Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (25 page)

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1948, Williams returned to New York to attend the rehearsal period of
Summer and Smoke
. Britneva followed soon after him to minister her particular astringent brand of concern and caprice, and to be his date for the Broadway opening. The day Britneva arrived on the
Queen Mary
, Williams met the boat and took her to see
Streetcar
, where she complained about Brando’s mumbling. “Tennessee, with a glint of malice in his eye, said, ‘Why don’t you go backstage and tell him?’ ” Britneva recalled. “Which I did. Brando was absolutely delighted and took me to the Russian Tea Room immediately.”

During the bumpy Broadway rehearsals for
Summer and Smoke
, Williams’s faith in Margo Jones declined; Britneva’s place in his affections grew. Britneva’s adoration was a happy contrast to Jones’s exasperation. “We were fighting,” Williams later told Brooks Atkinson, explaining what he saw as Jones’s failure of imagination with the play. Jones had used Atkinson’s glowing notice in the
Times
of her theater-in-the-round production in Dallas to sell Williams on the idea of her both producing and directing the play on Broadway. “Total autonomy between the two of us,” she told him. But as early as April, Williams was voicing doubts about her as director. “If you want to (
dare
to) bring up the subject of Kazan directing, do so,” he counseled Wood, “but I doubt that you will get anywhere with it as our girl Jones unquestionably regards herself as the American Stanislavsky which it is still faintly possible that she may be however much we may doubt it.” Although Wood doubted Jones’s abilities and her toughness—“I expressed my doubts to Tennessee but he merely shrugged them off,” she wrote—Williams “did, as usual, the gentlemanly thing. He’d promised her she could be his director, and that was that.”

Jones could certainly talk the talk. (“She was the con of cons,” the actor Ray Walston, who made his Broadway debut in
Summer and Smoke
, said.) As Williams learned to his cost, however, she couldn’t walk the walk. “The tragedy is that her performance rarely lives up to her passion. Like a lover so anxious, so frightened of his desire, that he can’t carry it through,” he told Atkinson. Jones’s theatrical vision was greater than her technical prowess. Among the many miscalculations surrounding the Broadway production of
Summer and Smoke
—its transfer from a theater-in-the-round to a more removed proscenium, its set, which was too big for the stage—the most fundamental was Jones’s inability to communicate with actors. A week into the rehearsals, Williams “began to have depressing premonitions about the venture,” he said. “An actor or actress would approach the ecstatic Margo with a question such as ‘How do you want me to play this bit, Miss Jones?’ ‘
Play
it? Honey, don’t play it,
feel
it.’ ”

Later, after the production had closed, Capote told Williams a story he had heard from Anne Jackson, who played Nellie in the Broadway production: that Jones had attempted to gee-up the cast by telling them that the play was “the work of a dying man.” The story so outraged Williams that he turned over a table in Capote’s lap. (“I had been ill at the time, but ‘dying’ was the furthest thing from my intention, then or any time since, and anyway it struck me as an irrelevant or false and certainly not helpful sort of ‘appeal’,” Williams explained to Atkinson. “Actors
always
do their best, and the real or imaginary sickness of an author doesn’t and shouldn’t, couldn’t, alter their contribution to the production.”) “In my opinion Margo Jones should have confined herself to a regional theatre, preferably in the executive and fund-raising departments,” Williams wrote in
Memoirs
. “I think it was there that her genius lay not in the direction of actors or of delicate plays.” In his frustration, at one point during rehearsals, Williams bounded up from the stalls to show the actors what he wanted. “I was onstage playing the scene,” Walston recalled. “Margo screamed from the audience, jumped up on the stage, threw her script down and said to Tennessee, ‘I am directing this play! You get off the stage and get out of the theater!’ ”

Several days before the opening, at the Music Box Theatre on October 6, Williams and Wood sat together on the steps leading down to the lounge and listened to “Margo Jones’s Farewell Address to the Troops,” as Wood called it. “She told her cast that without doubt Tennessee Williams was the most important playwright of our times, ‘Summer and Smoke’ was the best play he’d ever written, the play simply had to succeed here in New York, it was up to them to give a performance worthy of the work,” Wood recalled. Finally, Jones looked over to Williams. “Is there anything you’d like to say, Tenn?” she asked. “There’s nothing
left
to say, is there?” Williams said, glancing at Wood and smiling.

The almost uniformly dismissive reviews—“A pretentious and amateurish bore” (
New York Herald Tribune
); “mawkish, murky, maudlin and monotonous” (
New York
Daily News
)—confirmed Williams’s assessment of Jones’s “mediocre job.” “Not inspired, not vital, as Kazan would have been and as the play so dreadfully needed,” he wrote to Windham.

IF THE REVIEWS to
Summer and Smoke
took the shine off Williams’s public glory, his private life had taken on a welcome new luster with the reemergence of Frank Merlo. One night, soon after returning from Europe, while walking down Lexington Avenue around midnight, Williams spotted Merlo in a delicatessen. He hadn’t seen him since their passionate one-night stand on the Provincetown dunes a year before. Merlo was with a Navy friend. Williams invited them both back to his place on East Fifty-Eighth Street to picnic with their roast-beef sandwiches and potato salad. When Merlo’s Navy buddy left to catch a bus back to New Jersey, Merlo stayed on. “Something started or something stopped / and there I was and there was he / . . . For it was late and I was lost,” Williams wrote in his plaintive poem “Little Horse”—a nickname given to Merlo by Britneva because of his large front teeth.

There was nothing lost about the pragmatic Merlo, who was twenty-seven when he reconnected with Williams. “He was enthusiastic about everything, extremely positive,” said the theater historian Mary Henderson, who lived around the corner from Merlo when he was growing up in Peterstown, the Italian section of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and once dated him. “He was a stick of dynamite, and he remained that way for the rest of his life—voluble, funny.” Merlo, whom Williams described in a poem as “fleshed in a god’s perfection,” was muscular and handsome with thick black hair and a swarthy complexion.

Merlo had been a “change-of-life baby,” the fifth child of Rosalie and Mike Merlo, who was a fishmonger in America but had been, according to Henderson, “an important man in Italy.” Throughout his growing up, Merlo was known as “Fishy”; nonetheless, he carried himself with a distinctive swagger. He had ambitions to be a writer and was something of an autodidact. “Frank felt very keenly his lack of education,” Henderson said. (“He was far better read than Tennessee,” according to Vidal.) In 1941, forging the date on his birth certificate, Merlo dropped out of Thomas Jefferson High School in his senior year to join the Navy. Despite his diminutive stature—he was five foot three—he ended up serving with the Marines. War was his university; the Marines was his fraternity. “I damn near got to know a whole battalion of men, including officers, of whom, I may add, I’ve made some lasting friendships,” he wrote.

As a pharmacist mate first class attached to the Marine Corps’s First Division, Merlo saw action in the Pacific Theater. To his best friend Frank Gionataiso, who had enlisted with him, Merlo recounted coming under fire in a fierce three-day battle at Guadalcanal while he was carrying a sixty-five-pound pack on his back and six grenades in his pockets. “I had just witnessed a Jap .25 cal bullet tearing through the pack of a boy ahead of me and was sure the Japs could spot my pack. To me it seemed as if the god-damned thing stuck at least a mile in the air.” In front of him, he spotted a sergeant who had been mortally wounded. Merlo ordered four men forward to retrieve his body on a stretcher. He continued:

The path was very narrow, he weighed at least 180 pounds, it was very very hot, we had no water, even for him, it was steep climbing and altogether rotten going. At one point, we were standing on a ridge, and although we should have known better, were sky-lined. . . . I stepped ahead and just at that moment the air was splintered with the sharp staccato of Jap machine gun fire. The bullets were kicking up the corral rock around us. I inched down below the ridge and looked around. The four men I had just ordered to man the stretcher had dropped their burden. Three of them were hit, two fatally and the other mortally hit. I crawled up, sized up the situation and began to administer aid to the one who was still alive. . . . I gave him some morphine and he died a short while after.

From the calm of the dispensary at the Naval Hospital in Alameda, California, where he served out his tour of duty, the high-spirited Merlo wrote Gionataiso about his widening horizons. He was reading Salvador Dalí’s
My Secret Life
. (“It’s a very well set up book and profusely illustrated with his work. It costs six dollars and I think well worth the price even if one doesn’t care for Dali. He doesn’t omit any details and even includes a chapter called ‘My Intra-Uterine Memories, or Life in the Womb.’ Mad!!!”) He was going “high brow,” he said. “Every symphony that has come to San Francisco, I’ve went and seen. Last Saturday I went to see Claudio Arrau, a Brazilian pianist play one of Schumann’s Concerto’s for piano and orchestra and enjoyed myself immensely. I just see you there, while reading the letter, shaking your head wondering ‘what the hell does he want to waste his time going there for?’ That same afternoon I ‘worked’ at a restaurant across the street from the Opera House, which some very good friends of mine own. The whole family was down with the flu and there was just the waitress there to run the place. They were very busy because of the concert and I volunteered to help. I met a lot of nice girls that way. Intelligent besides being good-looking. Saturday night I went to bed with a girl I called ‘Red.’ Her real name was Freda.”

The spectacle of death had fired Merlo’s appetite for life. He dreamed of coming east (“When I do, watch out cousin, look out. I have lined up places—Meadowbrook, Blue Room, El Morocco, Hotel Taft, Hotel Pennsylvania, Harlem! Savoy Ballroom, Leon and Eddie’s and all of 52nd Street and Yorkville-86th St.”) and of traveling (“In regards to travelling after the war, I do intend to go to Samoa, but I shall also, if possible, go to Europe”). He was also considering marriage. “I had intentions of marrying Lena when I first came back,” he wrote to Gionataiso on February 3, 1943. “But after thinking it over awhile decided not to, although I haven’t had a change of heart yet. Just leery, I guess.” But when he imagined the future, the good times were associated with the company of women—especially Lena, “who may soon be my future wife (and bed companion, to be crude about it!).” “Tomorrow I have liberty from eight in the morning till eight Monday morning,” he wrote on February 27, 1943. “I have nothing planned, but shall probably take Lena dancing over at Sweets, a ballroom along the lines of the Roseland, which features big name bands occasionally. The last time we went dancing there, Freddie Slack was playing and when we started to dance, the floor slowly but surely cleared of dancers and before we knew it, Lena and I were dancing alone, for the benefit and I dare-say delight, of the admiring crowd. It always happens no matter where we go. Of course, I love it all and I always throw a very grateful smile at the dear public; a smile usually so full of teeth I look like a Jap after blowing up the Panama Canal. By the way, can you tell me where the Panama Canal is??”

After the war, Merlo returned to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the only decent paying job he could find was in construction. But his appetite for adventure and for the arts drew him inevitably to Manhattan and to the fringes of bohemia. “He got a job in New York with a ballet company,” Henderson said. “He was not gay then. . . . If he had been, he would have been destroyed by those kids.” In fact, during the war, Merlo had been outspoken on the subject of homosexuality. “My tongue, of late, has become as caustic as any acid,” he wrote to Gionataiso in 1943. “I am attached to Fleet Air Wing #8 which I call ‘Fruit Air Wing #8.’ Yes, sad fact, that is the case. Alas, my most horrible nightmare has come to life. There are so many weak-wrists around here, we don’t ever need to worry about the lack of fans if a hot spell comes. The boys (or should I say girls) do enough waving to keep the hottest air in circulation. The sad part of it is, that for the few reserves that are that way, the rest of us have to suffer.”

Merlo’s sexual volte-face was his ticket to ride into the world of culture. By the time he hooked up with Williams in New York, he had already been the lover of the Washington columnist Joseph Alsop and the Broadway lyricist and composer John La Touche. He had also had a flutter in the movies. Between 1940 and 1947, Merlo had walk-on parts in ten B-action movies, including
Buzzy Rides the Range
(1940),
Lawless Clan
(1946),
Jack Armstrong
(1946), and
The Vigilante: Fighting Hero of the West
(1947). Polite and well spoken, Merlo was almost exactly the opposite of the quixotic, unlettered Pancho, the mere news of whom sent a frisson of dread through the Williams camp. “Pancho is in town. Need I say more?” Wood once wrote to Irene Selznick. Pancho was unpredictable and violent; Merlo was resolute and generous. Pancho had been dishonorably discharged from the Army; Merlo was a war hero. Pancho created havoc around Williams; Merlo created order. “I thought you knew about Frankie,” Oliver Evans wrote to a mutual friend about Merlo. “He’s Pancho’s successor, more intelligent by far, if not so handsome. There are some who say he’s irresistible; I am not one of them.” Among Williams’s inner circle, however, Evans was in a distinct minority. “Frank was a warm, decent man with a strong native intelligence and a sense of honor,” Paul Bigelow said. “Tenn . . . needed someone to look after the ordinary logical structure of everyday life. And with great love, this is what Frank did.” Pancho had been a social impediment—“It is a small world with Pancho in it!” Williams wrote to Carson McCullers in 1948. The gregarious Merlo, by contrast, knew how to generate community and to expand the world around Williams.