Several nights a week I would go into Hollywood to see a movie. I would return by bus, and before the interior lights were turned off, I would spot someone on the bus with an empty seat beside him: when the lights were extinguished in observance of the blackout, I would then seat myself in the previously unoccupied seat beside him. After a few moments, my right knee would permit itself to be jolted against his left knee. If the contact were permitted to continue, I would know that it would not be necessary, when I got off at Santa Monica, to resort to the Palisades.
The gypsy proprietress was totally complacent about these adventures of mine, in fact she jested about them with great good humor. After all, she had replaced her sour little husband in the sack with a young boxer, and sexual morality was the last thing she’d be concerned with.
Early each morning I would prepare myself very strong black coffee in the combo dining room-kitchen which adjoined the sanctified bedroom. The proprietress would join me at coffee. She subscribed to The Daily Worker and would read me items from it while babbling hilariously about La Vie horizontale, hers and my own. Fortunately I have never been attracted to Communism so that aspect of her ample nature did not impress me. As soon as I’d had my second cup of coffee, I would dismiss her and turn like a blast furnace to the morning’s work. In those days a six- or eight-hour stint was not unusual: at its conclusion, I would have a fish dinner on the pier, inspect the boys at Muscle Beach and ride my bike to a club I’d joined, halfway to Venice, which contained a big swimming-pool.
It would be hard to devise a summer more to my satisfaction, especially with friends such as Isherwood, Lem Ayres and Eugene Loring. And later Margo Jones arrived to produce You Touched Me! at the Pasadena Playhouse. I would often spend the night at her Pasadena cottage. It contained only two beds, and when a certain personable young poetry publisher arrived, he was given the sofa to sleep on one night.
When lights were extinguished, I came to the living-room door and invited him to take or to share my bed: he declined the honor quite gently.
I wasn’t always rejected in such a gentlemanly fashion, and I remember being in a Hollywood bar one night. I kept staring at an attractive young sailor until he could no longer ignore the implication. He downed his beer and barged up to me and said, “The way I feel tonight I could fuck a snake.”
I am proud to say that I told him to go snake-hunting …
I shall set down a few remarks about last evening, while I wait upon time past to bring to the surface of my “savaged wits” some material of more importance to my life.
I had been invited by an off-Broadway producer to join him on Fire Island for dinner. He makes the best pasta I’ve eaten in the States. And he assured me of other entertainments, including a big dance of boys with boys, and I have delighted in dancing with boys since that long ago summer of 1945 in Mexico City when I learned to follow and was, for that reason, the belle of the balls at the weekend tequila-dansants—more about those later.
However, as I prepared for the one-night revelries at Fire Island, a phone call reminded me that I was to hear two extraordinarily gifted young actors, one male and the other a girl, both winners of Clarence Derwent awards, in the opulent quarters of Peter Glenville.
This was one reading too many of Out Cry, despite the fact that the young actress was quite gifted. Both Bill Barnes, my agent, and I came finally to realize that this play will never go on Broadway nor in the West End of London without “stars” playing Felice and Clare, for no matter how well it may be read by the young and gifted who lack the presence of stars, the play does not hold. Beautiful in parts, yes, but still doesn’t go the full course. Why? Partly because there are only the two actors for the considerable length of the work, and as Clare observes to her brother Felice: “This is an exercise in performance for two star performers.”—You see, I cannot help, at times, being totally honest about my work, even now that the years have made this honesty painful.
Still I do not despair about the play. Glenville has restored a lot of material that I excised with remarkable cunning during the Chicago gig. Now I must cut it out once again whether Peter approves or not.
5
I don’t think the leaves knew they were turning to flame for that reason nor did anyone else involved in the rehearsals in Chicago of The Glass Menagerie. As a matter of fact, everybody but Laurette Taylor was in a state of panic; that is, everybody but Julie Hayden who has never been in any mental or spiritual state short of ecstasy, at least none apparent to me.
The play was being directed by Eddie Dowling, who played Tom in it, too, and he was assisted by the late Margo Jones. The play was backed by a mysterious character named Louis J. Singer, who owned a chain of lucrative fleabag hotels. He hadn’t really taken his investment in the play very seriously—it wasn’t a very large investment compared to his investment in the chain of fleabag hotels—but when he came to rehearsals, which he did just once, he nearly died of apoplexy when he saw what he saw and heard what he did in that rehearsal hall.
Laurette Taylor did not seem to know her lines as Amanda Wingfield, hardly a fraction of them, and those she did seem to know she was still delivering in a Southern accent which she had acquired from some long-ago black domestic. Her bright-eyed attentiveness to the other performances seemed a symptom of lunacy, and so did the rapturous manner of dear Julie, who played Laura.
I was sitting in a corner wondering what menial occupation was next in store for me when I heard someone suddenly cry out. It was the mysterious Mr. Singer. “Eddie, Eddie, how could you do this to me!”
It seems that he felt the whole project was a practical joke that Eddie Dowling was perpetrating upon him.
Of course this desperate cry put a temporary halt to rehearsals. It did not dismay Laurette the least bit, nor did it surprise me much.
Laurette and Margo and I went out to an early lunch somewhere nearby and Margo and I were astonished by the gaiety of Laurette. She had never seemed to be in a better humor, although I’ve no recollection of her indulging herself in sorrow, however appropriate it might seem to the occasion. You see, Laurette knew she didn’t have to give her lines until the play opened, and so she was watching the others, observing, waiting. But at the time we didn’t know that, I thought she didn’t know her lines, and so did everybody else. (Dowling said, “Oh, poor thing. Poor lady. Wet brain. Can’t remember her lines.”)
Well, Julie was quite fond of the late George Jean Nathan and so Mr. Nathan, appreciating her devotion, took a certain interest in Menagerie, and that night he got together with Eddie and between the two of them they composed a drunk scene for Eddie which they thought was the only possible salvation for the play. This scene involved such things as a red, white, and blue flask, a song for Eddie—“My Melancholy Baby”—and other unmentionables.
This “drunk scene,” obviously composed in a state that corresponded, was given me as a fait accompli the next day, when I crept into rehearsals.
I said to myself, “This is the living and dying end.”
I went into a huddle with Margo. She shared my opinion of the drunk scene. And more than that, she said she was going to confront the no longer mysterious Mr. Singer and poor Eddie with a protest of the kind that had earned her the sobriquet of “The Texas Tornado.”
As usual, in such cases, a compromise was reached. I said they would have their drunk scene but that I would accept no collaboration on it.
I wrote it and it is still in the script and I honestly think that it does the play little harm.
A day or two later we had the cast playing in Winged Victory come to see a preview, and that’s when we discovered what Laurette had been up to. This lady knew every line—and then some. She put lines in the play that had to be cut out, just because they were pure Laurette. She was a great, great person. They don’t come that way anymore. Maureen Stapleton is very close, and Anna Magnani was. There was a great performance in Europe of Sweet Bird by Edwige Feuillere, the great French actress who ha
d trained with the Comédie Française, and she was even better than Geraldine Page.
Feuillere, Anna Magnani, and Laurette Taylor are three of the great female performers in my plays. Of the male performers, Marlon Brando is outstanding. I think he is probably the greatest living actor; I think he is greater than Olivier. I saw Last Tango in Paris reluctantly, because I heard it was pornographic. It was not pornographic, and I think Brando gave in it his best performance that I have seen. Paul Newman is also terribly good. He works up to a part slowly, but when he finally gets to it he’s marvelous.
Now obviously this “thing” has dealt so far mostly with the vicissitudes of my lean and green years as a writer. I hope it doesn’t seem characteristic of me to have omitted so much of a happier nature. I am not really a misanthrope or a gloom-pot. In fact, I am much more of a clown, an almost compulsive comedian in my social behavior. The humor sometimes may be black, but it is still humor. This fact has been exploited (whether to my advantage or disadvantage I am not quite certain) by various interviewers in the last dozen years. Perhaps I should not have used the word “exploited” to cover all instances. I suspect it has always been an instinctive thing with me, when being interviewed, to ham it up and be fairly outrageous in order to provide “good copy.” The reason? I guess a need to convince the world that I do indeed still exist and to make this fact a matter of public interest and amusement.
Once I met a stately professor at Harvard whose last name was Lanier. When I mentioned that I was also a descendant of the first Lanier in the States, from whom all Laniers here are presumably descended, he looked at me icily and gave me this beautiful put-down: “The ramifications of the Lanier family are wonderful and terrible.”
I don’t mind being put down when it’s done as cleverly as that.
I had finished Menagerie in the law-school dormitory of Harvard, in the rooms of a wild boy I’d met in Provincetown the summer of 1944. That boy was one of the aboriginal “beats”—I mean he was beat before there were “beats”; he was a beautiful gangling kid with dark hair and light eyes and a stammer. The boy appeared in P-town and was said to be straight. However, I got him into my cabin one night and—he didn’t exactly twist into a circle but he proved to have a warm sort of puppy-dog playfulness of nature. It was near the end of summer and I was not yet quite through with my last draft of Menagerie and I was not yet quite ready to return to Manhattan with it. This boy, Bill, had a group of friends at Harvard and they were all sort of freaked out, in varying degrees. One had attempted to slash his wrists a few days before—I remember how this attempt on his life had made him a celebrity in the group and the shy pride he took in exhibiting the scars when the wrists were unbandaged.
Bill was a peeping Tom—that was his sex hangup, or practice if you prefer—at the time I knew him. It was a funny thing. He had a map of the town of Cambridge with X’s marked to indicate the location of window shades that were likely to expose an exciting peep show. He would start out precisely at midnight upon the carefully mapped-out tour and he’d return, rocks off, about 2 A.M.—sometimes with rapturous reports on intimacies he had witnessed through those lucky windows.
I think it was a year or two later that Bill began to visit me in various New York hotel suites, before I had a Manhattan apartment with Frankie Merlo and maybe after—and by that time Bill was way out of his closet and he was always drunk but a good drunk, I mean a wildly exuberant drunk, and he was a good lay.
He died in a shocking way. He was leaning out of a subway train in New York, very far out and very drunk, shouting good-by to friends on the platform, when the subway train rushed forward.
And he was decapitated by a column in the subway.
On the Broadway opening night of Menagerie, the performers took bow after bow, and finally they tried to get me up on the stage. I was sitting in the fourth row, and somebody extended a hand to me and I went up on the stage. And I felt embarrassed; I don’t think I felt any great sense of triumph. I think writing is continually a pursuit of a very evasive quarry, and you never quite catch it.
In the essay that accompanies one of the printed editions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I talk very honestly about my goal in writing, what I want to do. That goal is just somehow to capture the constantly evanescent quality of existence. When I do that, then I have accomplished something, but I have done it, I think, relatively few times compared to the times I have attempted it. I don’t have any sense of being a fulfilled artist. And when I was writing Menagerie, I did not know that I was capturing it, and I agree with Brooks Atkinson that the narrations are not up to the play. I didn’t feel they were at the time, either. Thank God, in the 1973 television version of it, they cut the narrations down. There was too much of them. And the play itself holds without much narration.
Maybe I am a machine, a typist. A compulsive typist and a compulsive writer. But that’s my life, and what is in these memoirs is mostly the barest periphery of that which is my intense life, for my intense life is my work.
Mother came up to Chicago for the opening there of Menagerie in the late December of 1944. I don’t recall her precise reaction to the play but it was probably favorable, for Mother was very concerned with my long-delayed success. I do recall her coming backstage after the performance which she attended and paying her respects to Laurette.
“Well, Mrs. Williams,” said Laurette, briefly scrutinizing Edwina Williams in her dressing-room mirror, “how did you like yourself?”
“Myself?” said Mother innocently.
Laurette was as kind a person as I have known in a theatre mostly inhabited by jungle beasts, but even she, being Irish, was not one to pass by an opportunity to be mischievous.
“You notice these bangs I wear? I have to wear them playing this part because it’s the part of a fool and I have a high, intellectual forehead.”
Miss Edwina did not pick up on this either. She let it go by her without a sign of offense. She was probably bedazzled by Laurette’s somewhat supernatural quality on a stage.
Through the course of this thing I may talk a lot about Miss Edwina. But right now I’ll only say that she was a lady and that she still is a lady at the age of eighty-nine or ninety. My dear friend, Marion Vaccaro, once said to me, speaking of my sister, “Miss Rose is a lady but your mother just misses.” I never quite knew what she meant about Miss Edwina. I think perhaps she sensed that Miss Edwina had not been quite so perceptive about Miss Rose as she might have been, but I feel that Mother always did what she thought was right and that she has always given herself due credit for it even though what she sometimes did was all but fatally wrong.
In Chicago the first night, no one knew how to take Menagerie, it was something of an innovation in the theatre and even though Laurette gave an incredibly luminous, electrifying performance, and people observed it. But people are people, and most of them went home afterward to take at least equal pleasure in their usual entertainments. It took that lovely lady, Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, a lot of time to sell it to them, to tell them it was special.
She said Laurette ranked with Duse.
Eventually, though, Menagerie was a startling success, which success I attribute in large part to Laurette. She was, as I have said many times, a gallant performer; I still consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known. I wrote a tribute to her, on her death, in which I said that it is our immeasurable loss that Laurette’s performances were not preserved on the modern screen. The same is true of Duse and Bernhardt, with whom Laurette’s name belongs.
I also wrote that there are sometimes hints, during our lives, of something that lies outside the flesh and its mortality. I suppose these intuitions come to many people in their religious vocations, but I have sensed them equally clearly in the work of artists and most clearly of all in the art of Laurette. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about u
s had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us.
I have always been awkward and diffident around actors so that it has made a barrier between us almost all but insuperable. In the case of Laurette Taylor, I cannot say that I ever got over the awkwardness and the awe which originally were present, but she would not allow it to stand between us. The great warmth of her heart burned through and we became close friends. I am afraid it is one of the few close friendships I have ever had with a player. I said, when she died, that a whole career of writing for the theatre is rewarded enough by having created one good part for a great actress. Having created the part of Amanda Wingfield for Laurette Taylor is sufficient reward for all the effort that went before and a lot that has come after. (Not that I’ll settle for it!)
Almost directly after Menagerie went into rehearsals I started upon a play whose first title was Blanche’s Chair in the Moon. But I did only a single scene for it that winter of 1944-45 in Chicago. In that scene Blanche was in some steaming hot Southern town, sitting alone in a chair with the moonlight coming through a window on her, waiting for a beau who didn’t show up. I stopped working on it because I became mysteriously depressed and debilitated and you know how hard it is to work in that condition. I decided not to drink black coffee and not to work for several months and I really did stick to that self-promise. I had a strong will in those days, which are now past. However it was a happy time, there in Chicago.
I had a lot of fun with Tony Ross, now dead, who played the Gentleman Caller in Menagerie. Laurette was very fond of us both and she used to call us the Big Bum and the Little Bum. He and I went out together every night almost, after the curtain came down in Chicago. We went out cruising together. I had more luck than Tony for the reason that Tony would get drunk, and drunks are not likely to cruise well in Chicago or anywhere. He was an amiable drunk, but something in Tony was broken and the fine performances that he gave every night were an extraordinary accomplishment for a man who had so much torment in him.
Memoirs Page 12