Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (19 page)

Blanche, like Williams, longs for the safety of embrace and for release from terrible loneliness, “a cleft in the rock of the world that I could hide in,” as she famously says. Her turmoil—the promiscuity, the drinking, the fear behind the display of erudite charm—is a veiled admission of Williams’s own delirium. She believes, we learn, that her words have inadvertently caused the suicide of her beloved husband, just as Williams feared that his had precipitated his sister’s descent into madness. “It was because—on the dance-floor—unable to stop myself—I’d suddenly said—‘I saw! I know! You disgust me,’ ” Blanche says, haunted by the unforgivable outburst at her homosexual husband, who rushes from her and blows his brains out. Blanche exposed her husband’s sexuality; Williams exposed his sister’s fragility. In one way or another, for both “the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again.”

To get to Elysian Fields, Blanche takes two streetcars: one named “Desire,” the other “Cemeteries.” The destinations of the streetcars suggest the parameters of Blanche’s self-destructive journey. As the story unfolds, her legend of loss turns out to be more than her first momentary loss of composure: she has lost her husband, her home, her good name, her purity, and, in the end, her sanity. Her airs and graces cover her self-loathing. Her conscious mind sees marriage as her salvation—“Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly,” she says when Mitch, Stanley’s poker-playing buddy, takes a shine to her.

But the play traps another unconscious wish: to find someone to kill her. In the brutish Stanley, who in the original version sold “mortuary equipment and appliances,” Blanche recognizes a death dealer. “The first time I laid eyes on him I thought to myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me,” she tells Mitch. In scene 4, when Stanley enters and overhears Blanche telling Stella, “He’s
common
!
. . .
There’s something downright—
bestial
—about him!” Blanche unwittingly seals her fate, calling out the violence and envy that lie just beneath Stanley’s ruthless hedonism. In his production script, beside Blanche’s lines about his brutishness, Kazan wrote, “This Stanley never forgets. He’s common. He’s common! He’ll make her common as shit. He’ll fuck her and rape her. He’ll degrade her utterly. That’s his only answer.” From the earliest sketches of the play to the final draft, Stanley made his entrance carrying dead meat. Stanley is all about flesh and feast, both of which require killing (even the stage directions point out that the package is “red-stained”). “We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning,” he says just before he rapes her. And so he has. “I’ll put it to you plainly,” Kazan said, whose collaboration with Williams would become one of the century’s great theatrical partnerships, “Tennessee Williams equals Blanche. He is Blanche. And Blanche is torn between a desire to preserve her tradition, which is her entity, her being, and her attraction to what is going to destroy her traditions.”

In “Chart of Anatomy,” the character of Alma had been easy to write. “She simply seemed to exist somewhere in my being,” Williams said, who considered her one of his best female characters. “However, Johnny Buchanan, the boy she was in love with all her youth, never seemed real to me but always a cardboard figure.” In “The Poker Night,” Stanley, a personification of Williams’s erotic ideal, had a priapic vividness that Buchanan never did. In the original stage directions, Stanley’s carnal charisma was self-evident:

He is a man of thirty-two or three who moves slowly not out of apathy but from extreme male assurance. He is of medium height, about five feet eight or nine, and strongly, compactly built. He is eminently pleased with his body and all its functions and this pleasure, this animal joy in his own being, is implicit in all his movements and attitudes. For the past fifteen years the center of his life has been pleasure with women, the giving and taking of it, not with weak indulgence, uxoriously or dependently, but with the power and pride of a richly feathered male bird among hens. Branching out from this complete and satisfying center are all the auxiliary channels and interests of his life, such as his success as a salesman and his easy, close friendship with men, his appreciation of rough humor, his love of good drink and food, his enjoyment of games, his car, his radio, everything that is his, that bears his emblem of the gaudy seed-bearer. He is contemptuous of weak men, he doesn’t understand weakness. He is not even interested in his son and won’t be until the boy is big enough to fight him.

For his study of unruly, self-centered testosterone, Williams kept a model close at hand. “Sometimes my violence scared the hell out of him,” Pancho Rodriguez said about the mad scenes he played out with Williams. His dramatic explosions may have been scary, but they served Williams in a strategic literary way. On a personal level, they allowed Williams’s emotional neediness to be in Pancho, not in himself. “I felt that he was exploiting me,” Rodriguez said. “He used me as an inspiration for his work, to put me in positions where he wanted to see how I would react to certain situations, and out of those situations, write his own version of it.” Rodriguez added, “Tennessee told me one day much later that the poetic quality in me had brought out his desire to continue and finish ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ ” Certainly, like Blanche taunting Stanley, Williams pushed Pancho near to murder.

One night in the spring of 1947, staying in a rented cottage near Provincetown that they had christened “Rancho Pancho,” Williams and Pancho drove to hear the jazz singer Stella Brooks at a local auberge called Atlantic House. “I had a great fondness for her, which was not pleasing to Pancho,” Williams recalled. “He shouted some obscenities at her during her act and rushed off somewhere.” Williams wandered out on the porch and began talking to a handsome, well-built young man with whom he ended up on the dunes. “I have never regarded sand as an ideal or even desirable surface on which to worship the little god,” Williams said. However, that moonless night, Williams said, “the little god was given such devout service that he must still be smiling.”

While an exhausted Williams was wandering through the fog of Provincetown, Pancho returned to the Atlantic House and retrieved their car. Assuming Williams had gone to Stella Brooks’s place, he went there first. “Pancho gave her a clout in the eye, and he left her place a shambles,” Williams recalled. As Williams made his way home on foot, trudging up a steep hill toward North Truro, he spotted a pair of headlights of a wildly careening car coming down the hill toward him. “With that protective instinct of mine, I somehow surmised that the driver of this car was Pancho,” Williams said, who stepped off the road as it approached. “Pancho drove the car into the field of marsh grass with what seemed the intention of running me down,” Williams wrote. As Williams bolted across the marshes toward the ocean, Pancho, shouting obscenities in Spanish and English, gave chase. When Williams reached the ocean, he clambered out onto a wooden pier and “suspended myself from its under structure, just above water level. I remained there till Pancho, not being a bloodhound, lost track of me and had gone screaming off in some other direction.” The incident would lead to the first of many banishments of Pancho from Williams’s world.

On the day he completed “The Poker Night”—March 16, 1947—Williams wrote in his diary, “It looks like P and I may have reached the hour of parting—He has been increasingly temperamental. Has quit his job. Is crazily capricious. I still care for him but right now I hunger for peace above all else.” The play rated higher marks than his relationship. “A relative success,” he wrote in his diary on the same day. “Not pleasant but well-done. I think it will make good theatre, though its success is far from assured.” He sent it off to Audrey Wood. “It makes me shiver and shake to deposit in a post-office slot the first draft of a new play addressed to Miss Audrey Wood, and till she gives a report on her reaction, which may be two or three weeks after I mailed it, the shakes and shivers continue and steadily increase.” Over the previous year, Wood had dawdled over
Summer and Smoke
and been curt about
Camino Real
. “She said something like this: ‘Darling, promise me you won’t show this to anyone yet,’ ” Williams recalled years later.

But to his new play Wood’s response was immediate and passionate. “Tennessee’s script was as close to the finished play which opened in New York as anything he’s ever written, before or since,” Wood said. When Williams mentioned Margo Jones’s commitment to doing
Summer and Smoke
in Dallas, Wood was adamant: “Don’t think about this until you finish rewrite on ‘Poker Night.’ That comes first. We are both anxiously waiting the changes.”

By March 25, Williams had sent off the revisions; Wood’s only quibble now was with the play’s title, which to her ear smacked of a Western action novel. Williams suggested an earlier notion. Before sending “The Poker Night” to the typist, Wood crossed out the title and scrawled across the manuscript’s front page the more poetic and tantalizing “A Streetcar Named Desire.” “Do you think anything will be done about ‘Poker Night’ this summer?” Williams wrote her a few days later. “I want to take a very active part in it, particularly casting, and I am wondering whether that would be done on the East or West Coast. This sounds as though I were quite certain it
will
be produced. Actually I am only hoping so, very strongly.” He added, “Please do advise me about where to go!”

By April 8, Williams had his answer; he was to go to Charleston, South Carolina—halfway between New York and New Orleans—to meet Wood, Liebling, and a would-be producer, Irene Selznick—a name unknown to him—whom they felt would be “safe” and give the play “an all-out” production. Williams wired Wood:

MY TRAIN LEAVES 5:30 WEDNESDAY EVENING ARRIVES 8:15 THURSDAY EVENING. THIS WOMAN HAD BETTER BE GOOD.

As swift and strategic as Wood had been about finding Williams a potential producer, she was equally dictatorial about Pancho. “Audrey repeated twice on the phone that I should come
alone!
” he wrote to Windham, en route to the assignation with Selznick. He added, “She is supposed to have sixteen million dollars
and
good taste. I am dubious.” Pancho, whom Williams sometimes dubbed “the Princess” in his letters, had been a keen reader of movie magazines since childhood and knew that this putative producer was kin to two of Hollywood’s most famous powerhouses: the daughter of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, then the highest-paid man in the United States, and the estranged wife of producer David O. Selznick. “I did not know that Mrs. Selznick existed but the Princess even knew that her first name was Irene!” Pancho was furious at being left behind. “In fact she left me at the station with the baleful threat that she might not be there when I got back,” he wrote to Windham, adding, “The Princess was inconsolable.”

“I HAVE ALWAYS proceeded on the theory that as an agent I must cast the producer for a play as carefully as one would eventually cast the director, and the performers,” Audrey Wood said. By that criterion, Wood had done only moderately well for her beloved client. Lawrence Langner, who co-produced the botched
Battle of Angels
for the Theatre Guild, ended up something of a joke to Williams, who teased his pretentiousness by referring to him as “Lawrence Stanislavsky Langner.” He was equally cynical of his
Glass Menagerie
producers, Louis Singer and Eddie Dowling. Singer was a novice and a bully. Williams no longer “wanted any part of Singer (except his millions, which I can’t get).” He was also “deeply indignant” about what he considered Dowling’s mismanagement of the national company.

At the time Wood called on her, Selznick was forty and in the process of divorcing. Besides nursing a broken heart, she was nursing
Heartsong
, dying a slow death out of town. “My heart was with the playwright,” Selznick said. Even before Wood set her cap at Selznick, the news of Selznick’s literary zeal had gotten back to her. Selznick may not have had deep knowledge of theater, but she had something more important: deep ambition, deep connections, and deep pockets. “I wanted to find someone with money enough to keep a play out of town for as long as I thought it should be there, and also enough funds to cast the play perfectly, and to engage the right director for it,” Wood said. Wood called Selznick twice; on her third try, she finally got her on the other end of the line: “Third and last call, my girl. Have you lost your manners?” Wood said, in her royal, starchy manner. Wood wouldn’t talk specifics on the phone but proposed a tête-à-tête that afternoon. Wood’s combination of formality and urgency hooked Selznick. At their meeting, Wood expertly reeled in her prospect. “Why me?” Selznick asked, “dazed with disbelief” at being offered Williams’s new play. “Find me someone else,” Wood said.

Selznick read the play overnight. She tried to turn it down, but Wood pressed her to take a few days to think it over. “The play was bigger than I wanted, earlier than I wanted,” Selznick wrote. “I couldn’t swallow it, and I couldn’t spit it out. If I didn’t do it, I was washed up; take my marbles and go home; fraidy-cat.” In a letter written after their first meeting, still on “Mrs. Selznick” terms, Wood began by praising her—“I have a distinct feeling that you have the kind of approach, sustaining endurance and the right sense of humor and that all these virtues will help enormously toward making you a successful New York producer”—then neatly finessed Selznick’s natural qualms by playing the gender card. “The other day you seemed to have only a list of Godfathers. After all, there is another sex and with your permission I am appointing myself ‘Godmother No. 1.’ ” (Over time, Wood’s godmotherly role gave the neophyte producer a place in theatrical history; it also gave Wood and her husband 4 percent of the show’s profits for their $10,000 investment.)

Wood’s first godmotherly gesture was to deliver Tennessee Williams to the Hotel Fort Sumter in Charleston. “Feeling like a marriage broker,” Wood sent Selznick and Williams off for an hour’s walk. She had prepared Selznick for Williams’s shyness and for his disconcerting habit of looking away when others spoke. Selznick remembered the stroll as perfunctory. “I walked looking straight ahead,” she recalled. “The closest we came to contact was at the crossings, when, as a Southern gentleman, he took my arm. Neither the play itself nor my relation to it was mentioned, so I could hardly hold forth, although he did ask if I liked the original title ‘Poker Night.’ ”