Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (20 page)

At dinner, with still no mention of her status with the production, conversation strayed to possible directors. “The only time he seemed impressed was when he found out John Huston was a friend of mine,” Selznick said. “I couldn’t tell how I was doing, because he
did
turn away whenever I spoke to him.” Then, according to Selznick, as coffee was being served, Williams abruptly said, “Enough. This is a waste of time. Come on, Audrey.” He pushed away from the table. Selznick sat “mortified.” Wood turned back to her and said, “Come on, Irene.” As they moved out of the dining room, Selznick heard Williams say to Wood, “Let’s get this over with.” Wood produced the contract—it was finalized on April 19, 1947—and Williams signed. Then, looking up, Williams fixed his eyes on Selznick and smiled at the woman who not twenty-four hours before he had referred to as “a Female Moneybags from Hollywood.” “I was prepared for anything but this,” Selznick said, who produced glasses from the bathroom and toasted the new alliance with a bottle of whisky. That night Selznick sent a coded telegram to her office:

BLANCHE HAS COME TO LIVE WITH US. HOORAY AND LOVE.

Wood had chosen Charleston for the rendezvous in order to cauterize theatrical gossip and to prevent the inevitable leaks to the press. When the news finally broke, the panjandrums of the Rialto were incensed. Kermit Bloomgarden proclaimed himself “shocked.” Cheryl Crawford, the only seasoned female producer on Broadway, was “seething.” “I think it’s wrong that a new producer was handed our best playwright on a golden platter,” she scolded Wood. “I hear ‘Streetcar’ was offered to no one else. I wouldn’t be angry if it had gone to others who have earned the right. Some of us have stuck with the theatre all of our working lives, taken great chances, done the first plays of many authors, taken the failures, kept going.” “There was a hysteria of snobbery along Broadway’s inner circles,” Kazan wrote. “I’m embarrassed to say that I was part of it; snobbery comes quickly to the successful on our street.” Kazan and his powerful Broadway lawyer Bill Fitelson at first refused to take Selznick’s calls. Fitelson went one step further; according to Kazan, he swaggered that “none of his clients would ever work for her.” To the nabobs of commercial theater it seemed that one of the most promising new playwrights had been poached by a Hollywood interloper with only a flop and a famous family to her name.

With Wood and Selznick riding shotgun, Williams traveled straight to New York from Charleston to choose a director. “Irene is nice but overwhelmingly energetic and a real slave driver,” Williams wrote to Pancho, with an apology for the detour North. He went on, “This is a tough job, baby, but a great deal—in fact, everything—depends on it. I just hope the old Toro will stand up under the pressure!” Joshua Logan, John Huston, Margo Jones, Tyrone Guthrie, and Kazan were on the short list; but once Williams saw Kazan’s production of Arthur Miller’s
All My Sons
, the Broadway hit of the season, he recognized the “strong but fastidious director” he’d been hoping to find.
All My Sons
exuded what Williams called Kazan’s “peculiar vitality.” Williams wanted Kazan, and only him.

“The cloudy dreamy type, which I admit to being, needs the complementary eye of the more objective and dynamic worker,” Williams wrote Kazan, by way of special pleading to direct his play. “I believe you are also a dreamer. There are dreamy touches in your direction which are vastly provocative but you have the dynamism my work needs.” Selznick rushed the script to Kazan, but the thirty-eight-year-old director didn’t rush to read it. However, his wife, Molly Day Thacher, who had championed Williams for the Group Theatre prize he had won in 1938, read his copy. She considered
Streetcar
a masterpiece. When Williams called the house wanting to know her husband’s reaction, she told him so. “Gadg likes a thesis,” Williams said to her. “I haven’t made up my mind what the thesis of this play is.” Thacher hounded her husband to read it. When he did, Kazan had “reservations.” “I wasn’t sure Williams and I were the same kind of theatre animal,” he said.

Williams was shy, standoffish, and fragile; Kazan, on the other hand, was brash, extroverted, and powerful. Williams was discombobulated; Kazan was a fixer, known to his colleagues as “Gadg”—short for “gadget”—a remnant from his stagehand days and his ability to make himself useful. He was all sinew and sensibility; he exuded a sure-footed, ruthless vigor. A notorious philanderer who wrapped himself in the charisma of his prowess, Kazan bustled through his days with an irresistible appetite for life. Although their temperaments dramatically differed, both Williams and Kazan were pathfinders who wanted to change the shape of American theater. In acting, Kazan was pioneering the same unflinching interior exploration of the self that Williams’s plays were attempting on the page. “What our stage does is put a strong light on a person, on the inner life, the feelings of a person. These become monumental things,” he explained. As an actor with the Group Theatre in the 1930s, Kazan had the distinction of shouting, “Strike! Strike! Strike!”—the rabble-rousing theatrical mantra of the decade—in Clifford Odets’s iconic
Waiting for Lefty
(1935). Kazan earned the soubriquet “Proletarian Thunderbolt.” “I was intense, an intensity that came from pent-up anger in me,” he said. “I was like an instrument with only three or four very strong notes.”

As a director of actors, however, Kazan had an almost symphonic ability to draw out and to orchestrate the tones and textures of his cast. “The best actors’ director of any I’ve worked for,” Marlon Brando said. “The only one who ever really stimulated me, got into a part with me. . . . He was an arch-manipulator of actors’ feelings.” (In 1947, two months before
A Streetcar Named Desire
opened on Broadway, Kazan co-founded The Actors Studio, a systematic elaboration of instinct and impulse that changed the look and naturalistic feel of modern performing, a way of making the hard look easy and the easy look interesting.) Kazan admired Williams’s “emotionalism.” On the page, Williams oversaw his characters in exactly the same complex way Kazan attended to physical detail on the stage. “All his characters are felt for. No one is a heavy,” Kazan said. “He doesn’t tend to clean things up, clear them up, straighten them out, oversimplify, or the rest of that kind of dramatic claptrap.”

After their first meeting, Kazan was disarmed of his theatrical doubts. “His modesty took me by surprise,” he said of Williams. “We had a plain talk and liked each other immediately.” Both Kazan and Williams were sexual and social rebels. “We were both freaks,” Kazan wrote. “He was, as I was, a disappearer.” They shared a profound curiosity about the vagaries of the human heart; in Kazan’s case, since Williams was the first homosexual to whom Kazan had ever been close, this included the two of them going on double dates and sharing the same hotel bedroom for their homosexual/heterosexual couplings—after which, Kazan wrote, “My curiosity was satisfied.”

In Williams’s eyes, he and Kazan made “a perfect team.” “Our union, immediate on first encounter, was close but unarticulated,” Kazan said. “It endured for the rest of his life.” Both Williams and Kazan were romantic individualists who shared a faith in the instinctual and in excellence; each in their own way aspired to “burst the soul’s sleep.” They both also insisted on working as artists in the commercial theater. “I read the play again last night with no phones ringing and I felt close to you,” Kazan wrote Williams after their first meeting. “I’ll do everything possible to do your play. But I work best in single collaboration with the author. I’ll never go back to working for a producer when it means consulting with him (her) on every point as well as with administrators, executives, production committees, agents, backers and various and sundry personal associates.” He added, “All meetings on ‘All My Sons’ were between two people, Miller and me; that is the best way.”

Kazan was preparing Williams for his putsch of the system of American theatrical production. “I believed that those same powers over aspects of a production belonged to the director, that he, not the producer, should be the overlord of a production,” Kazan wrote. In other words, using a great play as leverage, Kazan was proposing that the workers take over the means of production and that the masters take an executive backseat. The show’s unique above-the-title billing—“Elia Kazan’s Production of”—announced this silent revolution in theatrical command. For the first time ever in American theater history, the production would be controlled by the artists who made it, not the producers who paid for it.

Before this formulation was arrived at, a great deal of blood had to pass under the bridge. Kazan’s asking price was, according to Williams, “pretty stiff.” Besides the usual directing fees and percentage of the ticket sales, Kazan wanted a 20 percent share of the profit and billing as co-producer. “Considering that I felt our producer was a beginner, for whom I would have to do much of the work of production, I thought (and do now think) this protective billing was fair enough,” Kazan wrote in his autobiography. Williams and Selznick were not of the same opinion. Kazan’s demands sent them both into a momentary flop sweat. Nobody was thinking too clearly. Seeing no way out of the rancorous stalemate, Williams suggested “an alternative which I think is even
preferable
.” He put himself and Margo Jones forward as possible co-directors. “In writing a play I see each scene, in fact every movement and inflection, as vividly as if it were occurring right in front of me,” he naively wrote Selznick, who, in turn, was hurt and outraged at what was perceived as Kazan’s greedy high-handedness. The proposed arrangement would relegate the producer to being an observer with little part in the making of the show, a special affront to the Selznick hands-on producing tradition. Rather than agree to Kazan’s terms, Selznick offered to step aside. “I was not going to knuckle under, no good would come of it,” she said. “In time she would,” Kazan said, who knew Williams wanted only him to direct, “because she had to.”

Elia Kazan

Although Kazan would come to respect Selznick, during the rehearsal period he kept her at arm’s length. “I was rude,” he wrote. “I sometimes handled the lady with unnecessary crudeness.” Nonetheless, Selznick staunchly persevered. She hired Jo Mielziner to do the set design. “Tennessee went off his noodle with joy,” she wrote in a memo to her business partner. After two disappointing readings in New York with Margaret Sullavan and Pamela Brown, Selznick brought Williams to Los Angeles with Pancho in tow to see Jessica Tandy perform Williams’s first sketch of a doomed hysteric, “Miss Lucretia Collins,” in his one-act
Portrait of a Madonna
. Kazan was also in town putting the finishing touches to
Gentleman’s Agreement
. “We all went to the show,” Kazan wrote of the Actors’ Lab production, which had been arranged by Tandy’s actor-husband Hume Cronyn. “And we were completely . . . taken with Jessie. She’d solved our most difficult problem in a flash.” Selznick was also quick to solve Williams’s personal problem. She parked Williams and Pancho on the estate of director George Cukor. “It has been a pretty fabulous time out here,” Williams wrote Windham, with no mention of his casting woes. “Have gone to some of the biggest parties and met all the big stars and Pancho says, ‘It’s like a dream come true!’ ” Williams went on, “It has put him in a wonderful humor and we have both gained about ten pounds so that we look like the big pig and the little pig.”

But, as the Southern folk saying goes, the fattenin’ hog ain’t in luck. That summer, the Selznick office leaked to the press the big news that thirty-four-year-old John Garfield, one of the few sexy Hollywood stars with a proletarian pedigree, had signed on to play Stanley. The contract was drawn up on July 19, 1947, but it was never signed. The following two months of negotiations with Garfield would be, as Williams wrote to Audrey Wood, “about the biggest headache I’ve had in my theatrical experience—outside of Boston.” Garfield wanted a four-month limited-engagement run and a percentage of the play—an unprecedented demand at that time—as well as a guarantee of being cast in the film role, and certain artistic controls, including how many and where the curtains were to be and approval of the last-scene rewrite. Although Kazan claimed in his memoir not to be that keen on Garfield, who was a Group Theatre alumnus and his friend, Selznick’s memos indicate “much pressure from Greek headquarters.” “Kazan tried to persuade me to give it to him on the basis that I had plenty of money and all I wanted was a hit,” Selznick wrote to her business manager.

Since she’d given Kazan such a large percentage of the manager’s share of the profit, Selznick offered to match any share of Kazan’s percentage he was willing to give up to secure Garfield. He declined. “I therefore had a final luncheon with Garfield either for a long-shot chance or a decent burial,” Selznick said. “He made me a sporting proposition.” She continued, “Garfield offered to take $1,500 a week against 10% of the gross for a brief period in order to prove his sincerity and at the same time to demonstrate to me his drawing power and the extent of his dramatic and artistic contribution to the show. He felt that after eight weeks in New York I would be willing to renegotiate the contract at terms more advantageous to him.” So the negotiations continued into August. With each passing day Williams grew more agitated. “I entered the agreement with Selznick because we were led to believe that we would have what we wanted in every respect and that there were great advantages to be derived from her management in casting due to her Hollywood connections,” he complained to Audrey Wood in August. “These advantages have not materialized.” He added, “It was bad management that announced Garfield in the papers before he was signed.”