by John Lahr
Part of Stanley’s sexual charge is the wallop of his selfishness, which registered the spiritual shift after America’s return to normalcy. “He builds a hedonistic life, and fights to the death to defend it,” Kazan wrote about him in his notebooks. Liberated from duty, from sacrifice, from class restrictions—all the emotional baggage that Blanche brings with her, represented by the loss of the family plantation, the well-named Belle Reve—each character pursues his own creaturely self-interest. When Stanley roars to his wife and to his intruding, neurasthenic sister-in-law, “I am the king around here,” that kingdom of self is, in a way, what all three are trying to claim. In their stage-managed battle Williams found a perfect metaphor of the era’s dynamic survival and of his own “divided nature.”
Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, the rape scene from A Streetcar Named Desire
Jessica Tandy and Elia Kazan backstage
Embracing Marlon Brando at the “bad notice” party, 1948
Streetcar’s success made Williams some kind of king. At the play’s opening-night party at the 21 Club, after the reviews had been read out and Williams had run the gauntlet of congratulations, Audrey Wood approached him. “Tenn, are you really happy?” she said.
Williams looked surprised. “Of course I am,” he said.
“Are you a completely fulfilled young man?”
“Completely,” Williams said. “Why do you ask me?”
“I just wanted to hear you say it,” Wood said.
From that moment on, for better or worse, Williams was on a first-name basis with the world. Everyone seemed to be at his table. He rarely signed himself “Tom”; he was “Tenn” or “10.” In May 1948, Williams won the Pulitzer Prize; in October, Margo Jones’s production of Summer and Smoke arrived on Broadway. After it was rumbled by most of the critics, Williams gave the failure the royal brush-off. He threw a catered “bad notice” party to which he invited “the critics who gave us the two worst notices.” “The party was really swell,” he wrote to Donald Windham.
At one point in the evening, Williams stole away to ride with Marlon Brando on his new motorcycle. Here, at the zenith of the century’s promise, in the time of their defining triumph, the greatest actor and the greatest playwright of their era sped around Manhattan feeling the exhilarating surge of power underneath them. Williams had embraced his sexuality and his talent; now he was embracing his new momentum. “I enjoyed the ride, clamping his buttocks between my knees as we flew across the East River and along the river drive with the cold wind whistling and a moon,” he said. Williams added, “My closest friends remained after the party—Jane, Tony, Sandy, Joanna, and the boy living with me named Frankie Merlo—Merlo means blackbird—and he is a Sicilian from New Jersey.”
CHAPTER 3
The Erotics of Absence
The desiring fingers enclose a phantom object, the hungering lips are pressed to a ghostly mouth.
—Tennessee Williams,
The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone
My writing dealt with you. I lamented there only what I could not lament on your breast. It was an intentionally long farewell—which you forced out of me, but which I shaped . . .
—Franz Kafka,
Letter to His Father
On December 30, 1947—four weeks after the clamorous opening of Streetcar—Tennessee Williams sailed for Europe on the SS America. It was his first transatlantic trip abroad as an adult, and he was going solo. “I don’t intend to get seriously involved with anyone ever again,” he said. Streetcar had set off a seismic shift in American theater. It had also triggered a shift in the playwright himself. For Williams, who was now earning two thousand dollars a week in royalties, austerity and anonymity were things of the past. He was a first-class passenger. And no matter how far afield he traveled, the spotlight would always somehow find him. “My nights have been wild and wonderful in Manhattan, lasting always till five in the morning, seldom getting more than four or five hours sleep,” he wrote to Margo Jones once he was en route.
On the day of his departure, the attention that the other grandees of the theater lavished on Williams signaled his new power. Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Montgomery Clift showed up at the disorganized playwright’s apartment for “a packing-bee.” Elia Kazan arrived with champagne. Later, crowded into his stateroom, the group presented him with a dozen white shirts, a cashmere sweater, and a bottle of scotch. Clift brought with him a portable Hermes Baby typewriter—a gift from Margo Jones and a reminder, if Williams needed one, that it was time to get back to work on the rewrites for the upcoming Broadway production of Summer and Smoke.
In Europe the parade of celebrities continued: Greta Garbo recommended his Paris hotel; Louis Jouvet, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Jean Cocteau—the nabobs of the French theater—turned up to dine with him. (When Williams threw a cocktail party for his famous Parisian friends, he noted dryly, “Sartre did not show up, although reported to be in the neighborhood.”) Paris, however, was a disappointment—“cold, bad food, no satisfactory company, no milk for my coffee.” Williams gave press interviews in his hotel bathtub—the water was warmer than the radiators. “I found nothing very good about Paris but the quality of the whores,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “You can fuck almost anything you lay your eyes on for the price of a black-market dollar.” He added, “There is no atmosphere of social unrest in Europe that I am able to sense. You feel no spark of any kind except the stubborn will to survive and you feel that they will support whichever party or doctrine offers them a chance to eat.”
When Williams fell ill during his first two weeks abroad, the editor of the fashion magazine Elle—a Madame Lazareff, whose husband owned Paris Jour and Paris Soir—packed him off for a week of rest and relaxation at the Colombe d’Or, in St.-Paul-de-Vence, where the dining room was a walled terrace garden dominated by a Léger frieze. It rained almost continuously. His first exposure to the sun was on the day he boarded the train in Nice and headed for Rome (“The sun—glorious sun—is on my face, in my eyes, and I love it”).
BY THE TIME Williams arrived in the Eternal City, fascism and the Second World War had more or less sealed it off as a destination point for the American traveler. Even in its ravaged, recuperative state, the city quickly became for Williams “the capitol of my heart.” “Here in Italy, this place of soft weather and golden light and of great bunches of violets and carnations sold on every corner and the Greek ideal surviving so tangibly in the grace and beauty of the people and the antique sculpture as well,” Williams wrote to Carson McCullers soon after arriving. “I cannot write coherently about Rome as I love it so much!”
For Williams, Rome was a “soft city,” tender and emollient in the blue transparency of its light, the skyline reminiscent to him of the eternal female: “domes of ancient churches, swelling above the angular roofs like the breasts of giant recumbent women, still bathed in gold light.” The warmth of the city extended to its people. “They do not hate Americans at all,” he wrote to Brooks Atkinson. “In fact the whole time I’ve been here I haven’t had an unfriendly word or look from any of them.”
After less than a month abroad, Williams wrote to Kazan, “I haven’t the slightest idea what I am doing over here, but if I were in the States I would probably be a lot more confused.” By the third month, however, his uncertainty had turned to impasse. He had fallen, he said later, “under the moon of pause.” “Sometimes the lamp burns very low indeed,” he confided to McCullers. “For the past five or six days I have been battering my head against a wall of creative impotence.” Sex, “the trapeze of the flesh,” as he called it, was his antidepressant; it swung him away from his writer’s block and into life. “You can’t walk a block without being accosted by someone you would spend a whole evening trying vainly to make in the New York bars,” he wrote to Windham, adding, “You may wonder how I ever get any work done here. The answer is I don’t get much.” Williams binged on boys.
Cruising, with its drama of enticement and evasion, of appearanc
e and disappearance, was particularly thrilling in Rome. “In the evenings, very late, after midnight, I like to drive out the old Appian Way and park the car at the side of the road and listen to the crickets among the old tombs,” he wrote. “Sometimes a figure appears among them which is not a ghost but a Roman boy in the flesh!” “The nightingales busted their larynx!” he wrote to Oliver Evans, in a letter about a dark-haired Neapolitan lightweight boxer with an “imperial torso,” whom he had picked up. “I wish I could tell you more about this boxer, details, positions, amiabilities—but this pale blue paper would blush!” After throwing a few big parties that “turned into orgies,” Williams found himself an unwitting set piece in the local homosexual scene. “I remind myself of that lady who Oscar Wilde said had tried to establish a salon but only succeeded in opening a saloon,” he told Windham.
When Williams tried to characterize for James Laughlin the extraordinary Roman social whirl—which included new friendships with such expatriate Americans as the novelist Frederic Prokosch and “that unhappy young egotist Gore Vidal”—he spoke of “the ephemeral bird-like Italians, sweet but immaterial, like cotton-candy.” The excitement, for him, he explained, lay in savoring their immateriality, their ghostliness, their ability to vanish. “I shall remember all of them like one person who was very pleasant, sometimes even delightful, but like a figure in a dream, insubstantial, not even leaving behind the memory of a conversation: the intimacies somehow less enduring than the memory of a conversation, at least seeming that way now, but possibly later invested with more reality: ghosts in the present: afterwards putting on flesh, unlike the usual way.”
With Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, 1948
WILLIAMS HAD INTENDED his European sojourn as a way of shaking off the self-consciousness of his new celebrity, of getting “back under the dining-room table with a child’s beautifully clear eyes,” as John Updike described the purpose of travel for the successful writer. But the experience of Rome left him more wide-eyed than clear-eyed. “Italy has been a real experience, a psychic adventure of a rather profound sort which I shall be able to define in retrospect only,” he wrote to Laughlin. “I also have a feeling it is a real caesura: pause: parenthesis in my life: that it marks a division between two very different parts which I leave behind me with trepidation.”
Williams was no longer a one-hit wonder. The dimension of his success had left him stunned, struggling to retain the long-cherished notion of himself as fugitive outsider and to come to terms with the imperatives of celebrity. “Being successful and famous makes such demands!” he wrote to Audrey Wood. “I wanted it and still want it, with one part of me, but that isn’t the part of me that is important or creative.” Before his success, Williams had everything to fight for; now he had everything to defend. He had a public name and a public posture. “You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you ‘have a name’ is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming,” he wrote in the essay “On a Streetcar Named Success.” “The continual procession”—the visitors, the side trips, the rent boys—only magnified what Williams referred to as his “spiritual dislocation.”
By June 1948, when he went north for the English debut of The Glass Menagerie, he felt distracted and “as nervous as a cat.” “I am quite forlorn here. In spite of almost continual society,” he wrote to Windham from the Savoy Hotel in London. Britain’s drabness and snobbery sank his spirits. “To really appreciate Italy fully you should come to London first,” he wrote to Windham. “Christ, what a dull town and what stuffy people! I have actually been compelled to start working again, which is a sign of real ennui.”
In his free time, Williams hobnobbed with Christopher Isherwood, E. M. Forster, and Gore Vidal. On the clock, however, at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, where the play was in tryout before its London opening, he had to contend with “the First Lady of the American Theater,” Helen Hayes, who was playing Amanda, and with John Gielgud, the play’s director. Hayes informed him that the show was in trouble, and Gielgud asked him not to take a bow at the curtain call. “I don’t want the beautiful effect of this play diminished by a perspiring little author with a wrinkled shirt and a messy dinner jacket coming up on stage,” Gielgud said. Williams had been skeptical of Gielgud from the beginning. “He is too English, too stylish, too removed from the subject and spirit of the script,” he had told Wood. As it turned out, Gielgud was also too removed from Williams, who described the director after their first meeting as a “frightfully nervous high-handed prima donna type of person.” On matters concerning the original Broadway production, Gielgud chose to consult with the American director Josh Logan, who happened to be passing through town, rather than with Williams, who sat each day a few rows behind him in the theater. Williams repaid the indifference with insolence, referring to Gielgud as “the Old One,” and vowed to defy him at the opening on July 28. “John G. says I should not take a bow and just out of perversity, now, I am resolved to do so if there is even the faintest whisper of ‘Author’ in the house,” he said to his newest English friend, Maria Britneva, a pert, high-spirited actress of White Russian origin whom he had met at a party in London.
In the end, Williams went one better: he bowed out entirely. His fear of the play’s failure, compounded by the prospect of a reunion with Miss Edwina, who traveled to London with Dakin for the first night, proved too much, and Williams fled to Paris. When Helen Hayes met Edwina backstage, she glimpsed the hostility beneath Edwina’s show of Southern charm. Introducing Hayes to Dakin, Edwina announced, “I want everybody to see that I have one son who’s a gentleman.” “She was everything I disliked in an ageing Southern belle,” Hayes recalled, “but in the play she was portrayed in a soft-focus of compassion.” Edwina denied her connection with Amanda, but in later years she would come to imitate her. “She’s spearing a shrimp, bringing it halfway to her lips, putting it down, going into a long passage from ‘The Glass Menagerie,’ ” Vidal said, recalling one occasion in Florida in the 1950s. “Finally, Tennessee, coughing, says, ‘Mother, would you eat that shrimp.’ ‘Why do you have that funny little cough?’ she said. Tennessee said, ‘Mother, when you destroy someone’s life, you must expect certain debilities.’ ”
Two days after the London opening, Williams sent Hayes a note of apology. “I do not altogether understand myself how I happened not to manage to make it,” he wrote. “You may put this down to my ‘pixy behavior’ and nobody knows better than I do that I have carried it much, much, much too far! I had looked forward to it intensely for such a long time: then the last few days I became enveloped in a cloud. Overwork. Nerves. A sort of paralysis.” On the same day, he also sent a note of thanks to Britneva, whom he called one of the “compensations” of his dire British excursion. “In fact, it is the afternoons with you, the walks, the teas, the companionship—the ability to talk to somebody—that I remember most happily about the English adventure,” he wrote.
Britneva exerted an almost immediate power over Williams. A tiny person—about five feet tall—with a mane of brown hair, huge gray-brown eyes, and a beaky nose that she turned up at the world, Britneva had an audacity and a frenetic energy that made her a kind of event. With a bluff, bow-wow manner, she faced down the world. “She scared people,” Vidal said. Williams spoke of “her spectacular velocity through time.” By sheer force of personality, she found a way to scale the English aristocracy and its talentocracy. “She was extraordinary about weaving her way into people’s lives,” her friend, the actress Paula Laurence said. “Before you knew it, you were entirely surrounded. But it was done with tremendous affection, the most flattering kind of interest, outrageous presents, and loving attention. How could you not want that?” Britneva was alternately funny, bold, and ferocious; she had, as Kazan said, a “desperate grip on what she valued in life.” She was adamant about living up to her
dreams—a hard thing to accomplish at any time, and especially so in threadbare postwar Britain. “She is full of a good kind of mischief,” Williams said. “Most women hate her and few men know what to think of her.”
Certainly the distracted and disorganized Tennessee Williams found Britneva a godsend. Just before she came into his life, he moaned to Wood, “I am quite incapable of learning the relative values of all these crazy coins, bobs, half crowns, ten shillings, quids, Etc. When Margo [Jones] deserts me”—she had been responsible for getting Williams from Rome to London in June—“I shall be in total chaos!” Almost immediately, Britneva made herself indispensable: clipping the British reviews for Williams as he hunkered down in Paris, sending him gifts, doing his laundry, advising him on presents to send to Helen Hayes and where to buy them, and dispensing a lot of crisp straight talk. “Somehow I cannot make plans or decisions about things like that so I will leave it to you to decide for me, if you will,” he wrote to her, having run out of shirts, on July 30. “What do you think we should do? I have great faith in your ability to solve this enormous problem! (Or ignore it!)”
Britneva’s loyalty to Williams was almost maternal. In fact, she resembled Edwina both physically and psychically. Both bossy women had the same petite physical outline, brusque emotional attitude, and, as it turned out, a nostalgia for a vanished aristocratic heritage that was largely a grandiose fantasy. In Britneva’s life story, Williams recognized his own desperate struggle for survival. He was touched by Britneva’s spirit and her circumstances. She was born on July 6, 1921, in St. Petersburg, Russia; thirteen months later, as she told it, under the threat of famine, she escaped to England with her mother, Mary, and her older brother, Vladimir, leaving her father, Dr. Alexander Britnev, apparently to the hands of the murderous Bolsheviks. She arrived in England with rickets, as well as a more lasting malady, a combination of sadness and terror, which her mother brought to their new life and was a large part of Britneva’s inheritance. Inevitably, the family aspirations were at odds with the family finances. In order to send her children to good schools, Mary Britneva gave lessons in French and Russian and did line translations of Chekhov’s works. She was ambitious for her daughter, shuttling Maria to and from ballet lessons, which Maria attacked with characteristic single-mindedness. When, in 1933, a young dancer with Monte Carlo’s Ballets Russes was found to be under the statutory age of twelve, Maria stepped in. After three seasons, she had to give up dance because of foot trouble and, she later told the director Richard Eyre, because “my bosom was too big.” She transferred her desire for stardom to the theater and got herself into Michel Saint Denis’s acting school.