Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (24 page)

In his free time, Williams hobnobbed with Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster, and Gore Vidal. On the clock, however, at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, where the play was in tryout before its London opening, he had to contend with “the First Lady of the American Theater,” Helen Hayes, who was playing Amanda, and with John Gielgud, the play’s director. Hayes informed him that the show was in trouble, and Gielgud asked him not to take a bow at the curtain call. “I don’t want the beautiful effect of this play diminished by a perspiring little author with a wrinkled shirt and a messy dinner jacket coming up on stage,” Gielgud said. Williams had been skeptical of Gielgud from the beginning. “He is too English, too stylish, too removed from the subject and spirit of the script,” he had told Wood. As it turned out, Gielgud was also too removed from Williams, who described the director after their first meeting as a “frightfully nervous high-handed prima donna type of person.” On matters concerning the original Broadway production, Gielgud chose to consult with the American director Josh Logan, who happened to be passing through town, rather than with Williams, who sat each day a few rows behind him in the theater. Williams repaid the indifference with insolence, referring to Gielgud as “the Old One,” and vowed to defy him at the opening on July 28. “John G. says I should
not
take a bow and just out of perversity, now, I am resolved to do so if there is even the faintest whisper of ‘Author’ in the house,” he said to his newest English friend, Maria Britneva, a pert, high-spirited actress of White Russian origin whom he had met at a party in London.

In the end, Williams went one better: he bowed out entirely. His fear of the play’s failure, compounded by the prospect of a reunion with Miss Edwina, who traveled to London with Dakin for the first night, proved too much, and Williams fled to Paris. When Helen Hayes met Edwina backstage, she glimpsed the hostility beneath Edwina’s show of Southern charm. Introducing Hayes to Dakin, Edwina announced, “I want everybody to see that I have one son who’s a gentleman.” “She was everything I disliked in an ageing Southern belle,” Hayes recalled, “but in the play she was portrayed in a soft-focus of compassion.” Edwina denied her connection with Amanda, but in later years she would come to imitate her. “She’s spearing a shrimp, bringing it halfway to her lips, putting it down, going into a long passage from ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” Vidal said, recalling one occasion in Florida in the 1950s. “Finally, Tennessee, coughing, says, ‘Mother, would you eat that shrimp.’ ‘Why do you have that funny little cough?’ she said. Tennessee said, ‘Mother, when you destroy someone’s life, you must expect certain debilities.’ ”

Two days after the London opening, Williams sent Hayes a note of apology. “I do not altogether understand myself how I happened not to manage to make it,” he wrote. “You may put this down to my ‘pixy behavior’ and nobody knows better than I do that I have carried it much, much, much too far! I had looked forward to it intensely for such a long time: then the last few days I became enveloped in a cloud. Overwork. Nerves. A sort of paralysis.” On the same day, he also sent a note of thanks to Britneva, whom he called one of the “compensations” of his dire British excursion. “In fact, it is the afternoons with you, the walks, the teas, the companionship—the ability to talk to somebody—that I remember most happily about the English adventure,” he wrote.

Britneva exerted an almost immediate power over Williams. A tiny person—about five feet tall—with a mane of brown hair, huge gray-brown eyes, and a beaky nose that she turned up at the world, Britneva had an audacity and a frenetic energy that made her a kind of event. With a bluff, bow-wow manner, she faced down the world. “She scared people,” Vidal said. Williams spoke of “her spectacular velocity through time.” By sheer force of personality, she found a way to scale the English aristocracy and its talentocracy. “She was extraordinary about weaving her way into people’s lives,” her friend, the actress Paula Laurence said. “Before you knew it, you were entirely surrounded. But it was done with tremendous affection, the most flattering kind of interest, outrageous presents, and loving attention. How could you not want that?” Britneva was alternately funny, bold, and ferocious; she had, as Kazan said, a “desperate grip on what she valued in life.” She was adamant about living up to her dreams—a hard thing to accomplish at any time, and especially so in threadbare postwar Britain. “She is full of a good kind of mischief,” Williams said. “Most women hate her and few men know what to think of her.”

Certainly the distracted and disorganized Tennessee Williams found Britneva a godsend. Just before she came into his life, he moaned to Wood, “I am quite incapable of learning the relative values of all these crazy coins, bobs, half crowns, ten shillings, quids, Etc. When Margo [Jones] deserts me”—she had been responsible for getting Williams from Rome to London in June—“I shall be in total chaos!” Almost immediately, Britneva made herself indispensable: clipping the British reviews for Williams as he hunkered down in Paris, sending him gifts, doing his laundry, advising him on presents to send to Helen Hayes and where to buy them, and dispensing a lot of crisp straight talk. “Somehow I cannot make plans or decisions about things like that so I will leave it to you to decide for me, if you will,” he wrote to her, having run out of shirts, on July 30. “What do you think we should do? I have great faith in your ability to solve this enormous problem! (Or ignore it!)”

Britneva’s loyalty to Williams was almost maternal. In fact, she resembled Edwina both physically and psychically. Both bossy women had the same petite physical outline, brusque emotional attitude, and, as it turned out, a nostalgia for a vanished aristocratic heritage that was largely a grandiose fantasy. In Britneva’s life story, Williams recognized his own desperate struggle for survival. He was touched by Britneva’s spirit and her circumstances. She was born on July 6, 1921, in St. Petersburg, Russia; thirteen months later, as she told it, under the threat of famine, she escaped to England with her mother, Mary, and her older brother, Vladimir, leaving her father, Dr. Alexander Britnev, apparently to the hands of the murderous Bolsheviks. She arrived in England with rickets, as well as a more lasting malady, a combination of sadness and terror, which her mother brought to their new life and was a large part of Britneva’s inheritance. Inevitably, the family aspirations were at odds with the family finances. In order to send her children to good schools, Mary Britneva gave lessons in French and Russian and did line translations of Chekhov’s works. She was ambitious for her daughter, shuttling Maria to and from ballet lessons, which Maria attacked with characteristic single-mindedness. When, in 1933, a young dancer with Monte Carlo’s Ballets Russes was found to be under the statutory age of twelve, Maria stepped in. After three seasons, she had to give up dance because of foot trouble and, she later told the director Richard Eyre, because “my bosom was too big.” She transferred her desire for stardom to the theater and got herself into Michel Saint Denis’s acting school.

Almost everyone around Britneva, including Williams, was seduced by her moving portrait of her family of noble White Russians—the paternal grandfather who was the physician to “Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna at Tsarskoe Selo,” and the father who had been “shot by the Soviets.” KGB files and government papers, however, show that most of this was revised or fabricated history. Maria’s mother was born an English citizen, and she was partly educated in England; Maria’s maternal grandfather, Charles Herbert Bucknall, was English. The Britnevs hadn’t actually been refugees from the marauding Bolsheviks; they’d had English papers. Britneva’s father’s family line was made up of
raznochinsti
—intelligentsia descended from petit-bourgeois merchants in Kronshtadt, where they’d owned tugboats and diving equipment and public baths. There was no record of Britneva’s grandfather’s association with the tsarina. As for Britneva’s father, far from being executed by the Bolsheviks, he served in the Red Army. All of which put paid to Maria’s claim to be a White Russian, or even an Off-White Russian.

However, Britneva’s associations with the rich and the famous gave credibility to her story and to her aura of artistic entitlement. With Williams, she played the devoted, adorable (and needy) girl; he was the benevolent sugar daddy, always ready to spring for vacations, hotels, loans, jewelry, even the occasional dress or fur. “I feel sorry for Maria,” he wrote to Windham. “She detests London and has fallen out completely with the Beaumont office”—Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont was the panjandrum of H. M. Tennent’s, the powerful West End management company—“so she has no prospect of work. . . . Seems to have no interesting friends here, nobody she likes much and her family is quite poor, except for an aunt who treats her rather coolly. Poor child.” “I felt I was in a state of grace when I was with him,” Britneva later said, and she was—protected by the big magic of Williams’s talent and renown from a world that, for her, had a habit of collapsing.

To win favor, Britneva was capable of acts of enormous rashness. Of a 1946 production in which she was elevated from understudy to walk-on, Gielgud said, “When Edith Evans, as the consumptive wife in ‘Crime and Punishment,’ coughed too constantly during one of my best scenes, Maria pushed her face in a cushion to keep her quiet. This, as you can imagine, was not well received by the Dame.” Maria had won a place forever in Sir John’s heart but lost herself a toehold in the mainstream of English theater. Beaumont, the producer of the play, canceled Maria’s contract. “She wasn’t a good actress,” the British drama critic Milton Shulman, who was a neighbor of Britneva’s, said. “She was too much a fantasist offstage to be a fantasist onstage.” Britneva had neither the conventional looks nor the reserve for the clipped English drawing-room comedy-drama that was the staple of the West End from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties. She had an artistic temperament, but she couldn’t produce art. Then she met Williams and hitched her wagon to his star.

The romance of the Williams-Britneva friendship was built on the cornerstone of their first meeting. In her version of the story, Maria cast herself as an ingenue of “eighteen or nineteen.” (She was just shy of twenty-seven.) She and Williams met at a dinner at Gielgud’s London home on June 11, 1948—a couple of weeks after
Streetcar
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. “I was invited to this wonderful party. Noël Coward playing the piano. Vivien Leigh, Larry Olivier, the most wonderful people. . . . I suddenly saw in the corner this crumpled little man, very alone—one red sock and one blue sock. I thought he must be another understudy,” Britneva later told Dick Cavett on his talk show. It’s hardly likely that Williams, already a much-heralded award-winning playwright, went unnoticed at the party. But there were a few things that assuredly did go unnoticed by Britneva. The Oliviers were not there: according to their biographers, they were in Australia most of that year. And it must have been the blithe spirit of Noël Coward who was tinkling the ivories, since Coward himself was in New York, meeting with his publishers, and didn’t arrive back in England until nearly two weeks later.

Gore Vidal believed that the two must have actually met several weeks later at a party given by Binkie Beaumont. Wherever the meeting took place, it made boon companions of Britneva, Vidal, and Williams. Vidal recalled the three of them walking along the Strand: “Maria ate and ate. She and her mother were poor. They were still on ration books. She had some toffees, and she gave me one. I had a pivot tooth—a false tooth—which immediately came out. Riotous laughter from Maria. Could’ve killed her. The three us became friends. And then she attached herself.”

With Maria Britneva

Britneva paid back Williams’s generosity with allegiance and excitement. Over the decades, she would become Williams’s “five o’clock angel,” as he dubbed Britneva. Exhausted after a day’s writing, he could always find her waiting at the other end of the phone to fill up his emptiness with plans and amusing badinage. Britneva was variously friend, court jester, dogsbody, confidante, cheerleader, keeper of the flame, and finally, in his Last Will and Testament, legal guardian of his sister (a post that she negotiated well and parlayed into the unofficial but nonetheless influential title of literary executor of his estate). She had a talent for stirring things up. “Word has reached here that Maria B is on her way,” Truman Capote wrote to friends in March 1949. “She writes 10”—Tennessee—“almost every day. Tell her please that . . . if she sees me to stay clear as I will slap her in the tits and kick her down the Spanish steps: you should see the things she has written 10 about me! Quel bitch. I mean this, you tell her. She is a dreadful liar.” As a playwright, Williams found Britneva’s provocations amusing, even dramatically useful. (She would later be the model for Maggie in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
.) As a person, he found her recklessness—her “savagely mordant sense of humor,” as she called it—both a thrill and a caution. “You seem to say all the things that discreet people only think,” he wrote her within the first year of their meeting. “Oh, that tongue of yours! As one who was, and perhaps still is, inclined to like so much of the rest of you, including what I optimistically assume to be your heart, I do most earnestly advise and beseech you to curb it, like the fancy little dogs on Fifth Avenue.”