Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (70 page)

A week after Merlo was buried, Williams left with Nicklaus for the Mexican resort town of Puerto Vallarta, where John Huston was filming
The Night of the Iguana
, with Deborah Kerr, Richard Burton, and Ava Gardner. “My heart is heavy, but I couldn’t have chosen a better place, not to forget, but to remember as peacefully as I can,” Williams wrote to Vaccaro, trying to coax her to join him. “The sea is just warm enough and the streets are full of creatures. Burros, horses descended directly from that horse of Don Quixote, wandering hogs.” He added, “Yesterday I made myself popular by re-writing a scene for Burton and Sue Lyon, which everyone liked. Today I’m re-writing the ending which had been sentimentalized. I’m trying to replace the sentimentality with some honest emotion and the producer, Ray Stark is adding several feet to the speed-boat or fishing boat that he’s offered to pay me with.”

But neither the glamour of the surroundings nor the company worked its distracting magic. “I have been very depressed over the loss of Frank,” Williams wrote to his mother and brother. “It was so awful to watch a young person so full of vitality before slipping so steadily away and trying so desperately not to face it.” “Things were never the same after Frank died,” Nicklaus said. Key West, to which Williams returned with Nicklaus in October, was no longer emollient. “The house, in fact the whole island, is haunted by Frank and our happy years together,” Williams wrote to Wood.

Bound up in his grief over Merlo’s death was a projection of his own demise. (Williams, who was almost always photographed with a cigarette in hand, immediately stopped smoking.) In his mind,
Milk Train
, which he was revising for a second opening on Broadway within a season after the play’s previous failure—an unprecedented opportunity that he considered “almost a miracle”—became a kind of swan song. He hoped for a stellar, uncompromised production “to conclude my Broadway career.” “I have no more illusions about the Broadway establishment,” he had written to Wood in July 1963. “A writer is valued only as long as he is in current fashion, and I have had my day. I was always psychologically prepared for this eventuality and I think I am able to face it, now that it’s come, having acquainted myself with the fate of other writers like Fitzgerald.”

THE FLAMBOYANT BROADWAY producer David Merrick (nicknamed the “Abominable Showman”), seeing an opportunity to corner Williams’s future output and turn himself into a producer of serious drama, had proposed the restaging of
Milk Train
to Williams in May 1963. He began his charm offensive by praising the play as “one of your best” and declaring Williams “the greatest playwright, now or ever.” Merrick “liked writers in the way that snakes like live rabbits,” John Osborne, whose plays
Look Back in Anger
and
Luther
had been produced by Merrick on Broadway, once observed. Nonetheless, Williams was easily seduced by his flattery. And, like all producers, Merrick paid to play. He hired the British director Tony Richardson, whose film adaptation of Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones
was one of the year’s cinematic sensations. (“Tony is a man of genius—only a man of genius could have directed that film so fabulously,” Williams said after seeing it.) Merrick’s other big move was to lure back to Broadway the legendary Tallulah Bankhead.

Given her precarious health, her notorious louche life, her addiction to pills, and her scabrous manner, Bankhead seemed like she was typecast for the role of Mrs. Goforth. In 1962, without Williams’s consent, she had been sent a copy of
Milk Train
, perhaps because she was—as she recognized—cruelly caricatured in it. “Every good female part you’ve ever written you’ve written for
me
!” she brayed to the author. She was “more than slightly right,” according to Williams. Of the four roles that Williams acknowledged having based in part on Bankhead—Myra Torrance, Blanche DuBois, Princess Kosmonopolis, and Flora Goforth—she had played only one. The evening she finished reading
Milk Train
, Bankhead told the actress Eugenia Rawls and her husband, the producer Donald Seawell, who were with her, “Tennessee has written a play that’s absolutely right for me—in fact, he has written it for me and I am going to call him right now and tell him I want to play it.” She placed a call to Key West. “It was an occasion when I might have lied if I had time to think of a lie,” Williams recalled, adding, “So I said: ‘Tallulah, I wrote it for you but it wasn’t ready for you, so I tried it out in Spoleto with an English actress, Hermione Baddeley, and she was so terrific that I staggered into her dressing room after the Spoleto opening, and said, ‘Hermione, this play will be yours if you want it next season on Broadway.’ ” The Seawells couldn’t hear Williams’s words, only Bankhead’s reply to them: “Well, dahling, that’s all right, and I
do
understand if you’ve promised it to someone else, but you
did
write it for me, and I just want you to know that if anything happens, I want to play it, and I
will
someday.”

Richardson knew next to nothing about Bankhead. Before engaging her for the role, he went to meet her. “I saw exactly what Tennessee meant,” he said. “In appearance and personality, Tallulah was the thing itself: the heavy-lidded, drooping ruins of a proud and striking beauty, with a growl of a voice, worn low by alcohol and cigarettes chain-smoked until she had burnt the flesh of her fingers down from the scarlet-lacquered nails to, quite literally, the bone.” In her prime, Bankhead had memorably created Regina in Lillian Hellman’s
The Little Foxes
and Sabina in Thornton Wilder’s
The Skin of Our Teeth
, but Richardson wasn’t sure she was still up to Flora Goforth. Williams was; he saw Bankhead, after her long, sodden hibernation, being revived by
Milk Train
, the way Laurette Taylor had been by
The Glass Menagerie
. After trying and failing to get Katharine Hepburn for the role, Richardson capitulated. “It was either Tallulah or not do it,” he said.

The price that Richardson extracted for his compromise was the casting of Tab Hunter—the buff, blond, B-movie heart throb, whose cover of “Young Love” had gone to No. 1 on the record charts in 1957—as Chris Flanders, the hustler and “Angel of Death.” “I have spent a sleepless night, the second in a row, examining my conscience about this Tab Hunter business, and now that I have examined my conscience and despaired of getting to sleep, I have risen, more like Lazarus than Jesus, to say that my conscience has said, No, no, no, no, NO!” Williams told Wood. He added, “It’s really a question of whether or not I am a serious writer. If I am a serious writer I can’t give such an intensely seriously created part as that of Flanders to one of those young men who have come into the theatre,
if
they have come into it, really not by the grace of God but that of Henry Willson. It would be a catastrophic injustice not only to the play, but to Tallulah and Tony and Merrick, to be a party to such a folly.” Even after Hunter was signed, as late as October 31, Williams was badgering Wood to use “your beneficent witch-craft to spare us all the embarrassment of starting rehearsals with Tab Hunter.” “Everyone who mentions the production to me says the same thing,” he wrote. “ ‘Bankhead and Richardson, sounds wonderful, but why Tab Hunter?’ Some even imply that I must have some non-professional attachment to the boy.”

With Tallulah Bankhead

Williams even sought his brother’s legal advice on ways to break Hunter’s contract. But, as it turned out, the problem with the second Broadway production of
Milk Train
was not Hunter, who gave a creditable performance—“YOUR PERFORMANCE IS ONE OF THE MOST DELIGHTFUL SURPRISES OF MY LIFE SINCE I HAD SEEN YOU ONLY IN FILM PARTS THAT GAVE LITTLE INDICATION OF YOUR RANGE AS AN ARTIST,” Williams wired Hunter on December 18, 1963—but Bankhead, who did not.

Even before they got into the rehearsal room, Bankhead and Richardson were at loggerheads. At a pre-rehearsal cast dinner, thrown by Bankhead at her Fifty-Seventh Street apartment and served by her maid, whom Bankhead referred to as “Cunty,” Richardson found himself blurting, “Fuck you!” to his rebarbative leading lady. The relationship between director and actress was toxic. “Tallulah was the most unpleasant person I’ve ever worked with,” Richardson said. He found the rehearsals—“though they really couldn’t be called that”—“torture.” “On the way to rehearsal I’d have a frantic inner dialogue: ‘I’ve got to find a way to like her, to like something—even to feel sorry for her, feel pity, feel compassion.’ ” Richardson couldn’t relate to Bankhead, or she to him. “Loud or soft—how do you want it?” she’d say when he would try to give her a note. “There wasn’t any choice,” Richardson said. “Tallulah was simply past it. She couldn’t remember, she couldn’t perform.”

Each morning, Bankhead would hobble into the theater, sit down at a table center stage, and apply makeup to the wreckage of her face, a messy ritual that included smearing her gums with grease, which, she claimed, helped with speech. “Then, like a hideous old vulture on a carrion heap, she’d look around for which of the understudies or assistants had the cleanest newest shirt or sweater, beckon, ‘Come here, darling,’ and wipe her hands on their fresh clothes,” Richardson recalled. She frequently chose for this duty the black actor Bobby Hooks—later the co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company—who played one of the two Stage Assistants, who move props, comment on the action, and add an Oriental artifice to Williams’s opaque storytelling. At one point, anticipating the segregation problem that awaited them at hotels in Baltimore, where the show was to begin tryouts, Bankhead said to Hooks, “Don’t worry, darling—I’ll say you’re my chauffeur.”

Bankhead proved to be an equal-opportunity abuser. Marian Seldes, who played Blackie, was frequently dragged to the ladies’ room by Bankhead to run lines with her while she sat on the toilet. From almost the first day, Bankhead took against Hunter, who had the temerity to call her out for her incessant interruptions during rehearsals. “Why the
fuck
don’t you shut up!” he screamed. As revenge for his insubordination, when asked by a reporter about Hunter’s sexual taste, according to Hunter, Bankhead said, “Tab
must
be gay—he hasn’t gone down on me.”

On November 22, 1963, when news of President Kennedy’s assassination drifted into rehearsals, national tragedy trumped theatrical calamity. At first, only the soft, unexplained offstage crying of Ruth Ford, who played the Witch of Capri, was audible. Then the stage manager brought the news to Richardson, who made the announcement to his players. “So that’s what the bitch has been wailing about,” Bankhead screamed. “My daddy was a senaatorrr!” She rushed toward the edge of the stage, threw herself onto her knees, and began to sob. Ford came in from the wings and joined the downstage caterwauling. As Richardson recalled, “In the middle of this, Tennessee arrived, pulling at his little silver pocket-flask of vodka, half in tears, half hysterically giggling, and murmured to me, ‘There, Tony, I told you—Tallulah should have had a frontal lobotomy.’ ”

“The second Milk Train just about killed me,” Williams wrote to Herbert Machiz, the play’s first director. “I was treated like a dead author, with cuts and transpositions made without any consultation, and Bankhead—well, you must have observed. She didn’t have a chance.” As early as the Baltimore tryouts, the debacle was apparent. “There was no way ‘Milk Train’ should have opened in Baltimore, or anywhere else,” Richardson, who had become “La Richardson” in Williams’s deflated estimation of him, said. “He showed a strange indifference to its disintegration on the road,” Williams wrote. Richardson couldn’t save the production, and he didn’t want Williams’s help. In a flop sweat, he imposed a cool Kabuki-like style on the play, which lent a strange Brechtian detachment to Williams’s impassioned words. After Williams vociferously objected to some piece of direction, he recalled, Richardson told him, “I don’t think you’re insane but you are a chronic (or natural) hysteric.” In Baltimore, where Merrick joined Richardson and Williams for a crisis meeting, Richardson pleaded with Merrick to close the blighted show. “I think it would kill Tallulah if we closed it,” Williams said.

So the play staggered onward to Broadway. In the last week of New York previews, Richardson jumped the sinking ship to meet his family in Europe for the holidays. Although this had been contractually agreed upon, his departure was seen as “desertion” by Williams; and, in a way, it was. Richardson didn’t return to New York for the show’s opening on January 1, 1964.
Milk Train
closed three nights later, after five performances. (“Half the seats in the Brooks Atkinson [Theatre] were empty,” Hunter recalled.) No Williams play had ever received such a crushing rejection. The critics’ gloves were off. “For the kind of playgoer who has hailed Williams the King of Broadway for a dozen years, it was undoubtedly an ordeal of tedium and a sad signal that he may indeed mean to quit,”
Newsweek
wrote. To
The
New Yorker
, “Miss Bankhead was hoarse and unhappy,” and Hunter was “about as stimulating as the greasy-kid-stuff addict in that television commercial.” Bankhead’s was “not a performance” but an “appearance,” according to the
Herald Tribune
; as for Hunter, “what vigor he brings with him is born of the gymnasium.”