Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (59 page)

SWEET BIRD
DIDN’T get uniformly rave reviews—
Time
and
The New Yorker
adamantly dissented—but Williams got his Broadway blockbuster. At the opening night, on March 10, 1959, he was called up onto the stage of the Martin Beck for a bow. “If this be blockbustering, we need more blockbusters. This is the noise of passion, of creative energy, of exploration, and adventure. Even in excess, it is enormously exciting,” concluded the
Herald Tribune
. “One of his finest dramas,” the
New York Times
said. “A play of overwhelming force” was the
Post
’s verdict. The combination of seven positive daily-newspaper reviews and the news of Geraldine Page’s extraordinary performance—“a tigress with the voice of a trumpet,” Walter Kerr called her—provided enough heat at the box office to propel
Sweet Bird of Youth
to a run of 383 performances.

Success immediately rewrote the public story of the play. “Kazan was marvelous: so patient and understanding during the whole ordeal,” Williams wrote to Atkinson, thanking him for his
Times
review. “But I think these ordeals are WRONG! TERRIBLY, TERRIBLY WRONG! . . . I had never been through such a gruelling work-out in my—how many years on Broadway—19!—The whole trouble was in Act Two, as I see it. I just couldn’t seem to write that damned act, I loved Act One and Act Three, but Act Two had to be forced out of me by all hands on deck. There must have been at least ten versions of it and I still don’t know if we wound up with the right one: but at least we seemed to get by with it, with everybody but Tynan and Time, but ‘getting by’ with something is not, I know, the worthiest aim of an artist.”

Williams had, in fact, written
Sweet Bird
with Atkinson’s critical precepts in mind. In November 1958, he called Kazan’s and Mielziner’s attention to an essay on tragedy that Atkinson had published in the Sunday
Times
. “He thought the writing and the performance must rise to a level of eloquence and truth that will justify the point of view, however black it may be,” Williams said. “I think this statement should serve as a warning for our production, since we need a good notice from Brooks. I don’t want to suck up to any critic’s artistic predilections unless I can sincerely buy them. In this case, I do. If he means what he says, I buy it. And so I am trying like hell to work into the last few minutes of this play some kind of summation comparable to Blanche’s last line in Streetcar: ‘Whoever you are, I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.’ I think the audience, even the intelligent audience, and the good critic, will want something out of our main protagonist, Chance, besides his destruction. They’ll want it to mean something to him. And to them. Otherwise it may seem like shooting cat-fish in a barrel. . . . I think that can only come out of a moment of dignity in him, which if I can find the words for it, he should express.” In the last moment of
Streetca
r, Blanche threw herself into the arms of the doctor taking her to the asylum; with Chance’s eloquent last lines in
Sweet Bird
, Williams threw himself into the arms of the audience.

In answer to the withering review in
The New Yorker
by his friend and early champion Kenneth Tynan, Williams opted for unbuttoned, rather than courtly, address. “Pride and dignity say SILENCE! ALOOFNESS!—All shit,” he wrote to Tynan, adding, “What hurts and bewilders me is a note of ferocity in your notice. . . . I’m fighting the sort of game that you are peculiarly able to recognize with a real comprehension, and believe me, I have never surrendered knowingly to anything that I knew was false or cheap but in your piece about the play you imply that I have. WHY?” The virulence of Tynan’s dismissal—“None of Mr. Williams’ other plays has contained so much rot,” he wrote—signaled an uncharacteristic refusal to think. In his vitriolic defensiveness, Tynan ignored the play’s argument, which, as Williams’s letter implied, struck a very particular, personal, and shared chord. “My complaint is that you didn’t listen to Act One and Act Three which rank with the best work I’ve done,” Williams told him.

Tynan, who was the most astute theater critic of his era, confessed to having been “dismayed and alarmed” by the play; he used wit to cover up
Sweet Bird
’s central argument about the spiritual attrition of fame—a new theme in Williams’s oeuvre and a subject that also went to the core of Tynan’s own spiritual malaise. For Tynan, the play had hit a very raw nerve. Like Chance, who is ravaged by envy and guilt, Tynan relentlessly sought the public gaze and the legitimacy of the famous; and like the play’s hero, he was full of self-loathing, compelled to pretend, as he put it, “to be somebody—anybody—else.” “Something always blocks me,” Chance says. By middle age, Tynan, a legendary
enfant terrible
, also found himself terribly blocked. “Still a non-smoker, but alas, a non-worker,” he wrote to Louise Brooks. Williams’s heroism lay in writing through his block; Tynan’s tragedy was that he couldn’t.

About the vexed issue of act 2, which dramatized the ruthless Boss Finley and his corrupt pursuit of power (“Big Daddy rewritten in the deep dyes of Victorian villainy”), Williams told Tynan, “You were obviously totally alienated by the dreadful but necessary Act Two. It is dreadful in
my
opinion. Maybe it really isn’t dreadful at all but a very accomplished way of linking up the elements of a little play to those elements that make it a big one. That is Kazan’s opinion, at least, anyhow, and I think Kazan has this time done a really wonderful job.” To the columnist Max Lerner, Williams gave a more fanciful explanation of the play’s luridness. “As an artist grows older he is almost always inclined to work in broader strokes,” he wrote. “The delicate brush-work of his early canvasses no longer satisfies his demands of himself. He starts using the heavy brush, the scalpel and finally even his fingers, his thumbs, and even, finally, a spray-gun of primary colors. Act Two is written with that heavy brush, scalpel and spray-gun. Delicacy, allusiveness are thrown to the winds in writing, staging, performance. And I honestly think that was the only way to do it, and that if we hadn’t done it that way the play would have failed to reach the mass audience that it seems to be reaching.” He added, “Some day I am going to write a piece about the importance of sheer excitement in the theatre!—both seriousness and dramatic excitement!”

But of all Williams’s postmortems of the play and himself, the most revealing was his letter to Kazan after Archibald MacLeish’s
J.B.
, which Kazan also directed, won the Tony Award for Best Play. “You are tired but not half as tired as I am: I was BEAT!—and I don’t mean ‘Beatific,’ just dead beat,” he wrote. “I kept my critical faculties almost entirely intact, or so I believe, but I couldn’t function on anything but the most hack sort of level and consequently a play that had the makings of greatness fell short of its mark. So the critics, rightly, gave their award to a play that set itself a much lower mark, and not only met it but passed it.” The structure of
Sweet Bird
violated an essential rule. Williams, who streamlined the play after its first production, explained: “the rule of the straight line, the rule of poetic unity of singleness and wholeness, because when I first wrote it, crisis after crisis, of nervous and physical and mental nature, had castrated me nearly.”

THE SUCCESS OF
Sweet Bird
propelled Williams, like the Princess, still farther “back alone up the beanstalk to the ogre’s country where I live, now, alone.” He was bigger than ever. By the end of 1959, the movie adaptations of
Suddenly Last Summer
and
Fugitive Kind
had been released;
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
was about to go into production, with
Sweet Bird of Youth
soon to follow. “Are you driven and compelled as I am to keep
at it, at it, at it!
—because nothing else means enough,” Williams asked Kazan three weeks after the opening of
Sweet Bird
. “I bet you feel like I do, that you have been through the meat-grinder. The consolation is that you turned our ground-up bits into successful chopped sirloin.”

Kazan counseled his exhausted friend to stop work for a while. “You are giving me the same advice that Kubie gave me but with an important difference. You know me and care about me as a man and I don’t think Kubie did except at moments,” Williams responded. He continued, “There was a wonderful, beautiful speech, by far the best that Miller ever wrote, at the end of Death of a Salesman, something about him being ‘Out there in the blue’—nothing solid beneath him to fall back on, to support him, except whatever natural, enduring power to rise or strength to stay up that he owned. That describes you and me. We are ‘out there in the blue’ with no net under. I’m SCARED! I think a lot more than you are. Out of my fright, as much as out of my love of creation, now, I am still working compulsively. The love of the work is greater than ever but the fear is too. The question is: If I go on this way, how long can I do so?”

In May, trying to negotiate some “freedom from pressure,” Williams instructed Wood to “tell everybody who wants a quart of my blood that I am suffering from pernicious anemia.” In July, as part of his campaign of rest and recuperation, he took a two-hour drive from New York to Pennsylvania to see Diana Barrymore, the daughter of the legendary actor John Barrymore, play Blanche in
Streetcar
. “She has the Barrymore madness and power and her last three scenes were remarkable,” he told St. Just, about the wafer-thin actress who shared his enthusiasm for “happy pills and sleepy pills” and whom he took to dinner afterward. “When we went backstage, the poor thing looked as if she had been drenched by a fire-hose.” Williams went on, “What happens to actresses in my plays?! . . . I seem to push them over, I mean around that well-known corner, maybe because I’m around it too, and not pushing but calling?”

Williams was a performance without an intermission. By the fall, alternately polishing
Period of Adjustment
and working “like crazy on ‘Night of the Iguana’ and I do mean crazy,” he found himself right up against his old malignant demons. To his friend Lilla Van Saher, Williams reported that several times on his travels he’d thrown awful, hysterical public scenes. “Something suddenly triggers my nerves and I flip! Really flip,” he said, writing after a sleepless night, in such a state that he had “knelt beside the bathtub and prayed to God.” “There is some volcano of violence in me and though I work every morning, as ever, it doesn’t seem to release enough of the tension to get me peacefully and rationally through what is left of the day.” As usual, Williams vowed to seek clinical help; as usual, the only interpretations to which he submitted were his own.

In December, Williams sent
Period of Adjustment
to Kazan. “Oh, God, Gadg, I don’t know,” Williams said, calling the play an “affirmation of sweetness in four troubled young people.” “If it interests you, baby, please try not to think in terms of radical revision because I’m not up to it. . . . If you have some inspirations, aside from that, give them to me, but don’t count on me being more than just
willing
to, for the Piper has arrived to collect his pay at my door and someone has let him in and told him that I am at home!”

To this rueful intimation, Williams added one last winded note. “I don’t feel ready for the Sixties,” he said.

CHAPTER 7

Kookhood

Perhaps my heart has died in me. If it is dead, I didn’t mean to kill it.

—

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

to Hermione Baddeley, 1963

The sixties came in like a lion and stayed that way. On January 25, 1960, Diana Barrymore, one of the army of gallant lost souls whom Williams held dear, died at the age of thirty-eight from a heart attack apparently induced by an overdose of alcohol and drugs. The blanket of two thousand violets that draped her coffin at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York was from Williams, who had flown from Key West to attend the funeral. “She had great honesty and a great capacity for love—and she died for lack of it,” he told the press. Barrymore, who was given her first drink by her father at age thirteen, and was dubbed “Personality Deb No. 1” by the press at seventeen, had botched the early promise of her film career and lost many years to alcohol and drug addictions and three turbulent marriages. She chronicled her louche lonely life in her best-selling autobiography,
Too Much, Too Soon
(1957). In the book’s final paragraph, she invoked Brooks Atkinson’s review of her theatrical comeback, at the age of thirty-five, in 1956. (“Any time she wants to stop fooling around and learn the difference between acting and performing,” Atkinson had written, “she can be an exciting actress. The stuff is there.”) “I repeat my vow—and mean it,” she wrote in the book’s last lines. “
I promise. You’ll see. You will indeed, Mr. Atkinson!
Perhaps I have begun to find my way.”

Diana Barrymore

For Barrymore, Williams was the pathfinder
and
the path. He was a kind of household god, an Orpheus who had led her back from her subterranean hell and into the light. “I don’t mean this in a sacrilegious way, but
he is
my savior on earth,” she wrote to Dakin Williams in April 1959. Barrymore was a wild but warm woman who often partied with Tennessee. Sometimes she dressed in male drag and pimped for him; sometimes, drunk and stoned, they would put Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly
on the record player and act it out, with Williams playing Cio-Cio San to Barrymore’s Pinkerton. She was also a frequent interpreter of his works. In 1958, she had taken on the role of Maggie in a touring production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. Good reviews had led to a successful engagement, the following year in Chicago, as Catharine Holly in
Suddenly Last Summer
, and finally as Blanche, in the summer-stock production of
Streetcar
.