Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (51 page)

ORPHEUS DESCENDING
CIRCLED Broadway for two years before finally opening at the Martin Beck Theatre on March 21, 1957. Of the many impediments along the way—Williams’s rewrites, settling on producing arrangements, the success of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
—the main one was wrangling Magnani, whom Williams dubbed “the Tigress of the Tiber.” Although Lady’s interior life, like Myra’s in
Battle of Angels
, is modeled on Edwina Williams—“a woman who met with emotional disaster in her girlhood; verges on hysteria under strain”—her exterior displays Magnani’s forthright toughness and sexual ripeness. “The only important thing in life is to be
authentic
,” Magnani said. To Williams, she lived up to her credo. “She was beyond convention as no one I’ve ever known,” he said. Although Williams was shy with Magnani at first—Merlo was “the intermediary between my reserve and her beautifully natural lack of it,” he said—he soon fell under her darkly shimmering spell.

“Forget that bit about her being nervous,” Williams wrote to Kazan in 1955, after Williams watched Magnani perform for her American film debut on
The Rose Tattoo
location next to his Key West house. “That dame is nervous in a way that’s terrific! She takes over like Grant did at Richmond!” Even more admirable to Williams than Magnani’s passion was her “incomparable sense of truth.” To Williams, her face was “like a mackerel sky, altering from moment to moment and always the most precise gauge, accurate as a seismograph, of the varying quality of what she was listening to.” He added, “She is almost a lie detector.”

The size of Magnani’s talent was matched by the size of her ego, which “surpasses mine but is more excusable,” Williams wrote to Wood. Magnani was in the habit of rising at about three each afternoon. “Ciao, Tenn. What is the program,” she’d say over the phone. Williams endured her habit of dining at eleven (“greater love (or is it endurance) hath no man”); the production she made of eating (“restaurateurs and waiters received her like a queen . . . she ordered wines, pastas, salads, entrees without consulting the menu”); and her midnight rambles, with the sack of restaurant leftovers she demanded, to feed the stray cats of Rome.

At the same time, there was continuing worry about her English, her schedule, her money, her weight, and her co-star. The news, in 1955, of Marlon Brando’s interest in playing Val—“I know how to write for that boy,” Williams said—got Williams back not only to rewriting the play but eventually to ghostwriting mash notes for Magnani to send to Brando. (“She has a genius for the wrong attachments,” Williams wrote to Britneva, about Magnani’s appetite for younger men. Sixteen years her junior, Brando fit her particular sexual sweet tooth.) The prospect of Brando was a spur to both Williams and Magnani. “This news gave me a great joy,” she wrote to Wood. “Such a news gave me a courage of a lion and I’m ready to face this big struggle.” But Brando, who thought Val’s part was weaker than Lady’s and demanded rewrites, wouldn’t answer calls, not even from Williams.

By November 1955, exasperated by the silence, Magnani tried to get involved in the negotiation. “I know that Brando is very much interested in this play, and I also know that he asked Tennessee to alter the final part of his character, and frankly for an actor of his calibre, it should be granted,” she wrote to Wood. “Keeping in mind that with his talent and sensibility HE WILL NEVER ASK FOR SOMETHING THAT WOULD ALTER THE SPIRIT OF THE PLAY. Why not agree to that?” Magnani continued, “Do you realize the importance of giving to Broadway an important, if not the most important artistic event of the century by re-uniting the names of Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani. . . . You must get Brando.”

Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in
The Fugitive Kind

By September 1956, however, both Magnani and Brando had withdrawn from the Broadway production. Brando admired the play—“You wrote your funky ass off,” he told Williams. Brando’s problem was with Magnani. “When you play with her you either make sure that the parts are equally volatile or plan to carry a fair sized rock in your hand when you go on stage,” he wrote.

Magnani doesn’t frighten me, how can any one so lonely and so choked with longing frighten anybody? I think that she is a woman of unusual force who has a very hard time because she can’t find any one that would be willing to defeat her if they could. She yearns to be subjugated in a way that is natural to all women but she can’t find anybody with enough fire to “burn her down.” As well as strength she has aggression, and that makes her pitifully incongruous because it makes her domineering in her search to being dominated. The total effect of her force doesn’t make her frightening it just makes her unattractive. When I refer to her wanting to be burned down, I don’t mean just sexually, I mean she must find someone that will

her completely as a woman and love her too. As an actress she is a different rag on a different bush. I can’t think of an actress I would rather play with providing the potential dynamics of the parts are equal.

It took three years and the first million-dollar contract in movie history to get Brando to play Val opposite Magnani in the film version,
The Fugitive Kind
. “The money wasn’t nearly as much a problem as the fact he wouldn’t sleep with her,” the director Sidney Lumet said. Brando and Magnani never shared off-camera the sweet sensuality of the romantic attachment between Val and Lady. “After we had some meetings in California, she tried several times to see me alone, and finally succeeded one afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Brando explained in his autobiography. “Without any encouragement from me, she started kissing me with great passion.” He went on, “To refuse her would have been a terrible insult. But once she got her arms around me, she wouldn’t let go. If I started to pull away, she held on tight and bit my lip, which really hurt. With her teeth gnawing at my lower lip, the two of us locked in an embrace . . . we rocked back and forth as she tried to lead me to the bed. My eyes were wide open, and as I looked at her eyeball-to-eyeball I saw that she was in a frenzy, Attila the Hun in full attack. Finally the pain got so intense that I grabbed her nose and squeezed it as hard as I could, as if I were squeezing a lemon, to push her away. It startled her, and I made my escape.”

Sidney Lumet directs Marlon Brando in The
Fugitive Kind

Magnani posed problems for her director as well. “The essence of Anna?” Lumet said. “One day our call on set was 9:10, no Anna. 9:30, no Anna. 10:00, no Anna. I go, ‘Fuck.’ I went up to her dressing room. I come in. Marlon is there by the door, against the wall, shaking his head. She’s seriously stain-faced, mascara running, the works. I said, ‘Jesus, Anna, what’s happened!’ So help me God, she says, ‘Even in Italy, even in Italy, he won’t give me first billing!’ ”

Magnani commanded Lumet to shoot her only from the right side. “It completely ruined my staging,” Lumet said. “It meant that everyone had to be in a certain position in relation to her. You never saw Marlon’s right side, because he was always opposite her. I cannot tell you how destructive this kind of thing is to a movie.” Lumet went on, “A very gentle cameraman will sometimes imply a tenderness to a scene. I used it on Marlon’s big speech about the bird sleeping on the wind. I couldn’t do those gentle movements right to left with her. I generally stayed above the eye level. It was fatal because of the lack of tenderness, the lack of knowledge.” Despite Brando’s opening five-minute monologue to the camera, which was done in one take and is among the finest, and least known, of his great film performances, and Magnani’s magnificent fury, their chemistry never lived up to the shout line of the ads—“
Their fire! Their fever! Their desire!
”
The Fugitive Kind
“sputters more often than it sizzles,”
Variety
said. The fact that the
New York Times
’s Bosley Crowther found his senses “throbbing and feeling staggered and spent at the end” hardly mattered.
The Fugitive Kind
, which Lumet knew was botched from “the first time I saw the rushes” because of Magnani’s caveats, was a box-office disaster.

Williams had counted on Magnani to be a creative influence on Harold Clurman, the director of the Broadway production. As a co-founder of the Group Theatre in the thirties, Clurman had made his name directing the naturalistic work of Clifford Odets; by the late fifties, he had achieved a string of impressive Broadway hits, including
The Member of the Wedding
,
Bus Stop
, and
The Waltz of the Toreadors
. An early admirer of Williams, he had been a signatory of the “Special Award” from the Group Theatre that launched Williams’s playwriting career in 1939. In 1940, he had offered to mount one of Williams’s one-act plays at the Group just before it collapsed. Clurman had Williams’s measure, if not his metabolism. “It is the ‘peculiar people,’ the unprotected, the innocently sincere, the injured, the estranged, the queer, the defenseless, the abandoned and the maimed whom Williams redeems with his compassion,” he wrote.

Although Williams considered Clurman a “dear man and fine critic,” as an artistic team the two were a forced fit. Clurman was a man of reason, not intuition; he had energy but not poetry. He was an explainer, an arguer, an inspirer, a man of vivacious intellect, but more boulevardier than bohemian. Penetrating in his analysis of plays and buoyant in his personality, he was romantic in his devotion to art but not in his relation to life. His mind was seductive, but his physical presence was not. Talk, for him, was the source of erotic connection. “Harold’s rehearsals were like parties, at which he was the guest of honor,” Kazan, who was Clurman’s stage manager on
Awake and Sing
, said, adding, “He had trouble turning the psychology he had so brilliantly detailed into behavior on the same level of penetration and originality. There was often something inept about his staging; he had trouble getting people in and out of doors. He relied on the actors to work this out.” “I know that Anna would break through his tendency to make a play a bit static or ‘fixed,’ ” Williams told Wood.

Williams’s verdict on Clurman’s production, which finally starred Maureen Stapleton and Cliff Robertson, was that it was “under-directed.” Prior to the opening, he leveled with the producer Cheryl Crawford: “For your own sake, honey, I am glad you are not doing ‘Orpheus.’ I think it is a beautiful and true play that says something very clearly but I don’t think many people are going to like what it says.” When he believed that his prediction had come true, Williams was devastated, “a truly shattering setback,” he called it. In fact, the reviews were mixed but generally respectful. Atkinson damned
Orpheus Descending
with faint praise: “one of Mr. Williams’s pleasantest plays . . . There are streaks of his special genius all through it.”
Newsweek
concluded, “Something missing, but enough here.” The
New York
Post
called it “a drama of notable power, grim poetic insight, and disturbing fascination.”

The most devastating of the notices came not from the daily critics but from the weekly
The New Yorker
. Under the headline “Well, Descending, Anyway,” Wolcott Gibbs began, “The trouble with Tennessee Williams’s new play is . . . , I should say, that the people in it aren’t really terribly interesting.” He continued, “In ‘Orpheus Descending,’ I could see nothing but purposeless ruin, and while the author writes a good many of his customarily vivid scenes, I don’t believe that he has turned out a coherent play, or that he was quite sure of what was on his own mind.” Williams claimed later that the critics of the play “put it down with a vengeance,” but Gibbs’s review seems to be the only one to live up to the legend of vitriol in Williams’s memory. The trauma of the review was compounded by the news a few days before of his father’s death on March 27, in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of seventy-seven. “There was an emotional shock, more than I would have thought,” Williams wrote to Windham.

CC HAD BEEN out of touch with his famous son for more than a decade. “If he ever refers to my sister or me in any of his writing I will make him regret it as long as he lives,” CC wrote to Wood in 1950, CC having been outraged by the publication of Williams’s “devilish” short story “The Resemblance between a Violin Case and a Coffin.” All of CC’s obituaries contained his curt appraisal of his son as “a flop”: “He didn’t last long at anything until he started writing plays,” CC had said. Nonetheless, by 1954, Williams had come to accept CC as “my desperate old father.” “I’ve stopped hating my father and I do hope you won’t put in any hurtful things about him,” he told Kenneth Tynan in 1955, when he was writing an article on Williams. “He was not a man capable of examining his behavior toward his family, or not capable of changing it.” Williams added, “My Mother devoted herself to us three kids and developed an hostility toward him, which he took out on me, the first male to replace him.”