Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (40 page)

When Kazan first met Thacher, at the Yale Drama School (her patrician pedigree included a former president of Yale), she had a more academic and practical understanding of theater than he did. She had studied drama, written one-act plays, and worked on productions with Hallie Flanagan, who was soon to head the Federal Theatre Project. She believed in Kazan’s artistic potential and in his mind; for him, she became a “talisman of success.” “I came to rely on her judgment in scripts. She made up for my lacks in taste and savvy,” he wrote. Among the writers who benefited at times from Thacher’s forthright analytic capacities were John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, Robert Anderson, and Arthur Miller. For Williams, however, her finger-wagging over
Camino Real
went too far. In August 1952, having read the play, Thacher told Kazan, “I think you can help him, if he will help himself, for he clings to your strength. But what I began to feel out of the ‘Camino’ rewrite, was that—for this production—he was dragging you into his own swamp. And that’s too high a price.” To Williams, she said, “Never before with you and never with any writer have I seen so desperate and absolute an identification. It’s dangerous.” “She is my bete-noir!” Williams complained to Britneva, whose nickname for Thacher was “Catch-as-Catch-Can Kazan,” adding in another letter, “Molly is a pain in [Gadg’s] derriere but he has to make a public show of loyalty to her as the Mother of His Four Children, and so forth, while he puts on her more horns than cab-drivers blow in Paris!” In fact, Kazan made shrewd strategic use of his wife’s well-argued notes to challenge his writers and to think against his own opinions.

In the meantime, Kazan had been offered Robert Anderson’s
Tea and Sympathy
, a solid commercial bet, which he postponed in favor of
Camino Real
, which he saw as a way to refurbish his sullied public image in the eyes of the New York theater community. Thirteen of twenty-one actors in the
Camino
cast were from the Actors Studio. In hindsight, Kazan’s commitment to the project, he said, came from a desire “to be accepted as their hero by the actors of that organization, to demonstrate my courage and my steadfast loyalty to them and to live up to an ideal to which I’d pledged support again and again and for which I’d demanded theirs. By demonstrating that I had the power to force things to happen our way, I would make the Actors Studio mine again. In plainer language, I wanted to be liked.” Kazan forced
Camino Real
to happen; in December 1952, he was still trying to force Williams to impose a shape on the play.

Throughout the long process of rewrites, Williams both needed and resented Kazan’s trenchant collaboration. “I have fallen off remarkably in the esteem of my co-workers when they start dictating my work to me,” he noted in his diary. To friends like Paul Bigelow and Carson McCullers, Williams blamed this loss of creative control on the vagaries of the marketplace. “It’s awful how quickly a theatrical reputation declines on the market,” he told McCullers. “A few years ago and I could have anything I wanted in the theatre, now I have to go begging. Two plays that didn’t make money and, brother, you’re on the skids.” But whether out of fatigue or fear, or both, Williams listened to Kazan. “This play moves me every time I read it,” Kazan began in a long, excellent pep talk about revisions. “The author is saying a few thousand words in defence of a dying race, call them what you will: romantics, eccentrics, rebels, Bohemians, freaks, harum-scarum, bob-tail, Punchinellos, odd-ducks, the out-of-steps, the queers, double-gated, lechers, secret livers, dreamers, left-handed pitchers, defrocked bishops, Maria Britneva, the artists, the near artists, the would-be-artists, the wanderers, the would-be wanderers, the secret wanderers, the foggy minded, the asleep on the job, the loafers, the out and out hobos, the down and out, the grifters and drifters, the winos and boozers, the old maids who don’t venture to the other side of their windows, the good for nothings, the unfenceables, the rebels inside, the rebels manifest, in fact all those blessed non-conformists of whom Kilroy is the present legendary hero and plain and simple representative.” Kazan continued, “Incidentally wouldn’t a list like this written by a man of talent be great somewhere in the play. Esmeralda speaking on the roof before she retires: ‘Dear God, protect tonight, wherever they are, all the . . .’ and then go into it. (It would also make abundantly clear whom the play is in praise of.)”

Williams took Kazan’s idea and his rhythms and positioned the speech precisely where Kazan had instructed. The result was one of the play’s bravura moments, and one of Williams’s most brilliant soliloquies. Esmeralda’s lyrical prayer became Williams’s own romantic anthem:

God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who’re likely to lose once more, the courtesan who made the mistake of love, the greatest of lovers crowned with the longest horns, the poet who wandered far from his heart’s green country and possibly will and possibly won’t be able to find his way back, look down with a smile tonight on the last cavaliers, the ones with the rusty armor and soiled white plumes, and visit with understanding and something that’s almost tender those fading legends that come and go in this plaza like songs not clearly remembered, oh, sometime and somewhere, let there be something to mean the word

again!

Williams was less happy to take Kazan’s cuts. For a backers’ audition in the first week of December 1952, Williams wrote a preamble, “Invocation to Possible Angels,” in which he explained that
Camino Real
asked, “Where are we, where do we come from and where are we going?” Two hours and forty minutes later—this was without the dance sequences—the bemused would-be backers had the same questions about the play. No one but Williams was in doubt about
Camino
’s vagueness or disarray. After the reading, Thacher had the temerity to tell him that forty-five minutes needed to be cut. “I screamed at her all the four-letter words that I could think of, and Gadg just sat there and smirked,” Williams told Britneva later, adding, “She then sent out ‘circulars’ to everybody saying that I must cut 45 minutes of the play and that if ‘we kept her with it we would have a play.’ ” As it turned out, Kazan held more or less the same view. “This play is at least twenty minutes too long by any standard and by any measure, including the only valid one: its own nature. It hasn’t enough development of theme or plot to take on the jumbo length,” he told Williams. Nonetheless, at a testy meeting in Crawford’s office, Williams threw a tantrum. He balked at directorial interference; he claimed that neither Kazan nor Crawford had been frank with him. “Why stick to a conventional length?” he said.

The first person to call Williams on his intransigence was Thacher. In a letter written the next day, she accused him of using the legend of his own collapse to hold his collaborators to ransom. “You also exercise thru the intensity of your feeling a sort of psychological weapon against your friends and colleagues . . . a submission finally before your desperate and intransigent identification with the play,” she wrote him, adding, “It’s time for you to stop identifying with the play and, for a time, to identify with the audience. . . . The future of the play depends only on one thing: on you. . . . If this is treason—my husband is prepared to get on the Titanic with you anyway.”

The Kazans were using different songs to deliver the same unhappy message: the play was not working. Kazan was the more collegial; his method was to pull no punches about either praise or problems. His forthrightness signaled equality and intimacy. “I’m not going to make any concrete suggestions to you. Or maybe I’ll sneak in a few later. Probably. And incidentally I think you’re quite right to do everything in your way ONLY,” Kazan said, confessing himself “slightly singed” by Williams’s post-audition outburst. Writing a five-page letter from the couchette of the railroad car that was taking him from New York to California, Kazan painted a comic picture of himself wading through the
Camino
rewrites “from A to infinity.” “I sat down one morning and ripped the covers off and went through every page,” he said. “By nightfall I was blind. (I recovered my sight just a few hours ago just to write this.) The floor of my compartment was a foot and a half deep with your crumpled efforts. . . . The point is that I got those goddamned versions out of my life. They’re gone.”

Kazan proceeded to lay down the law about reworking the first act. He commanded Williams to send Merlo out of the house for an hour, to put the telephone in a pail of lukewarm water, and to read act 1 through as if it were someone else’s play. “Just do that,” he said, adding, “Do you think the first act is ready to go into rehearsal? I don’t. Probably there isn’t an awful lot of work, mechanically speaking, pressing on typewriter keys and all that. I just think you’ve got to sit down and see that goddamn act thru. I mean see your way thru it, make some kind of one piece of it. It can be a bloody peculiar piece, but one piece it should be. It should have a sequence an audience can and will follow. And above all I think it should come to a climax—a real ‘internal’ one, a climax of a story and a climax of meaning, and one that calls for Act II.” Kazan added, “A few ’ole’s, a light change and a flurry of movement is not an act curtain. You can bring the rag down, but you still won’t have an act curtain. You’ll have a disaster.”

For the final creative push before rehearsals at the end of January, Williams retreated to Key West and his quiet lemon-yellow studio. In this space, filled with the constant flickering of light and shadow, the rustling outside his windows of palm and pine trees “like ladies running barefooted in silk skirts downstairs,” and the tinkling of glass pendants on the Japanese lantern above his head, Williams slogged away at his “perennial work-in-progress,” which was “expanding in conception although it is now only ten or twelve days short of rehearsals.” He was feeling, he said, “so beat!” “Kazan is still dissatisfied with the second-act curtain,” he explained to Konrad Hopkins, his handsome new twenty-four-year-old Harvard-educated pen pal. “He is indispensable to this play so I must try to please him as well as myself. It’s my most difficult undertaking so far and I regard it as a test of whether or not I can continue to write for Broadway.”

The combination of good weather and the arrival of Mr. Moon, a four-month-old British bulldog, lent a distracting calm to the surface of Williams’s life. “My dream-self betrays the true extent of anxiety,” he noted to Hopkins. In one of the night sweats that Williams reported, he was in a house watching a parade. “All at once the paraders screamed and threw themselves flat against an embankment. The front wall of the house collapsed,” he wrote. Williams saw a great black locomotive plunging directly toward him. Later the same night, “for some unfathomable reason—since no window was open more than two inches,” a picture fell off the wall in his bedroom with a terrific crash. “I woke up screaming,” he explained. “It was a picture of one of my play-sets. Baleful omens!”

The call for the first rehearsal of
Camino
was at 10:30 a.m. on January 29, 1953; by 10:00 a.m., the actors began drifting in. “All of us in the cast felt we were embarking on a trip to a world we had never encountered before,” said Eli Wallach, for whom
Camino Real
would be “the greatest experience I had in the theater.” At exactly 10:30, with the actors, the producers, the author’s agents, and the nervous author himself assembled, Kazan strode onto the stage of the National Theatre. A hush came over the group, according to the production’s stage manager, Seymour Milbert, who kept a journal of the rehearsals. “His air is one of unusual power, concentrated force,” Milbert wrote. “Directness over everything: there is no latitude for anything but the most simple and meaningful communication.” Kazan flung off his overcoat and moved to the small table that had been set up center stage for him, his assistant, Anna Sokolow and Williams. He put his script on the table; inside it, highlighted in green, he had written:

Motto: No matter what you do,

tricks you pull, how “brilliant” you are, never forget the strength and truth of the play. We’ll be lost unless the audience always feels the underlying reality . . . the pain & terror & emotion beneath the surface.

In black uppercase letters, just below the green words, he had added:

PAINFUL HUMOR, MOCKING HUMOR,

PLUS POETIC TRAGEDY

In his opening remarks to the cast, Kazan said, “This is a profound, emotionally charged play, with philosophically written lines, and poetry. Treat the philosophy and the poetry with reality, as simple meaning.” He added, “When you come down to the apron and talk to the audience, find one person in it you can talk to. Above all, don’t perform.”

Later, after lunch, when he and the company were finally alone together, Kazan sketched out some thoughts on fantasy that he’d jotted in his script notes. “Fantastic events are played simply,” he said. “Don’t be sententious, or philosophic, or sorry for yourself. All these people in this play are engaged in a desperate struggle for existence. They have no time to feel sorry for themselves.” He went on, “Death is too real for the people on this street. Have you ever been to Mexico and seen the disregard for the death of another human? It is fantastic for us Americans.” Kazan divided the denizens of the Camino Real into Realists and Romantics. The Realists were “adjusted, make a living, have fun, are cruel, yet happy, behave sensibly, have all the good things, and can even afford to be generous! Remain calm, live by hurting and depriving, die.” The Romantics, on the other hand, “behave absurdly, are anxious, don’t fit, are ‘guilty,’ out of place, don’t get ahead because they cannot live by hurting and depriving, are unhappy, always searching and always BROKE.” Kazan’s notes continued, “Marguerite, Jacques, Baron, Byron are all
legends
. If they give these legends up and live in an ‘ordinary’ way, they lose their identity and disappear. The legend of each is killing each, but they are fated to cling to it.”