Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (44 page)

Of course you know, as I’ve already told you, that I’d never give the play to Joe (assuming he still wants it) except in the unlikely event that there is an irreconcilable difference in your point of view and mine. I’ve never resisted any changes in work that you suggested for

except a

to make them, never because I didn’t understand or approve of them. Sometimes you specify sweeping changes which would involve a sort of re-write that would occupy months of time, at my slower and slower pace of working. I’d hate to have to compute the amount of time I’ve already devoted to this re-write of “Battle”: it would shock you!—and I just couldn’t embark upon another very extensive revision of it, especially with two new plays in first draft which I think should now take precedence, although neither of them has, in my opinion, the potential stature of this one, but do have the advantage of complete newness. I believe Audrey feels the fact that this play is based on an old one would weigh against it critically. This may be true. But I feel that if it’s powerful enough, as it surely would be in your hands, with the right cast, that disadvantage would be annihilated and even almost forgotten before it passed Philadelphia, because what they want is a

play, or a

one, new or old.

In September, two weeks before his return from Europe, Williams wrote to Kazan again; in pencil, at the top of the letter, he scrawled, “Will return with 2 other plays besides ‘Orpheus,’
no lie
!”

One of those plays was
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. When Williams had first shown the short version to Wood in Rome, he had floated the idea that it be part of a double bill. Wood was adamantly opposed. “I still wish it could be a full evening,” she wrote to him in July, “and I’m still troubled by your desire to keep it in a length that will necessitate adding something alien to it.” Wood felt the play was unfinished, but her idea challenged Williams’s poetic conception of the play. He remained intransigent. “To me the story is complete in its present form, it says all that I had to say about these characters and their situation, it was conceived as a short full-length play: there are three acts in it. First, Brick and his wife. Second, Brick and Big Daddy. Third, The Family Conference,” Williams wrote to Wood in September. “I thought at least structurally the play was just right, I liked there being no time lapse between the acts, one flowing directly into the others, and it all taking place in the exact time that it occupies in the theatre. I would hate to lose that tightness, that simplicity, by somehow forcing it into a more extended form simply to satisfy a convention of theatre.”

Williams could straight-arm Wood with palaver about his artistic intentions; Kazan, however, was a cagier customer. At the prospect of getting his hands on a new Williams play, even before he’d seen it, Kazan passed on
Orpheus Descending
. “I’m quite exhausted. Out of gas. No gissum left,” Kazan said, suggesting that Williams go with Mankiewicz and he would “wait for one of the new plays.”

On September 30, accompanied on the
Andrea Doria
by Anna Magnani on her way to Hollywood to film
The Rose Tattoo
, Williams and Merlo docked in New York. Two weeks later, production plans for
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
were already being formulated, with Wood and Kazan “both hot for it,” according to Williams. “The only thing I want is Kazan,” Williams wrote to Maria Britneva on October 17.

With two consecutive Broadway financial failures to his name, Williams needed a hit, and Kazan was a hit-maker. Before Kazan read
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, Williams wrote him a well-judged letter, and in it played both to his sense of friendship and to his artistic ambition. “You are on the threshold of your richest creative period. There were unmistakable signs of this in ‘Waterfront’ and in ‘Tea and Sympathy,’ ” Williams wrote. “In both cases you triumphed over scripts which I personally don’t care for and invested them with values without which they would have been red caviar: I mean salmon roe, not shad. All you need now is a thing that can rise when you rise, with the same sort of lift that you give it, and I am still hoping that something of mine will be it. I even dare to
believe
so!”

“I’ve occasionally lied to playwrights when they’ve offered me a play to direct that I’ve liked but with qualifications that were negative,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography. After reading
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, however, he pulled no punches. He believed that Williams had written “a brilliant first draft,” but he was convinced that there was more to do. “PLEASE PLEASE stop and don’t rush into production,” he said. “You’re letting yourself in for a lot of grief if you do.” In the push and pull of their collaboration, Kazan acted as a kind of clear-eyed father who had Williams’s best interests at heart. “I’m scared to death to embark with you on this play before I think the script is ready,” he insisted on October 18, in a three-page letter. “We did that on CAMINO and you had a sore blow. I don’t think you should again.” Kazan went on, “I told you way back then that I thought it was the wrong third act. About the wrong thing. You didn’t really agree with that. But I still think so. I wish I JUST WISH to Christ you’d stop and think it thru. The script is 99% of the problem in the theatre. UNITY. Clarity. What the audience follows. What they are made to be interested in and what they want to follow.” Kazan set out the problems as he saw them and challenged Williams to find solutions for himself. “I have no good suggestions,” he told Williams in his notes. “You’re out of my league. I don’t think anyone else is going to help you, however. You’re in a game where only you know the rules.” Kazan’s passion and prowess offered Williams a safety net, which emboldened the fearful playwright to write beyond himself.

The dying patriarch of Williams’s tale, Big Daddy Pollitt, had risen from Delta plantation manager to become the owner of twenty-eight-thousand acres of “the richest land this side of the valley Nile.” Into an early version of the play, Williams pasted a 1921 clipping from a local Mississippi newspaper about G. D. Perry—a friend of Reverend Dakin’s—which had planted the seed that sprouted Big Daddy and his son and daughter-in-law Gooper and Mae’s big family of “no-neck monsters”:

G.D. Perry and family of Hollywood, Miss. Mr. Perry has just closed a deal for one-half interest in the Duke Plantation which consists of 14,800 acres. This gives him 7,400 acres in Tunica County, Miss. He and his wife were reared in Tennessee. He is the son of Marshall Perry, formerly of Madison County, and grandson of Col. G.W. Day of Humboldt. His wife was Miss Sallie Jett Whitley of Mason, Tenn., at which place they were married in 1897. He went to the delta in 1900 as manager for B.F. Duke, better known as Tobe Duke, on this plantation which he has just closed the deal for. He managed for Duke 12 years. After Duke’s death he leased this plantation and bought the plantation of W.M. Johnson and C.A. Barr——both of Memphis. Mr. and Mrs. Perry have nine children.

Big Daddy is a huge man, matched by a huge anger and a huge appetite for life. Williams seems to have borrowed the name and the look of the character from the father of his old Macon, Georgia, friend, Jordan Massie, a cousin of Carson McCullers, but for Big Daddy’s bombast and bawdry Williams channeled his own bull-necked father. (The title of the play also came from CC. “My father had a great gift for phrases,” Williams said. “ ‘Edwina,’ he used to say. ‘You’re making me as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof!’ ”) Big Daddy’s voice—raffish, rough, rollicking—was mesmerizing and unique to the theater of its time, a twentieth-century manifestation of the folkloric American ring-tailed roarer. Big Daddy “strikes the keynote of the play. A terrible black anger and ferocity, a rock-bottom honesty,” said Williams, who felt he had “reached beyond” himself to find a “crude eloquence” unmatched in any of his other characters.

In the play, Big Daddy, onstage or off, is the focus of the other characters’ attention. It is his sixty-fifth birthday, and the household is celebrating his apparent clean bill of health after a struggle with cancer. He is the play’s thematic catalyst, calling out the ambition in Maggie, the greed in Gooper and his wife Mae—“a monster of fertility”—who are intent on freezing Brick out of the family inheritance, and the self-delusion in Brick:

BIG DADDY: (

.) What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don’t you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a goddamn book on it and still not cover the subject anywhere near enough!!—Think of all the lies I got to put up with!—Pretenses! Ain’t that mendacity! Having to pretend stuff you don’t think or feel or have any idea of? Having for instance to act like I care for Big Mama!—I haven’t been able to stand the sight, sound or smell of that woman for forty years now!—even when I

her!—regular as a piston. . . .

Pretend to love that son of a bitch Gooper and his wife Mae and those five same screechers out there like Parrotts in a jungle? Jesus! Can’t stand to look at ’em!

Church!—it bores the Bejesus out of me but I go!—I go an’ sit there and listen to the fool preacher!

Clubs!—Elks! Masons! Rotary!—

!

lived with mendacity!—Why can’t

live with it? Hell, you

to live with it, there’s nothing

to

with except mendacity, is there?

Despite the majestic energy of Big Daddy’s personality and the brilliant extravagance of his talk, Williams, in his original conception of the play, did not bring him back in act 3. Instead, having learned from Brick that the family has kept his terminal prognosis from him, Big Daddy exits in act 2 and climbs up on the belvedere. For the rest of the play his offstage “long drawn cry of agony and rage” was the only thing that anyone in the Pollitt household heard of him. The banishment of Big Daddy from the last act was a narrative mistake. Wood remarked on it; Kazan jumped on it:

This play is about what the second act is about.

The first act needs work, yes. But it’s not the crucial problem.

I think the central problem is to find out what the second act is about and to resolve that in Act 3.

The third act just plain loses me.

I want to know what Big Daddy does, after he’s been told. That isn’t there. Simply and plainly, whom does he affirm? All right, I know you detest the word affirm. What does he do when he climbs up there?

I don’t give a shit in hell how Big Mama takes the fucking news. We know.

It bores me to see Margaret and Mae squabble and bitch. It’s beneath your play and we’ve had it. It’s worth about a minute of action and not a second of act three. . . .

What is the hurry? A guy with talent the size of yours shouldn’t put out something half-baked. You have a super superb second act. I know, I just know the third act is not right. I don’t know what it should be. I think keeping the old man “alive” on the Belvedere is just a substitute.

Please don’t satisfy me. Take time to satisfy yourself. Are YOU really satisfied with this play? You weren’t at all when you gave it to me. . . . Tenn, this play is just not ready to have conferences about yet. That’s the plain plain plain truth.

In another note, on October 20, Kazan added more fuel to the fire: “I am left at the end of Act II with an intense concern with Big Daddy’s fate—and I want to see how he comes out, so to speak. I wouldn’t even mind him just sitting on stage for a moment or two at the beginning of Act III. It would interest me more than what you have there now. . . . You can’t get me all hot and bothered and then walk away and say let’s look at the view.” To the vinegar of his unfettered opinions—he delivered them in a back-to-back flurry of hastily typed notes over two days—Kazan added the honey of praise. “I think you’ve got the best play here potentially in years and years,” he wrote. “Why throw that away because this wind of
let’s get going
is pushing you? I’m not going anywhere. I want to do the play badly. I don’t get but one play I really want to do every three years or so. I sure want to do this one.”

On receiving Kazan’s first set of notes, Williams couldn’t sleep; nonetheless, at eight the next morning he was at the typewriter, determined, he told Kazan, “to get what you want without losing what I want.” Williams added, “I dare to believe that I can work this out, but it would help me immeasurably if you and some producer would give me a vote of confidence by committing yourself to a date of production with the work still on the bench.”

By October 29, as Williams reported to Britneva, Kazan “had committed himself (verbally) to do ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ ” The parenthetic word in Williams’s sentence spoke volumes. Kazan was slippery. His power over a script’s final shape was in direct proportion to the withholding of his complete commitment. Kazan knew his measure; even in production he was not above using his prestige as leverage to control Williams. At one rehearsal, Williams called up from the orchestra to Barbara Bel Geddes, who was the original Maggie: “More melody in your voice, Barbara. Southern girls have melody in their—” Kazan cut him off, then came up the aisle to sit beside Williams. “I whispered to him that if he did that again, I’d quit,” Kazan recalled. Despite their loyalty, for both men, working together was a delicate dance.

In order not to lose Kazan, Williams had to find ways to answer his narrative demands, while keeping “the core of the play very hard, because I detest plays that are built around something mushy such as I feel under the surface of many sentimental successes in the theatre.” Nobody has ever gone broke on Broadway purveying absolutes; as Williams saw it, however, he was dramatizing ambivalence. “This is a play about good bastards and good bitches,” he told Kazan. “I mean it exposes the startling co-existence of good and evil, the shocking
duality
of the single heart.” He went on, “I am as happy as you are that our discussions have led to a way of highlighting the good in Maggie, the indestructible spirit of Big Daddy, so that the final effect of the play is not negative, this is a forward step, a step toward a
larger
truth which will add immeasurably to the play’s power of communication or scope of communication.”