by John Lahr
Williams’s enthusiasm for Stapleton in her auditions overrode the collective anxiety about her age and her inexperience. According to Stapleton, that anxiety resulted in “a World Series of readings.” Stapleton and Wallach auditioned together five times. “Finally, I assisted her in ‘making up’ for a reading,” Williams recalled in Memoirs. “I had her dishevel her hair and wear a sloppy robe, and I think even streak her face to look like dirt stains. And that reading she gave made all agree that she was the one.” “They seemed to want more assurance I could handle it,” Stapleton said of her last audition. “I said: ‘I can’t promise anything. I might really be terrible.’ ” Williams stood up. “I don’t care if she turns into a deaf mute on opening night!” he said. “That to me was extraordinary,” Stapleton recalled.
Just before The Rose Tattoo company set off for Chicago, where the play opened on December 29 for a month of tryouts, prior to opening on Broadway on February 3, 1951, Williams wrote to his mother and grandfather. “The girl playing the lead is almost as good an actress as Laurette Taylor,” he said. “In fact, she is like a young Laurette, which pleases me especially because nobody else wanted to cast her in the part, since they felt her youth and lack of experience would be too great a handicap.” He continued, “She has tremendous power and honesty in her acting and I think she is going to put the show over. She is an Irish girl, not pretty in any conventional way and considerably too plump, but she has more talent than any of the leading ladies of twice her age, and half her size. The director is not as gifted as Kazan but he works twice as hard all day and half the night. It is his big chance.”
For Williams, it was also a big roll of the dice. The Rose Tattoo was, he wrote in one elegant defensive preamble to the play, “the desire of an artist to work in new forms, however awkwardly at first, to break down barriers of what he has done before and what others have done better before and after and to crash, perhaps fatally, into some area that the bell-harness and rope would like to forbid him.” In the weeks before the cast set off for Chicago, Williams took in some of the Broadway competition, including what he called “the Caesarean delivery” of John van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle, produced by Irene Selznick. Its success gave him pause and also fueled his malice. “It was the most miraculous opening I have yet seen on Broadway,” he wrote to Kazan. “Although she had packed the house with her Broadway and Hollywood friends, there wasn’t a genuine laugh in the house after the first act. I could amuse myself only by counting the number of times that Rex ‘Sexy’ Harrison planted his mouth on Lili Palmer’s in a fashion so remarkably sexless that it seemed more like a pair of birds dividing a worm between them.” He added, “The audience sat entombed in embarrassed silence. . . . The final curtain was jerked up and down like a man of eighty trying to jerk himself off, to the feeble patter of about ten pairs of hands, mine not included.—Then the great celebration at Irene’s, climaxed by the reading aloud, the breathless incantation, of Brooks’s ‘Unqualified Rave!’ ”
With Maureen Stapleton in rehearsal
At the opening-night party for Bell, Book and Candle, Williams received another rueful jolt. “For some time I have suspected that I am already washed up in the professional theatre,” he told Kazan. “Rex Harrison put this feeling into words for me when he responded to my routine felicitations by saying, ‘Yes, I think this play shows that the theatre has recovered its health after a recent period of sickness.’ ” Williams added, “Of course I am a little ashamed of my malevolence, of wishing [Selznick] bad luck . . . but I don’t believe that she is at all ashamed of the letter she wrote from London about ‘The Rose Tattoo’ and I don’t think she had any real concern for what it might do to me and what it did. (Spoiled my summer.) I think that my play is going to answer hers. I doubt that it will receive, even from Brooks, as good a notice as she got, but just the same it will contain the answer.”
In Key West, less than a week before The Rose Tattoo’s Broadway opening, Williams, full of cold medicine and Seconal, sat up in the early hours listening to Merlo breathing beside him. “Four days now, and we will know,” he scribbled in his notebook. “It seems like the whole future hangs on it. I mustn’t ever again permit myself to care this much about any public success. It makes you little, and altogether too vulnerable. I wonder if I can try to concentrate on becoming a new, free person after this thing is over. It is mostly for Frank’s sake that I care. Alone, I could run away from it. But with Frank I will have to face the possible failure more or less squarely. God be with us!” Williams added, “P.S. What do you think is going to happen?—I don’t know!!”
CHAPTER 4
Fugitive Mind
Once Kazan and I were a perfect team.
—TENNESSEE WILLIAMS to Bill Barnes
“Now that the waiting is over, I can tell you that I was scared out of my wits,” Williams wrote to Brooks Atkinson about The Rose Tattoo on February 5, 1951. “I knew that a sense of defeat at this point might have been altogether insurmountable.” He added, “I feel invited to go on working for the theatre, and that is an invitation that I am only too eager to accept.”
Although the New York Post condescended to Williams (“intermittently satisfactory”), the New York Journal-American brushed him off (“Play Isn’t Worthy of the Fine Acting”), and the Daily Mirror more or less told him to pull up his socks (“We believe that the world today needs moral affirmation and not negation”), Atkinson, the most literate and fair-minded daily critic at America’s most influential newspaper, the New York Times, was the person whose endorsement meant the most to the playwright and the producers. “His folk comedy about a Sicilian family living on the Gulf Coast is original, imaginative and tender,” Atkinson wrote. “It is the loveliest idyll written for the stage in some time. . . . The respect for character and the quality of the writing are Mr. Williams at the top of his form.” Later, in a more reflective follow-up piece, Atkinson observed, “Behind the fury and uproar of the characters are the eyes, ears and mind of a lyric dramatist who has brought into the theatre a new freedom of style.”
The narrative advances of The Rose Tattoo were not the only news generated by the play; it also made stars of both Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. (They, along with the play itself and the set design, won Tony Awards.) “If I keep working on it maybe I’ll improve,” Stapleton told the Times in her first interview about the play. “Every time I open my mouth onstage, I seem to see people looking at each other and saying, ‘This is no Magnani.’ ” Stapleton’s combination of forthrightness, exuberance, and insecurity made her, over the years, a darling of the press, of the public, and of Williams, who called her “Maw” (she called him “Paw,” a nod to the outlandish Mr. and Mrs. Kettles of screen comedy). At the outset, however, her freewheeling interpretation irked Williams, who tried, in his courtly way, to correct some of her “improvements” on the script. A day after her Times interview, just two weeks into the Broadway run, he wrote Stapleton a gossipy letter from Key West that praised her gift of gab (“You are good at public relations”), dishing Carol Channing (“She started giving me the needle. What is your name, how did you get it, how did you get that accent, my husband never heard of you. On that last remark, I got up and said, My wife never heard of you neither!”), and strategically slipping her his notes:
Brooks Atkinson, the influential drama critic of the New York Times
I hope that you are “concentrating”—and making all the right “adjustments.” The last time I saw you I only caught the last scene. You got some bad laughs on the stigmata bit. I think it was lack of “concentration” that did it. On the “ecco la comica” bit you seemed to be cross with the ladies. That is a wrong “adjustment.” The right adjustment is one of exultant defiance—exultant! The way that the lone survivor of a fortress would brandish a flag in the teeth of too many assailants!—Wait for the tympani. Then get the stigmata with great definition, so that one really knows what and when it occurs!—You have great power to control your audience an
d you should never fail to exert it.
Although Williams claimed to Cheryl Crawford that putting on The Rose Tattoo had been his “happiest experience in the theatre so far,” and that it was “the first time I have ever felt at home with a cast in the theatre,” he kept a cold, clear eye on his show. And he continued to be distressed at Stapleton’s attack on the role. “I am a little vexed by Maureen’s attitude toward continued work on the staging,” he wrote to Wood in March. “She knows we have to put up a fight for this play and she ought to be more than willing to make a real effort.” He added, “Confidentially, I think if the show goes on the road we ought to give serious consideration to the idea of getting Judith Anderson, not only for box-office draw but for professional attitude toward work. Talent is not enough, even in the young!”
“This play was a radical departure,” Williams wrote to Atkinson in his thank-you note for The Rose Tattoo review. To the Theatre Musicians Union, whose feather-bedding threatened to eliminate the use of music from the struggling production, Williams adamantly set out the nature of his theatrical innovation. “Modern creative theatre is a synthesis of all the arts, literary, plastic, musical, Etc.,” he wrote. “ ‘The Rose Tattoo’ is a notable case in point since I think it has gone further than any recent legitimate American drama to demonstrate this fact.” Privately, however, Williams feared that the Broadway production gave “only the barest glimpse” of what the play could have been, as he noted in an essay contemplating its adaptation as a film.
Consequently many people missed altogether what was most original and distinguished in the play on paper. Many of the audience and critics had the mistaken idea that the community life, the Strega, the goat, and crowd scenes and the activities of the children were meant only to fill in and distract the eye. Very few seemed to realize that all of these were an integral part of the artistic conception of the play, that this was a play built of movement and color, almost as much as an abstract painting is made of them. This is arty talk. But what I am talking about is not “artiness” but something very rich and alive and universally appealing. . . . “The Rose Tattoo” should have been a riotous and radiant thing but the spatial limitations of the stage and the limits of time, etc., put it into a straight-jacket and only about two-thirds of its potential appeal came through.
Nonetheless, despite the mixed reception of the Broadway production, Williams could put his feet up on the railings of his Key West porch and relax with some satisfaction. “If it had been a smash hit like ‘Streetcar’ or a dismal failure like ‘Summer and Smoke,’ it would have been, either way, bad for me,” he told Irene Selznick. “As it is, I think it provides what is always most essential, a bridge to the future.”
The future, it turned out, was looming. In the eighteen months that it had taken Williams to bring his play to completion, the Soviet Union had acquired the atomic bomb, Mao Zedong had declared the formation of the People’s Republic of China, and the Korean War had begun. “The big Chinese Red offensive in North Korea”—a rare political allusion—made its way into his story “Two on a Party,” as a signal not of international threat but of sexual thrill. “Trade is always best when the atmosphere of a city is excited,” Williams wrote, adding, “Anything that stirs up the whole population makes it better for cruising.”
Williams could run from history, or trivialize it, but he could not avoid it. The world was “lit by lightning,” which flashed across even Williams’s backwater paradise. “Dakin, my brother’s, number has come up again in the draft, although he did four years in Burma and India and lost most of his hair from malaria,” Williams wrote to Stapleton, on returning, after the opening of Rose Tattoo, to Key West, where all his family were in temporary residence. “Mother is so upset that she fell down on the street. Grandfather was walking with her and came home alone and said, Your mother fell down. You had better go get her. She was still sitting at the side of the road when Frank picked her up with the car. She was not too seriously injured to eat a big ‘Shore Dinner.’ ”
Cold War suspicion was the unmooring undertow beneath the placid surface of 1950s America. The new foreign war, the policy of containment abroad, and the purge of so-called subversive elements at home were the shadows that offset the glow of America’s booming economy. Although it was true, as Kazan said, that politics was not Williams’s “game,” he had a clear perception of the toxic political landscape around him and its epidemic of fearmongering. “It is part of Nixon’s job to show that if Americans want to rid themselves of Communism and left-wingism at home, they must throw the Democrats out,” Williams, quoting a recent issue of Time magazine, wrote to Kazan. Nixon, he said, reminded him of the grade-school bully who “used to wait for me behind a broken fence and twist my ear to make me say obscene things.” He continued, “Out in the open at last: the sneaking raid on all liberal thought and feeling under the transparent pretext of stamping out reds.”
The growing national obsession with Communism was also a measure of the country’s insecurity about its new abundance, which had broug ht “the bright idea of property” within range of more citizens than ever before. Fueled by the single greatest rise of individual wealth in world history, the middle class grew to include 60 percent of Americans. In the same period, thirteen million new homes were bought; the number of two-car families doubled; and the nation, which was home to only 6 percent of the world’s population, was consuming a third of the world’s goods and services and producing two-thirds of its manufactures. The suburbs mushroomed; food and hotel chains spread. The increase in consumption led inevitably to a homogenization of taste; a pall of sameness settled over the land. In this, television had a seismic effect. Madison Avenue’s total television billings were $12.3 million in 1948; by 1951, the figure had ballooned to $128 million. In 1949, Americans owned about one million television sets; by the end of the next decade, forty-eight million people did. They watched, on average, six hours a day. “Radio was abandoned like bones at a barbecue,” the comedian Fred Allen quipped. In a real, as well as a symbolic way, society had become spellbound.
With Edwina
“It was a bad time to be very young, a bad time to enter the early chapters of your life, bad for curiosity or the impulse to explore,” the journalist and film critic Nora Sayre wrote in her memoir Previous Convictions. “You heard a lot about fitting in; molds were awaiting you: professional molds, marital molds, ways of comporting yourself so that others would not think you were peculiar.” This conformity did not go unnoticed by Williams. “Do you realize that there is scarcely a newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station or cinema in the whole country that doesn’t represent practically the same old tired, blind, bitter and desiccated attitude toward life?” he wrote to Margo Jones in December 1950. “The Big Time Operators are all one guy and those are the qualities of him.” The Broadway theater, which, more than any other art, survived by accurately reading the public mood, registered the new climate with an unmistakable tameness. “A lizardic dormancy seems to be upon us,” Arthur Miller complained in the New York Times. “The creative mind seems to have lost its heat.”
Williams, in his romantic rebellion, was always pitched against the restrictions of conformity: like that of the promiscuous characters in his story “Two on a Party,” his existence was “a never-ending contest with the squares of the world, the squares who have such a virulent rage at everything not in their book.” Williams, who had known rejection as a child, styled himself an outcast, a fox pursued by Philistine hounds, “calling the pack to follow / a prey that escaped them still.” In his work and his life, he embraced the eccentric; tolerance was the flip side of his detachment. On his fortieth birthday, March 26, 1951, for instance, he attended a Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet in which the thirty-four-year-old movie star Olivia de Havilland played the thirteen-year-old Juliet. He was joined by the poet and professor Oliver Evans (on whom he based Billy, the lush in “Two on a Party”). At one point, late in the show, as de Havilland came downstage
to deliver her soliloquy, the drunken Evans shouted up at the stage, “Nothing can kill the beauty of the lines!” then stalked out of the theater. Back in Key West, Williams wrote to Evans about his behavior. “One of the very few advantages of being my friend is that the point at which I become seriously offended, or even surprised, however moderately, is hard to reach,” he said.
Gore Vidal, contemplating “a fermenting new world” of the fifties in his novel The Golden Age, cited A Streetcar Named Desire as one of its bellwethers: “When she was taken away at the end, barbarism—‘the apes,’ as Blanche had called the Stanleys of this world—had triumphed. Was this a warning or a prophesy?” he wrote. From where Williams sat, in Key West in the spring of 1951, that barbarism was already at his back door. “The town has changed much for the worse,” he had written to Cheryl Crawford. “The campaign against ‘Bohemianism’ still virulent, a spirit of suspicion making you feel uncomfortable when you go out in the evenings, however innocently.”