by John Lahr
“Right this minute? You know what I’d like better than anything else in the world? I’d like a martini,” Taylor replied.
“Would you like me to take you out and get you a martini?” Dowling said.
Taylor did a little twirl around the room and lifted her leg. “She said, ‘I can’t go out. Look,’ ” Dowling recalled. “She said, ‘Look at those nylon stockings. There’s a war on, you know that. I don’t have a pair of stockings to my name.’ I said, ‘I could order some things for you.’ ” Taylor continued, “You’re a big shot, head of the USO [United Service Organizations]. You have a lot of influence. Could you get me a few pairs of nylon stockings?”
“I can get you all the stockings you want. I have to get them for the troupes we send abroad. I’ll get them for you today,” Dowling said.
“All right,” Taylor said. “You’ve got your actress. I’ll play that Southerner.”
Dowling was thrilled to have his star; but Tennessee Williams, after hearing her first tentative reading at Hotel 14, was not. When he and Dowling got outside, Dowling remembered, Williams stood beside a row of garbage cans, beseeching him, “Oh, Mr. Dowling, you’ve got to get rid of that woman who’s doin’ a Negress. My mother ain’t a Negress. My mother’s a lady.” “Young man,” Dowling told him. “You’ll live to eat those words.” He went on: “You wait till the curtain goes up on it. You just wait.”
ON DECEMBER 16, 1944, the day the company was to catch the train to Chicago, where the play was trying out, Williams almost didn’t make it to Grand Central. The night before, he’d gone on the town with Dowling, Louis Singer, George Jean Nathan, and Nathan’s girlfriend, Julie Haydon, who played Laura Wingfield, Amanda’s daughter. Margo Jones, whom Williams called “the Texas Tornado” and whom he had lobbied to be the play’s co-director, an agreement that rankled Dowling, who referred to her as “my assistant,” also joined the party. They were having seasonal drinks at a French café when Dowling proposed a toast to Williams. “Wouldn’t it be great, George, a fine Christmas present, if the curtain went up and the next day the Chicago papers gave our boy a hit?” Dowling said. “Just a minute before you drink that toast,” Nathan cut in. “You’re asking a whole lot, Dowling. I don’t think there’s going to be anything like that unless this young man takes out a lot of the delicatessen that’s in there. I know it’s still stunk up with a lot of Limburger he’s got to get out of there. If he doesn’t, you’ll be back before New Year’s, and we’ll have a New Year’s drink at the Algonquin.”
With that, Nathan told Haydon to get her things, and got up to leave. “As Tiny Tim said,” he remarked to the assembled. “Bless you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay, even the wisdom of the acidulous Nathan.” The famous critic was hardly out the door before Singer started to cry. “I knew it. I knew it,” he sobbed. “What did you know?” Dowling said. “Ilka Chase told me. Laurence Stallings told me. The president of City College, my dear friend. A lot of my broker friends. They all told me what a silly ass I was to put up all this money. I don’t want to go to Chicago. I knew everything that Mr. Nathan said.” “Oh, you did? How did you find this out?” Dowling challenged him. “You left a copy of the play on the desk one day and I read it,” Singer replied.
Williams was stung by the scene, but most of all by Nathan. “He doesn’t mean to hurt you,” Dowling told him later in the night. “Don’t think that he dislikes you or that there’s anything personal about this. . . . He’s disappointed in me that I haven’t had more influence with you.” Dowling added: “Go home and don’t try to sleep. Take a bottle of gin home with you. Have a damn good night. Stagger onto the train, but get on it and come out there.” Williams didn’t say whether he would or wouldn’t be on the train. But later, after he’d left, Margo Jones took Dowling’s arm. “Thank you, Eddie. He’ll be on the train,” she said. And the next morning, he was.
Setting off for Chicago, Williams didn’t know what to expect. “It’s just in the lap of the gods,” he wrote to his friend the publisher James Laughlin, whom he frequently addressed as “Jay.” “Too many incalculables—the brain-cells of an old woman, a cold-blooded banker’s reckoning of chances, enigmas of audiences and critics. It is really a glass menagerie that we are taking on the road and God only knows how much of it will survive the journey.”
Julie Haydon and Laurette Taylor as Laura and Amanda in The Glass Menagerie
The troupe had a mere fifteen days in Chicago to get their show to opening night. “Well, it looks bad, baby,” Williams noted in his diary after an early rehearsal. In the narrow, carpeted Chicago rehearsal hall, Williams was perplexed by Taylor’s flat, ungiving performance and her ad-libbing. “My God, what corn!” Williams screamed over the footlights after Taylor “made one of her little insertions.” Williams wrote Windham about the encounter. “She screamed back that I was a fool and all playwrights made her sick that she had not only been a star for forty years, but had made a living as a writer which was better than I had done.”
“What was she working toward in that terrifyingly quiet and hidden laboratory of her work in progress?” he wrote, several years later, recalling his mounting despair at her muted presentation. “There she sat, a small round woman with amazingly bright eyes usually shielded by a wide-crowned hat that came down level with her eyebrows. I say ‘sat’ advisedly for she did not often rise to her feet and when she did, she made such indefinite, shuffling movements that you wondered if she realized she was actually standing up! What was she thinking? What was she doing? What was going on? Only the eyes seemed much alive to the progress of rehearsals. How they darted and shone as if they possessed some brilliant life of their own! Watching inwardly, outwardly! But what? And the speech—God help us! She usually seemed to have difficulty forming words with her tongue and sometimes the words were indistinguishable, they were only vague mutterings. . . . Sometimes she would not bother to get to her feet and perform a cross in the playing area. Rather she would mention it verbally. ‘Now I get up,’ she would say, ‘and I go over there.’ She would point a bit indefinitely, sometimes more at the ceiling than the floor, and you wondered if she intended to walk up the side of a flat like a human fly. ‘When I get over there,’ she would continue, hesitantly, ‘I open my pocketbook and take out a handkerchief and sniff a little. No, I don’t,’ she would suddenly amend. ‘I sit right there like I’m sitting and I don’t do a thing!’ And she would look up with blazing eyes at this heaven-sent inspiration, not at all troubled by the blank look that she got from the rest of us in the dim room. I was keeping a journal at the time. I don’t have it with me but I can quote from memory this line. ‘Poor Laurette! She mumbles and fumbles! Seems hopelessly lost!’ ”
Williams found himself in a full-court press of production concerns. Dowling condescended to him—he called him “laddie”—and badgered him for rewrites. “Mr. Dowling . . . is trying (in vain) to get the author to write more (God knows he talks forever more!) in his part,” Taylor wrote to her son. “Tennessee is Southern, thirty [sic], and very obstinate when they call him ‘an ungrateful little squirt.’ ” (Williams’s response to Dowling had been to drawl, “I can’t find the tranquility in Chicago to write.”)
Singer, fearing economic catastrophe and refusing even to pay twenty-five dollars for a new dress for Laura, demanded a happy ending. At one crucial production meeting, Singer said he wanted Laura and the Gentleman Caller—Tom’s workmate whom Tom is pressured to invite to dinner as a potential suitor for his sister—to get together at the finale. Williams was being steamrolled. Knowing the limitations of his shy, awkward personality, Margo Jones put her foot down. “Tennessee, don’t change that ending,” she said, slamming her fist into her palm. Part of Jones’s job description was to run interference for Williams; she then leveled her husky voice at the producer: “Mr. Singer, if you make Tennessee change the play the way you want it, so help me I’ll go around to every critic in town and tell them about the kind of wire-pulling that’s going on here.” Willi
ams’s ending stayed.
The opening night performance of The Glass Menagerie in Chicago was on the snowy day after Christmas in 1944. “It was a strange night,” Dowling said. “There was no applause for anybody, no applause on entrances, nothing. It was bitter cold. The audience, it seemed to me in the first part of it, were all huddled like people trying to get close to each other to try to keep warm.” Although subsequent ads for the play dubbed it “the greatest play in fifty years,” the first-night audience, according to Audrey Wood, “was respectful but hardly ecstatic. The reviews were good, especially that of Claudia Cassidy, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune. She and Ashton Stevens, another respected critic took it upon themselves to campaign for the survival of ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” Wood recalled. However, there were no advance ticket sales and the box-office takings for the first fortnight were a meager $11,530. “For eight weeks, we starved. We were losing four and five thousand a week,” Dowling recalled. For a production capitalized at $75,000, the writing was on the fourth wall. For most of its ten-week run, The Glass Menagerie was on the verge of closing.
The play’s commercial future may have been in doubt, but the amperage of Laurette Taylor’s star never was. The reviews heaped lavish praise on her, with the Chicago Tribune even comparing her to the legendary Eleanora Duse. Show-biz cognoscenti began converging on Illinois to see what the excitement was about—among them, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Raymond Massey, Maxwell Anderson, Luther Adler, Gregory Peck, and Ruth Gordon. (After seeing the play twice, Gordon sent Taylor three-dozen roses with a poem that read, “When Miss Taylor plays in ‘The Menagerie of Glass’ / She makes all other actresses seem a pain in the ass.”)
Despite all the ballyhoo, only at the last minute did the production find a Broadway theater. By that time, Williams was in the doghouse. After he’d published a snippy letter to the editor in the Chicago Herald-American lamenting “the distortions that have taken place since businessmen and gamblers discovered that theater could be made part of their empire,” Dowling and Singer, furious, struck his name from all pre-Broadway publicity. “Pandemonium back-stage!” Williams wrote to James Laughlin, with less than three weeks to go before Broadway. “Intrigues, counter-intrigues, rages, smashed door-panes—quelle menagerie!” He added: “Things are so tense all the time you never know when the whole company will just blow up and vanish! Actors are just not believable—so fantastic! Especially the good ones.”
The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway on the warmest March 31 on record. “We arrived in New York a week before our opening. I rehearsed them all week because I was worried about Miss Taylor. The minute she found out in Chicago that the odds were against us in getting a theater in New York and we might close there, she began to sneak a little martini or two. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I was frightened stiff.” Even on opening night, Dowling had rehearsed the company until five in the afternoon, then called the cast back onstage at seven for “a quick run-through.” “It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance,” Tony Ross, who played the Gentleman Caller, said. “All the company were on me, but I knew very well what I was up to,” Dowling said.
The day was muggy; the trees in Central Park had begun to bud. Williams, accompanied by Donald Windham, spent the afternoon rummaging through junk shops on Second and Third Avenue in search of a lampshade for the show’s second act. He dropped by a bookstore in Penn Station to tell his friend, the actor-turned-playwright Horton Foote, about the opening. Foote, who was eight years younger than Williams, thought of him as “artistically my big brother.” Both men were young playwrights trying to forge a new, emotionally truthful American theater. Foote, who had read early versions of the play, had received permission to stage the Gentleman Caller scene at his Neighborhood Playhouse acting class. He was keen to be at opening night. Williams explained that he had ceded to his agent all but two tickets, with which he was taking Windham. He told Foote that he’d try to slip him in.
At about five-thirty, as Dowling and his wife, Ray, reached their hotel near the theater to change clothes and get some dinner, there was, as Dowling recalled it, “a torrential downpour.” “Oh, it was frightful,” he said. “And this was our opening night. Of course it didn’t mean anything so far as tickets were concerned, but it meant a whole lot in performance, because when you bring in an audience soaking, wringing wet from head to foot, with all this sort of stuff, it’s an uncomfortable audience. Well, it was just an ominous kind of thing to happen at that particular time.” When they came out on the street again, at quarter to seven, the rain had stopped. “The most beautiful rainbow that I’ve ever seen in my life was right across the sky encompassing the whole Playhouse Theatre, the sign, the sidewalk, everything,” Dowling said. “It was almost like daylight. It was so gorgeous—this beautiful rainbow. And she and I stood and looked up at it. We were two very, very happy people.” They strolled to the theater, “thanking all of the gods that we ever heard about, and just feeling so reassured.”
As the Dowlings turned into the alley leading to the Playhouse’s stage door, they saw Laurette Taylor. She was slumped on the steps, with the rain dripping from the roof onto her. She was drunk and “soaking, wringing wet, like a cat that’s been locked out all night,” Dowling said. They got her to her feet. “Hel-lo, Ray. Hel-lo, Eddie. It’s the rain. Nothing wrong with me. Just the rain,” she said. Curtain time was ninety minutes away. Dowling and his wife walked Taylor around, feeding her black coffee and stewed tomatoes from a can. Finally, an hour later, they got her into her dressing room, where she took a shower. “We could hear the buzzing of a great crowd outside,” Dowling recalled. The beaming producers were backstage full of news of the celebrities in attendance. “I said nothing to anybody about her,” Dowling recalled.
Fifteen minutes before curtain, Williams, with Horton Foote in tow, found Dowling smoking a cigarette in the alley. “Eddie, can you get him a seat for tonight?” Williams asked.
“Laddie, it’s all sold out,” Dowling said, turning to Foote. “Would you mind standing?”
“No, sir.”
Dowling disappeared inside the stage door for a few minutes.
Because of Foote’s warmth and bushy-tailed ingenuousness, Williams referred to him behind his back as “a pineapple ice cream soda”; however, the same earnest qualities had kept Foote in Williams’s mind as possible casting for either the Gentleman Caller or Tom.
Dowling pushed open the stage door. “Tennessee, tell them in front to let him in. He’s to stand,” Dowling said.
“Thank you, sir,” Foote said.
“Let’s hurry,” Williams said to Foote. They bustled off down the alley to the front of house.
Inside, as Williams rushed to his seat, Margo Jones worked the aisles, glad-handing friends. “Darlin’, we gonna change the whole theater I’m tellin’ you, we gonna do it. Honey, we gonna bring you along with us,” she gushed to Foote just before the lights dimmed.
Arguing with Dowling outside Taylor’s apartment after her inept first reading, Williams had invoked his first monumental Broadway-bound failure, Battle of Angels, a theatrical dream that had gone up in smoke. “Oh, my God, our fate will be worse with this thing in Chicago than ‘Battle of Angels’ in Boston,” he said.
Williams had begun writing Battle of Angels in late 1939, almost a year after the day, December 26, 1938, that he, a recent graduate from the University of Iowa drama school, had mailed a batch of plays from his grandparents’ house in Memphis to a Group Theatre competition and set off for New Orleans to claim his literary and sexual destiny. Williams wagered everything on his imagination. “Know Your Opportunity—Seize It” was the family motto, and Williams did just that. In an attempt to disguise the three years that he’d shaved off his age to meet the competition requirement, Tom Williams had signed himself “Tennessee” for the first time. In one of the scripts he submitted—Not About Nightingales—the hero, about to attempt a prison
escape at the finale, announces, “Now is the time for unexpected things, for miracles, for wild adventures like in the storybooks! . . . Almost a chance! I’ve heard of people winning on a long shot.” Williams was taking a similar leap of faith, and the bet paid off. The judges at the Group Theatre, the most innovative and influential theater company of the thirties, had awarded him one hundred dollars. They had also steered him to Audrey Wood.
Battle of Angels, which Williams began under the working title “Shadow of My Passion,” was, according to its author, “a huge advance over its predecessors.” “I am packing into it practically all that I have felt about life,” he wrote. Williams’s first full-scale attempt “to fuse lyricism and realism,” the play represented “the country of [his] childhood.” “Onto it I projected the violent symbols of my adolescence. It was a synthesis of the two parts of my life already passed through. And so the history of the play begins anterior to the impulse to write it. It begins as far back as I remember, in the mysterious landscape of the Delta country, the smoky quality of light in the late afternoons when I, as a child, accompanied my grandfather, an Episcopal clergyman, on seemingly endless rounds of rural parishioners,” he said.
Working on Battle of Angels
The play was a personal, opaque, overwrought, somewhat absurd parable about a dying, penny-pinching ogre of a husband (Jabe), a dutiful, desolate wife (Myra), trapped by economic circumstance into a humiliating, loveless marriage, and a free-spirited young bundle of sexual charisma (Val), whose exciting presence rattles the cage of propriety in the pious, hidebound rural community of Two Rivers, Mississippi.