfour, was in the passenger seat. He required a hundred stitches, but ultimately pulled through.

Back from a holiday in Switzerland, Vivien began to rehearse Tennessee’s play. It had been announced in the newspapers that Laurence Olivier Productions would open
A Streetcar Named Desire
on October 11, 1949 at the Aldwych Theatre in London, with Vivien cast as Blanche DuBois, the tragic heroine of Tennessee Williams’ drama. Bonar Colleano was cast as Stanley Kowalski. Renée Asherson starred as Stella, which Kim Hunter had played to such acclaim in New York.

Vivien had not seen Jessica Tandy’s Blanche on Broadway, so she developed her own characterization. “I came to understand Blanche and ultimately love her,” she said. “Blanche lives in her own dream world which is far preferable than the nightmare of reality.”

Attending the first week of rehearsals, Irene Selznick did not like Vivien’s interpretation of Blanche. Irene had perhaps been indoctrinated by the countless performances she’d watched of Jessica Tandy emoting as Blanche.

Olivier later told Ralph Richardson, “Directing
Streetcar
was humiliating for me. Irene Selznick is destroying my creativity. She is demanding that I present an exact replica of her Broadway hit. She reminded me, of course, that
Streetcar
ran on Broadway for years.”

At one point, he confronted Irene, telling her that, “In Britain, Vivien and I are known as the King and Queen of the West End.”

She shot back, “That’s nothing. In Hollywood, my father, Louis B. Mayer, is an Emperor.”

When Olivier was asked if playing Blanche every night was driving Vivien mad, he said, “Acting great parts devours you. It’s a dangerous game.”

“I wonder if Blanche’s madness is contagious,” Irene asked Olivier during rehearsals. “I hope Tennessee’s play doesn’t drive your girl over the cliff.”

“It’s a risk Vivien wants to take,” he told her. “As you can see for yourself, she has the shaky emotional equilibrium of Blanche and she brings to life her delusionary colorations and deceits. The problem is, she can’t turn off Blanche when she goes home. At times, she seems to become Blanche in real life. Playing Blanche seems to trigger bouts of hysteria and depression.”

Years later, Olivier expressed regret about casting Vivien in
Streetcar
. “She was too much affected by the part she played. It had a great deal to do with playing Blanche DuBois and being ill in the same way.”

The critics piled attack upon attack on Vivien for her performance in
Streetcar
and on Tennessee for writing it. All she would say was, “Of course, it’s not a drawing room comedy.” One reviewer, in town from Leeds, headlined his critique:
SCARLETT O’HARA DROWNS IN A CESSPOOL
.

A woman who arranged flower shows in Chelsea told the press, “It’s sordid, a perfectly awful play that gets even more horrid every time I see it.”

The London newspapers played up the “sex sensationalism” of
Streetcar
, and Vivien noted that on many a night, the audience flocking to see her as Blanche was “like a pack of apes waiting to see me get raped. I feel as if I’ve been bulldozed and can’t believe I have to go through a gut-wrenching performance of Blanche every night.”

After watching Vivien as Blanche onstage, critic Kenneth Tynan continued his life-long assault on her, claiming that Olivier’s casting of her in the role had been a mistake. “Why not call it
A Vehicle for Vivien
. She plays Blanche like a bored nymphomaniac, a Hedda Gabler of the gin palaces.”

Novelist and playwright J.B. Priestley on the BBC likened Vivien’s performance to that of a bearded woman in a circus. He also said that Vivien’s audiences were mostly men who on other nights might be catching a nudie girlie show at the Windmill.

Noël Coward, after seeing
Streetcar
, wrote: “Vivien magnificent; audiences sordid, theatre beastly.”

After Dame Edith Evans saw the play, Vivien confided to her that it was hard “to shake off Blanche after playing her. I do not have the self-control and artistic discipline to bury Blanche once the curtain has gone down. Isn’t playing Blanche like flirting with suicide?”

Dame Edith told her that “actors can shake off their roles faster than actresses.”

In an interview with David Lewin, Vivien said, “I challenge any woman to be able to accept the scene when Blanche’s face is held pitilessly under a naked light bulb and she is asked to contemplate what she will look like when her beauty has gone. Blanche is a woman with everything stripped away. She is a tragic figure and I understand her. But playing her has tipped me into madness.”

John Gielgud delayed going to see her in
Streetcar
, because he’d heard the play was “loathsome.” When he came backstage to congratulate her on a brilliant performance, he found her sobbing and shaking. Her lips trembled. “I fear she was near a nervous breakdown. I held her in my arms and let her have a good cry. Her demons were on parade that night. But were they really her demons? Perhaps they were straight from New Orleans and from the psyche of Blanche DuBois herself?”