Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (30 page)

“Consider Gadg’s approach with great care—it has certain virtues—it presents certain grave problems to my way of thinking but maybe one can have one’s Alvaro and yet eat the memory of Rosario at the same time,” Wood counseled Williams in her first full response to the play. In fact, by keeping Rosario an offstage character, Kazan instinctively repositioned the story so that it tapped more deeply into the sense of absence and yearning that was the emotional core of Williams’s lyricism.

Although it took Williams half a year to rebuild his story along Kazan’s lines, the director’s notes laid down a narrative track that Williams immediately found liberating. By the last week of March, he was reporting exciting new discoveries. “I have just now completed what I think is the best scene in any of my long plays, the first scene between Pepina and Alvaro. It suddenly came out of the bushes!” he wrote to Kazan and his wife. “I feel now that I will be able to do what I want to do with this play, that it is only a matter of patience.” But in the next few months such moments of composure were rare. The upheavals of Williams’s plot were as extreme as his mood swings. “The most violent see-saw of my life!” he wrote to Wood in early April. “For a few days I will be in a state of euphoria, then I will suddenly hit bottom.”

On April 11, Williams felt sufficiently upbeat about the rewrites to send the play to “Dame Selznick.” “When I think about Irene I don’t even ask myself if I like her or don’t like her—although I am pretty sure that I do—I just know—without thinking about it—that the woman has demonstrated one of the most extraordinary powers of will, or drive, or vitality—or whatever you call it—that I’ve ever seen,” he wrote to Wood, who had soured on the imperious, bullying producer whom she had once called “Woman of the Year.” Williams went on, “That’s what I lack and what the rest of us don’t have time for and what is, above everything else, most needed to give a delicate play the fortification and care it must have.”

Selznick had kept vigilant watch over
Streetcar
in New York. (She owned 12½ percent of it.) She had cosseted the Williams family by sending letters to Edwina and candy to Reverend Dakin. In London, as Williams’s emissary on all literary
Streetcar
matters—“I place it, like Pilate, in your hands,” Williams wrote to her—she’d kept a beady eye on Laurence Olivier in his lackluster but successful British-debut production. In Williams’s mind the question wasn’t whether Selznick should produce
The Rose Tattoo
so much as whether the play should be produced at all. On the other hand, Selznick was looking for product. “I simply had to have a play for the 1950 fall season,” she recalled in her memoir. In his cover letter, Williams asked Selznick to “be as devastatingly candid as you please. There is no ‘icon’ left to be ‘clastic’!” he joked.

FIVE DAYS LATER, Selznick did as she was told and lowered the boom. “Just hope with me that I am dead wrong, slightly for my sake—and overwhelmingly for yours,” she wrote. For Selznick the work that she had waited so eagerly to read was dead on arrival. In fact,
The Rose Tattoo
seemed to defy diagnosis; Selznick wasn’t even sure what to call it. “To me, this is not a play but rather a libretto—far more than either, it is a ballet. As presently conceived, it cries out to be danced or sung, or both, in its entirety. It could be painted, but not played. It is all mood and movement—a violent, colorful pattern
for
emotion and lustfulness.” Then there was the issue of his new idiom. “The dialogue is at a penalizing minimum (by
you
, a master of words!) and further reduced by the excessive use of Italian.” She also felt let down by the characters: “I keep seeking more which is revealing of the leading characters. I do not ‘know’ them (beyond their passion and Pepina’s grief) and I
must
, if I am to be caught up and feel.”

“Your letter knocked the goddam bottom . . . and almost the top off me!” Williams told her. Had that thing, Williams wondered, that “eventually happens to most lyric talents, the candle is burned or blown out and there’s no more matches,” now happened to him? After a dark twenty-four hours of introspection, he went from self-doubt to self-affirmation. “For the first time since this draft was completed, I liked what I had done and felt that I had done just exactly what I had meant to do in all but a few short passages, that in the play, as a whole, I had said precisely what I had wanted to say as well as it could be said, and the play existed,” he wrote Selznick, adding, “For the first time in my life I knew that I must take a solitary position of self-belief.”

In
The Rose Tattoo
, Williams used behavior and imagery to express a hysterical hauntedness, an internal drama that Selznick couldn’t fathom. “Were I to see rather than read the play, I fear I would be at a loss to understand the sources of sustained crisis under which Pepina labors,” she had written. Williams argued that the crisis was “fully documented and justified.” He was aware, he said, of the “high pitch of emotion in the characters,” which “might make exhausting demands on everybody concerned.” It was because of this that he had kept his scenes deliberately low-key, so that the expressive burden was borne as much as possible by the visual, instead of the lines. “The great advance I have made in this play—technically, as a theatre-craftsman—is what you call its ‘penalizing minimum’ of dialogue and the effects which you seem to think are extraneous ornamentation,” he wrote.

Even as Selznick was reading
The Rose Tattoo
onboard ship to London for the British premiere of
Streetcar
, Cheryl Crawford, a seasoned producer, was writing to Kazan to ask that he put in a good word for her as a producer for the play. “I don’t know if you realize what it would mean to me to do a play by a writer like Ten,” Crawford wrote. “Regardless of Irene’s having produced ‘Streetcar,’ I can say, on record, and without being egotistical, that she has never contributed her life and guts to the theatre as I have. She, or her millions, had a wonderful break, but I don’t see that that entitles her to another.” Crawford continued, “I feel that the matter of my getting the play is such a toss up that if, without prejudice to Irene’s character or ability, you could simply tell Tenn that you like to work with me (you do, don’t you?) and point out the justice of my statements, THAT IT WOULD HAVE A STRONG EFFECT.” She signed off, “Yours, kind of despondently.” As it turned out, Crawford was pushing at an open door. With Selznick out of the running and Wood shrewdly greasing the wheels, Crawford was assured the role of Williams’s producer. The real problem turned out to be Kazan himself.

Just before Williams and Merlo sailed for Europe on May 20, 1950, because of film projects with John Steinbeck (
Viva Zapata!
) and Arthur Miller (
The Hook
), Kazan let Williams know that he probably would not be able to fit
The Rose Tattoo
into his directing schedule. On the same day, Molly Day Thacher told Williams what she thought of the play:
The Rose Tattoo
, Thacher said, represented a departure from the human into formalism; the only character she could understand and feel close to in the play was the daughter. Williams replied to Kazan, dating his letter “All-At-Sea, May, 1950.” “It is a bad thing that there is only one American director who appears equipped to handle plays in a non-conventional form,” he wrote. “I think it is far more important to the theatre to train directors than actors. Now there is you, Danny Mann, [Harold] Clurman and Bobby Lewis and you are the only one of the group that I would feel safe with.” On foreign soil, Williams was still at sea. In Paris, he lost his passport; at the last minute, he balked at the plan to travel to England to attend the premiere of
Streetcar
with Vivien Leigh playing Blanche. By his own account, seized by “a grim, nihilistic mood,” he “plunged into the anarchistic nightlife that the city has to offer.” He also fired off another plaintive letter to Kazan:

. . . I have never been anything with you but completely honest and completely loyal in thought, word, and deed, and . . . you are the only person in my professional world for whom I have a very deep liking as well as an artistic affinity and the sort of respect that I have only given once or twice before in my life. The rejection by Irene hurt my pride and my confidence but yours goes deeper than that. I know, you haven’t worded it like a rejection but that’s what it adds up to. I understand about Zapata. The script is finished, it is ready to shoot. In August or September you will do Streetcar. But now you talk about a commitment to a movie-script which is not finished, “not right yet but on the way.” Now I think I know Art Miller well enough to know that he would not demand that this film take precedence over my play. Both of us are terribly serious about our work, Art and I, desperately serious about it and we both have a true respect for each other and I don’t think he would anymore stand in my way than I in his in making demands on your time. An uncompleted film-script can be scheduled at any time in the future, that is, the shooting of it. The period in which a play can go into production is definitely restricted. So I wish you had not mentioned that as one of the reasons you can’t do “Tattoo.” It makes it appear that the real reason is somewhere between the lines, which is evasive and not like you at all. I wish we could talk to each other for then I feel, in fact know, that you would make things clearer.

In mid-June, Kazan wrote to reassure Williams and to reiterate his interest in
The Rose Tattoo
. He had instructed Crawford not to engage another director, a bit of encouragement to which Williams was “clutching . . . for all it is worth.” Kazan’s letter brought tears to Williams’s eyes. “Not very manly of me, but still in character, since I have never pretended to have much hair on my chest,” he wrote back. “The moisture came from relief, for your letter removed the doubt I had felt about your continued interest in my work and myself. I have too much reserve with people, as a rule, too much doubt and suspicion, but I had thrown all that overboard in my relations with you and had been totally honest and open with you, and something in the apparently cool tone with which you told me you would not be able to do ‘Rose Tattoo’ hurt me a great deal more than the professional set-back. Now you have dispelled that feeling and we can forget it.”

Williams went on to unburden himself about where the story now stood:

My main concern, now, is to know that you want to do it and to continue my work on it. I feel that the Rosario part is coming richly to life, and perhaps Cheryl has told you that I have a new (alternative) ending which

be better than the two women. I know what you’d dislike about the two women. It represents to you a retreat for Pepina. To me it was an advance on a realistic basis. But my objection to it is that it may be just a little bit cliché, a little expected or pat. Maybe that’s only because of brooding too much about it. The other ending is really

and it involves the children.—Of course Alvaro can’t take the place of Rosario. Does anybody ever take the place of the first great love? What he accomplishes is her escape from the urn of ashes and her reconcilement with life! In the new ending I may go so far as to suggest, symbolically, that she will bear a child by him. I am sure that in playing, the feeling will be one of the affirmative statement, not decadent melancholy, because that is how I have conceived it. But the statement will have to have

in it too.

Kazan, an expert philanderer, knew how to dissimulate and to seduce. He wouldn’t commit to
The Rose Tattoo
, but he couldn’t seem to let it go. Even as he was assuring Williams of his allegiance, he was asking the novelist and playwright Irwin Shaw to give him a no-holds-barred second opinion about the play. Kazan was ambivalent; Shaw also had “mixed feelings.” “It is not a continuation or an intensification, even,” he wrote, comparing the play to Williams’s other work. “It is new ore from the same vein, and not quite as rich in quality. The heroine is no Blanche du Bois, neither of the men is a Kowalski. They are single-faced, with the exception of Alvaro, who has overtones of the shnook (a la the character Karl Malden played in ‘Streetcar’) while representing some of the brutal and, to Tennessee, beautiful core of sex. I got a feeling while reading it that Tennessee had merely juggled a lot of his old characters, mixing parts of one up with parts of another, and leaving out, as was inevitable, the very best things.” Shaw added, “It might be a good idea to burn this letter. And, of course, I won’t tell anyone I’ve read the play. And I guess you won’t either.”

Williams continued to veer between hope and hopelessness. “Please keep after Gadg, and so will I,” he wrote Crawford in late June. “I have a feeling that Kazan will like what I am doing in this last version of the play, as he originally said he thought Rosario was better as a memory.” At around the same time, he was writing to Oliver Evans, “Kazan is still not entirely sold on the play and as yet I have no assurance that he will consent to do it. . . . Wonder if I should quit writing. But there is only one other thing I like doing very much, and you can’t do that
all
the time. Or
can
you?”

By July, Kazan’s continued silence was only part of the pall that hung over Williams’s holiday, which seemed “infinitely
wrong
.” The previous year’s apartment had already been rented out; Williams and Merlo found themselves in a cramped, airless flat above a motorcycle garage, whose twelve-hour workdays sounded to Williams’s ears “like the battle front in Korea” and made sleep impossible. “Key West seems like heaven in retrospect—the morning energy for work—the cool, sweet rooms—the night rides along the ocean highway,” he wrote in his journal. “And Frank’s friendliness. That’s quite different here. I wonder if I have a single friend left?”

Williams was now not so much drifting as driven. “I have felt like a tired horse at the last high hurdle,” Williams wrote to Wood and Crawford in mid-August. He was writing, he added, “by compulsion, not inspiration, and I am afraid that most of the progress I thought I was making was wishful thinking.” Adding to the atmosphere of exhaustion was the vexed issue of the forty-two-year-old Anna Magnani, whom Williams always had in mind to play the widow. “The play is hung like a tent on the requirement for a magnificent performance in the part of Pepina. It demands the art of a Laurette Taylor or an Anna Magnani: the one is gone and the other may not speak English! . . . If the miracle of a Pepina comes to pass, I would like the male part to be offered to Marlon Brando,” Williams wrote in the introductory note to the kitchen-sink version. Wood agreed. “If we don’t get Magnani—where the hell we go from there I have not the remotest idea,” she had written earlier in her letter of response to
The Rose Tattoo
.