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) (75 page)

“I confess I did, but he turned it down,” Tennessee said. “I’ve got to be honest with you, and this is not bullshit. I’ve thought it over and have decided that even though Marlon may have made a better Stanley, you’ll make a better Alvaro. Of that, I’m sure. Actually, Marlon was afraid of the role. He told me that he feared Magnani would wipe him off the screen.”

“I fear she’ll do the same for me,” Burt said.

“You and Marlon are two strange birds,” Tennessee said. “It takes one to know one, so I’ve included myself in the flock. Certainly, God never created two more beautiful men than you two guys. Marlon makes it a point not to appear hostile to actors he competes with. They are a challenge to him. He told me he regularly seduces his male competitors as a means of understanding their weaknesses before surpassing them. Two of them come to mind: Monty Clift and James Dean.”

“Add Burt Lancaster to that list,” the actor said, ruefully.

“When
Streetcar
was being shot in Hollywood, my lover, Frankie Merlo, told me he had gone to Mushy Callahan’s Gym on the Warner’s Lot. He thought the place was empty at first. But then he heard noises coming from one of the shower stalls. He spied on you and Marlon showering together. You were soaping Marlon’s back.”

“Guilty as charged,” Burt said. “With our clothes off, we’re lovers. With our clothes on, we’re bitter rivals. I once seriously considered having Marlon wiped out by some of my contacts in East Harlem where I grew up.”

“As I’m sure you know, Marlon and I are both bi-,” Burt contined. “We never compete for the same boys, although on occasion, we’ve gone for the same woman. Take that brassy blonde from Brooklyn, Shelley Winters for example, although what both of us saw in her I’ll never know. Shelley and I had a back-street romance until Marlon came back into her life. After she met him, she ended our romance and told me to go back to my wife.”

[Before the end of their rendezvous at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Burt told Tennessee that he expected to win the Oscar for his film appearance in
The Rose Tattoo.
Actually, he would have to wait another five years when he carried home his Oscar for his appearance in the title role of
Elmer Gantry (1960).

In the future, Brando would continue to steal roles from Burt, most notably the part of Don Vito Corleone in
The Godfather
(1972).]

As agreed, Tennessee accepted Burt’s invitation to visit his suite at six o’clock the following evening for drinks and dinner.

Tennessee later recalled, “I was shown in by one of Burt’s homosexual secretaries. He’d told me he always hired gay boys as his secretaries because ‘they come in handy.’ I think he carefully staged his entrance. After the secretary made a drink for me and then discreetly disappeared, Burt came out jaybird naked from the shower. He stood before me in his living room toweling himself off, letting me appraise his body.”

“You look fabulous in your clothes with that athletic body of yours,” Tennessee told him. “And without clothing, you’re a Greek God. You must spend at least three or four hours a day at a gym to exhibit a body like you’re displaying in front of me.”

“Forgive me…I’m an exhibitionist,” Burt said.

“There is nothing to forgive,” Tennessee said. “You’re a ten-star road show attraction.”

“Don’t be disappointed by the look of my penis,” he said. “I’m a grower, not a show-er.”

“There is nothing disappointing to me at all. Quite the contrary.”

As he sat down on the sofa, he told Tennessee, “I believe in the complicated life—that is, balancing kids, a wife, and a mistress or two, with occasional gay forays. I want to live life to the fullest. That’s why I’m inviting you over here to sample the wares.”

“It will surely rank as one of my more memorable invitations,” Tennessee said, putting his drink down and heading for the reclining nude on the sofa.

In the wake of the success of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Tennessee offered an option to produce his next play,
The Rose Tattoo
, to Irene Mayer Selznick, who had previously produced the theatrical version of
Streetcar
. After reading it in one night, she rejected it. “It’s more suited to an opera than to a film,” she said.

The next day, he presented the play to her rival producer, Cheryl Crawford, who telephoned five hours later to tell him, “I love it! It’ll be a hit. Let’s go into production!”

Tennessee later confirmed that whereas many of his plays had originally been conceived as acting vehicles for Tallulah Bankhead,
The Rose Tattoo
had been envisioned with Anna Magnani specifically in mind. As a result of that vision, Crawford called Magnani, and a meeting was organized for a locale in Paris, a city Magnani was visiting at the time, and not in her native Rome.

At their first dinner together, both Tennessee and Frank Merlo made it clear that they adored her and desperately wanted her to play the role of Seraphina on Broadway. Because of the language barrier, she bonded most amicably with Frank, often conversing with him in Italian, and not including Tennessee because “my no good English.”

During that inaugural dinner, as she expressed herself in rapid, voluble Italian, Tennessee observed her closely. He agreed with the assessment of
Time
magazine, which had defined her as “the most explosive emotional actress of our generation.”

In her native Rome, she was known as “La Lupa,” which in her case translated as “a living symbol of the she-wolf.” Tennessee had been stunned by the quality of her acting in the 1945 film directed by Roberto Rossellini,
Rome, Open City
.

In the press, Rossellini had called her “the greatest acting genius since Eleonora Duse.” He’d also begun an affair with her, which had been widely reported in the press. The
Open City
film launched neorealism in Italian cinema, and
Life
magazine gave Magnani a rave, claiming, “She is one of the most impressive actresses since Garbo.”

A month later, when Frank and Tennessee flew to Rome, Magnani had changed her mind about performing in the Broadway version of
The Rose Tattoo
. “The language is too hard for me. I’m not ready for the live version of your play. But when the film is made, I’ll be ready to speak in the right way. I’ll practice my English every day. I will prepare myself for the role.”

Disappointed, Tennessee returned to New York and helped Crawford recast the play, this time with Maureen Stapleton in the role of Serafina, and Eli Wallach as the truck driver, Alvaro.

Daniel Mann was the director. He’d later become the director of the film version as well.

Many critics objected to the heavy-handed symbolism of
Tattoo
. In a statement that might have been misunderstood (or not understood) by many theater-goers, Tennessee said, “
The Rose Tattoo
is the Dionysian element in human life, the lyric as well as the Bacchantic impulse. The transcendence of life over the instruments it uses. A celebration of the inebriate god.”

Edwina Williams attended one of the performances, but found the play embarrassing—“all that talk of sex and lovemaking—how horrible.”

In the play, Wallach—cast as the sexy truck driver—acquires a large tattoo, depicting a rose, on the center of his chest in commemoration of Serafina’s late, lamented, and still mourned husband. The rest of the plot centers around Serafina’s acceptance and acquiescence to the love which Alvaro unselfconsciously offers.

When the Tony Awards were passed out,
The Rose Tattoo
was honored as best play, and both Stapleton and Wallach also garnered awards as Best Actress and Best Actor.

After all that acclaim, the adaptation of the play into a film became inevitable.

—Tennessee to Magnani

From Rome, Anna Magnani notified Tennessee that she felt her English was at last adequate for her involvement in a film adaptation of
The Rose Tattoo
. Consequently, he and Frank flew to Rome to retrieve her and bring her back to America, using the opportunity to coach her in the nuances of the script and her role within the screenplay.

When they rendezvoused in Rome, Magnani found Tennessee on the verge of a total mental collapse, with him entertaining thoughts of suicide. He was drinking around the clock, and he was also popping all sorts of pills throughout the day and evening, both sedatives and barbiturates.

In a letter to Cheryl Crawford, he wrote: “I am going through the worst nervous crisis of my life, and I don’t know why.”

Consequently, Magnani became his older sister and his Earth Mother. “I kept him from killing himself. Great artists have great pain. I should know.”

He told her that he was kept alive by the inspiration of the words of D. H. Lawrence—“Face the facts and live beyond them.”

It was during this visit that Tennessee formed what became his lifelong friendship with Magnani. He agreed with a writer’s assessment of her: “She lacked the conventional beauty and glamour of a typical movie star. Slightly plump and rather short in stature, she had a face framed by unkempt raven hair and eyes encircled by deep, dark circles. She smouldered with seething earthiness and a volcanic temperament.”

Roberto Rossellini defined her as “a forceful, secure, courageous man.”
[Despite his assessment of her as a man, he’d launched a torrid affair with her before he succumbed to the (Nordic) charms of Ingrid Bergman.]

In addition to Magnani, Tennessee easily made friends in Rome with personalities who included director Franco Zeffirelli. One night over dinner, Zeffirelli told him that, “I’ve known Magnani most of her life. When she started out in Rome, she sang in cabarets and was known as the ‘Italian Edith Piaf.’ She is called the most Italian of actresses, but she’s not Italian at all. She was born in Alexandria to an Egyptian father and a Jewish mother.”

***

Nearly every night during their stay in Rome, Frank and Tennessee dined with Magnani at a
trattoria
of her own choosing, most often in Trastevere. She told him she’d have preferred Luchino Visconti or Vittorio De Sica as the director of film version of
The Rose Tattoo
, but that she would settle for Daniel Mann.

In spite of her reluctance, he would helm her into the best performance of the year by an actress, garnering her an Oscar.

Mann was not without his credentials. In the same year (1955) as his direction of
The Rose Tattoo
, he’d also helm
I’ll Cry Tomorrow
, one of Susan Hayward’s best films, and he’d go on to direct Elizabeth Taylor in
BUtterfield 8
, for which she’d win an Oscar. A year later, he’d direct Marlon Brando in
Tea-house of the August Moon
(1956).

Tennessee noted that wherever she went in Rome, Magnani was treated like royalty. In restaurants, at the end of dinner, she would make the rounds of tables, gathering up bags of leftovers to feed to the stray cats of Rome, especially those that hung out in the Colosseum or at the Roman Forum. She also found a lot of cats living under Rome’s bridges.

One of their evenings ended on the Via Veneto, where she fought off the paparazzi, denouncing them.

At her apartment house, Magnani and her
beau du jour
stood at the entrance to the elevator and bid Frank and Tennessee goodbye with lots of kisses and plenty of utterances of
Ciao, caro!”

She lived on the top floor of the Palazzo Altier, close to the Pantheon. Tennessee always praised her taste in young men, who were “beautiful Italian stallions,” although they rarely spoke English. “My nights are awful,” she told Tennessee. “I wake up in a state of nerves, and it takes hours to get back in touch with reality. The only way to do it for me is to be pounded endlessly by a young man such as the one standing here beside us looking bored. I have to select my studs carefully.”

When Frank disappeared to hail a taxi for them, Tennessee whispered to Magnani, “I envy you your choice of young men. Will you be so kind as to give me your cast-offs, please?”

—Anna Magnani

On September 2, 1954, Tennessee and Frank had flown to Rome in anticipation of hauling Anna Magnani to America for the debut of the filming of Tennessee’s
Rose Tattoo
.

On the way back, after a stop in New York, they flew with her to Key West, which would become the setting for what the playwright had defined as a port in Mississippi along the Gulf coast.

During one of the flights, Magnani confided in Tennessee that she’d been having romantic fantasies about Burt Lancaster, her co-star. “He’s my kind of man. I dumped my boyfriend in Rome, even though he wanted to come to the United States with me. I want to be free for Burt.”