Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (58 page)

Kazan’s other great contribution was to the play’s casting. His prowess secured Newman’s commitment to the production. For the bravura role of Princess Kosmonopolis, Kazan opted boldly “for the inner qualities” of Geraldine Page, an actress he “greatly admired” but who was no protection at the box office. As Alma Winemiller in José Quintero’s 1952 Circle in the Square revival of
Summer and Smoke
, Page had turned in an uncanny performance that had made the name of the star, the director, and the play. “Miss Page is not the kind of actress who waits to give a performance on opening night,” Quintero wrote in his memoir,
If You Don’t Dance They Beat You
. “She plunges into her role at the very first reading. It’s almost as if she wanted to forget herself as Miss Page and utilize everything that she owns to become the character that she is playing.” Casting her was a brilliant decision, one that Williams had questioned. “I think it may demand more power and technique than a young actress like Geraldine could give it,” he worried to Crawford, who agreed at first. “The Princess is a pretty cosmopolitan character and I would still be better satisfied with Page if I first heard Margaret Leighton, Vivien Leigh, Eileen Herlie and Edwige Feuillère and maybe even Siobhán McKenna,” Williams wrote to Wood, adding, “It’s a virtuoso part, demanding great stature, stage presence, power, vocal richness and variety, and so forth, but Gadg, we have to remember, has a genius for casting, second to no one’s.”

Kazan maintained that “consanguinity”—by which he meant being American—was a very important factor in casting the role. Still, Page struggled at first to locate the ravaged emotional geography of Princess Kosmonopolis’s character. In preparation Kazan gave her a collection of photographs of silent-film stars and asked her to consider which one her Princess might have been. Page discounted Greta Garbo as too remote, with a coolness that was not indigenous to the Princess’s combustible nature. She discarded Mary Pickford, and her trajectory from sweetheart to diva, as a lazy choice. She was tempted by the steaminess of Theda Bara and the sassiness of Clara Bow. But in the end, she chose the complexity of Norma Talmadge, who seemed to have “an air of great vulnerability, as of someone who would greet everything and everyone with a spontaneous open-heartedness, and I was very touched by it,” she explained. “I felt the shocks and hurts that would fall full force on a heart like that could turn someone into a complicated, volatile phenomenon like the Princess.”

On the first day of rehearsal, at the Martin Beck Theatre, however, Page had two surprises for Williams. The first was that she would not sign her contract unless there was assurance in writing that she would play the lead in the film version. Wood was called to the theater, losing her fabled cool as soon as she marched through the lobby doors. “If Miss Page continues to insist on it,” she told Page’s agent, “we will have to find someone else to play the part.” With the producer and the director standing within earshot, Wood prevailed. (Page, whose stage performance made her famous and earned her a Tony Award, starred in the 1962 film, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.) Then, when the actors finally sat at the table to begin reading the play, Page’s delivery was fearful and hesitant. Midway through, Williams bolted from his chair. “Stop it, stop it! It can’t go on, it’s too awful!” he said, and stormed out. Like the Princess in the play, who senses disaster and flees up the aisle at the premiere of her movie, Williams rushed home, refused to answer the phone, and knocked himself out with a cocktail of booze and pills. He craved a little of the “
temporary
obfuscation” he described in
Period of Adjustment
, a comedy he had premiered and directed at the Coconut Grove, in Florida, a few months before. Page’s reading had convinced Williams that his first instincts were right and Kazan was wrong—that he was mistaken about the actress and, even worse, about the play.

Kazan spent the remainder of the afternoon dealing with Page, who had retreated to her dressing room in despair. “She was convinced that she couldn’t do the part,” he said. “I told her she could and would, that it was a stretch for her, true, but that she had to be courageous, and if she was, she would play the part precisely as I wished it played and no one else could or would play it as I wished.” He added, “I knew I had to use some extreme measures—like making her ‘camp’ the part for a few rehearsals, to break down the inhibitions that the truth-seeking of the Method often causes in our actors. . . . It only needed me to hold her hand for a few days, then spur her on.”

Sometime that evening, Williams roused himself to answer the insistent banging at his front door. Molly and Elia Kazan—“sweetly and genially smiling as if nothing has happened of an unusual nature”—were standing at the threshold. Williams had no choice but to invite them in. He was “now dreadfully ashamed of my conduct before the company but not yet swerved from my conviction that the play should not go on.” The Kazans talked to him, he recalled, “as you do to a wounded animal or a sick child.” Except for the time after the disastrous opening night of
Camino Real
, when Williams had locked himself in his bedroom, refusing even to receive the congratulations of John Steinbeck, who waited outside, Kazan had never seen Williams so distressed and timorous. “He doubted his own play; he wanted it withdrawn,” Kazan said. “I believe that only the rather mystical faith he had in me persuaded him to go ahead.” In a note to Kazan just prior to the beginning of rehearsals, Williams expressed that faith. “I think we have to go for broke,” he wrote, adding, “I think we have got to draw out of Paul [Newman] an approximation of a kind of subtlety and sophistication and decadence that he doesn’t have in him, and that is the ‘rub.’ I should have also put in the word ambivalence. If you can accomplish that, you’ll have created a miracle almost. But I think you can.”

Kazan once told Williams that he should never talk to actors; his combination of shyness and vagueness would make any suggestions more confounding than clarifying. “You get the impression, out of frustration really, ‘Oh, I don’t think he’s read his plays even. He doesn’t know anything about them,’ ” Geraldine Page recalled. “You want to shake him and knock him on his head and say, ‘Open up and let me in to talk to you.’ That ‘you’ that’s way back in there, inside, that does the writing.” She continued, “I imagine the number of people who have been able to really share that part of his work with him on a conversational level are very few.”

Kazan, of course, was one of them. For
Sweet Bird of Youth
, Williams insisted that Kazan allow him “a close, undisturbed working relationship between you and me: no others.” He felt an almost Oedipal connection to his director, which showed itself when he returned to the theater the day after his panicky scene. A young man—an Actors Studio “listener,” unknown to Williams—was sitting beside Kazan, in the place usually reserved for the author. Convinced that the person had been “brought in to rewrite my work” and “jealous of his proximity to Gadg,” Williams took a seat against the back wall. During the lunch break, he was introduced to the visitor, and his paranoid suspicions evaporated. For subsequent rehearsals Williams took his “rightful place next to our great white father.”

As the play struggled to find its form in the Philadelphia tryout, the issue of whom Williams would collaborate with to solve its many structural and technical problems threatened to destroy the production and ruin his working relationship with Kazan. The problem was primarily Molly Day Thacher and her brusque opinions. “O.K. I’ll play it cool and deal with MK’s notes, but only on condition that from now on, in or out, there be no further exposure of my frayed nervous-system to notes, or discussions within my hearing, of this play . . . except between you and me,” he wrote to Kazan. “I must not be demoralized at this point by the little group of well-wishers that close in for the kill when a play is in trouble. The moment that happens I’ll close the play.” The people to whom he would talk, he explained, were Kazan, Crawford, Mielziner, Wood, and “nobody else at all.” Williams felt demoralized, exhausted, and under siege from other would-be advisors. “I will throw my typewriter at them if they come near me,” he warned Kazan. “I will call on the Dramatists Guild for protection of my rights as an author to have exclusive control and authorship of this script. I have written a play about castration but refuse to enact the role of victim-protagonist in it.”

When under attack, Williams could fight his corner with ferocious intelligence. In Philadelphia, sensing that Kazan was trying to “correct” his play in a “willfully, fatally wrong way”—he sparred even with his trusted director. “The sick fury that I felt last night at the demolition of the finest last scene that I’ve ever written, and I’ve almost always been best in my last scenes, has now died down and I am still alive, the fury is gone, just the sickness remains,” Williams began a note to Kazan. Before launching into the most blistering, clear-eyed attack he’d ever leveled at Kazan, Williams praised his work with Newman (“You have given him, or drawn out of him, a really great performance”) and his smooth handling of the play’s flawed and faltering second act (“You have staged it as only you could. Nobody can equal you at obscuring the worst in a writer”). What threatened “to sever the Gordian knot of our friendship,” however, was Williams’s contention that Kazan was also “obscuring the
best
of my writing, in fact I might almost go so far as to say that you have obscured the play.” At issue was Kazan’s attitude toward the Princess:

Your direction of her in the bar-scene, where the play is most eloquently stated—the tragedy of people that need each other not reaching each other—seems, as I told you last night, as if you regarded that scene as a bit of lousy writing, a bunch of dummy lines, and that you wanted to throw it away by obscuring it with busy-busy direction which is not even interesting or good as direction alone.—I realize that you had built up a tension, a momentum, through your masterful staging of the crowd scene in the bar which a

passionate, lyrical scene between Chance and the Princess would appear to break. Actually, it’s needed there!—I mean a break of pace, of momentum, of fury. It’s set up that way in the script. They retreat to the gallery and the palm garden—everything is set up for an effective counter-point of something tenderly human, meaningful and dramatic in a

way, with the influence of music and what you will have on the back-drop: sky and palm-garden. It’s in this scene that you could score as a director who deeply understands and loves the true meaning and values of the material with which he is working, but you sacrifice it for what I suppose you regard as powerful staging, and I think you’re so wrong!—but do you still care what I think?

In Kazan’s strong hand, Williams sensed a certain hostility, which had as much to do with Kazan’s growing frustration with his role as an interpretive artist as it did with Williams. (Kazan had recently finished his first original screenplay, for
Wild River
, and was in the process of translating William Inge’s prose version of
Splendor in the Grass
into screenplay form.) “You know how suspicious, how paranoiac I can be and so often am, so you will not be surprised that I suddenly felt, last night, that your direction of Act III, your use of the Princess in it, was one of those unconscious acts of aggression that our analysts expose in us to our dismay—and that the aggression was really directed at the play’s author, perhaps because you feel that I identify with the Princess and that I am a cheap, pretentious old bitch,” he wrote in another furious note to Kazan. “Well, you’re right in a way, but only in a way and to a degree. I am haunted all the time by ‘the goddam end of my life,’ by which I don’t mean my physical death but my death as an artist: I am haunted by that terror, and that’s why I drink as I do, and why I work compulsively as I do, shouting at life: ‘IT AIN’T SO!’ ”

Williams was not wrong. “A sort of distortion was going on,” Kazan admitted decades later in his autobiography. “I remember I felt an irritable impatience as I’d worked on those plays”—
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
and
Sweet Bird of Youth
—“and, with it, a need to speak for myself at last. Here was born, I must suppose, the resolve to stop forcing myself into another person’s skin but rather to look for my own subjects and find, however inferior it must be to Tennessee’s, my own voice.” In Philadelphia, incensed by laughter at the Princess in act 3—“the most truly powerful and moving scene in the play”—Williams called Kazan out about his competitiveness:

A director of your skill and perception could not do such a thing without knowing what he was doing: consequently I must regard it as deliberate aggression, as an expression of disdain which you obviously now have toward me as a writer. You knew, you couldn’t help knowing, that in the character of Ariadne del Lago I was expressing and tragically purging my own fearful dilemma, my own obsession, my terror, of losing my power as an artist and being obliged to live out the rest of my life with liquor and drugs and whores to stand the most unbearable loss that anybody can suffer, and one that I wasn’t suffering through any thing except terror of it. Don’t regard this as mere Narcissism. I take a pretty objective view of myself, I see what I am in a clear mirror, which is merciless. This in its conception and writing is a scene of tragic stature, and pure dramatic theatre, the best I can do and have ever been able to do. The audience is meant to recognize the pathos of this woman . . . neither that nor her fiercely honest monologue while the phone-call is being put through, could be laughed at if it were played as conceived and written.—I don’t mean it just incidentally when I add that it is also the sacrifice of a great talent in Gerry.

“I must know if you are now, finally, willing to regard me, and me alone, as your co-worker in the salvage operation that lies before us,” Williams concluded, threatening otherwise to close the play, in which both men had large financial, as well as artistic, stakes. (Williams had invested $100,000 in the show; Kazan, $37,000.) Kazan took Williams’s heat and agreed to return to their “original” version, which he felt “was more moving than the one we are playing now.” In that version, Kazan said, “you watch the growing guilt, growing awareness of guilt which leads up to [Chance’s] staying and submitting to (wanting the expiation of) castration.” Because of cuts in the storyline, Kazan concluded, the bar scene in act 2, as it played in Philadelphia, was “shallow.” “It seemed to be on the surface, concerned with external events. Occurrences in a bar! And instead of being INSIDE Chance, we are on the outside watching him bullshit and moan. . . . He seems like a callow and callous fool. The girl says they ripped my guts out. And he says I got it made. And carries on in the bar as if he still had a chance with her.” The scene’s construction was the problem, Kazan said, and he set Williams the task of rearranging the narrative elements so that Chance’s crushing realization of his guilt mounts gradually. “If this is realized too early and he behaves semi-casually after it, then he stays for reasons that do not MOVE us,” Kazan said. He added, “I think you and Audrey and I should have one fundamental talk. I’ll ride up on the train with you or do or be anything and anywhere you want. But IT IS NOT TOO LATE to right ourselves.”