Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (37 page)

Kazan’s artistic destiny, like Williams’s, was dreamed up by his mother, as a kind of joint rebellion against his father’s overweening authority. Just as the teenage Williams had done in St. Louis, Kazan lived a kind of underground existence. “I learned to mask my desires, hide my truest feeling,” he wrote. “I trained myself to live in deprivation, in silence, never complaining, never begging, in isolation, without expecting kindness or favors or even good luck.” He added, “But I learned to keep coming back, to persist. I hardened. . . . I learned to live as an artist lives, empathically, observing, imagining, dreaming, all behind the mask.” Convinced that his father “would be opposed to everything I wanted most,” Kazan, with help from his mother and a supportive English teacher, applied to a liberal arts college rather than a commercial one. When he was accepted at the prestigious Williams College in Massachusetts, he couldn’t bring himself to tell his father, so Athena did. “He hit her smack across the face, knocking her to the floor,” Kazan recalled.

At college, where he was virtually friendless and isolated for four years, Kazan’s otherness was forcibly impressed upon him. He joined no teams, attended no dances, rushed no fraternities. “I knew what I was. An outsider. An Anatolian, not an American,” he said. Surrounded by wealthy Wasps, Kazan’s sense of social and sexual inferiority festered. “I wanted what they had: their style, their looks, their clothes, their cars, their money, the jobs they had waiting for them, and the girls they had waiting for them,” he recalled, adding, “Every time I saw privilege from then on, I wanted to tear it down or to possess it.”

In the thirties, this corrosive longing for revenge led Kazan into an eighteen-month flirtation with the Communist Party; it also fueled his hunger for success. As an actor, he carried his chippie swagger onstage—“ ‘Fuck you all, big and small!’ I used to mutter during those years—to myself, of course, secretly,” he recalled. Kazan’s appetite for vindictive triumph—which drove his compulsive ambition and unrepentant womanizing—was partly rooted in one inescapable fact: Kazan was unhandsome. “Didn’t you look in the mirror?” his father asked him when he first announced that he was going to Yale Drama School. His gnarly mug, with its large, jagged nose, telegraphed both his foreignness and his ferocity, and it made a Hollywood film career a nonstarter. Williams also felt blighted by his looks. “He didn’t have the kind of physicality to lure,” according to his friend, the actress Elizabeth Ashley. “He was one of those people who are more hungry than hungered for. . . . He was uncomfortable in his body. He was always fixing himself. He was always looking for something in the mirror that he knew he was never gonna find.”

For Kazan, and for Williams, fame was the best defense against the humiliation of envy. Williams could write the anger out; in his acting, directing, and skirt-chasing, Kazan lived it out. “Women have always meant everything to me,” he maintained. “I’ve never warmed to the so-called masculine virtues; I’ve lived apart from the male world and its concerns.” Kazan related best to men like Williams who had “strong ‘feminine’ characteristics . . . sympathetic yielding qualities.” “Baby, you know as well as I know, that, first of all, we’ve got to obey the first commands of our hearts,” Williams wrote to Kazan about a business matter in late January 1952. “You know that or we wouldn’t be so close to each other in spirit.” Both men had educated themselves in desire; both saw sexuality as the pathway to knowledge. “Promiscuity for an artist is an education, a great source of confidence, and a spur to work,” Kazan said. For Kazan, every woman was an adventure and an inspiration; for Williams, it was every man.

Kazan, like Williams, took a long time to grow into both his carnality and his talent. Directing allowed him to re-create the feeling of conspiracy he had shared with his mother, with whom he was, to use Freud’s term, “the undisputed darling.” “I wanted to be the source of everything,” he said of directing. His rehearsals had, according to Arthur Miller, “the hushed air of conspiracy . . . not only against the existing theatre but society, capitalism—in fact everybody who was not part of the production. . . . People kept coming up to whisper in his ear.” His approach to directing was a seduction: quiet, intuitive, penetrating. In his assessment of both the actor’s and the character’s psychology, Kazan was forensic. He paid his collaborators a kind of intense, strategic attention. In rehearsal, according to Miller, he “grinned a lot and said as little as possible,” which had the effect of making his actors compete even harder for his affection. He worked by insinuation not command; stimulation and dissimulation were his twin gifts. “He would send one actor to listen to a particular piece of jazz, another to read a certain novel, another to see a psychiatrist, and another he would simply kiss,” Miller recalled. He added, “Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately rather than instruct before the others, sensing that anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment. . . . A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back upon himself.” Kazan’s trick was to make his ideas seem like the actors’ own discoveries. “He let the actors talk themselves into a performance,” Miller said, which “they would carry back to him like children offering some found object back to a parent.” And, like any good parent, when things were going in the right direction, Kazan knew how to stay out of the way.

To Williams, who refused any engagement with his actual father, Kazan was a kind of luminous, empowering father figure. “You are a man of action, Gadg,” he wrote to him in 1949. “That is one of the beautiful things about you. You don’t just talk and mess around. But translate yourself into dynamics! I wish I could do that.” Kazan’s straight talk challenged Williams; it set for him both tasks and boundaries. Kazan organized Williams and, figuratively speaking, forced him to clean up his mess. Like all sons of powerful fathers, Williams felt a certain ambivalence toward this authority. He needed Kazan’s energy and inspiration; he also resented his intrusiveness. “I am very excited and a little dismayed and quite frightened over the rapid progress for the short plays,” he wrote to Wood in October 1951. “He talks of ‘work and work’ (which sounds like an awful lot of it) but he doesn’t say what it is to be, and I have never worked as badly in my life as I have these past few months.” He added, “I do hope they don’t include a desire to collaborate with me on the script! That is, to take part in the actual writing. On the other hand, Gadg has a very creative mind and he might stimulate me.”

Around the time Williams returned to America, in late November 1951, the one-act idea had morphed into two projects. Williams was now expanding
Ten Blocks on the Camino Real
into a full-length play, which Kazan would direct when it was ready. Meanwhile, with the early studio excitement over
Streetcar
filling their sails, Williams and Kazan went full speed ahead on a screenplay based on
27 Wagons Full of Cotton
, tentatively titled
Hide and Seek
, which would become the basis for the movie
Baby Doll
. Feeling that “salvation lies only in new work,” Williams wrote to Kazan pleading for literary assistance: “HELP! HELP! SEND ME A WRITER!” He needed a collaborator who knew the Delta Country. In the end, opting for a bargain-basement solution to the problem, he invited his Maine-born, Cambridge-educated friend Paul Bigelow to join the ménage in Key West and help him with the script. Williams claimed “always to have had a slightly superstitious awe of Bigelow. I think he has magic powers, at least of divination.”

Inevitably, Bigelow’s stimulating presence and the obvious fun the two men had together—“We laugh our heads off while working,” Williams said—disturbed Merlo, who continued to act out his disaffection at home as he had abroad. “F. and Bigelow joined us in bar and we saw a dull strip show,” Williams wrote in a February entry in his 1952 journal. “F. took off by himself as usual. . . . I’m a dull boy, have been for a long time. Can’t really blame F. for not desiring my company any more. . . . I’ll find it hard to sleep tonight. The same old dull tedious resentment and hurt—why do relationships have to be turned into duels. I don’t want to fight—I want to trust and love and feel loved. Or at least liked—not barely tolerated—Oh, shit—what’s the way out?” He went on, “I do have love in my heart for Frank, which he seems to despise. Why? Because he feels confined by me—his dependence. And isn’t reasonable enough to understand that the circumstance was and is his choice. . . . Nothing has changed much—but time goes on. I go on with it still.”

Williams threw himself into work; Merlo threw himself into the local social merry-go-round. “Frank has found a crowd he enjoys,” Williams wrote to Evans. “They do all the bars at night and he rolls in about daybreak. They’re composed of the ‘after the lost generation’ guys and dolls who live on liquor and ‘bennies’ and the fringe of lunacy.” He went on, “Frank dances wildly with the dolls. Possibly lays the guys. I wouldn’t know. I’ve had a dry run as far as sex is concerned.” In one moment of reprieve from that arid time, as Williams was undressing “a gorgeous . . . Adonis from Southern California” on the front-room sofa of the Key West house, Merlo pulled up in a taxi. “There was a real Gotterdamerung to pay!” Williams wrote to Evans, not disguising his pleasure at Merlo’s surprising ardor. “Screams, protestations, fury and tears, winding up with Miss Merlo in her most becoming position on the living-room carpet and me wondering if Miss Southern California would be game for a second try under more discreet circumstances!—after being denounced as the whore of Babylon.” Williams added, “I must say that Miss Merlo, when she is in a rage, pays very little attention to inequalities of size between her and the opponent.”

To his friends, Williams struck a pose of defensive nonchalance. “Frankie is having himself a ball,” he wrote to Crawford. “I’m just a bit cross about it, but he is like a kid at play and somebody ought to be having a good time in this sand-lot even if it can’t be me.” But in this fractious time his poems about Merlo were wistful, almost heartbroken. In “A Moment in a Room,” for instance, he wrote:

Coarse fabrics are the ones

for common wear,

the tender ones are those

we fold away.

And so I watch you quietly

comb your hair.

Intimate the silence,

dim and warm.

I could but do not break

a thing so still,

in which almost a whisper

would be shrill. . . .

For time’s not cheated by

a moment’s quiet,

the heart beats echo to

eternal riot . . .

But while it waits, I speak not

false to you,

something unspoken in

the room is true,

And still it goes as though

it longed to stay,

this tender moment we

must fold away.

The year 1952 was a turning point for the country, as well as for Williams. On January 14, while Williams was at work on
Hide and Seek
, Kazan made the first of two appearances in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). At this closed session, he refused to give names. “I decided to look the other way until forced,” he recalled. In the meantime, he concentrated on
Hide and Seek
and the upcoming Academy Awards.
Streetcar
had been nominated in twelve categories: best picture, director, actress, actor, supporting actress, supporting actor, screenplay, art direction, cinematography, costume design, and music. “We made a clean sweep,” Kazan wrote Williams on February 14. “I have a hunch, though, that ‘A Place in the Sun’ is going to get it because it’s much more in the pattern of the way those people think. Why I don’t know.” Two days later, the Committee demanded that Congress punish espionage against the United States in peacetime as well as in war; it also took the film industry to task for not acting “with sufficient firmness to weed out Communists.” Williams finished the screenplay for
Hide and Seek
on February 19; on March 7, he noted in his diary, “everyone seems pleased with the film script.”

Prior to the Academy Awards, on March 20, Williams and Kazan met in Hollywood to pitch
Hide and Seek
to Warner Brothers and to do some politicking for
Streetcar
. Just as they arrived in Hollywood, however, news of Kazan’s former affiliation with the Communist Party broke in the newspapers. Williams and Kazan, the two theatrical powerhouses of their time, could not make a deal. “Warner’s stalled us with a lot of censorship objections and demands for revision without any signed contract,” Williams told Crawford.

Hollywood lived and died by pleasing the public; the Red Scare petrified the industry. “Almost immediately that put him in the deep freeze out here,” Williams confided to Britneva about Kazan, adding, “They are waiting to see what will happen next. There is even the possibility of a jail sentence if he persists in his determination not to reveal names of other party members when he was in it. This I think very admirable of him, and very brave, and all decent people ought to respect his sense of honor about it. But of course most of them don’t.” Williams continued, “Red hysteria has reached such a pitch that this disclosure may very well wreck his career as a motion-picture director.”

Terror attacks thought. To avoid annihilating doubt, people rush to simplicities and make quick decisions. The 1952 Academy Awards was a small weather system that nonetheless reflected the larger national climate.
Streetcar
lost the best-picture award to the musical
An American in Paris
. Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden, and Kim Hunter won Oscars. “Gadg, Marlon and I were obviously screwed out of the Academy Awards,” Williams said. He found the occasion “a hideous ordeal sitting there with your bare face hanging out and pretending not to care.” Kazan claimed never to have seen anybody slumped so low in his chair as Williams. “I was afraid even to remove my flask from my pocket when Madame Clare Booth Luce got up on the platform and announced the writers awards,” Williams confided to Crawford. “One part of me despises such prizes and the vulgar standards they represent, but another part of me wants to be ‘The Winner’ no matter what. When and how can we ever get over that, and have a dignified humility about us and a true sense of what matters?” The day after the awards, Kazan left Hollywood for New York. “I believed my days in that town and in that industry were over,” he said.