by John Lahr
In time, Williams would find Hollywood anathema to his freedom of expression; in the glamour and the glory of the moment, however, he looked on the glitterati with benign detachment. “They are all very nice, like children, but the games that they are playing do not seem to make any sense,” he said. “I think [Clifford] Odets must have approached them from the wrong angle. That is the trouble with an angry social attitude, an outraged premise, you see all the ugly things but not the often-delightful humor and fantasy of it, and the pathos.”
Hollywood’s charm offensive may have been comically transparent, but it was potent. Williams was bedazzled. Flush with faith in the studio and in the Menagerie screenplay, he wrote to his family, “The vulgarities have been eliminated. I have re-written the whole thing according to my own ideas. I now think it has a chance to be a very successful picture.” Williams saw the screen test of Gertrude Lawrence, who had finally been chosen to play Amanda. Although he would later call her casting a “dismal error,” at the time, under the heady spell of Hollywood, he pronounced her “amazingly good.” (Williams arrived twenty minutes late to his first meeting with Lawrence. “I brought her a corsage, and she threw it right in the sink,” Williams said.)
The studio’s solicitousness was, in part, an attempt to coax Williams into turning Menagerie’s vague, problematic ending into a climax with Hollywood uplift. Even before his visit to California, Williams had agreed to give Laura a ray of hope at the film’s finale, but it was a difficult task for him, because, as he told the film’s director, Irving Rapper, “in my heart the ending as it exists in the play was the artistically inevitable ending.” Williams proposed a minor adjustment. “I think it is all right to suggest the possibility of ‘someone else coming,’ ” he wrote to Rapper. “And that ‘someone else,’ remaining as insubstantial as an approaching shadow in the alley which appears in conjunction with the narrative line ‘The long delayed but always expected something that we live for’—it strikes me as constituting a sufficiently hopeful possibility for the future, symbolically and even literally, which is as much as the essential character of the story will admit without violation.”
Warner Brothers, however, wanted Williams’s poetic sorrow turned into heartwarming salvation. Even while glad-handing Williams at the Chaunticlair, the studio swamis were plotting to betray him and his original vision. Unbeknownst to Williams, they had instructed Peter Berneis, the film’s other screenwriter, to come up with his own upbeat ending. Berneis wanted Laura to offer a moral—“a bitter experience can prepare a soul for a new life.” As he put it, “If we don’t show that Laura changes after the unicorn is broken, if we don’t have a basis in her for an eventual open heart and an open mind to receive a man, then we might as well stick to Williams’s original tragedy.”
Berneis didn’t limit himself to suggesting the immanence of a second beau for Laura; he gave her a fellah with a physique and a name: Richard Henderson. To the studio moneymen, this second Gentleman Caller was magic. “We have tagged on the ending for Laura and Tom that was written by Peter Berneis. Williams knows nothing about this. His ending is used in addition to the scene between Laura and Tom. . . . My over-all feeling is that this last version is a tremendous improvement over the other scripts. The role of Tom has been built up considerably, Laura’s role has much more sympathy piled on it,” the film’s co-producer, Jerry Wald, who was partly the inspiration for Sammy Glick in Budd Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run?, wrote in a memo to Charles Feldman. Wald continued, “The addition of the new scene with the Gentleman Caller is well worth all the efforts that you went to in getting Williams out here.”
At a private screening the following year, with Merlo and Marlon Brando present, Williams saw the final cut. The ending outraged him; it destroyed, he said, the “quality of poetic mystery and beauty which the picture badly needs in its final moments.” The film received the bad reviews that Williams had predicted. (“Life isn’t a bust just because you’ve got a bum gam,” Variety said. The New York Times, under the subhead “ ‘The Glass Menagerie’ Reaches the Screen in Somewhat Battered Condition,” was not so flippant: “The Glass Menagerie,” it said, “comes perilously close to sheer buffoonery in some of its most fragile scenes.”) Williams denounced the film as a “travesty.” Jack Warner, who had rolled out the red carpet for Williams in September, promptly rolled it up. “Am surprised at Tennessee,” he wired Warner Brothers’ New York representative Mort Blumenstock. “These temperamental derelicts who get rich on the efforts of others after they create something should offer prayers of thanks instead of finding fault with producers, studios, directors, cameramen. Am not interested in any form shape or manner with his being indignant.” But Charles Feldman was. “I can’t impress upon you too much the wisdom of cautioning Tennessee not to make any adverse comments to anyone,” he wrote Wood, demanding later that Williams say “something very complimentary about the picture that we can use.” Williams bowed to pressure and worked up some appropriate weasel words. “In the picture there is less darkness and more light, more humor and less tragedy,” he said after The Glass Menagerie was released on September 7, 1950.
WILLIAMS WAS MORE apt to be positive about his life than about the botched film. Bored and soured by their Hollywood junket, he and Merlo had made their way to the bohemian outpost of Key West in November 1949. On Duncan Street, at the edge of the town’s old section, Williams rented what he called “a sort of Tom Thumb mansion”: a snow-white Bahama-style house with a white picket fence, pink shutters, and light-green patio furniture. There, he and Merlo were joined for the winter by Williams’s ninety-two-year-old grandfather, Reverend Walter Dakin, who occupied the ground floor. Next door, two Rhode Island red hens and a white leghorn rooster scuttled around an “improvised poultry yard.” A “magnificent black goat with big yellow eyes, surely one of God’s most beautiful creatures, always straining at his rope as if he had an important errand to run if he could get loose,” completed the piquancy of the scene. “Life here is as dull as paradise must be,” Williams wrote to Laughlin when he first arrived in Key West.
The following year, for $22,500, Williams bought the house. Over the decades, he improved on his paradise: screw pines, coconut trees, clustering palms, orchids, begonia, and hibiscus were among the many plantings that in time turned his domain into a shady, luxuriant Eden. For the rest of his life, no matter how far afield Williams wandered, 1431 Duncan Street would be his official residence and his only home. He loved, he said, “the water, the eternal turquoise and foam of the sea and the sky.” He also loved the house, which he associated with something even rarer than the sun-dappled landscape: harmony. “Frank is now happy here,” Williams confided to Bigelow after the first few weeks of Key West living.
Back on native ground, Merlo found himself with full days; he was in charge of the house, the food, and the eccentric Reverend Dakin. “Grandfather is having the time of his life,” Williams wrote to Margo Jones. “He’s crazy about Frankie who drives him around everywhere that he takes a notion to go, and he usually has a notion to go somewhere.” In St. Louis, where he lived in a room in Edwina’s house, the Reverend felt confused and marginalized. (Insisting that her father was only “pretending to be deaf,” Edwina refused to repeat anything that he didn’t hear.) In his makeshift Key West family, Reverend Dakin was an honored guest, at the center of things. “Tom is so good to me,” he wrote to Wood. “I love him.” While Merlo and the Reverend ventured out by car most mornings, Williams typed away at the dining-room table, gradually converting the strangulated “Stornello” into the rich comic lyricism of The Rose Tattoo. In the afternoons, the ménage decamped to the beach. “A girl makes her best contacts in the afternoon when she can see what she’s doing,” Williams joked.
“I feel somewhat rejuvenated and moderately at peace for the first time in perhaps three years,” he wrote to Jones in the first days of the new ecade. Even his alcohol intake was down to “five drinks a day,” he crowed to the bibulou
s Carson McCullers. When Merlo went north for Christmas, intending, among many other treats, to visit Carson McCullers and see her Broadway hit The Member of the Wedding, Williams wrote ahead to her. “He will bring you good-luck as he has me,” he said. Merlo returned on January 5, 1950, bearing Christmas presents for Williams—records, cologne, and a gold snake ring with little diamond chips, “the nicest piece of jewelry I have owned.” “Frankie had lost weight at home and seemed glad to be back in our peaceful little world,” Williams said. It was true: for Merlo, too, these gracious days felt like a blessing. “We shall all be together again soon in the house we love so much,” Merlo wrote later to the Reverend Dakin, from Rome, in July 1950. “God has been very good to us this year, dear friend, when we think how much happiness and good fortune these past few months (and coming ones, too) contained.”
With Merlo outside Key West house, 1957
By December 4, 1949, Williams had completed a “kitchen sink version” of The Rose Tattoo. The story celebrated his deliverance from a creative and emotional stalemate. Inevitably, as Williams’s bond with Merlo solidified, the landscape of his play took on deeper coloration; he compared it to a “dark, blood-red translucent stone that is twisted this way and that, to give off its somber rich light.” When he submitted the play to Kazan in June 1950, the light-dark theme was a defining part of his pitch. “During the past two years I have been, for the first time in my life, happy and at home with someone and I think of this play as a monument to that happiness, a house built of images and words for that happiness to live in,” he wrote. “But in that happiness there is the long, inescapable heritage of the painful and the perplexed like the dark corners of a big room.”
For The Rose Tattoo, Umberto, the improbable figure who lures the widow away from her ascetic resignation and back into life, was rechristened Alvaro Mangiacavallo (“eat a horse”), a surname that incorporated Williams’s nickname for Merlo and made him central to the widow’s erotic excitement, just as “Little Horse” was central to Williams’s own yearning. When Alvaro makes a phone call, on behalf of the widow, to identify Rosario’s inamorata, he says, “Well, this is your little friend, Alvaro Merlo, speaking!” Alvaro was constructed more or less to Merlo’s proportions: “one of those Mediterranean types that resemble glossy young bulls . . . short in stature, has a massively sculptural torso. . . . There is a startling, improvised air about him,” the stage directions read. The plump and hysterical widow is a medley of vulnerabilities and vainglories—“the Baronessa,” as the community teasingly nicknames her—an outline into which Williams could insert his own porous, crying-out heart. The struggle she faces—between the pleasures of renunciation and of connection—was also dramatized in “Humble Star,” a poem Williams wrote just after completing the first draft of Rose Tattoo and dedicated to Merlo:
Death is high.
It is where the green-pointed things are.
I know, for I left on the wings of it.
While you slept, breathlessness took me
to a green-pointed star.
I was exalted but not at ease
in the space.
Beneath me your breathing face
cried out, Return, return!
Return, you called while you slept.
And desperately back I crept
against the vertical fall.
It was not easy to crawl
against those unending torrents
of light, all bending one way,
And only your voice calling, Stay!
But my longing was great
to be comforted and warmed
Once more by your sleeping form,
to remain, yet a while, no higher
than where you are,
Little room, warm love, humble star!
Williams honored Merlo’s inspiration in another significant way: he gave him a percentage of the play. “I want him to feel some independence,” Williams told Wood in March. “His position with me now lacks the security and dignity that his character calls for.” Intimacy required equality; the money went some way to ensuring it. The Rose Tattoo was also dedicated to Merlo “in return for Sicily”; the exchange to which the play was a testament, however, was as much psychological as geographical. Even before Williams had written about Sicily or visited it, his identification with the place and with Merlo’s stories about it signaled a hysteric’s desire to merge with the alluring personality of his friend. Merlo regaled Williams with tales of his parents, originally from Ribera, and their large, noisy, bumptious first-generation Sicilian-American family. According to Merlo, sometimes after a family blowup, his mother would take umbrage in the garden and climb into a fig tree to sulk. “I remember Frankie telling us that after one particularly blinding row, she refused to come down,” Maria Britneva recalled. “Having shouted at her, and pleaded with her, her sons eventually took an axe to the tree and brought the whole thing down, with her in it.” Britneva went on, “Tennessee and I . . . were whimpering with laughter. Frankie was livid.”
Merlo’s tales of his Sicilian community—with its aggressions and repressions, its emotional extravagance—excited Williams’s imagination and suited his rhythm. “My approach to my work is hysterical,” he told Kazan. “It is infatuated and sometimes downright silly. I don’t know what it is to take anything calmly.” The Sicilian response to life was also histrionic; it turned feeling into event. “Have I ever told you that I like Italians?” Williams wrote to Britneva from Rome in 1949. “They are the last of the beautiful young comedians of the world.” He went on, “The Young Horse . . . has returned from Sicily where he had a case of galloping dysentery. . . . He said it was the goat’s milk that did it. They brought the goat right into his bedroom and milked it beside the bed and handed him the milk and would not take no for an answer as the goat was a great prize. Soon as he has recovered sufficiently, and he is showing some signs of recovery now, we are going back down there together in the Buick. As I am too fat, the goat will do me no harm, and the reports of social life down there are fantastic. The girls are not allowed to speak to the boys till after marriage: a kiss has the same consequences as a pregnancy used to have in the backward communities of the South, and they must still have dowries, no matter how pretty.” (A goat appears in The Rose Tattoo as an emblem of the play’s lyric spirit—“the Dionysian element in human life, its mystery, its beauty, its significance.”)
The Rose Tattoo’s Sicilian-American locale “somewhere along the Gulf Coast” also strategically allowed Williams to depart from the familiar topography of the South, as well as from the tropes of Southern character, caste, and speech that threatened to stereotype his work. A “giant step forward,” Wood called The Rose Tattoo, even before she approved of the play. But Williams’s personal breakthrough was even more significant than his stylistic one: his guarded self had surrendered to another. The Rose Tattoo tried to capture the perplexity of this connection—“the baffled look, the stammered speech, the incomplete gesture, the wild rush of beings past and among each other.”
HAVING LABORED SO fiercely to finish The Rose Tattoo and to get it to Wood before the New Year, Williams found her silence deafening. By the end of January, feeling “tentative and mixed,” afraid even to re-read his play, he finally cabled Wood for a response. Wood immediately wired back that she was “very optimistic and thought it had the making of a great commercial vehicle.” Williams saw through her well-chosen words, which made him feel “that the script might be something to pretend had not happened like public vomiting.”
Meanwhile, word of the play was leaking out. On January 22, Irene Selznick called Key West asking to read it. “I said I was still too nervous,” Williams told Wood. To Bigelow, he worried as he awaited more word from Wood: “The play is probably too subjective, an attempt to externalize an experience which was too much my own.” To Gore Vidal, he bitched, “Audrey is sitting on the new script like an old hen.”
In late February, Williams finally got an enthusiastic res
ponse from Kazan, who was already in pre-production with the screen version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “It is a kind of comic-grotesque Mass said in praise of the Male Force,” Kazan wrote—a description so apt that Williams himself later adopted it. “Your letter about the play makes it possible for me to go on with it,” Williams replied. “I think you see the play more clearly than I did. I have this creative will tearing and fighting to get out and sometimes the violence of it makes its own block. I don’t stop to analyze much. I guess I don’t dare to. I am afraid it would go up in smoke. So I just attack, attack, like the goat—but with less arrogance and power!” He went on, “You have a passion for organization, for seeing things in sharp focus which I don’t have and which makes our combination a good one.”
By his own admission, Kazan was then the most powerful director in America. He had successfully mounted the mid-century’s three most important Broadway plays—Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, and Miller’s Death of a Salesman; his second film, Gentleman’s Agreement, had earned him an Academy Award. “Kazan, Kazan / The miracle man / Call him in / As soon as you can” went a bit of Broadway doggerel about his extraordinary prowess.
Gadg, Kazan’s benign nickname, invoked his expertise as a handyman, which extended to tinkering with the construction of plots. He had a forensic sense of dramatic structure and how to fix or to finesse those parts of a story that weren’t working. In the case of The Rose Tattoo, he saw exactly Williams’s intention; he also saw his failures. “I do not think the material is organized properly,” he wrote. “It is, at any rate, not ready to produce, or to show.”