Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (114 page)

377

“Kubie didn’t seem to understand”: Williams to Elia Kazan, June 28, 1958, WUCA.

377

“A writer is always two beings”: Williams to Ted Kalem, undated, Columbia.

378

“It’s the work”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Sept. 2, 1959, BRTC.

378

“I think the arias”: Elia Kazan to Williams, May 20, 1958, WUCA.

378

“the potential of being a character”: Ibid.

378

“I think this is the most truly autobiographical play”: Elia Kazan to Jo Mielziner, Sept. 9, 1958, WUCA.

378

“The play is an expression”: Molly Day Thacher to Elia Kazan, May 29, 1958, WUCA.

379

“The PLOT of the play”: Ibid.

379

“He is surrounded by murderous forces”: Elia Kazan to Jo Mielziner, Sept. 9, 1958, WUCA.

379

“There, if ever I saw one”: Ibid.

380

“subjective scenery”: Ibid.

381

“Chance, you’ve got to help me”: LOA2, p. 217.

381

“PRINCESS: . . . I seem to be standing”: Ibid., p. 230.

381

“Grown, did you say?”: Ibid., p. 232.

381

“You’ve just been using me”: Ibid., p. 233.

381

“Frank . . . is so pitifully”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Sept. 27, 1959, HRC.

382

“the huddling-together”: LOA2, p. 235.

383

“the home of my heart”: Ibid., p. 207.

383

“Something’s got to mean something”: Ibid., p. 234.

383

“I don’t ask for your pity”: Ibid.

383

“big deal gamble”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 7, 1958, HRC.

383

“if you want to wait”: Elia Kazan to Williams, May 20, 1958,

, p. 118.

383

“the most important thing”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 6, 1958, LLC.

383

“Please help me not to be seduced”: Williams to Audrey Wood, June 6, 1958, HRC.

383

“what happens to Chance”: Sept. 2, 1958,

, p. 119.

384

“attention to his presence in town”: May 20, 1958, ibid., p. 117.

384

“the camera cutting from enormous close-ups”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Aug. 28, 1958, WUCA.

384

“stunt”:

, p. 544.

384

“I can’t think of any other director”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 26, 1958, HRC.

384

“I am out”: Elia Kazan to Audrey Wood, Aug. 28, 1958, Columbia.

384

“I don’t really make deals with agents”: Elia Kazan to Williams, Aug. 28, 1958, Columbia.

384

“I do think he’s probably entitled”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 26, 1958, HRC.

385

“I feel that this play needs him”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Sept. 4, 1958, HRC.

385

“He mustn’t try to screw me”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Aug. 31, 1958, HRC.

385

“for the inner qualities”:

, p. 545.

385

“Miss Page is not the kind of actress”: José Quintero,

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 113.

385

“I think it may demand more power”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, Aug. 13, 1958, HRC.

385

“The Princess is a pretty cosmopolitan character”: Williams to Audrey Wood, July 24, 1958, HRC.

385

“consanguinity”: Ibid.

386

“an air of great vulnerability”: Mike Steen,

(New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969), p. 229.

386

“If Miss Page”:

, p. 177.

386

“Stop it, stop it!”:

, p. 174.

386

“

obfuscation”: LOA2, p. 271.

386

“She was convinced”:

, p. 545.

387

“sweetly and genially smiling”:

, p. 174.

387

“now dreadfully ashamed”: Ibid.

387

“He doubted his own play”:

, p. 545.

387

“I think we have to go for broke”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Feb. 18, 1959, WUCA.

387

“You get the impression”: Steen,

, p. 242.

388

“a close, undisturbed working relationship”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.

388

“brought in to rewrite my work”:

, p. 174.

388

“rightful place”: Ibid.

388

“O.K. I’ll play it cool”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Harvard.

388

“correct”: Ibid.

388

“The sick fury”: Ibid.

390

“You know how suspicious”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, Columbia.

390

“A sort of distortion was going on”:

, p. 546.

390

“the most truly powerful and moving scene in the play”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, 1959, LLC.

390

“A director of your skill”: Ibid.

391

“was more moving”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, Columbia.

391

“shallow”: Elia Kazan to Williams, undated, 1959, LLC.

392

“If this be blockbustering”: Walter Kerr, “Sweet Bird of Youth,”

, Mar. 11, 1959.

392

“One of his finest dramas”: Brooks Atkinson, “Portrait of Corruption,”

, Mar. 11, 1959.

392

“A play of overwhelming force”: Richard Watts Jr.,

, Mar. 11, 1959.

392

“a tigress with the voice of a trumpet”: Kerr, “Sweet Bird of Youth.”

392

“Kazan was marvelous”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 27, 1959, BRTC.

392

“He thought the writing”: Williams to Elia Kazan and Jo Mielziner, Nov. 16, 1958, WUCA.

393

“Pride and dignity”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, HRC.

393

“None of Mr. Williams’ other plays”: Kenneth Tynan, “Ireland and Points West,”

, Mar. 21, 1959, pp. 97–102.

393

“My complaint is that you didn’t listen”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, LLC.

393

“dismayed and alarmed”: Tynan, “Ireland and Points West.”

393

“to be somebody—anybody—else”: Kenneth Tynan,

, ed. John Lahr (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 9.

393

“Something always blocks me”: LOA2, p. 175.

394

“Still a non-smoker”: Tynan,

, p. 15.

394

“Big Daddy rewritten”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, 1959, LLC.

394

“You were obviously totally alienated”: Williams to Kenneth Tynan, undated, 1959, LLC.

394

“As an artist grows older”: Williams to Max Learner, undated, 1959, Harvard. About his critics, Williams continued to Lerner, “I think these detractors, so curiously impassioned in their attacks, far more impassioned than they could be if provoked by dullness, tedium, by that which is ordinary or pedantic—don’t really know what they want. They pay homage to foreign theatre, mostly French. But when you examine their reviews even of Giraudoux, Camus and Anouilh, you are disturbed by a response which is more intellectual than emotional. And isn’t theatre always addressed, first of all, to that part of us, wherever, whatever it is, that is capable of warm feeling?”

394

“You are tired”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.

394

“the rule of the straight line”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.

395

“back alone up the beanstalk”: LOA2, p. 233.

395

“Are you driven and compelled”: Williams to Elia Kazan, Mar. 28, 1959, WUCA.

395

“You are giving me the same advice”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, WUCA.

395

“freedom from pressure”: Williams to Audrey Wood, May 7, 1959, HRC.

395

“She has the Barrymore madness”: Williams to Lady St. Just, July 8, 1959,

, pp. 161–62.

396

“like crazy”: Williams to Audrey Wood, Oct. 30, 1959, HRC.

396

“Something suddenly triggers my nerves”: Williams to Lilla Van Saher, Oct. 20, 1959, HRC.

396

“Oh, God, Gadg, I don’t know”: Williams to Elia Kazan, undated, HRC.

397

“Perhaps my heart has died in me”: Williams to Hermione Baddeley, 1963, HRC.

397

“She had great honesty”: “Playwrights: Unbeastly Williams,”

, June 27, 1960. According to Gilbert Maxwell, Williams seemed discombobulated by Barrymore’s death: he arrived in snowy New York wearing cotton slacks and no jacket, and he forgot the keys to his New York apartment, which had to be retrieved from his maid in Harlem. (Gilbert Maxwell,

(Cleveland: World Publishing, 1965), p. 276.)

397

“Personality Deb No. 1”: Mervin Block, “The Diana Barrymore Tragedy,”

, Jan. 26, 1960.

397

“Any time she wants to stop fooling around”: Brooks Atkinson, “

Opens at the Provincetown,”

, May 25, 1956.

397

“I repeat my vow”: Diana Barrymore and Gerold Frank,

(London: Muller, 1957), p. 303.

398

“I don’t mean this in a sacrilegious way”: Dakin Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

398

“You can make a career”: Beatrice Washburn, “D. B.: Bewitching,”

, June 1, 1959.

399

: Williams to the Editors of

, Feb. 10, 1960, HRC. The material resurfaced years later in

.

399

“1960 is

year”: Maxwell,

, p. 264.

399

“Not knowing anything”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

399

“She flashed it everywhere”: George Keathley, unpublished Ms., JLC.

399

“held no surprise”:

, p. 177.

399

“I thought Diana”: Ibid., pp. 176–77.

399

“She read the part with a violence”: Williams to Lucy Freeman, Feb. 27, 1963, LLC.

399

“the most heart-breaking point”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

399

“My hatred for Kazan burns black”: Ibid.

400

“The only strong men I had met”: Barrymore and Frank,

, p. 301.

400

“Just your brother matters to me”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

400

two other friends: Marion Vaccaro and Dr. Hugh Hyatt.

400

“It was an idyll”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

400

“If you don’t watch out”: Maxwell,

, p. 283.

400

“sympathetic attachment”: Williams to Brooks Atkinson, Mar. 1960, BRTC.

400

“Tom and I have talked of many things”: D. Williams, “Last Days,” LLC.

401

“I remember her wearing”:

, p. 177.

401

“Diana loved me as a writer”: Williams to Lucy Freeman, undated, LLC.

401

“deeply disturbed”:

, p. 177.

401

“I didn’t think she would take it so badly”: Ibid.

401

“The two of them”: Maxwell

, p. 266.

401

“It was half in jest”: Ibid.

402

“sinking into [a cavern] gradually”: LOA2, p. 272. Williams wrote to his then agent Bill Barnes about his memoirs: “I have a new title for them. ‘Flee, Flee This Sad Hotel’—it’s a quote from a poem by Anne Sexton, who borrowed it from Rimbaud. Of course a hotel is a metaphor for my life, and flight from it—if not an impulse—at least an imminence.” (Williams to Bill Barnes, May 31, 1973, HRC.)

402

“The human heart would never pass”: LOA2, p. 322.

402

“isn’t my best”: Williams to Cheryl Crawford, undated, BRTC.

402

“to cast a kinder shadow”: “Playwrights: Unbeastly Williams.”

402

“the nightmare merchant of Broadway”: Ted Kalem, “The Angel of the Odd,”