Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (65 page)

Williams became quite an aficionado of Jacobson’s “miracle tissue regenerator,” which the doctor insisted should not, under any circumstances, be mixed with alcohol—a caveat that Williams overlooked to his cost. Eventually, he learned to inject himself, using the needles and ampules that Jacobson mailed to him around the world; he followed the intramuscular injections with a 500-milligram chaser of Mellaril, an antipsychotic whose side effects included irregular heart rates, tremors, severe confusion, and unusual body movements. Williams referred to this high-low drug combination as “the Goforth Syndrome.” “I felt as if a concrete sarcophagus about me had sprung open and I was released as a bird on the wing,” he said of his first Jacobson injection. (For one of his early injections, Williams had taken Corsaro with him to Jacobson’s office on East Eighty-Seventh Street in New York. “Would you like to try it?” Williams asked. “Holy shit, no, I’ll just sit here,” Corsaro said, who found the German-born doctor “right out of ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.’ ”

After the Chicago reviews, Williams certainly needed something to boost his spirits and to keep him at work. The
Tribune
’s Claudia Cassidy—the critic whose review of
The Glass Menagerie
had launched Williams’s career—now seemed to want to revoke his artistic license. “EVEN FOR A MAN OF LESS TALENT THIS WOULD BE A BANKRUPT PLAY,” the headline of her column read. Cassidy had thrilled at Tom Wingfield’s romantic pursuit of his destiny; fifteen years on, she was appalled at Shannon, whose collapse was a kind of betrayal of that renegade imagination. “I would almost have paid a psychiatrist to save me from having to listen,” she wrote.

“What is rather pathetic is the shock which the bad reviews were to Charles Bowden and Tennessee Williams,” Maxtone-Graham observed. As the show got closer to New York and the author and the cast were, in Leighton’s words, “punch-drunk with new pages,” Williams grew even harder to wrangle. “Flushed with whisky and battered with failure, I think the Chicago reviews have hurt him more than he admits,” Maxtone-Graham reported. A dictum about contacting the playwright was sent out to the stage management. “[Williams] is to be notified in writing the day before he is needed,” Maxtone-Graham reported. “He is then telephoned at half-hour intervals during the morning to assure that he will be there. This morning’s visit required constant attention by a secretary. Four different calls, practical administration of Bromo-Seltzer to get to the theatre.”

In Chicago,
Iguana
found itself in the paradoxical position of being a critical catastrophe and a box-office success; nonetheless, Cassidy’s vitriolic response was a kind of wake-up call. Williams and Corsaro had no choice but to cut half an hour out of the play. The situation was so drastic that Corsaro had Wood, who also believed the play needed a severe haircut, fly in from New York to convince Williams. Corsaro recalled Williams yelling, of Davis, “I can’t. I’d be taking her part.” “But, Tennessee, your play will be ruined,” Wood insisted.

After reviewing the cuts, Davis called a meeting onstage with the management. With three weeks to go before the Broadway opening, she demanded that Patrick O’Neal be fired. “It was insane,” Corsaro said. “Patrick O’Neal had been with this show from the very beginning, and he had been just brilliant. But his performance was suffering because of her. He couldn’t stand everything that was going on, and he started to act like Shannon offstage, drinking and holing himself up in his hotel room. He didn’t tell anyone his phone number; you couldn’t reach him. He was completely incommunicado, hiding out from Bette Davis.” In her demand to the management, according to Maxtone-Graham, Davis struck the bullying tone that the company had come to dread—“that rather hysterical, over-definite pronouncement of hers, usually abysmally ignorant. That led to an impasse of the kind: I’ll have my way, or you’ll have no way at all.” Davis claimed that O’Neal’s constant improvisation was a deliberate attempt to undermine her performance, an idea of which Williams had tried throughout the run to disabuse her. “I can’t agree with you that he means to be that way, that he is doing it deliberately,” Williams wrote to Davis, who remained adamant on the issue even after the show had opened. He continued:

I think he is just trying very hard to correct the flaws in his performance, just as I have always kept making little revisions in a script. Actually, Bette, you are fully able, in my opinion, to cope with these little variations of Pat’s, that is, so long as he doesn’t give you a wrong cue. You have more virtuosity as an actress than you know. Remember that he is playing the part of a very disturbed man, about to have another crack-up. If you keep that in mind, I believe you will find that you are able to “use” those bits of variation that seem to be so much a part of his style. I remember how Eddie Dowling used to try little changes with Laurette Taylor in “Menagerie.” She didn’t like them, but she “used” them, sometimes just by some little variation of her own, sometimes just by giving him a “good look,” a good hard look that took his measure, and invariably this little variation of her own would be entirely in the frame and key of the play and would actually work better for her than Eddie’s variation would work for him.—Please don’t be mad at Pat! I know this sounds like easy advice. But try to remember that Pat is struggling with a feeling of disappointment in himself.

News of Davis’s demand somehow got back to O’Neal in his dressing room. He slipped into the theater. Davis saw him coming up the aisle. “Where have you been?” she said. O’Neal charged up the stairs onto the stage. He lunged at Davis, knocking her to the ground and grabbing her by the throat. “Patrick almost killed her,” Corsaro recalled. “We had to run up and pull him off her. The thing that was amazing was, as he was doing it, she was smiling.” O’Neal ranted at her—“You filthy
cunt
!”—threw a table across the stage and stormed out of the theater.

O’Neal wasn’t fired; but the next day, at Davis’s command, Corsaro was. “I can feel vibrations between he and I,” she said, quoting a line from the play. Williams didn’t defend him. “He was a frazzled man,” Corsaro said. “You couldn’t depend on him. He didn’t want to get involved. Bowden, who was a wriggly guy, saw his chance to take over the production. Tennessee just sort of fell in with him.” Corsaro fought for two days to keep control of his production, “hiding down in the back of the theater until the curtain went up and then taking notes.” He was discovered by one of Davis’s factotums and banished to New York. “We now have no director and our producer has just today gone into hospital for a three-day check up,” Maxtone-Graham said in the last entry of his backstage chronicle. “I asked him before he left who was in charge, he said gaily, ‘Oh, Mr. Williams.’ And if that sodden relic who sits in the back row of the orchestra every night is in charge, I think it’s time that I packed up my tapes. Good night, and to all a merry Christmas.”

In the end, Corsaro’s work was saved by the surprise intervention of Elia Kazan, who came to see the Chicago production at Williams’s request. “He told Williams and Bowden. ‘The play is very well-directed. Davis is gonna do exactly what she’s gonna do and there’s nothing you can do about it but don’t change the staging,’ ” Corsaro recalled. Nonetheless, Williams maintained his focus on Davis’s performance, trying to chip away by degrees at her tense, mannered, self-conscious characterization, which even her biographer called an “unabashed disregard of the playwright’s specifications.”

In an effort to spackle over the emotional cracks in her portrayal, Davis imposed on Maxine a lurid vividness—a lacquered, ketchup-colored wig, brassy makeup, a brazen blue shirt unbuttoned to the waist, a push-up brassiere. “I think this creation of Maxine will be enormously helped when all these ‘externals’ have been set right,” Williams wrote to Davis in Chicago. “One of these ‘externals’ that isn’t right, yet, is the wig. I like the color of it but it is too perfectly arranged, too carefully ‘coiffed.’ It ought to look like she had gone swimming without a cap and rubbed her hair dry with a coarse towel and not bothered to brush or comb it. When she says, ‘I never dress in September,’ I think she means just that. Her clothes shouldn’t look as if they’d just come from the laundry: there’s nothing ‘starchy’ about her. . . . She moves with the ease of clouds and tides, her attitudes are free and relaxed. There’s a touch of primitive poetry in her.”

Even though the show had been “frozen” in Chicago, as it shifted to New York, Williams was still at work trying to give Maxine more dramatic impact at the finale; he had figured out a way to bring her pagan presence into the center of the play’s argument about body and soul. He pitched his new ending to Davis as “giving color and visual poetry.” Maxine has Shannon tied up in a hammock to suffer through his breakdown, and then leaves. “It is made apparent that, Shannon being roped up, she has reverted to the Mexican kids for companionship. (I don’t mean sex.)” Eventually she returns; “she’s ready for a night swim so she checks on Shannon. She discovers that he’s out of the hammock. It doesn’t particularly surprise her but she’s happy to see that he’s hitting the booze since this is what makes Shannon acceptable, mostly.” Williams added, “In her silk robe and her vivid-striped towel there is something a little suggestive of some ancient female (Egyptian or Oriental) deity . . . and, without stressing it too stylistically, the two kids are like a pair of pagan acolytes attending her, till she dismisses them.”

The Night of the Iguana
opened at the Royale Theatre on Broadway on December 28, 1961. “I thought Maggie Leighton’s final bit with the grandfather one of the most beautiful moments I have ever seen,” Kazan wrote to Williams, adding, “It’s so far ahead of any other play this season that I have seen, in my feelings, that I can’t really compare it with anything.” He continued, “All that pain and so on the road was worth it. Incidentally, I thought Frank Corsaro did an excellent job and don’t let anybody ever tell you different.”

In the twenty-two years of life that remained to Williams, he would have seven more Broadway openings, but
Iguana
would be his last hit. The play’s arrival in New York was preceded, in late November, by a front-page article by Brooks Atkinson in the
New York
Times Book Review
on two biographies of Williams. (“Mr. Williams is the most gifted theatre writer in America,” Atkinson said.) The play’s opening was followed, in March, by Williams’s appearance on the cover of
Time
, a portrait of tweedy, cigarette-smoking composure.
Time
, which had been Williams’s homophobic nemesis in the fifties, had changed its theater critic and its allegiances; the magazine became his champion, declaring him “in his best dramatic form since ‘Streetcar’ ”: “
Iguana
served to bracket the whole range of Williams’s achievement, a body of work so substantial that it now casts a larger shadow than the man who made it.”

On opening night, as she entered to a barrage of cheers, Bette Davis broke out of character, walked downstage, jutted out her chin to the audience, who stood for her, then lifted her hands above her head like a prize fighter who had just knocked out an opponent. “I fell down,” Corsaro, who had been “allowed” to come to the opening, said. Davis’s grandstanding meant that when Patrick O’Neal made his entrance, he was, he said, “greeted by a flat, dead house. It was difficult.”

A couple of weeks later, after reading the glowing reviews of Margaret Leighton’s performance and her own tepid press (Walter Kerr spoke of her “tattered and forlorn splendor”), Davis considered stopping the show another way. “The day I left New York I was informed that you might be about to quit,” Williams wrote to Davis in early January. “Of course you know that this [will] automatically close it, and if you’re sincere in your stated love of the play and your part in it, and I am pretty sure that you are, I know that you don’t want this to happen anymore than I do, which is not at all. We’ve had a wonderful bit of luck with the critical reception, the play is regarded as a hit, at least enough of one, and if we play our cards right, to carry it to the end of the season, possibly even further.” He added, “For both of us this is desperately important, it would be very bad for us both if . . . the play should expire prematurely.”

Williams, who seemed incapable of saving himself, would do anything to save his play. At some personal cost to his notion of truth and honor, he managed to persuade Davis to stay until the theater parties were finished. “I want to tell you that, believe it or not, I love you,” his begging letter began. “And, more important than that, I admire and respect you. You are a good, hard fighter, you have terrific courage and stamina.” He added, “It thrilled me the way the public responded to you on opening night, I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed an ovation for an actress quite like that.”

After 128 performances, Davis left the show in April. (Shelley Winters replaced her and stayed with the show until it closed, after 316 performances. “It is hard to say which was worse but at least La Davis drew cash and La Winters seems only to sell the upper gallery,” Williams wrote to St. Just.) After her final performance, Davis called the cast out onto the stage of the Royale to bid them farewell. “I’m
so
happy that everyone thinks Maggie is so
charming
and Patrick is
so
brilliant! I’m sorry I had to irritate you for so long with my professionalism. You obviously like doing it your way much better.
Well!
Now you can,” she said. Five months later, Davis took out ads in the “Situation Wanted” section of
Variety,
which famously read, “Thirty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumor would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway.)”

After the play became a hit, Williams welcomed Corsaro back into his circle. Corsaro, who hired Winters to replace Davis, oversaw the production for the remainder of its run. He had delivered to Williams the prize of commercial and critical success—Williams won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and a Tony nomination for best play. It was the kind of victory that ordinarily would lead to a creative partnership, but Corsaro never worked with Williams again. For a while, during the run, they’d meet at the Isle of Capri, an Italian watering hole on Sixty-First Street and Third Avenue, which had become their hangout during the many months of planning and revisions. “We would sit there and he would just mumble his way through a meeting. You almost felt there was nobody there, in a way,” Corsaro said. “I lost a certain kind of compassion for his view of himself and the world, his desire, literally, to extinguish himself.” He added, “He was not a very good person, really. He became very much the monster of the theatre, the man who was at the top.” One night late in the run, after dropping in on the actors before curtain, Corsaro went over to the Isle of Capri for dinner. Through the restaurant’s glass front door, he saw Williams at a table nursing a drink. “I turned around and went to another place. I just didn’t want to go near him,” Corsaro said. He never saw Williams again.