Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (28 page)

ON JUNE 21, 1949, with a draft of his novella finished, Williams sent Wood an eight-page outline for “Stornello.” It was a project into which he’d “wandered,” he told Kazan and his wife, “simply because it seemed to demand so much less of me.” Like
Mrs. Stone
, the landscape of “Stornello” was defined by loss. The heroine, Pepina, a widowed Sicilian seamstress, “idolizes” her late husband, Rosario. Her house is “practically his shrine.” To drive home Rosario’s absence, the family Parrott frequently calls out Pepina’s name “in the voice of the dead husband.” The synopsis goes on: “Pepina wishes the Parrott would die . . . it never forgets how Rosario used to call.” Neither does Pepina, who for eight years has not “felt the coarse fingers of a man on her matronly flesh.” Her house has become an extension of her own petrified puritanical will, a sort of barricade around her desires. Just as she has locked herself away, Pepina has incarcerated her daughter, Rose, in order to protect the lovelorn teenager from the sailor with whom she’s infatuated. (“To say she is fallen in love is an understatement,” Williams writes. “She is transported with ‘the awakening ardors of adolescence!’ ”) Rose ends the standoff and wins her release by threatening to kill herself with a butcher’s knife.

Into this arena of hysterical repression comes Umberto, “a young bull of a man: swarthy, powerful—Dionysian!” Like Rosario, Umberto is a truck driver, a brawler; even his build resembles Rosario’s. He is, in other words, Rosario’s double. At first sight, Pepina “blinks at him with an incredulous gaze,” as if she had seen a ghost. For all extents and purposes, she has. Umberto literally and figuratively steps into Rosario’s shoes. Like the figure who resembled Paolo in
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, Umberto is a stand-in for the woman’s real object of desire. Briefly, he holds the promise of some kind of emotional salvation. He finds Pepina “molto simpatico.” He is warm, “tremendously understanding,” and immediately at home. Eager to be helpful, he unwittingly subverts Pepina’s closed-off world. He is an agent first of disenchantment (he confirms a rumor of Rosario’s infidelity), then of disruption. After a night with Pepina, he drunkenly comes upon Rose asleep on the living-room sofa and gropes her. Nothing survives the emotional chaos of that clownish encounter. Umberto is driven out; Rose rushes to her romantic destiny with the sailor; Pepina batters the Parrott cage. Disabused of everything but the sure knowledge of her unfathomable desire, she is left alone. At the finale, she “crawls sobbing to the Madonna: as the light fades, her prayer becomes audible.”

Neither Pepina nor Williams seemed able to find a path beyond endurance to grace, a failing that disappointed Kazan and his wife when they read Williams’s synopsis in July. “My efforts to make it sound lively made it sound cheap,” Williams wrote them, “but in the character of Pepina there was a lostness which I could feel and write about with reality, and would have, if I wrote it.” Although Williams valued ruthless criticism—“Honesty about failure is the only help for it”—the negative response sent him into a tailspin. In his diary, the same day, he wrote:

Approaching a crisis.

Kazan’s letter—the dissolution of play project—

Nerves—the fear of talking—society almost intolerable.

Nervous impotence,

Concern over F.

Bodily weakness—fatigue—sloth.

Tonight barely strength to hold this pencil.

Merlo continued to be as capricious in life as Williams’s “illogical phantoms” were on the page. The night of his near collapse, Williams wrote, “Left F. at theatre with ‘his gang.’ Came home alone under influence (waning) of a seconal taken right after supper. Something has to break soon.—Hope not me.” A few days later, he confided to his diary, “Saw Frank only in morning—He disappeared before I got back tonight—first time we haven’t dined together in Rome.” He added, “Nerves quieter but the trauma is there. And work remains useless.” Still, there were nights, duly noted, when “the nightingales sang very sweetly for Frank and I.”

While Williams worried about the outcome of his relationship, Hollywood was worrying about the outcome of
The Glass Menagerie
. Warner Brothers sent for Williams. “They say they don’t want a fairy-tale ending but there is evidence of double-talk,” Williams wrote ruefully to Laughlin on August 17. He went on, “At least I should learn something more about the technique of film-making which I can use creatively on some other assignment perhaps over here. I am on excellent terms with Rossellini and De Sica and Visconti and would enjoy working with any one of them. Last week had supper with Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini. Their ‘Fuck you’ attitude toward the outraged women’s clubs and sob-columnists is very beautiful and should have a salutary affect on discrediting those infantile moralists that make it so hard for anyone to do honest work and live honestly in the States.”

Before leaving Rome in late August 1949, for emotional and literary luck Williams threw coins into the Trevi Fountain. His departure from Europe was full of the anxiety of failure; his return to America was full of the excitement of success. In New York, Wood greeted him with the news that Hollywood had agreed in principle to a lush deal for the screen rights to
A Streetcar Named Desire
. At a time when the average yearly income was $2,100, Williams would get half a million dollars, plus a percentage of the film’s profits.

Almost instantly, Williams’s drift was transformed into direction. In the first week of September, he and Merlo rolled into Hollywood and into its carefully orchestrated world of blandishments and ballyhoo. As a preemptive measure, to bolster her skittish client during the
Menagerie
script conferences, Wood had written ahead to the director George Cukor to ask that he show Williams some hospitality. “I always feel Tennessee is bound to be in a happier, safer frame of mind if you have your good eye on him,” she said. “I think you will find him in the Bel-Air. If not he will be at the Beverly Hills hotel. If he isn’t in either place, call me and we will search America together.” Wood needn’t have worried. Warner Brothers escorted Williams around Los Angeles like the goose who had laid a Fabergé egg.

Amid the low-hanging sycamores and the bougainvillea of the Hotel Bel-Air, he lounged in a three-room Spanish-style bungalow, with a pool just outside his front door. A rented Buick convertible was at his disposal. And Warner Brothers threw him an A-list black-tie party at the swank Chaunticlair—“like a wet dream of Louella Parsons’s,” Williams joked to Kazan. Williams and Merlo had arrived early, in rented white dinner jackets that made them look more like waiters than grandees. The maître d’ barred them from entering. Charles Feldman—the film producer of
The Glass Menagerie
and
A Streetcar Named Desire
—“who was arranging place cards . . . rushed over to make amends,” Wood recalled. She added, “Everyone who was anyone in Hollywood of the forties was there that night. Dear Hedda and dear Louella, David Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Jack Warner, phalanxes of leading men and ladies.” Williams was given his first solid-gold cigarette case, lovingly inscribed by management. With a mixture of amusement and awe, he moved through the surreal spectacle among large ice statues of animals, which melted and flooded the floor. He saw his name in blue letters inside an illuminated block of ice. “The deeper you go into this dream-kingdom, the more fantastic it becomes,” Williams told Kazan. “I expect to meet the Red Duchess or the Dormouse and the Mad Hatter at any moment.”

In time, Williams would find Hollywood anathema to his freedom of expression; in the glamour and the glory of the moment, however, he looked on the glitterati with benign detachment. “They are all very nice, like children, but the games that they are playing do not seem to make any sense,” he said. “I think [Clifford] Odets must have approached them from the wrong angle. That is the trouble with an angry social attitude, an outraged premise, you see all the ugly things but not the often-delightful humor and fantasy of it, and the pathos.”

Hollywood’s charm offensive may have been comically transparent, but it was potent. Williams was bedazzled. Flush with faith in the studio and in the
Menagerie
screenplay, he wrote to his family, “The vulgarities have been eliminated. I have re-written the whole thing according to my own ideas. I now think it has a chance to be a very successful picture.” Williams saw the screen test of Gertrude Lawrence, who had finally been chosen to play Amanda. Although he would later call her casting a “dismal error,” at the time, under the heady spell of Hollywood, he pronounced her “amazingly good.” (Williams arrived twenty minutes late to his first meeting with Lawrence. “I brought her a corsage, and she threw it right in the sink,” Williams said.)

The studio’s solicitousness was, in part, an attempt to coax Williams into turning
Menagerie
’s vague, problematic ending into a climax with Hollywood uplift. Even before his visit to California, Williams had agreed to give Laura a ray of hope at the film’s finale, but it was a difficult task for him, because, as he told the film’s director, Irving Rapper, “in my heart the ending as it exists in the play was the artistically inevitable ending.” Williams proposed a minor adjustment. “I think it is all right to suggest the possibility of ‘someone else coming,’ ” he wrote to Rapper. “And that ‘someone else,’ remaining as insubstantial as an approaching shadow in the alley which appears in conjunction with the narrative line ‘The long delayed but always expected something that we live for’—it strikes me as constituting a sufficiently hopeful possibility for the future, symbolically and even literally, which is as much as the essential character of the story will admit without violation.”

Warner Brothers, however, wanted Williams’s poetic sorrow turned into heartwarming salvation. Even while glad-handing Williams at the Chaunticlair, the studio swamis were plotting to betray him and his original vision. Unbeknownst to Williams, they had instructed Peter Berneis, the film’s other screenwriter, to come up with his own upbeat ending. Berneis wanted Laura to offer a moral—“a bitter experience can prepare a soul for a new life.” As he put it, “If we don’t show that Laura changes after the unicorn is broken, if we don’t have a basis in her for an eventual open heart and an open mind to receive a man, then we might as well stick to Williams’s original tragedy.”

Berneis didn’t limit himself to suggesting the immanence of a second beau for Laura; he gave her a fellah with a physique and a name: Richard Henderson. To the studio moneymen, this second Gentleman Caller was magic. “We have tagged on the ending for Laura and Tom that was written by Peter Berneis. Williams knows nothing about this. His ending is used in
addition
to the scene between Laura and Tom. . . . My over-all feeling is that this last version is a tremendous improvement over the other scripts. The role of Tom has been built up considerably, Laura’s role has much more sympathy piled on it,” the film’s co-producer, Jerry Wald, who was partly the inspiration for Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel
What Makes Sammy Run?
, wrote in a memo to Charles Feldman. Wald continued, “The addition of the new scene with the Gentleman Caller is well worth all the efforts that you went to in getting Williams out here.”

At a private screening the following year, with Merlo and Marlon Brando present, Williams saw the final cut. The ending outraged him; it destroyed, he said, the “quality of poetic mystery and beauty which the picture badly needs in its final moments.” The film received the bad reviews that Williams had predicted. (“Life isn’t a bust just because you’ve got a bum gam,”
Variety
said. The
New York
Times
, under the subhead “ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Reaches the Screen in Somewhat Battered Condition,” was not so flippant: “The Glass Menagerie,” it said, “comes perilously close to sheer buffoonery in some of its most fragile scenes.”) Williams denounced the film as a “travesty.” Jack Warner, who had rolled out the red carpet for Williams in September, promptly rolled it up. “Am surprised at Tennessee,” he wired Warner Brothers’ New York representative Mort Blumenstock. “These temperamental derelicts who get rich on the efforts of others after they create something should offer prayers of thanks instead of finding fault with producers, studios, directors, cameramen. Am not interested in any form shape or manner with his being indignant.” But Charles Feldman was. “I can’t impress upon you too much the wisdom of cautioning Tennessee not to make any adverse comments to anyone,” he wrote Wood, demanding later that Williams say “something very complimentary about the picture that we can use.” Williams bowed to pressure and worked up some appropriate weasel words. “In the picture there is less darkness and more light, more humor and less tragedy,” he said after
The Glass Menagerie
was released on September 7, 1950.

WILLIAMS WAS MORE apt to be positive about his life than about the botched film. Bored and soured by their Hollywood junket, he and Merlo had made their way to the bohemian outpost of Key West in November 1949. On Duncan Street, at the edge of the town’s old section, Williams rented what he called “a sort of Tom Thumb mansion”: a snow-white Bahama-style house with a white picket fence, pink shutters, and light-green patio furniture. There, he and Merlo were joined for the winter by Williams’s ninety-two-year-old grandfather, Reverend Walter Dakin, who occupied the ground floor. Next door, two Rhode Island red hens and a white leghorn rooster scuttled around an “improvised poultry yard.” A “magnificent black goat with big yellow eyes, surely one of God’s most beautiful creatures, always straining at his rope as if he had an important errand to run if he could get loose,” completed the piquancy of the scene. “Life here is as dull as paradise must be,” Williams wrote to Laughlin when he first arrived in Key West.

The following year, for $22,500, Williams bought the house. Over the decades, he improved on his paradise: screw pines, coconut trees, clustering palms, orchids, begonia, and hibiscus were among the many plantings that in time turned his domain into a shady, luxuriant Eden. For the rest of his life, no matter how far afield Williams wandered, 1431 Duncan Street would be his official residence and his only home. He loved, he said, “the water, the eternal turquoise and foam of the sea and the sky.” He also loved the house, which he associated with something even rarer than the sun-dappled landscape: harmony. “Frank is now happy here,” Williams confided to Bigelow after the first few weeks of Key West living.