by John Lahr
In exchange for issuing a B rating, the Legion also insisted that the director’s version not be shown at the Venice Film Festival. Outraged by this demand, and buoyed by the film’s subsequent commercial and artistic success (it was nominated for Academy Awards in six categories, including Best Director), Kazan refused to let the issue drop. “My picture had been cut to fit the specifications of a code which is not my code, is not a recognized code of the picture industry, and is not the code of the great majority of the audience,” Kazan wrote in the Times article, blowing the whistle on the studio’s perfidy. Decades later, in his autobiography, Kazan recalled the incident and its implications. “The Legion of Decency had acted with a boldness and an openness that were unusual for them,” he wrote. “What it meant—and I didn’t immediately recognize this—was that the strength and confidence of the right in the entertainment world was growing stronger.” The rising power of the Right, with its strategy of secrecy and intimidation, destabilized the cultural atmosphere. “Now an air of dissolution settled everywhere around me,” Kazan noted. “From sources I didn’t know, mysterious pressures were attacking the professional lives and, as a consequence, so it seemed, the personal relations of many of my friends. . . . Chaos was in the air.”
On May 18, 1951, Williams set sail for Rome. His retreat from America was a measure of his increasing sense of oppression at home. “It seems to me that the very things that make it uncomfortable for you here in the States are the things that make you write,” Kazan wrote in a letter criticizing Williams’s impulse to flee. “It seems to me that the things that make a man want to write in the first place are those elements in his environment, personal or social, that outrage him, hurt him, make him bleed. Any artist is a misfit. Why the hell would he go to all the trouble if he could make the ‘adjustment’ in a ‘normal’ way? In Rome, I’d say, you felt a kind of suspension of discomfort. . . . You are not really Tennessee Williams in Rome. . . . Blanche was a fragile white moth beating against the unbreakable sides of a 1000 watt bulb. But in Rome the 1000 watt bulb doesn’t exist. The moth is more or less at home. . . . Whether you like it or not, and in a way, especially since you do not, you should stay here in the States. I think you’d soon have some new plays writing that NO ONE could turn you off.”
It was a turbulent time. A month earlier, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been sentenced to death for allegedly passing a design for the atomic bomb to the Soviets, and in Korea, the Chinese and the United States were nearing a stalemate on either side of the thirty-eighth parallel. But Williams wasn’t interested in making political statements; he worked from the inside out. Politics existed, like most of his relationships, somewhere on the periphery of his work, “a sort of penumbra outside the central mania.” His plays wrestled with history only insofar as the contour of the times paralleled his internal drama. Abroad, during Williams’s “summer of wanderings,” a cold war of an altogether different kind loomed. “Yesterday was the first time in our lives together that I’ve known him to act like a bitch, and a rather usual one at that,” Williams noted in his diary about Merlo’s increasing truculence. “Of course there have been ‘signs’, now, for a number of months, but the resentment, the discontent—whatever it is—and he is still an enigma to me—are more and more exercised and displayed, now even publicly, adding humiliation to confusion, insecurity and sorrow. I can only wonder.”
Like all factotums to the famous, Merlo was both needed and unacknowledged; he was trapped between empowerment and alienation. Throughout the rehearsals and the opening of The Rose Tattoo, he steadfastly supported the frantic Williams. But anything he did to help Williams only maximized the disparity between them. With the success of The Rose Tattoo, which was inspired by and about him, Merlo found it impossible to hide his ambivalence. Williams got the glory; Merlo got the grief. In Key West, before leaving for Europe, he dutifully oversaw the household affairs first for Williams’s family, who had struggled with the flu during their stay, then for Rose and her caretaker, who visited. In order to relieve Merlo of some of his ever-increasing responsibilities, Williams hired the unflappable Leoncia McGee as cook and housekeeper, a position she held devotedly until Williams’s death, in 1983. (Leoncia, Williams wrote, “makes the foulest coffee that ever made a man take to drink! It seems to be a distillation of volcanic ash. Tastes horrible but is so strong it blows your lid after the first dreadful swallow.”) But Leoncia’s presence in the eccentric ménage left Merlo even more restless; losing his daily chores, he also lost part of his identity. He now had no purpose. He was both the beneficiary of Williams’s largesse and its captive. The glamour of their life—the famous friends, the exciting events, the travel—was to Merlo both a pleasure and a perpetual reminder of his own powerlessness. Inevitably, he kicked against his golden cage. Neither he nor Williams wanted to understand that his sudden disaffection (which he denied when Williams confronted him about it) was an envious attack on Williams and his writing. By making it hard for Williams to work, Merlo unconsciously was robbing him of some of his power and control.
With Merlo, Vogue session, 1949
For part of the summer, Merlo insisted that he and Williams go their separate ways. “He is not at all keen on seeing me at present,” Williams noted in his diary on July 25. “It is unfortunate for me that this emotional dislocation had to come at a moment in my life when I most needed someone to give me the security that I used to feel in thinking myself cared for.” Williams continued later the same day, “I called F. He made or suggested no appointment to meet. I feel as alone as a man must feel at the moment of his death. I know he will never really say—I will just have to try to guess what’s happened, what I’ve done, what’s wrong between us. I have no home but him. Can I find another? Can I live without one?”
In his letters Williams referred to this period as “the summer of the long knives.” Wood had an appendectomy, Oliver Evans had an ear operation, Britneva an abortion, Paul Bigelow had surgery on his jaw, and Williams himself almost ended up on an operating table. In late July, heading from Rome to the Costa Brava, Williams drove his Jaguar into a tree at seventy miles an hour. “I had been quite witless for several days prior to the accident and should not have started out, but I felt that only a change could pull me together,” he told Kazan. “So I filled a thermos with martinis and hit the highway.” What happened next he recounted to Wood: “About one hundred miles out of Rome I became very nervous. I took a couple—or was it three?—stiff drinks from a thermos I had with me, and the first thing I knew there was a terrific crash! . . . It was amazing that I was not seriously injured. My portable typewriter flew out of the back seat and landed on my head. Only a small cut, no concussion, but the typewriter badly damaged!—Ever since, from the shock, I suppose, I have been very tense.”
In Venice, recovering from the accident and “almost panicky with depression,” Williams vowed to “be sweet to acquaintances and so to make friends.” To get through the nerve-wracking string of evenings he had arranged with Peggy Guggenheim and Harold Clurman and his wife, the actress Stella Adler, Williams drank heavily. By day, he contemplated his loneliness, his self-loathing, and his boozing, adapting his “term in Purgatory” into a story called “Three against Grenada,” a meditation on “Southern Drinkers,” specifically a young Mississippian of “great vigor and promise,” Brick Bishop, who succumbs to alcoholism. (The story, extensively rewritten and retitled “Three Players of a Summer Game,” was published fifteen months later in The New Yorker and became the basis for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) Brick’s hapless hanging-on mirrored Williams’s bewildered mood. “No one noticed Mr. Brick Bishop and he noticed nothing; his eclipse was total,” Williams wrote of Brick.
He falls in love with his liquor with the same heroic abandon that he showed when he fell in love with and courted the girl he married. He loves it as if he had married it or given birth to it, it is his child now and his lover. Everything else disappears behind the comforting veil of his liquor or is seen thr
ough it with indifference and dimness, and then from that time on until the incredibly long time afterwards when it does eventually kill him, long after when it should have, in a crash on a highway . . . he seems to be throwing himself away like something disgusting he has found in his hands and has to get rid of as rapidly as he can.
Brick, who takes up residence in the bottom of a glass, embodied Williams’s desire for retreat. “The crustacean world for a while!” Williams advised himself in the miserable dog days of July 1951. He was, he said, “drawing the sails of my heart back in, for the wind is against them.” “Just taken: 2 phenobarbs, 1 seconal, 1 martini,” he noted in his diary a month later. “Now already the magic begins to work. But I know it isn’t right, it isn’t well, this cycle of sedation.” Williams, like Brick, “had not yet completely fallen beneath the axe blows of his liquor”; he was also “not long past his youth, in fact he was still in the further region of it.” In the story, Brick is described emerging noisily from a car in order to kick down the “For Sale” sign on a property he has just bought, in defiance of his wife’s power of attorney over their financial affairs. The scene inspires a recollection from the narrator’s childhood—a childhood that exactly resembled Williams’s own:
I am telling you mostly what I saw out of a window one spring in my childhood when I was recuperating from a long childhood illness which had turned me an ordinary active boy of ten into a thin and dreamy little spectre of a boy who had to depend on girls for companionship. I was like a child in wet weather. I brooded about the house, inventing solitary games, and I spent a lot of time looking out of windows.
Brick’s immobility certainly paralleled the creative and emotional still water in which Williams now found himself. Except for the story, Williams “couldn’t get going on anything that seemed important” to him. He had been “working, working, working all summer,” he confessed to Wood; for much of that time, he felt “like a man trying to run with a sprained ankle.”
BY THE BEGINNING of August, Merlo and Williams were cohabiting again; the time apart, however, hadn’t lifted Merlo’s sour mood. To Williams, he appeared cagey, irritable, and sullen, exuding “all the warmth and charm of a porcupine.” “I think the reason the Horse is so nervy and temperamental is that he has absolutely nothing, but NOTHING to do!” Williams wrote to Britneva. “I don’t think I could stand another year without him being busy at something, and so I’m going to do everything in my power to get him to go to a secretarial school when we get back to the States. If not that, both of us to a good analyst!” Williams saw the problem; his solution, however, missed the point. He figured that the typing of his manuscripts would allow Merlo to share in the work. He didn’t understand that Merlo’s serving as an in-house secretary would only exacerbate the problem.
In the emotional standoff, Britneva’s fierce allegiance—her “amitié amoureuse,” as she called it—became increasingly important to Williams, who longed to be kept in mind by someone. When he went to London without Merlo at the end of August, the high-spirited and affectionate welcome he got from Britneva was an answer to his prayers. “Thank God for Maria, if she still likes me,” Williams noted in his diary. “I wonder if anyone does, and why if they do.” But even the reunion with Britneva and her “good kind of mischief,” as Williams called it, was dogged by fiasco.
On the way to watch a polo match, at the invitation of the playboy the Maharaja of Cooch Behar, Britneva and Williams were part of a caravan of Rolls-Royces that stopped to pick up the actress Hermione Baddeley and her twenty-two-year-old bisexual lover, the actor Laurence Harvey, from her small house in Chester Square. Among the matchgoers was the drama critic Kenneth Tynan, whose gift for limpid description—Britneva, he wrote, was “attractive in a wild sharp-toothed way, like a dashing stoat”—captured in his diary the world of brittle and bewildering folly into which Williams had wandered:
We entered a small living-room, dark and shuttered despite the hot sun, full of bottles, glasses and party debris. Practical jokes were scattered everywhere, such as ashtrays in the shape of human hands and simulacra of lighted cigarettes lying on satin cushions. Laurence Harvey then staggered downstairs in a dressing gown, obviously hungover, to be introduced to us all and to pour drinks. He was followed by Hermione Baddeley, wearing an egg-splattered kimono. Hjalnar talked continuously; nobody else spoke except Tennessee, who muttered to me: “Do you know any of these people?” I shook my head. So did he. Hjalnar suggested we should leave: Miss Baddeley and Mr. Harvey got dressed; and as we were stumbling through the gloom to the door, Miss Baddeley said dramatically: “Larry—the beards!” “My God, yes,” said Harvey and plunged back upstairs.
He soon returned with an armful of long false beards made of crêpe hair and dyed extraordinary colours—green, yellow, purple, orange, puce. Solemnly he distributed them among the party: just as solemnly we hooked them over our ears. This was done without any suggestion of a prank but as if it were raining and he was handing out mackintoshes. “We turn up everywhere in our beards,” said Miss Baddeley categorically. Flamboyantly hirsute, we piled back into the cars, and silently sped through the suburbs. As we stopped at traffic lights, people would stare curiously at the bizarre convoy, beards steadily wagging, myself in magenta quietly rabbiting with Tennessee in sky-blue.
At Cowdray Park we disembarked and the chauffeurs produced hock and cold pheasant from the boot. Some of us remained bearded, others did not. . . . All at once there was a scream: “Jesus Christ!” Mr. Harvey had been stung on the lip by a wasp. He danced around in a panic. “Christ, fuck it, I’m filming tomorrow and what happens to the fucking close-ups if my lip’s swollen up like a fucking balloon?” Miss Baddeley soothed him, procured a bottle of brandy from a chauffeur and retired with him into one of the cars, closing doors and windows and pulling blinds behind them. Outside the car, conversation remained becalmed in the heat. . . . Tennessee became silently drunk. No one had any idea why they were there. My wife and I joined Baddeley and Harvey in the car for some brandy. Harvey was moaning, Baddeley philosophically drinking. Emptying the bottle, she peered through the window and said memorably: “I think I’ll pop out for a mouthful of fresh wasp.”
Harvey followed her, so noisily in need of medical attention that the kindly Cooch Behar decided we all had better return to London. . . . We climbed back into the cars. My wife and I travelled with Tennessee, Miss Baddeley and Miss [Susan] Shaw; our host went ahead with Hjalnar, Mr. Harvey and Miss Britneva who had already shown, in a number of flashing oeillades, that she had very little time for Mr. Harvey’s tantrums.
As we were purring (I think that’s the word) past the Albert Hall the leading Rolls drew up at the kerb and Miss Britneva flew out. She ran back to our car, weeping hysterically. Opening the door, she said: “Get me out of here, Tennessee. That shit Harvey has just spat in my face.” It turned out that she had interrupted a monologue by Harvey on the subject of his film career to deliver herself of an incisive opinion on the effect of narcissism and megalomania on talent (if any). Whereupon Mr. H., who was facing her on a jump seat, had leant forward and let fly.
“The queen spat in Maria’s face and called her the foulest names I’ve ever heard addressed to a woman by anyone but Pancho,” Williams wrote to Merlo. “Of course Maria provoked the quarrel by some untactful remark, called him ‘insufferably conceited’ to his face.” Williams’s gossipy letter, which was meant to amuse, put a fine face on his aimlessness. “I’ve missed you an awful lot, both night and day, and Maria and I talk about you so much,” Williams concluded, before adding a false note of ingratiation. “But I think we needed this period away from each other.”
Over the next year, as Merlo’s withdrawal of affection continued, Williams learned resignation. Like his character Brick, Williams adopted “the cool air of detachment that people have who have given up the struggle.” “At times in life there is a big two-letter word that says ‘No!’ and you must learn how to read it,” he admonished himself in his diar
y. “And if I don’t read it and believe and accept it, at least for a while, I’m going to crack in so many pieces you couldn’t find one of them!” Williams tried to achieve detachment. “I like being with Frank when he is friendly to me, which is only part of the time,” he wrote in his journal on September 16, 1951, shortly after reuniting with Merlo. Two days later, the day that Streetcar was being praised by the American press as a contemporary film classic, Williams was being put down by Merlo in Rome. “The Horse is in bed, cross as two sticks—no, as five or six sticks!” Williams wrote to Britneva. “What are we going to do with him?!”
AS WILLIAMS STRUGGLED to distance his heart from Merlo, he began to invest it more in his work. In mid-September, buoyed by the response to Streetcar, Kazan contacted Williams about doing a theatrical evening of one-act plays from Williams’s collection 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, which he found “sexy, original and lively,” plus Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, a recently published one-act play, two scenes of which Kazan had workshopped at the Actors Studio in 1949. With Kazan’s rejection of The Rose Tattoo still not forgotten by either man, this suggestion of a new collaboration was a deep bow to Williams’s talent. It elicited from Williams a deep curtsey in return. “The prospect of another Kazan production is a good enough reason for any living playwright to go on living and even return to America,” Williams said. “Do you think he can be pinned down?” he wrote to Wood. “He would do a magnificent job and I think success, with him, would be fairly certain.”