Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Almost everyone around Britneva, including Williams, was seduced by her moving portrait of her family of noble White Russians—the paternal grandfather who was the physician to “Dowager Empress Maria Fedorovna at Tsarskoe Selo,” and the father who had been “shot by the Soviets.” KGB files and government papers, however, show that most of this was revised or fabricated history. Maria’s mother was born an English citizen, and she was partly educated in England; Maria’s maternal grandfather, Charles Herbert Bucknall, was English. The Britnevs hadn’t actually been refugees from the marauding Bolsheviks; they’d had English papers. Britneva’s father’s family line was made up of raznochinsti—intelligentsia descended from petit-bourgeois merchants in Kronshtadt, where they’d owned tugboats and diving equipment and public baths. There was no record of Britneva’s grandfather’s association with the tsarina. As for Britneva’s father, far from being executed by the Bolsheviks, he served in the Red Army. All of which put paid to Maria’s claim to be a White Russian, or even an Off-White Russian.

  However, Britneva’s associations with the rich and the famous gave credibility to her story and to her aura of artistic entitlement. With Williams, she played the devoted, adorable (and needy) girl; he was the benevolent sugar daddy, always ready to spring for vacations, hotels, loans, jewelry, even the occasional dress or fur. “I feel sorry for Maria,” he wrote to Windham. “She detests London and has fallen out completely with the Beaumont office”—Hugh (Binkie) Beaumont was the panjandrum of H. M. Tennent’s, the powerful West End management company—“so she has no prospect of work. . . . Seems to have no interesting friends here, nobody she likes much and her family is quite poor, except for an aunt who treats her rather coolly. Poor child.” “I felt I was in a state of grace when I was with him,” Britneva later said, and she was—protected by the big magic of Williams’s talent and renown from a world that, for her, had a habit of collapsing.

  To win favor, Britneva was capable of acts of enormous rashness. Of a 1946 production in which she was elevated from understudy to walk-on, Gielgud said, “When Edith Evans, as the consumptive wife in ‘Crime and Punishment,’ coughed too constantly during one of my best scenes, Maria pushed her face in a cushion to keep her quiet. This, as you can imagine, was not well received by the Dame.” Maria had won a place forever in Sir John’s heart but lost herself a toehold in the mainstream of English theater. Beaumont, the producer of the play, canceled Maria’s contract. “She wasn’t a good actress,” the British drama critic Milton Shulman, who was a neighbor of Britneva’s, said. “She was too much a fantasist offstage to be a fantasist onstage.” Britneva had neither the conventional looks nor the reserve for the clipped English drawing-room comedy-drama that was the staple of the West End from the mid-forties to the mid-fifties. She had an artistic temperament, but she couldn’t produce art. Then she met Williams and hitched her wagon to his star.

  The romance of the Williams-Britneva friendship was built on the cornerstone of their first meeting. In her version of the story, Maria cast herself as an ingenue of “eighteen or nineteen.” (She was just shy of twenty-seven.) She and Williams met at a dinner at Gielgud’s London home on June 11, 1948—a couple of weeks after Streetcar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. “I was invited to this wonderful party. Noël Coward playing the piano. Vivien Leigh, Larry Olivier, the most wonderful people. . . . I suddenly saw in the corner this crumpled little man, very alone—one red sock and one blue sock. I thought he must be another understudy,” Britneva later told Dick Cavett on his talk show. It’s hardly likely that Williams, already a much-heralded award-winning playwright, went unnoticed at the party. But there were a few things that assuredly did go unnoticed by Britneva. The Oliviers were not there: according to their biographers, they were in Australia most of that year. And it must have been the blithe spirit of Noël Coward who was tinkling the ivories, since Coward himself was in New York, meeting with his publishers, and didn’t arrive back in England until nearly two weeks later.

  Gore Vidal believed that the two must have actually met several weeks later at a party given by Binkie Beaumont. Wherever the meeting took place, it made boon companions of Britneva, Vidal, and Williams. Vidal recalled the three of them walking along the Strand: “Maria ate and ate. She and her mother were poor. They were still on ration books. She had some toffees, and she gave me one. I had a pivot tooth—a false tooth—which immediately came out. Riotous laughter from Maria. Could’ve killed her. The three us became friends. And then she attached herself.”

  With Maria Britneva

  Britneva paid back Williams’s generosity with allegiance and excitement. Over the decades, she would become Williams’s “five o’clock angel,” as he dubbed Britneva. Exhausted after a day’s writing, he could always find her waiting at the other end of the phone to fill up his emptiness with plans and amusing badinage. Britneva was variously friend, court jester, dogsbody, confidante, cheerleader, keeper of the flame, and finally, in his Last Will and Testament, legal guardian of his sister (a post that she negotiated well and parlayed into the unofficial but nonetheless influential title of literary executor of his estate). She had a talent for stirring things up. “Word has reached here that Maria B is on her way,” Truman Capote wrote to friends in March 1949. “She writes 10”—Tennessee—“almost every day. Tell her please that . . . if she sees me to stay clear as I will slap her in the tits and kick her down the Spanish steps: you should see the things she has written 10 about me! Quel bitch. I mean this, you tell her. She is a dreadful liar.” As a playwright, Williams found Britneva’s provocations amusing, even dramatically useful. (She would later be the model for Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) As a person, he found her recklessness—her “savagely mordant sense of humor,” as she called it—both a thrill and a caution. “You seem to say all the things that discreet people only think,” he wrote her within the first year of their meeting. “Oh, that tongue of yours! As one who was, and perhaps still is, inclined to like so much of the rest of you, including what I optimistically assume to be your heart, I do most earnestly advise and beseech you to curb it, like the fancy little dogs on Fifth Avenue.”

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1948, Williams returned to New York to attend the rehearsal period of Summer and Smoke. Britneva followed soon after him to minister her particular astringent brand of concern and caprice, and to be his date for the Broadway opening. The day Britneva arrived on the Queen Mary, Williams met the boat and took her to see Streetcar, where she complained about Brando’s mumbling. “Tennessee, with a glint of malice in his eye, said, ‘Why don’t you go backstage and tell him?’ ” Britneva recalled. “Which I did. Brando was absolutely delighted and took me to the Russian Tea Room immediately.”

  During the bumpy Broadway rehearsals for Summer and Smoke, Williams’s faith in Margo Jones declined; Britneva’s place in his affections grew. Britneva’s adoration was a happy contrast to Jones’s exasperation. “We were fighting,” Williams later told Brooks Atkinson, explaining what he saw as Jones’s failure of imagination with the play. Jones had used Atkinson’s glowing notice in the Times of her theater-in-the-round production in Dallas to sell Williams on the idea of her both producing and directing the play on Broadway. “Total autonomy between the two of us,” she told him. But as early as April, Williams was voicing doubts about her as director. “If you want to (dare to) bring up the subject of Kazan directing, do so,” he counseled Wood, “but I doubt that you will get anywhere with it as our girl Jones unquestionably regards herself as the American Stanislavsky which it is still faintly possible that she may be however much we may doubt it.” Although Wood doubted Jones’s abilities and her toughness—“I expressed my doubts to Tennessee but he merely shrugged them off,” she wrote—Williams “did, as usual, the gentlemanly thing. He’d promised her she could be his director, and that was that.”

  Jones could certainly talk the talk. (“She was the con of cons,” the actor Ray Walston, who made his Broadway debut in Summer and Smoke, said.) As Willia
ms learned to his cost, however, she couldn’t walk the walk. “The tragedy is that her performance rarely lives up to her passion. Like a lover so anxious, so frightened of his desire, that he can’t carry it through,” he told Atkinson. Jones’s theatrical vision was greater than her technical prowess. Among the many miscalculations surrounding the Broadway production of Summer and Smoke—its transfer from a theater-in-the-round to a more removed proscenium, its set, which was too big for the stage—the most fundamental was Jones’s inability to communicate with actors. A week into the rehearsals, Williams “began to have depressing premonitions about the venture,” he said. “An actor or actress would approach the ecstatic Margo with a question such as ‘How do you want me to play this bit, Miss Jones?’ ‘Play it? Honey, don’t play it, feel it.’ ”

  Later, after the production had closed, Capote told Williams a story he had heard from Anne Jackson, who played Nellie in the Broadway production: that Jones had attempted to gee-up the cast by telling them that the play was “the work of a dying man.” The story so outraged Williams that he turned over a table in Capote’s lap. (“I had been ill at the time, but ‘dying’ was the furthest thing from my intention, then or any time since, and anyway it struck me as an irrelevant or false and certainly not helpful sort of ‘appeal’,” Williams explained to Atkinson. “Actors always do their best, and the real or imaginary sickness of an author doesn’t and shouldn’t, couldn’t, alter their contribution to the production.”) “In my opinion Margo Jones should have confined herself to a regional theatre, preferably in the executive and fund-raising departments,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. “I think it was there that her genius lay not in the direction of actors or of delicate plays.” In his frustration, at one point during rehearsals, Williams bounded up from the stalls to show the actors what he wanted. “I was onstage playing the scene,” Walston recalled. “Margo screamed from the audience, jumped up on the stage, threw her script down and said to Tennessee, ‘I am directing this play! You get off the stage and get out of the theater!’ ”

  Several days before the opening, at the Music Box Theatre on October 6, Williams and Wood sat together on the steps leading down to the lounge and listened to “Margo Jones’s Farewell Address to the Troops,” as Wood called it. “She told her cast that without doubt Tennessee Williams was the most important playwright of our times, ‘Summer and Smoke’ was the best play he’d ever written, the play simply had to succeed here in New York, it was up to them to give a performance worthy of the work,” Wood recalled. Finally, Jones looked over to Williams. “Is there anything you’d like to say, Tenn?” she asked. “There’s nothing left to say, is there?” Williams said, glancing at Wood and smiling.

  The almost uniformly dismissive reviews—“A pretentious and amateurish bore” (New York Herald Tribune); “mawkish, murky, maudlin and monotonous” (New York Daily News)—confirmed Williams’s assessment of Jones’s “mediocre job.” “Not inspired, not vital, as Kazan would have been and as the play so dreadfully needed,” he wrote to Windham.

  IF THE REVIEWS to Summer and Smoke took the shine off Williams’s public glory, his private life had taken on a welcome new luster with the reemergence of Frank Merlo. One night, soon after returning from Europe, while walking down Lexington Avenue around midnight, Williams spotted Merlo in a delicatessen. He hadn’t seen him since their passionate one-night stand on the Provincetown dunes a year before. Merlo was with a Navy friend. Williams invited them both back to his place on East Fifty-Eighth Street to picnic with their roast-beef sandwiches and potato salad. When Merlo’s Navy buddy left to catch a bus back to New Jersey, Merlo stayed on. “Something started or something stopped / and there I was and there was he / . . . For it was late and I was lost,” Williams wrote in his plaintive poem “Little Horse”—a nickname given to Merlo by Britneva because of his large front teeth.

  There was nothing lost about the pragmatic Merlo, who was twenty-seven when he reconnected with Williams. “He was enthusiastic about everything, extremely positive,” said the theater historian Mary Henderson, who lived around the corner from Merlo when he was growing up in Peterstown, the Italian section of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and once dated him. “He was a stick of dynamite, and he remained that way for the rest of his life—voluble, funny.” Merlo, whom Williams described in a poem as “fleshed in a god’s perfection,” was muscular and handsome with thick black hair and a swarthy complexion.

  Merlo had been a “change-of-life baby,” the fifth child of Rosalie and Mike Merlo, who was a fishmonger in America but had been, according to Henderson, “an important man in Italy.” Throughout his growing up, Merlo was known as “Fishy”; nonetheless, he carried himself with a distinctive swagger. He had ambitions to be a writer and was something of an autodidact. “Frank felt very keenly his lack of education,” Henderson said. (“He was far better read than Tennessee,” according to Vidal.) In 1941, forging the date on his birth certificate, Merlo dropped out of Thomas Jefferson High School in his senior year to join the Navy. Despite his diminutive stature—he was five foot three—he ended up serving with the Marines. War was his university; the Marines was his fraternity. “I damn near got to know a whole battalion of men, including officers, of whom, I may add, I’ve made some lasting friendships,” he wrote.

  As a pharmacist mate first class attached to the Marine Corps’s First Division, Merlo saw action in the Pacific Theater. To his best friend Frank Gionataiso, who had enlisted with him, Merlo recounted coming under fire in a fierce three-day battle at Guadalcanal while he was carrying a sixty-five-pound pack on his back and six grenades in his pockets. “I had just witnessed a Jap .25 cal bullet tearing through the pack of a boy ahead of me and was sure the Japs could spot my pack. To me it seemed as if the god-damned thing stuck at least a mile in the air.” In front of him, he spotted a sergeant who had been mortally wounded. Merlo ordered four men forward to retrieve his body on a stretcher. He continued:

  The path was very narrow, he weighed at least 180 pounds, it was very very hot, we had no water, even for him, it was steep climbing and altogether rotten going. At one point, we were standing on a ridge, and although we should have known better, were sky-lined. . . . I stepped ahead and just at that moment the air was splintered with the sharp staccato of Jap machine gun fire. The bullets were kicking up the corral rock around us. I inched down below the ridge and looked around. The four men I had just ordered to man the stretcher had dropped their burden. Three of them were hit, two fatally and the other mortally hit. I crawled up, sized up the situation and began to administer aid to the one who was still alive. . . . I gave him some morphine and he died a short while after.

  From the calm of the dispensary at the Naval Hospital in Alameda, California, where he served out his tour of duty, the high-spirited Merlo wrote Gionataiso about his widening horizons. He was reading Salvador Dalí’s My Secret Life. (“It’s a very well set up book and profusely illustrated with his work. It costs six dollars and I think well worth the price even if one doesn’t care for Dali. He doesn’t omit any details and even includes a chapter called ‘My Intra-Uterine Memories, or Life in the Womb.’ Mad!!!”) He was going “high brow,” he said. “Every symphony that has come to San Francisco, I’ve went and seen. Last Saturday I went to see Claudio Arrau, a Brazilian pianist play one of Schumann’s Concerto’s for piano and orchestra and enjoyed myself immensely. I just see you there, while reading the letter, shaking your head wondering ‘what the hell does he want to waste his time going there for?’ That same afternoon I ‘worked’ at a restaurant across the street from the Opera House, which some very good friends of mine own. The whole family was down with the flu and there was just the waitress there to run the place. They were very busy because of the concert and I volunteered to help. I met a lot of nice girls that way. Intelligent besides being good-looking. Saturday night I went to bed with a girl I called ‘Red.’ Her real name was Freda.”

  The spectacle of death had fired Merlo’s appetite for life. He dream
ed of coming east (“When I do, watch out cousin, look out. I have lined up places—Meadowbrook, Blue Room, El Morocco, Hotel Taft, Hotel Pennsylvania, Harlem! Savoy Ballroom, Leon and Eddie’s and all of 52nd Street and Yorkville-86th St.”) and of traveling (“In regards to travelling after the war, I do intend to go to Samoa, but I shall also, if possible, go to Europe”). He was also considering marriage. “I had intentions of marrying Lena when I first came back,” he wrote to Gionataiso on February 3, 1943. “But after thinking it over awhile decided not to, although I haven’t had a change of heart yet. Just leery, I guess.” But when he imagined the future, the good times were associated with the company of women—especially Lena, “who may soon be my future wife (and bed companion, to be crude about it!).” “Tomorrow I have liberty from eight in the morning till eight Monday morning,” he wrote on February 27, 1943. “I have nothing planned, but shall probably take Lena dancing over at Sweets, a ballroom along the lines of the Roseland, which features big name bands occasionally. The last time we went dancing there, Freddie Slack was playing and when we started to dance, the floor slowly but surely cleared of dancers and before we knew it, Lena and I were dancing alone, for the benefit and I dare-say delight, of the admiring crowd. It always happens no matter where we go. Of course, I love it all and I always throw a very grateful smile at the dear public; a smile usually so full of teeth I look like a Jap after blowing up the Panama Canal. By the way, can you tell me where the Panama Canal is??”