Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Nothing quite as poetic and visually playful had ever been tried on Broadway. “This play is moving to me because it describes what is happening in the world of 1952 to the people I love most in the world . . . all those blessed nonconformists,” Kazan told Williams. (At a time when merely knowing a homosexual could justify an FBI investigation, Williams brazenly included the first unabashed portrait of a gay man on the Broadway stage, the promiscuous Baron de Charlus. “My suit is pale yellow. My nationality is French, and my normality has been often subject to question,” he says.) Kazan continued, “I say, if the play IS about these people, let’s speak out and say so clearly because they are being killed off and ironed out, they are being shamed out and trained out and silenced and shunted and shoved off the edge of the world. Let’s speak out for them so everyone will hear and understand. If we don’t no one else will.”

  “To the hard of hearing you shout,” Flannery O’Connor observed about the use of the grotesque, “and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” Camino Real did both. “Are you afraid of anything at all?” Williams’s Gypsy asked the audience through a loudspeaker. “Afraid of your heartbeat? Or the eyes of strangers! Afraid of breathing? Afraid of not breathing? Do you wish that things could be straight and simple again as they were in your childhood? Would you like to go back to Kindy Garten?”

  When Wood first read the play, she told Williams “to put [it] away and not show to anyone,” he recalled, adding, “Her reaction had depressed me so that I thought the play must be really quite bad.” But by June 1952, despite his morbid fears to the contrary, Williams was on a kind of artistic roll. The film of Streetcar was a hit; Summer and Smoke had been successfully revived Off-Broadway by José Quintero, who brought new luster to the play and to its star, Geraldine Page; and Williams had just been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. These things and Kazan’s enthusiasm for the full-length Camino Real renewed Williams’s hope and his energy. “The script is only about 1/10 of the total quantity of writing done on it,” he told Kazan, when he delivered it, adding, “The writing has a wild, breathless, stammering quality which reflects my own brink of hysteria, but nevertheless I feel tonight that it is the most original piece of writing I have done and is, in a way, as beautiful as ‘Streetcar.’ The texture of the writing is not as fine, of course, but the underlying spirit is finer. ‘Streetcar’ was fundamentally an encomium to the enduring gallantry of the human spirit. So that is how I feel about it tonight, and I am not drunk, though tanked up on coffee.”

  In mid-June 1952, Kazan and Williams met in Paris to discuss Camino. “I was prepared for anything, but to my happy surprise he seemed to be very favorably impressed,” Williams reported to Wood, adding, “He says he wants to start rehearsals in late October. This suits me!” In late July, Kazan’s suggestions for rewrites reached Williams. “I am terribly stimulated by these notes,” Williams told him. But, privately, he worried that “The Terrible Turk” was a “slippery customer,” liable to drop out of the project; strategically, he urged Wood to hurry the decisions about the show’s producer and set designer. “The important thing is to keep Gadg occupied with it.” Williams’s own way of keeping Kazan occupied was to create a melodrama. Camino, he confided to Kazan, was “very likely my last [play]. I almost hope that it is.” He added, “Except for some unexpected thing that will restore my old vigor, it would be better to put writing away, after this last job, and settle for whatever I could get out of just existing.”

  Kazan, who, like the characters in Camino, had his back against the wall and was making a daring fight for his integrity, responded in particularly pugnacious form. “We’re fighting here for fun and for theatre and for self expression and not for money,” he wrote to Williams about Camino, the day after he finished filming Man on a Tightrope. “So let’s see to it that this once we do it really right, and not as a job. I don’t want to do a job now. I’m not in the mood to overly respect that word.” He went on, “Christ: let’s have some fun! Let’s have a costume parade that sends us home happy and relaxed and relieved. . . . I don’t want to take the attitude towards this play that we’re lucky to be able to GET IT ON at all. The hell with that. I’m in too mean a mood, and also too happy a mood, for that. . . . But I want the most difficult, the most experimental play to have the best help it can get. Who should ‘experiment’ except the best people.”

  But over the next few months it became apparent that the best people didn’t know quite what to make of the experiment that Williams called “essentially a plastic poem on the romantic attitude toward life.” The set designer Jo Mielziner, who had done three productions with Williams, “felt like an ungrateful dog” for his lukewarm response. Cheryl Crawford worried about cost, clarity, succès d’estime, and her preference for a “hot light” finale. “This play ends with a sort of ‘misty radiance,’ and I am not sure that will be, or can be, hot enough to suit her,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “If you dissolve the shimmer of mystery over this thing, you lose its fascination.”

  Unsettled by the reactions of the other potential collaborators, Williams wrote to Kazan in late July: “I think it is remarkable that your own interest and faith in the play still survives. Mine is indestructible.” But over the summer, after a couple of script-conference trips to Germany, where Kazan was filming, Williams began to discern “a retrenchment” of his director’s enthusiasm. “Yesterday eve we read over the work I’ve done on ‘Camino’ under Gadg’s direction,” he noted in his diary on August 20. “He kept snorting and exclaiming, oh, this is wonderful! The way a doctor tells a dying man what perfect condition he’s in. It seemed to me like one long agonized wail and I couldn’t go out to eat with him. Said excuse me but I think I’ll go cruising now.”

  With Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford

  “I hate writing that is a parade of images for the sake of images,” Williams said. But Camino was in danger of becoming just that. The connections between his passages were not linear and naturalistic but imagistic and symbolic; the play was a delicate, elusive weave of ideas and metaphors, unified as much by the rhythms of the music as by the rhythms of speech. The problem with Williams’s proliferating imagination was one of organization. Those poetic fragments had to be melded into a whole; a dramatic through-line had to be found in “a chowder of archetypes,” as one wag called the play. “It’s an almost super-human job,” Williams said. It took Kazan more than a month to respond to Williams’s September revisions. “I am very, very disturbed by the fact that you say that you have not read the script,” Williams wrote to him.

  As Williams suspected, a lot of Kazan’s hesitation came from the reaction of his wife, Molly Day Thacher, who served as a kind of in-house critic for all her husband’s work. Thacher was the playreader for the Group Theatre who had “discovered” Williams in 1939 and had been responsible for getting him to Audrey Wood. After the skirmishing over Camino, however, Williams came to see her as “the self-appointed scourge of Bohemia.” At the end of September, still straddling the fence about Camino Real, Kazan wrote to Thacher, “About Tennessee: I called him yesterday, and he said he had finished the script and had sent one to Audrey, etc. As I told you, and then he said, he had the feeling I was going to run out on him again, he quoted from ‘Glass Menagerie’ and said: ‘Don’t fail me Tom! You are my right-hand bower!’ Now, what can I possibly do but do his entire and utter bidding—at the same time of course making the script good which it is not yet.” Kazan added, “I truly believe I can work with Tenn more, but he is the one guy that when I work with him, the stuff doesn’t turn out as I put it down in the outline. Not at all. . . . I can certainly understand any queasy feeling about this venture, and it is a staggering job, once embarked on. It seems to me life and death to Williams, though.”

  Thacher, who hadn’t read the play at that point, heard the doubt in her husband’s tone. “When you’re sold, you just sell and don’t take no for an answer from anybody you want,” she replied. “The
re’s quite a difference. You said No to ‘Tattoo’ not too uncomfortably and with clarity. Here, you’re involved. And perhaps it wouldn’t be fair to look at it as though you’d never read it before and then decide. I sense a great hesitation or reluctance or something in what you write. I’m not talking about what I think—I haven’t read it—I’m talking about what you think, which is important.”

  THACHER BROUGHT TO her passionate, articulate opinions an element of the firebrand. (Three days before Kazan began shooting On the Waterfront, for instance, she went behind her husband’s back to tell the producer, Sam Spiegel, that the script wasn’t ready and the film would be a disaster.) “Molly, to all extents and purposes, was smarter than Elia,” their son, the screenwriter Nick Kazan, said. “They both knew it. He desperately needed her critical input. It was one of the reasons he respected her and one of the ways they kept their marriage together. But once he felt that a play was going to work, he didn’t want to hear everything that she had to say.” He continued, “At some gut level, Elia worked and lived out of his heart and groin; Molly lived in her head.”

  When Kazan first met Thacher, at the Yale Drama School (her patrician pedigree included a former president of Yale), she had a more academic and practical understanding of theater than he did. She had studied drama, written one-act plays, and worked on productions with Hallie Flanagan, who was soon to head the Federal Theatre Project. She believed in Kazan’s artistic potential and in his mind; for him, she became a “talisman of success.” “I came to rely on her judgment in scripts. She made up for my lacks in taste and savvy,” he wrote. Among the writers who benefited at times from Thacher’s forthright analytic capacities were John Steinbeck, Irwin Shaw, Robert Anderson, and Arthur Miller. For Williams, however, her finger-wagging over Camino Real went too far. In August 1952, having read the play, Thacher told Kazan, “I think you can help him, if he will help himself, for he clings to your strength. But what I began to feel out of the ‘Camino’ rewrite, was that—for this production—he was dragging you into his own swamp. And that’s too high a price.” To Williams, she said, “Never before with you and never with any writer have I seen so desperate and absolute an identification. It’s dangerous.” “She is my bete-noir!” Williams complained to Britneva, whose nickname for Thacher was “Catch-as-Catch-Can Kazan,” adding in another letter, “Molly is a pain in [Gadg’s] derriere but he has to make a public show of loyalty to her as the Mother of His Four Children, and so forth, while he puts on her more horns than cab-drivers blow in Paris!” In fact, Kazan made shrewd strategic use of his wife’s well-argued notes to challenge his writers and to think against his own opinions.

  In the meantime, Kazan had been offered Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, a solid commercial bet, which he postponed in favor of Camino Real, which he saw as a way to refurbish his sullied public image in the eyes of the New York theater community. Thirteen of twenty-one actors in the Camino cast were from the Actors Studio. In hindsight, Kazan’s commitment to the project, he said, came from a desire “to be accepted as their hero by the actors of that organization, to demonstrate my courage and my steadfast loyalty to them and to live up to an ideal to which I’d pledged support again and again and for which I’d demanded theirs. By demonstrating that I had the power to force things to happen our way, I would make the Actors Studio mine again. In plainer language, I wanted to be liked.” Kazan forced Camino Real to happen; in December 1952, he was still trying to force Williams to impose a shape on the play.

  Throughout the long process of rewrites, Williams both needed and resented Kazan’s trenchant collaboration. “I have fallen off remarkably in the esteem of my co-workers when they start dictating my work to me,” he noted in his diary. To friends like Paul Bigelow and Carson McCullers, Williams blamed this loss of creative control on the vagaries of the marketplace. “It’s awful how quickly a theatrical reputation declines on the market,” he told McCullers. “A few years ago and I could have anything I wanted in the theatre, now I have to go begging. Two plays that didn’t make money and, brother, you’re on the skids.” But whether out of fatigue or fear, or both, Williams listened to Kazan. “This play moves me every time I read it,” Kazan began in a long, excellent pep talk about revisions. “The author is saying a few thousand words in defence of a dying race, call them what you will: romantics, eccentrics, rebels, Bohemians, freaks, harum-scarum, bob-tail, Punchinellos, odd-ducks, the out-of-steps, the queers, double-gated, lechers, secret livers, dreamers, left-handed pitchers, defrocked bishops, Maria Britneva, the artists, the near artists, the would-be-artists, the wanderers, the would-be wanderers, the secret wanderers, the foggy minded, the asleep on the job, the loafers, the out and out hobos, the down and out, the grifters and drifters, the winos and boozers, the old maids who don’t venture to the other side of their windows, the good for nothings, the unfenceables, the rebels inside, the rebels manifest, in fact all those blessed non-conformists of whom Kilroy is the present legendary hero and plain and simple representative.” Kazan continued, “Incidentally wouldn’t a list like this written by a man of talent be great somewhere in the play. Esmeralda speaking on the roof before she retires: ‘Dear God, protect tonight, wherever they are, all the . . .’ and then go into it. (It would also make abundantly clear whom the play is in praise of.)”

  Williams took Kazan’s idea and his rhythms and positioned the speech precisely where Kazan had instructed. The result was one of the play’s bravura moments, and one of Williams’s most brilliant soliloquies. Esmeralda’s lyrical prayer became Williams’s own romantic anthem:

  God bless all con men and hustlers and pitchmen who hawk their hearts on the street, all two-time losers who’re likely to lose once more, the courtesan who made the mistake of love, the greatest of lovers crowned with the longest horns, the poet who wandered far from his heart’s green country and possibly will and possibly won’t be able to find his way back, look down with a smile tonight on the last cavaliers, the ones with the rusty armor and soiled white plumes, and visit with understanding and something that’s almost tender those fading legends that come and go in this plaza like songs not clearly remembered, oh, sometime and somewhere, let there be something to mean the word honor again!

  Williams was less happy to take Kazan’s cuts. For a backers’ audition in the first week of December 1952, Williams wrote a preamble, “Invocation to Possible Angels,” in which he explained that Camino Real asked, “Where are we, where do we come from and where are we going?” Two hours and forty minutes later—this was without the dance sequences—the bemused would-be backers had the same questions about the play. No one but Williams was in doubt about Camino’s vagueness or disarray. After the reading, Thacher had the temerity to tell him that forty-five minutes needed to be cut. “I screamed at her all the four-letter words that I could think of, and Gadg just sat there and smirked,” Williams told Britneva later, adding, “She then sent out ‘circulars’ to everybody saying that I must cut 45 minutes of the play and that if ‘we kept her with it we would have a play.’ ” As it turned out, Kazan held more or less the same view. “This play is at least twenty minutes too long by any standard and by any measure, including the only valid one: its own nature. It hasn’t enough development of theme or plot to take on the jumbo length,” he told Williams. Nonetheless, at a testy meeting in Crawford’s office, Williams threw a tantrum. He balked at directorial interference; he claimed that neither Kazan nor Crawford had been frank with him. “Why stick to a conventional length?” he said.

  The first person to call Williams on his intransigence was Thacher. In a letter written the next day, she accused him of using the legend of his own collapse to hold his collaborators to ransom. “You also exercise thru the intensity of your feeling a sort of psychological weapon against your friends and colleagues . . . a submission finally before your desperate and intransigent identification with the play,” she wrote him, adding, “It’s time for you to stop identifying with the play and, for a time, to id
entify with the audience. . . . The future of the play depends only on one thing: on you. . . . If this is treason—my husband is prepared to get on the Titanic with you anyway.”

  The Kazans were using different songs to deliver the same unhappy message: the play was not working. Kazan was the more collegial; his method was to pull no punches about either praise or problems. His forthrightness signaled equality and intimacy. “I’m not going to make any concrete suggestions to you. Or maybe I’ll sneak in a few later. Probably. And incidentally I think you’re quite right to do everything in your way ONLY,” Kazan said, confessing himself “slightly singed” by Williams’s post-audition outburst. Writing a five-page letter from the couchette of the railroad car that was taking him from New York to California, Kazan painted a comic picture of himself wading through the Camino rewrites “from A to infinity.” “I sat down one morning and ripped the covers off and went through every page,” he said. “By nightfall I was blind. (I recovered my sight just a few hours ago just to write this.) The floor of my compartment was a foot and a half deep with your crumpled efforts. . . . The point is that I got those goddamned versions out of my life. They’re gone.”