Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (32 page)

The play’s emotional ambivalence mirrored Williams’s own. Throughout much of the play’s gestation, Williams was not certain whether he and Merlo had a future either. By the time Williams had finally understood his own story, Merlo was a fixture in his life. Mangiacavallo resuscitates Serafina in much the same humble way that Merlo bolstered Williams: he coaxed Williams reluctantly out of his isolation and into life. Williams’s bravura final ending was a daydream of romantic transcendence—an eloquent image that was both an answer to Kazan’s theatrical challenge and proof of Kazan’s contention that Williams’s plays “might be read as a massive autobiography . . . as naked as the best confessions.”

For three years, in his “little cave of consciousness,” Williams had labored to excavate comedy from his sense of collapse; for three years, struggling in a similar reverie of loss, Serafina buries herself in the shuttered gloom of her sewing room. Both are compelled to rendezvous with ghosts. Serafina’s morbid lamentation is a way of keeping Rosario close to her; likewise, in his writing, Williams’s habitual reconfiguration of his family and friends was a way of not losing his love objects, who were, as Vidal said, “forever his once they had been translated to the stage.” In Serafina’s story, Williams materialized the transfiguration he longed for in life. By the finale, she is no longer living in the past but in the moment. (The watch that Serafina meant to give Rosa for her graduation, which had stopped ticking, suddenly starts to work again.) The wind blows Rosario’s spilled ashes away, and with it the sump of melancholy. “A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes,” she says. “No woman can hold him.”

The loss of Serafina’s illusions is symbolized by a rose-colored silk shirt—a totem of Rosario’s faithlessness—originally ordered by his mistress and sewn by Serafina with her own cuckolded hands. At the finale, reversing the negative trajectory of the end of
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
, in which the widow invites destruction by throwing her keys
down,
Williams contrives to have the disputed shirt passed
up
to the temporarily banished Mangiacavallo, who is hiding out of sight on the embankment behind Serafina’s house. Once an emblem of humiliation, the shirt is transformed into a semaphore of hope. “Holding the shirt above her head defiantly,” Serafina throws it to the townsfolk, who rush it up the embankment “like a streak of flame shooting up a dry hill.” “Vengo, vengo, amore!” Serafina shouts, feeling a supernatural burning in her breast that signals to her that she is pregnant. As the curtain falls, she is heading up the embankment toward her new man—she is finally fecund and in motion.

In this last scene, Mangiacavallo is crucially not present; he is an immanence just beyond Serafina’s horizon. This absence seems to inspire her passion. Desire, Williams once said, was “something that is made to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being.”
The Rose Tattoo
, which Williams called “my love-play to the world,” was also a keepsake of a unique personal moment in his own life. Throughout the tale, Williams bore witness both to Merlo’s liberating presence and to the shadow of autoeroticism in his romantic desire.

THE CASTING OF
The Rose Tattoo
coincided with the publication on September 27, 1950, of
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
. Before the novella came out, Williams told Cheryl Crawford that he was “terribly afraid of critical reactions to the book!” “I am sure they will find it ‘rotten,’ ‘decadent,’ Etc. and will revive the charge that I can only deal with neurotic people,” he wrote. He added, “My answer to that, of course, is when you penetrate into almost anybody you either find madness or dullness: the only way not to find them is to stay on the surface.” After the publication, he was worried by the public indifference. “It comes at a point in my life when I have a need for some confirmation or reassurance about my work’s value,” he wrote to Laughlin, and sent the relevant portion of the letter to the
Herald Tribune
, one of the most egregious culprits. “The fact that the
Herald Tribune
has ignored it completely, both in the daily and Sunday book-review sections, is the worst sort of slap in the face, not only to this one book, but also, I feel, to all the work I have done, to my whole—
position
is
not
the word I want to use!”

But what was Williams’s position?
Streetcar
had been closed on Broadway for nearly a year; the movie version wouldn’t be released until the following year. The 1950 season had seen the debut of William Inge (
Come Back, Little Sheba
), the return to form of Clifford Odets (
The Country Girl
), and the premiere of
Guys and Dolls
, whose buoyancy and ambition defined the confidence of the new decade. Williams could be forgiven for fearing that he had somewhat fallen out of the cultural discussion. “Critical reactions to the novel indicate a downward trend in my favor with reviewers,” he wrote to Wood. He felt himself “at a crucial point when a failure might [be] final.”

Wood had warned Williams that following
Streetcar
would be “a gigantic task.” So it was proving. Williams finally settled on the director Danny Mann, who was responsible for staging
Come Back, Little Sheba
. “He has your aliveness,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “He is young and daring and says he is ready to rehearse the play as I wrote it and devil take the hindmost! Why are most people so cautious when the whole scheme of things is suspended by a single fine blond hair in the beard of God?” One of Mann’s other mots was “ ‘Mood’ is ‘doom’ spelt backwards,” which gave Williams pause. “Probably means that I shall have to put up a fight for the plastic-poetic elements in the production,” he wrote to Laughlin, noting, however, that Mann was “no fool.” Still, Williams had a new producer, a new director, a new leading man (Eli Wallach), and a play that attempted a new theatrical form. All the more reason, the management argued, for the box-office insurance of a star in the part of Serafina.

“Would Maureen Stapleton be all right?” Williams wrote to Crawford in mid-August. “I have never seen her but have heard she is a somewhat Magnani type.” Stapleton was twenty-five, Irish American, and an unknown who had appeared a couple of times on Broadway. She had arrived in Manhattan from Troy, New York, at the age of seventeen, weighing a hundred and eighty pounds, determined to be an actress. By day she worked as a billing clerk for twenty-nine dollars a week; at night, she studied theater with Herbert Berghof. At the Actors Studio and in a few character roles, she had, with her combination of volatility and vulnerability, caught the attention of such Broadway nabobs as Guthrie McClintic and Harold Clurman, whom she credited with planting the idea of her as the middle-aged Serafina in the mind of Crawford. “Maureen must have been a victim in her early life of some nameless wound,” Clurman once wrote, responding to the uncanny power of her playing. “To bear it she requires the escape of acting and the solace of close embrace.”

Williams’s enthusiasm for Stapleton in her auditions overrode the collective anxiety about her age and her inexperience. According to Stapleton, that anxiety resulted in “a World Series of readings.” Stapleton and Wallach auditioned together five times. “Finally, I assisted her in ‘making up’ for a reading,” Williams recalled in
Memoirs
. “I had her dishevel her hair and wear a sloppy robe, and I think even streak her face to look like dirt stains. And that reading she gave made all agree that she was the one.” “They seemed to want more assurance I could handle it,” Stapleton said of her last audition. “I said: ‘I can’t promise anything. I might really be terrible.’ ” Williams stood up. “I don’t care if she turns into a deaf mute on opening night!” he said. “That to me was extraordinary,” Stapleton recalled.

Just before
The Rose Tattoo
company set off for Chicago, where the play opened on December 29 for a month of tryouts, prior to opening on Broadway on February 3, 1951, Williams wrote to his mother and grandfather. “The girl playing the lead is almost as good an actress as Laurette Taylor,” he said. “In fact, she is like a young Laurette, which pleases me especially because nobody else wanted to cast her in the part, since they felt her youth and lack of experience would be too great a handicap.” He continued, “She has tremendous power and honesty in her acting and I think she is going to put the show over. She is an Irish girl, not pretty in any conventional way and considerably too plump, but she has more talent than any of the leading ladies of twice her age, and half her size. The director is not as gifted as Kazan but he works twice as hard all day and half the night. It is his big chance.”

For Williams, it was also a big roll of the dice.
The Rose Tattoo
was, he wrote in one elegant defensive preamble to the play, “the desire of an artist to work in new forms, however awkwardly at first, to break down barriers of what he has done before and what others have done better before and after and to crash, perhaps fatally, into some area that the bell-harness and rope would like to forbid him.” In the weeks before the cast set off for Chicago, Williams took in some of the Broadway competition, including what he called “the Caesarean delivery” of John van Druten’s
Bell, Book and Candle
, produced by Irene Selznick. Its success gave him pause and also fueled his malice. “It was the most miraculous opening I have yet seen on Broadway,” he wrote to Kazan. “Although she had packed the house with her Broadway and Hollywood friends, there wasn’t a genuine laugh in the house after the first act. I could amuse myself only by counting the number of times that Rex ‘Sexy’ Harrison planted his mouth on Lili Palmer’s in a fashion so remarkably sexless that it seemed more like a pair of birds dividing a worm between them.” He added, “The audience sat entombed in embarrassed silence. . . . The final curtain was jerked up and down like a man of eighty trying to jerk himself off, to the feeble patter of about ten pairs of hands, mine not included.—Then the great celebration at Irene’s, climaxed by the reading aloud, the breathless incantation, of Brooks’s ‘Unqualified Rave!’ ”

With Maureen Stapleton in rehearsal

At the opening-night party for
Bell, Book and Candle
, Williams received another rueful jolt. “For some time I have suspected that I am already washed up in the professional theatre,” he told Kazan. “Rex Harrison put this feeling into words for me when he responded to my routine felicitations by saying, ‘Yes, I think this play shows that the theatre has recovered its health after a recent period of sickness.’ ” Williams added, “Of course I am a little ashamed of my malevolence, of wishing [Selznick] bad luck . . . but I don’t believe that she is at all ashamed of the letter she wrote from London about ‘The Rose Tattoo’ and I don’t think she had any real concern for what it might do to me and what it did. (Spoiled my summer.) I think that my play is going to answer hers. I doubt that it will receive, even from Brooks, as good a notice as she got, but just the same it will contain the answer.”

In Key West, less than a week before
The Rose Tattoo
’s Broadway opening, Williams, full of cold medicine and Seconal, sat up in the early hours listening to Merlo breathing beside him. “Four days now, and we will know,” he scribbled in his notebook. “It seems like the whole future hangs on it. I mustn’t ever again permit myself to care this much about any public success. It makes you little, and altogether too vulnerable. I wonder if I can try to concentrate on becoming a new, free person after this thing is over. It is mostly for Frank’s sake that I care. Alone, I could run away from it. But with Frank I will have to face the possible failure more or less squarely. God be with us!” Williams added, “P.S. What do you think is going to happen?—
I don’t know!!
”

CHAPTER 4

Fugitive Mind

Once Kazan and I were a perfect team.

—

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

to Bill Barnes

“Now that the waiting is over, I can tell you that I was scared out of my wits,” Williams wrote to Brooks Atkinson about
The Rose Tattoo
on February 5, 1951. “I knew that a sense of defeat at this point might have been altogether insurmountable.” He added, “I feel invited to go on working for the theatre, and that is an invitation that I am only too eager to accept.”

Although the
New York
Post
condescended to Williams (“intermittently satisfactory”), the
New York Journal-American
brushed him off (“Play Isn’t Worthy of the Fine Acting”), and the
Daily Mirror
more or less told him to pull up his socks (“We believe that the world today needs moral affirmation and not negation”), Atkinson, the most literate and fair-minded daily critic at America’s most influential newspaper, the
New York
Times
, was the person whose endorsement meant the most to the playwright and the producers. “His folk comedy about a Sicilian family living on the Gulf Coast is original, imaginative and tender,” Atkinson wrote. “It is the loveliest idyll written for the stage in some time. . . . The respect for character and the quality of the writing are Mr. Williams at the top of his form.” Later, in a more reflective follow-up piece, Atkinson observed, “Behind the fury and uproar of the characters are the eyes, ears and mind of a lyric dramatist who has brought into the theatre a new freedom of style.”